Elsewhere:
Maitimo wakes up.
The room is littered with forensic conjurations of people and notes and wands and books and planets. In the room is Ms. Chua, and a black-winged demon. Looks too straightforwardly Asian to be naturally occurring.
He finishes braiding his hair. "If you don't want a diplomatic incident I sincerely recommend you murder me and request a meeting with the version of me in Valinor and meticulously avoid mentioning that you did this. If you want to set this right I sincerely recommend you let me call for a ride home now."
"Spells don't all work on daeva, and some only work if they're letting them. If their mind-control spells work on unwilling daeva then you could recruit in Hazel for the thing you want, but I think the crew handling Hazel has decided not to tell wizards about summoning yet lest we get wizard daeva with 1802 ethical sensibilities."
"One of the people who looks like you carries a wand," says the demon.
"Even now you're weaseling as much as you think you can get away with," says Chua disgustedly. "I knew you were up to something and I'm beginning to wonder if you depend on being up to something to live."
"Timothy's in training to be a wizard, yes. So's Minor, the vlog demon, they're brothers. I was not up to anything until you captured Swan and declined to hand him over, then I was 'up to' making sure the trial forensics didn't run across exactly this, and right now I am 'up to' being mildly annoyed to have been brought into existence with loose hair in a windowless room somewhere I can only presume is in your star system."
"On your end; it had everything to do with it on ours. We were not equipped to do spot arrests and competent trials but we offered anyway because you weren't budging on Swan and at any moment someone could have started running trial forensics and noticed Elf forking and we were highly motivated to avoid that.
Elves don't have a nudity taboo but we do have a comparably strong taboo on having loose hair. Please don't fork people again but should you find yourself doing so know that creating them naked is far less - frightening to wake up to - than creating them with hair unbraided."
"- what we would like would be reassurance that this will not be shared or repeated, no matter how angry Ms. Chua gets with Elves in the future. If that's forthcoming then we can agree many mistakes have been made on both sides of this meeting of peoples and we'd be happy to move forward with all of them forgiven all around. If that can't be promised, then we have cause for concern."
"Our complaints about the kidnapping as well as your complaints about - not employing Hazel's mindcontrol on your behalf? Failing to disclose that an alternate universe version of me is brothers with the vlog demon? - anyway, we do not take all those public and tear each other apart over them, you can go about your work without our hindrance."
"She called it off, thought the risks were intolerable. I was indeed prepared to go through with it. I did end up promising her that if you do recapture any of them we will not interfere or object, and I meant that. But if we are going to forgive nonconsensual forking, a crime which my society regards as considerably more serious than murder, you can drop it. They were entirely free, before. Now none of them will ever hurt anyone again. We came to you first, you communicated nothing about what you wanted for over a month, at that point we had to try them, we tried them, even if we're willing to subject them to double jeopardy you don't have a plan for anything to do with them. Give it up."
"The court acquitted the fairy after making the determination he wouldn't do it again, and also he can't take summons. I don't expect you to agree with me here, Ms. Chua. I just expect you to develop some realistic expectations. We forgive each other serious errors on both sides, you give it up with respect to the daeva, we overlook this, we stay out of your way and out of the way of your institution."
"He could be asleep, it could be a couple hours. If this is Earth I can leave Ms. Chua's house and wait for them somewhere my presence is less unpleasant. They can talk with you here, if that's most convenient, and then assuming everyone is on the same page it shouldn't be more than an hour's conversation."
"Hi. Somebody forked my Singularity alt. And let him write home for help, so it probably wasn't maliciously intended, but - seems like a good idea to go and talk to her, figure out how likely she is to mention it in public, hopefully come to a mutually satisfactory agreement and if not -"
"Hi. The director of the GCP has been having her demon dig into multiverse stuff. She cannot stand me and I think is seriously contemplating threatening to make this public if we fail to hand over the daeva she wants to punish; the demon is GCP founder Lilie Ho and I think would much prefer it not come to that but has not outright ruled it out. I want to see what's going on so I can tell if they're being truthful, but I'm not at all sure I should accompany you; Ambela, can you bounce me -"
"Unfortunately it's not just your plans but those of anyone else who might learn what you have that concerns my species."
"I do not believe anyone else is liable to have as much motivation to attempt to discover what is underlying the various universes and their contact," says Lilie. "I do not plan to invite demons to attempt the same myself."
"- we're aware you have no particular obligations to or affections for Elves. I would rest easier if I left here today knowing that you were convinced that keeping your silence on this matter was the right thing to do anyway," she tells Chua.
"You people let five dangerous daeva off scot-free in an incompetent mockery of a judicial process while you were scrambling to get the black hole demon off our hands before it was allowed to tell us anything," snaps Chua.
"Elves seldom find ourselves in need of haste and are not very practiced in its use. The mechanical realities of the situation as it stands -"
Chua gestures angrily at a Hazel wizardry book.
"Hazel does have mind control magic. It is, wisely, illegal; there are, at least at this time, no exceptions."
"Not just illegal, it's an automatic life sentence. You could probably find people to do it anyway. There's the recent would-be Dark Lady who used it to make three hundred Muggles slit their children's throats in a blood ritual to make herself immortal, I don't think she'd take much convincing. Look, my world takes 'this is a problem you can solve with the Imperius Curse' about the way your world takes 'this is a problem you can solve by summoning an unbound demon', no one inclined to propose it under even extreme circumstances belongs anywhere near power. If Maitimo'd asked us we would have strongly suggested he get replaced."
"This seems prudent," says Lilie, before Chua can get started.
"The five daeva were selected because they had resisted their circles for a considerable time," says Mirelótë. "They were unlikely to respond and were able to take random summonses - may in fact have been motivated to do so to avoid what I'm led to believe is a very distracting sensation of having hundreds of circles. They are now summoned by immortal people and kept thoroughly away from this star system. Their stories will not be very quelling to any daeva who are afraid of prison in general or Ganymede in particular, to be sure, but they might be to some who fear specifically getting caught. No one will look at a loose binding and think in the course of dealing with some criminal temptation, 'well, I can probably resist a bunch of circles'."
"The fairy's sentence in particular is a travesty."
"As I understand it he currently lives among the people who were so eager to acquit him. If he recidivizes on their own heads be it. We have no grounds for complaint if you keep your circles for him open should he fail to be contained there."
"You don't sound like you actually read my charter," remarks Lilie.
"What is your charter?" asks Mirelótë.
"To bring to account daeva who transgress against the human beings they were summoned to help, and dissuade those given the opportunity from the impulse to do harm," says Lilie.
"They haven't been brought to account," adds Chua.
"They may yet dissuade those given the opportunity from the impulse to do harm," Mirelótë says.
"You're asking me? I didn't even hear about it until Timothy wrote my girlfriend asking for a telepath. Uh, at a guess he might've literally grabbed Cam and teleported him out which is definitely illegal but not exactly mind control or murder? Or tried to explain the problem directly to the summoner if he thought that stood a chance. Or maybe a complicated substitution plot with Polyjuice - like, there are laws Timothy'd break, that doesn't make him a potential murderer."
"He's the worst," he says agreeably. "You can get him to cut it out by being like 'Timothy how about you not lie' but in this case that seems like it'd possibly just make everything worse since then neither of you would be pretending at cordiality. You liked the new ambassador, right? If you don't make any more of 'em you won't have to be around any more of 'em."
" - I am pretty sure it coulda been worse. Also consider that when you are yelling at him in front of other people and he is being charming you are not his intended audience, they are? He cares what President Melo thinks of him, they might put a Godspring portal on Mars eventually. If you wanted him to be appallingly rude but totally honest that was a bad way to frame the interaction."
Mirelótë is carefully neutral about that assertion. "There are a lot of tradeoffs we could choose to make if we wanted it more than we wanted what we'd sacrifice on the way. You could attempt to force us to find it the single most important thing on our priority list. I don't expect from you that you'd threaten innocent people mostly uninvolved with the decisions that have so upset you to get it, but you could."
"I'm not a monster," says Chua. "You persist in thinking of me as a monster for attempting to do my job, which is not interplanetary politics, it is capturing criminal daeva."
"Lilie was the first person to guess that multiple circles might succeed where single ones failed," Chua says, pointing across the room at her predecessor. "She is responsible for over a century of better behaved daeva and contained threats and whatever you think of me her legacy deserves respect."
"When no one is making Rochelle do interplanetary politics she is a committed and efficient director," Lilie says.
"I have no idea if he made improvements to their personal lives but they became incapable of performing their jobs to their previous standards," snaps Chua. "Manipulation by an outside actor with undisclosed aims is antithetical to security."
"I don't think Ms. Chua has had much exposure to Maitimo's virtues that she'd trust, Michael," says Mirelótë. "I am sure that in most respects your job of sequestering ill-intentioned daeva has been so well done that arriving as late as we did in the GCP's history it's invisible to us. It would probably be disingenuous to attempt to thank you on behalf of all the people who you have been and still are protecting, especially since they cannot even be identified specifically. I imagine the bleedoff of employees who normally liaise for you with politicians was even less welcome to you than to us. Perhaps now that you've unraveled the mystery you could rehire them, or rearrange your organization so that you need not interact with Elves in order to search for answers any further."
"I don't need advice from you on how to handle my staffing," says Chua.
"I apologize."
"You can have your damn jurisdiction split. Figure out with Niari what to do about it if some daeva kills some of both before getting caught, she seems to tolerate you," she says, waving at them like they're irritating flies. "If you come up with a way to hand over that fairy without illegal curses that is not a good time to bicker with us about double jeopardy or any suddenly invented Elf law that comes to the same thing, you just turn him in. You stop complaining about my organization behind my back to every president in the solar system and you tone it down with the Elves swarming my prison and you tell your little brother to take his acquittal and call it done and I won't tell anyone demons can make Elves like a vending machine makes pizzas."
"I understand."
"Now get out of my house."
Mirelótë ducks her head politely. Anything else need covering -
"Terrifying. I asked if anyone else knew and Lilie said 'no' and I said 'that's important to us' and Ms. Chua just said 'I imagine it is', and I wasn't sure - plus, like, now I exist and would have preferred not to." Sigh. "Maybe Lilie'll convince her she can stop gagging demons."
Meanwhile:
Kib gets really good computer syncing set up and allows Aydanci out of his sight for thirty seconds. He does not repeat the experiment for two and a half weeks, during which Aydanci is relentlessly quizzed about whether it is possible that anything awful might have happened in those thirty seconds. Aydanci does not report anything concerning about the temporal order of his memories, or anything.
...Kib tentatively lets Aydanci out of his sight for half an hour.
"Thanks. I'm not positive it wouldn't've happened even if I hadn't been trying though - it's sort of a - I just attach a flinch reaction to everything I think until I stop, I don't think I could do it if I didn't think I was being mindread and I'm not sure I could have not done it given that I did, although I definitely sped it up."
He messages Niari. Spoke to Ms. Chua again recently, we had a productive conversation but one of her requests was that we tell the vlog demon, with whom we're now on very good terms, to 'take his acquittal and call it done', do you have a guess about what concretely I should be pushing for, there? No visiting your dimension, no more videos, no more unflattering expansions of the GCP acronym?
I'm glad to hear it! Status with the daeva remains that if you figure out how to hold them I will figure out how to transfer them and in the meantime I'll let you know if the one not presently under arrest leaves the dimension where he's staying. It seems like the GCP might want to make sure all your bindings are resilient to various kinds of interdimensional magic, so I've asked for you to be top priority to hear about discovery of any new worlds with magic systems that might be persistent on daevafication. There's a summary package attached.
The most plausible avenue by which someone would try to break them out is probably using extradimensional magic against the summoners, not the daeva. We don't know of a way to protect against greenmagery; there's a way to protect against Hazel mind control but I take it it's a logistical nightmare to arrange to learn it. If you think it's plausibly worth it anyway let's discuss in person.
It's a better outlet for frustration than vaguely racist press releases, that's for sure. He has an outline of Hazel magic of interest:
memory charms (erase or with more difficulty alter memories, usually of the last few minutes but with sufficient expertise of several decades); detectable with Legilimency, no known counter unless the spell was cast to be reversible
Legilimency - mindreading, mostly inferior to the Elf kind but not perfectly so (for example, can be used to extract and review memories). Typically requires eye contact. Counter is Occlumency, which seems learnable by everyone with six months to two years of mental exercises
Veritaserum - truth potion. Occlumency counters it. Works on daeva only if they're permitting it.
Polyjuice potion - changes the appearance of the drinker to that of another person, for one hour. Works on daeva if they please. Popular in Hell these days mostly for sex; it's how the Hazel representatives have been paying demons when the ones they have interpersonal access to aren't sufficient for something.
Stupefy - renders the target unconscious for two hours in the case of a human or ninety seconds in the case of a daeva; Hazel wizards have been advised not to demonstrate efficacy against daeva except in a dire emergency lest it damage confidence in security.
Confundus - leaves target confused and suggestible, Occlumency counters it, ensuring daeva cannot cast this on summoners is a major priority to resolve before the Hazel rollout. Likely to work on daeva but has not been tested. Almost certainly insufficient to get a daeva to take a summons, common use cases in Hazel are low-stakes deceptions like 'you already took my ticket' or 'no, remember, she's expecting me'.
Imperius Curse - indefinite absolute mind control. Works on daeva even when they're unwilling. One of the three Unforgivable Curses (the other two do torture and instant death; the instant death one has no effect on daeva and the torture one has not been tried; no one familiar with it is accessible and no one trustworthy is willing to learn it.) A feature of the Unforgivable Curses is that they must be cast with malicious intent; you can learn to throw off the Imperius through repeated exposure but someone cannot cast it on a target with the intent of helping the target learn to throw it off, the Killing Curse cannot be used for painless suicide, etc.
"This part it would have been unwise to commit to writing but daeva can give themselves wizard genes if they want, after which if they can acquire a wand magic works fine for them. As you can see that dimension's a bit of a potential disaster."
"We're handling it by keeping a much tighter chokehold on summoning than is tractable for you to do, so you're in the harder position by far. The Hazel natives are willing to answer questions, should you have some, and willing within some constraints to do training and experiments and so on."
"Local law - which is disturbingly indifferent about memory modification and so on but does take the Unforgivables very seriously - lack of expertise - these are mostly spells it would be highly suspect to know at all, and they're all teenagers - informed consent..."
"- more context: Way was attending magic school in Hazel in 1802 when he encountered an interdimensional portal to a location called Milliways, which is a - library of worlds, with the published works of any dimension anywhere in the multiverse. Swan was unbound on the replacement Valinor halfway through fifty-five million resurrections when he encountered a portal to the same location. Swan noticed the resemblance to me, and asked for an overview of Hazel magic in case there was anything that can do time-travel or resurrections or kill Melkor - at this point he disclosed that he'd recently holed a planet - and Way asked for 2180 medical technology and infrastructure and so on. Swan taught him how to do summoning safely; he summoned a demon and requested documentation to verify Swan's story about the circumstances surrounding the destruction of Valinor, summoned a fairy and evacuated Azkaban in favor of a prison arcology on the Moon, rounded up all of the Dementors and put them in deep space somewhere, and had a bunch of elderly non-magic and not-informed-of-the-existence-of-magic people summon daeva in order to check whether they, like Revelation's inhabitants, would thereby become daeva when they died.
They then decided that their top priority was checking interactions between their magic systems, in particular whether daeva were vulnerable to mind control or to murder and additionally whether the Imperius could override a binding. If daeva were safe against magic, it seemed possible to roll out summoning in Hazel; if not, it would have to remain a secret. Though I think they were still considering using it personally to end slavery and so on."
"Not at all. - incidentally Swan's summoner was at this point on a planet whose location was known only to Swan in a dimension to which Swan controlled access. If you're inclined to find 'had he desired to make trouble there is nothing anyone could have conceivably done about it' persuasive. Anyway, one of Timothy's younger siblings is murdered by a fairy he summoned, and becomes a demon; this provides confirmation that summoners daevafy even outside your dimension. When he becomes a daeva he is to his grave disappointment no longer a wizard. This is, from a strategic perspective, good news, as it means they can roll out summoning in Hazel without the fear of adding wizards to the daeva population. But Minor is terribly upset over it. Swan takes a few weeks looking at the genetic basis of Hazel wizardry, does a bunch of self-transplants, and becomes a wizard.
They check whether the Killing Curse works on daeva; it doesn't.
And at this point someone wanders into Milliways from yet another Arda. It transpires that there are four hundred million of them - there are even more Earths, if you were inclined to wonder. Now it seems urgent to know whether Hazel spells can stop Melkor - Swan, of course, already has a way of solving this problem but it has appalling collateral damage; teaching him the spells just gives him a cleaner one. Swan contemplates whether to turn himself into the local Valar in the hope that after executing him they'd fix the Valinor he destroyed. Timothy is opposed - they're involved by this point - and proposes instead that they look through all four hundred million and find a set of Valar who won't execute him and enlist those ones for help fixing the black hole."
Nod. "They find a set of Valar who seem qualified. Those Valar invite Swan in, interrogate him about the events, conclude he should face a war crimes trial but is not a danger to anyone pending that, let him go, go resurrect everyone who was not yet resurrected, and capture the local Melkor so the effectiveness of Hazel unforgivables against him can be tested. Swan attempts it; it fails just like it fails against daeva. They come up with a way of using Vala magic to cancel black holes, so Swan can kill Melkors while everyone else on the same planet is uninjured. They employ this at need in other Ardas. I've elided lots of other interdimensional interventions that don't touch on Hazel or Swan especially.
Now that everyone has been resurrected and the black hole set to rights, Swan goes to get his summoner off the hidden planet. Summoner is horrified and dismisses him; he arrives back in Hell to several hundred Ganymede circles open for him and the rest I think is familiar to you."
"And my insistence that we'd have no trouble recapturing him. I'm unsure how best to explain to the world at large that the Elven empires are actually clusters of parallel worlds - I've had to be evasive about things as basic as our population because it jumps a few billion whenever we intervene in a new one."
"Trillions of them. They might not smoothly integrate, though - the most recent Arda we found is a thousand years ago, and I'm still running it, so it was no trouble to tell them how to restructure their government to be part of a multiverse usefully. Humans don't have as much continuity of rule."
"Yep. The circle's microscopic but they could of course get a microscope. Or they could ask a daeva, we think that's the more likely avenue for it to get out. The Valar can restrict summoning to only working in certain locations, that's what they're doing in Ardas, but they don't have the attention to do it everywhere and haven't done it in Godspring. My fork there has been conjuring for summoning circles outside the permitted locations but that of course doesn't catch stolen projectors, of which there's been at least one incident. Local infrastructure is maintained by demons on long-term summons to raise children, which has gone very well so far."
"Yes, exactly. There was only one incident, one demon decided to end slavery and supplied some underground rebels towards that end. There was nearly a war and we had to relocate her to somewhere without any atrocities she'd be tempted to end. - we finished abolition in Godspring eighteen months after first contact, we were prioritizing doing it peacefully. There's an internal review now evaluating whether we should have moved faster."
"Goldmages - the timetravellers - lose the magic when they daevafy. Whitemages, who do healing, inconveniently do as well. Redmages will almost certainly never take summons - neither would bronze - bluemages and silvers could be a danger by accident, greenmages avoid most of the disadvantages of their magic type by daevafying - they forget to eat, sleep, use the restroom, and breathe, but none of those matter to a daeva - and could be a danger on purpose. Copper could be a danger on purpose but less of one, they do increased strength -" and so on -
"One has not yet been developed. There are records in all the temple-guilds, those are now available electronically, but if someone dipped a young child and got away forensic conjuration won't help us notice. Precautionary measures should probably be taken for all arrests of ex-residents of Godspring. And I don't know what the laws surrounding disability accommodations in prison are here, but dwindled Godspring mages are mostly disabled with lots of support needs."
"They have a caretaker assigned to them in childhood who can have an expanded role in care as they become further dwindled. For blue and redmages this is a lifetime contract; I don't know how they plan to handle it after the death of one or both parties." Bright wrote up descriptions for him of mage types and the responsibilities of their caretakers; he flips through countries giving examples.
"Right now there's no way for people in Godspring to get here except via our dimension or Milliways. We're considering setting up a portal on Mars so you can have normal trade relations with them unmediated by Elves, but that's likely thirty years out."
"I don't expect it to come up much, I expect Godspring daeva to mostly go home to their families when they die. - they actually have a very, very high rate of suicides-in-order-to-become-a-daeva-in-order-to-feed-your-family, we're hoping once they're mostly post-scarcity that will stop."
"They're mostly fairies - ex-humans from here seem to be mostly fairies too, actually - and they're not all sharing - some areas are very fragmented along religious or tribal lines, some just don't yet have the infrastructure, people want to take care of their own family instead of counting on the goodwill of a neighbor, people want to be the provider - we're doing an analysis of which countries have the worst problems, see if we can identify which economic and cultural factors produce that outcome, see what we can tinker with to avoid it."
"I don't know how much of that was a consequence of your forensics demons's determination to keep it quiet and how much was a consequence of people saying it, not being believed, and deciding it was unwise to bring it up again. I'm glad it's known now, though, so fewer lives can be sundered by accidents and illness and so on."
"We haven't received a formal report about it and I can therefore justify leaving it alone. If it got out of my hands - I'm not eager to reopen that can of worms. How about I just introduce you to my PSSA contact and you introduce them to Minor and he can do pentesting for them."
"Last time a large share of his complaint was that you were factually mistaken about a question fairly central to the case, and also that you'd added laws so you'd have one to charge him with breaking, and also that you didn't have a case and knew it and were determined to see it go to trial anyway. This one - and mind I don't have any details - his concerns about your forensics have been assuaged and the law was in place anyway and the thing he did was a problem, thus his mentioning it to us so protections against it could be developed. If you'd let him write he wouldn't even take any prompting. Since I take it that's a nonstarter, he will take prompting, but he'd be promptable."
Trevor is delighted to receive him. He comes up with experiments he'd like to do with cooperating daeva and has the idea of a gagged fairy circle to test randoms - "I know it's not fun, but many fairies taking random summonses bring star navs, with writing on them, it'd cut down on extraneous answers."
"I was hoping you could get us in touch with a greenmage fairy who might be willing to help. The wand test should work whether or not the fairy's a wizard though. I can run through our preprints collection, recall the ones that phrase staying inside the circle in a way that allows that..."
"It's not horrible just not as good. They get to be indestructible but they don't get magic powers, and they get one thing which is also indestructible - the one thing you'd want most, or something...but there's no food and the ground is just flat dust you can't grow things in and it's kind of boring. The Elf gods are gonna make a portal there next chance they get and then maybe they can make it nicer."
"Demons can conjure for things. We've known about all the afterlife stuff for ages, angels and fairies only found out more recently. And there are concordances, which is when this little bit of Hell overlaps with Limbo and we can send them things. The whole space of the concordance is full of train tracks and we send them supplies, as much as we can squeeze through before it closes again, and we read some of their writing and music and stuff."
"It's not important for the immortality it's important for me to be allowed to leave the circle. We could agree, say, that I make you things you want and can also make myself things for convenience while I'm stuck here, and in exchange you pay me by, I don't know, telling me a good place to go sightseeing."
He can write Bright an annoyed note observing that lots of daeva would be provocable under this particular set of circumstances.
He can spy on the weird cult in Canada some more. What exactly were they chanting in bad Sanskrit, how long have most of the members been members, how often do they summon daeva...
...how'd they get here? Has this baby been in a ship for ten days, she has clear evidence of the outdoors in her hair and not fixing that during ten days on a ship is not good. (The doctors aren't asking this; this is some kind of social worker in between questions about how Vissi's appetite is and so on.)
Taking summons, mostly. Lobbying against escort laws in the EU. He doesn't know if Miranda wants to be on the show, she's pretty busy. His brother Timothy ran into a demon and thought a demon would be super useful for ending slavery and stuff and so promptly seduced him and the demon knew the Elves and the Elves were very upset about death and it grew from there. Daeva know lots about the multiverse because summons take you to Godspring and Arda as often as to Revelation, most daeva just don't have arrangements so they can vlog about it. He's kind of surprised there haven't been more reporters and tourists going to visit the Elves though.
"Some company would have to ask a demon for some lightleapers and then train some people to pilot them and then fly it. And Timothy could probably seduce anyone he wanted - unless they were a girl, he's hilariously terrible at girls - but I think he did it in this case with dramatic monologues. Michael seduced his demon girlfriend by trading her whatever she wanted for all of the music in the world, I do not recommend that method at all."
Yeah, sure! You are supposed to have a crew of four, two on-duty at all times. The computer does almost everything, honestly, but they found that when people were alerted to situations the computer couldn't handle they were inattentive and failed to handle it in time, so now there are thoroughly engrossing things to do all of the time though they only affect the trajectory of the ship should there be problems with the computer systems. Here's a six-month course and a simulator to practice in!
Okay, getting Godspring people medical care in Revelation doesn't work. Maybe the Milliways infirmary can handle them. If people try to make their sick little babies summoners there're going to be a lot of annoyed daeva around but maybe it's still worth it. - if they're willing to do it with the bindings Cam described he can send the daeva back home through portals and the bindings can avoid restricting their activities back home.
Meanwhile:
Mirelótë comes downstairs with Bella on her shoulders. "Bella has now spent about a twelfth of her subjective childhood here and however accessible her mother it would be intractable to get her father too if we tried not to be noticed; he lives far away from her door. Do we have the wherewithal to get on her world now?"
"Bella's world compared to Godspring has much higher literacy rates - it's virtually every adult without a disability and most of the children - so the dots needn't be as personnel-heavy, but it has a higher population and a lower death rate so the demand will be high and the turnover to relative summoning instead will be slower."
" - if Bella doesn't want more subjective time to pass before we're ready to handle Arceus she could step into Stork, which is also paused, and then we could go get her when those are a little better - with that wait time even if it doesn't increase the dots just won't be tractable..."
Sigh. "Better payments don't help, more people take summons but they take fewer of them because it doesn't take many to get what they want. It'll be a generation before you get real turnover to just summoning relatives and even then you'll get people who want to stay home instead of being dismissed and resummoned -"
"May as well harness it now. Soon enough there won't be huge numbers of orphaned Godspring children either. And it might improve treatment of daeva on Revelation if they had to wait an hour for a new random and were incentivized to find long term arrangements that work for their summonees."
"We should also communicate in the daeva realms that if someone ends up trapped or mistreated taking summons, they or someone who notices they're missing can write us and we'll get them immediately released and, if it's outside Revelation, their kidnapper sanctioned."
"My objections to Ganymede have always been the gags and the wrongful convictions. Guilty people not getting showers and internet access - when every single person in the multiverse who hasn't raped any children has showers and internet access then I will make sure he gets them too, how about that."
"No, but it doesn't matter, because there's already a record in the system of the guy being accused, he just got himself killed in a farm equipment accident while out on bail before it went to trial and the GCP hasn't caught up to checking whether all of various human criminals were summoners."
"I sort of get the argument but it's not clear when to start applying it if it's a kid and I'm not sure I buy it even for adults. And, like, the summoner told Minor, who was a random stranger. And could have been lying, did he forensic it - if you turn a thousand cases on your lie detection ability you'll be wrong a few times -"
"I'm actually sort of surprised I was insufficiently clear. If you have a policy of reporting child rape cases decades after the fact to the GCP for a very public trial whatever the people involved want, then I do wish I hadn't told you anything I don't want the GCP clumsily and publicly announcing eventually."
"Yes, obviously. The whole point of rights is that you can't get them revoked by being sufficiently horrible; summoning people to a random uninhabited corner of the galaxy is a shitty form of problem solving that we have the resources to improve on, even if I'm more reliable at determining guilt than a jury trial - and we both know I am - systems matter and ad-hoc handling of peoples' lives creates problems and is a bad precedent to set if we're going to try to fix the whole multiverse and you're not wrong but I wish I hadn't told you."
"Somebody wrote Minor about a vigilante summons, Minor and I looked into it, it was a - messy situation and one we decided was not a priority - she'd summoned him because he'd raped a seven-year-old, he was annoyed that people were still making a big deal out of that - anyway Cam reported it to the police and to Ganymede and was disappointed in me for not doing so and it transpires that we have a disagreement on reporting rape cases to the police without the consent of the victim. - I don't think you should do that, not if other people aren't in danger -"
" - it would help if he actually reassured me that he wouldn't do that, so I guess you could say that to that extent it's related to mistrust? But it's mostly - I haven't told my brothers and the reason is that they'd be tempted to do something about it, and even though I could talk them out of that it would be - exhausting -
- as long as it's just people who agree it's obviously my right to decide how to handle it - then I don't have to be constantly thinking about how to perform being-sufficiently-competent-to-handle-this so they aren't tempted to override me - once my privacy here is a special license being extended to me then I have to think about it all the time and I really hate thinking about it."
"So - if you explained your reasoning to him he probably doesn't explicitly think this but his background assumption would be that there'd be some other reason to bring it up, that it was an optional vulnerability to present. Which he has failed to handle in the way you would have hoped."
" - I mean, the other reason to bring it up would be so he could understand why I'd have irrationally strong reactions to cases like this one, but I couldn't have told you what I'd have wanted him to do as a consequence of having the information - be slower to lose patience and announce he was handling it unilaterally, maybe - but I was not consciously expecting him to do that, and I wouldn't want him to, ah, trust me to handle things unless they're child rape cases, that would be horrible -"
"I wouldn't have automatically assumed you wanted him to do anything with the information, necessarily. I think - mm, if there were something comparable in his history he'd probably want to tell you about it sooner or later for - 'just for completeness' seems trite but more or less encapsulates the idea?"
"There's that too but if I'd known that having told him was going to make certain multiverse policy decisions stressful that would be more significant than completeness. Like - I do think that it would be a cost to our relationship not to have ever mentioned it, but I'd rather incur that cost than be terrified like I was today -"
"I would ordinarily think my impression on this was being colored by how Elves are compared to humans and psychologically-humans about marriage but Kib's the same way so I think it applies - this is awkward to put in words, I can rephrase it if I need to - if policy decisions have effects like this on the relationship something somewhere has gone horribly wrong, and if the expressed regret is having disclosed information that adds to the completeness of a relationship, the obvious place wherein something may have gone horribly wrong is in attempting to have a complete relationship."
"If you regret telling him things that he regards to be part of a fully realized partnership to tell, then from his perspective that reasonably backpropagates into regret about embarking on that serious a partnership in the first place. Wishing you hadn't told him reads as wishing you'd been less involved, in general. I don't think he actually expects you to dump him but he may have serious doubts about whether this is because you're young or chasing sunk costs or something."
" - oh. No, I'm treating 'I have panic attacks at the thought people close to me think that child rape cases should be reported to Ganymede without the consent of the victim and have enough information to act on that even if they currently think highly enough of me they can probably be dissuaded' as a inconvenient thing about me which I should mostly work around until I can look up the state of the art on trauma processing or whatever and make it stop being true. The deficit is with me."
"Mirelóte did some translating." Snuggle. "I feel scared, I feel helpless, I am not used to feeling that way and don't know how to go about changing facts about my head so I don't feel that way, so it feels easier to wish I hadn't made the decisions that put me in that position but those aren't - really the problem. I - are you going to go report him to whatever authority claims jurisdiction, should it come up -"
"Thank you. So, uh, that doesn't make the feeling scared and helpless go away, it's sort of tied to - the difference between feeling like I have something as a matter of course and feeling like I have it because I've performed my way into a special exception, but I think I can probably get there eventually. And that's much preferable to never having told you."
Cam belatedly pulls out his wand and casts the conversational privacy spell. "Your mom has not summoned the creep to make him stand in a five foot circle till she gets rid of him or dies. You consciously and at more than twice the girl's age took a risk, which doesn't mean you couldn't decide you wanted to prosecute him if you were so inclined but means it implies a markedly different risk profile for people who didn't take that risk and don't know how he conducts himself. Insofar as he has the ability to appear in assorted locations that may be inadequately secured against his magical powers, that is a security problem we are currently pausing his whole world to fix in the general case rather than a feature of his being dead which feature is addressed by an existing imperfect but usually okay justice system."
"If people'd rather handle things like this with a vigilante summons than have to testify to Ganymede I'm - not unreservedly okay with that but I'd talk to them before calling the cops on them. I agree that letting him free would have been a bad solution."
"You usually get good or at least informative results from talking to people; it makes sense for you to have it as a first resort.
"I don't know if it makes any difference that it didn't even occur to me to compare the situations at the time I said I was going to go send the tips in, you presented yours as - sort of distinct in character and I mostly don't think about it unless the creep comes up in conversation, I probably should've."
"I didn't think you had. I don't think of them as equivalent. I didn't realize how much it'd bother me to hear you say that until you said it and I just thought - oh no oh no oh no what about when - I guess it had been on my mind because I was trying to imagine what the girl might want -"
"Came upstairs to be very patient at the thing. I can see how she worked her miracles on the Valar. I - it'll help me if in the future if when you make a decision like that you - nod at - some of the costs of doing so and indicate you've thought about them, but other than that I don't think you did anything wrong and I really don't want you to be all sad on a couch down here wondering if I regret falling in love."
"- I was sort of premature in announcing plans, I did check various things like the presence of a preexisting police report before I sent any emails and if I'd been being careful I would've mentioned that my intentions were potentially conditional and so on, would that have helped -"
"A very long time ago... well, for those of us who are not yet twenty, it was like a year back - I said 'we don't have to do the right thing every time' and you made such a face and said 'yes we do' and it is one of the things I like very much about you, not compromising on that."
"I do want you to be able to trust that when I interact with a situation it gets handled acceptably. A rapist being stuck in a cornfield for a week while I figure out what to do is acceptably, to me, but that is very important and I don't want to damage it."
"I did, didn't I. I was not especially invested in speeding him to cozy accommodations as quickly as possible but when I feel that way it rarely lasts past a good night's sleep. Would probably have finished the letter, ignored him for a day and felt quite satisfied about it, looked things up the next day, gone and talked with the family...they might be okay with Ganymede, might've done this because they didn't feel like they had options - it must be unpleasant to know that someone you were glad to see dead is in fact still around and with magic powers..."
"If the victim would have been required to testify at trial, wasn't okay with doing that, and wanted him stuck, then I would have been okay with him staying stuck. Roof over his head and visitors, yes, but - I wasn't going to intervene in order to force a choice between testifying and watching him go free. But maybe they won't need her to testify, and maybe they'd have been okay with Ganymede."