"You might be a good person to do that, if you wanted to."

"Especially if he might want coaching on how to tell Miranda."

"I bet he would greatly appreciate coaching on how to tell Miranda."

"I'll go find him. It's lovely to meet you, Tireh."

And she goes looking for Minor.

Flopped on a couch reading. "Hi."

"Hello. How are you doing?"

" - not as bad as the summons where the building'd blown up, actually. But then at least there was, like, 'go to med school' as an obvious way of avoiding that situation in future..."

"This time you're already working on changing the conditions that made it less than astonishing, outlier behavior on the summoner's part."

"If it gets out I'll set all that work back by a ton."

Hug.

Hug.

"Do you want to tell me what happened?"

"Took the egg summons. Came back. There were eggs right there next to my summoner. Checked in glass - yep, the summoners' species hatched from them - checked how many daeva they'd summoned - dozens of them - wrote Cam - took a circle - 

- it was to Vienna, the dad of one of the people who daevafied after watching my show. I tried to gesture that I urgently needed to go home. He threw a brick at my head and left."

Nod.

"Didn't come back. And I tried to think - you would probably notice I was gone and send somebody, a soul Elf if there was one around, but Milliways, didn't know how long to expect it to take, and it wasn't the sort of thing where if I waited for three hours and no one had come, that meant you were probably going to be there soon, after three hours if you hadn't come I would be in the exact same position except three hours would have passed, so I should make up my mind right away, either way.

I figured they'd summon another couple people while I was waiting to get the message to you. And the people they'd already have summoned would talk to more people. I thought worst case you'd just have a goldmage jump - but can't be sure of that, could be that one randomly jumped recently in Godspring for some silly unrelated reason -"

"Mm."

"So. Trying to let him to let me go would scare him but stood a decent chance of being the difference between someone writing the curators of Hell to say 'hey, have you got the winged people world yet'? and not. So I went invisible, drew his attention, thought he'd dismiss me when he saw I wasn't in the circle."

"It sounds like that was a reasonable guess even in hindsight."

"I don't think I guessed badly with the information I had, no. Maybe I could've inferred from the fact I didn't get literacy and the circle was in sand that it was just one person doing it, but even so I think there's a significant chance someone'll write the library asking about this world. Could've told Cam 'pause Hell' instead of telling him to get me, I should've just done that and hoped you'd piece it together -"

Hug.

"Invisibility just made him read the binding more carefully. So I paralyzed him and dragged him into the circle and glared at him - I honestly thought that'd do it -"

"I would have expected that too."

"Waited ten minutes. It wouldn't - wouldn't have been okay if he'd been in the middle of trying and - 

- at ten minutes if it was worth it at all there was no reason to let more time pass first -"

Nod.

"And then I wrote Cam again and came home and we paused Hell and it doesn't look like anyone'd written the curators. Yet."