"How'd they treat the defendants -"

"They were so -" She pauses thoughtfully. "Stared at."

Nod. He takes notes for his list. "Would you be interested in forensics work in a different setting, then?"

"I'm good at it. I don't know though."

"Been anywhere interesting lately?"

"I went to one of those dots. I could tell they were trying to be nice but it felt very institutional."

"I would pass that on to the Elves but I don't know that they'd know how to solve it, they might just take it as 'make them prettier'..."

"Oh, that's not it at all, the decor was nice."

"I sort of figured that wasn't the problem, yeah. I wonder if it's just - institutions. I'm from 1802 and there's been so much social progress since then but, like, Ganymede was as blandly dehumanizing as anything we came up with -"

"I've never been."

"I wasn't a fan. How about compensation, is there anything you'd want -"

"They used to pay me a salary and I'd tip people on the internet with it. Or buskers. I think I might like to travel, it's not the sort of thing you can really plan to do except in the most technical sense via summon."

"Yeah. Did you meet the winged people -"

"I saw a winged person."

"Singy language?"

"I suppose, yes. I didn't pay a lot of attention to it; they didn't want to talk."

"We were kind of hoping to keep that world from coming to anyone's attention."

"Who's 'we'?"

"People who've been paying attention to multiverse stuff."

"That seems like a vague criterion."

"I could give you a list but there's no obvious descriptor that catches us all."

"I don't have any plans that turn on announcing the summon but I object to lying."

"That's very reasonable. We really just want to avoid someone adding it to a list of known worlds, something like that."

"I won't volunteer the information."

"Thank you. Can I get you anything for your time -"