"Why are you telling me, why now -"

"I've been trying to make sure I had enough information not to make things worse. I'm really not sure who to go to about it on our end - I did talk to the Anitami government -"

"He's already on summon, if we can't get to his summoner we really have very little ability to do anything about him. Scatter, I guess, but lightleapers exist and we know he knows about them -"

"And it'd be a nightmare. And - something doesn't add up."

"Like, what, why wasn't he a serial killer when he was alive? Are you sure he wasn't?"

"He was a summoner before Revelation, he could've gotten away with it. But no, people change. The weird thing is the contact with Amenta. See, we - we had some serious social problems we've been glossing over, there was a - unstable situation ongoing such that if we'd gotten daeva someone would've immediately used it to commit genocide -"

"- of who?"

"The red caste. The biohazards one. There are sixty-five million of them and the only reason people hadn't killed them was that we needed them."

"...that's awful."

"Yeah. I wouldn't - but it was awful. And - Swan - said he wouldn't teach us summoning until we fixed it."

"...so he likes red Amentans more than Elves -"

"He was also very concerned that we not use the lopsided advantage summoning would give us to bother any aliens in our universe."

"We know he's subtle or has complicated interests or something, he was summoned unbound to a moon of the planet he wound up holing and he didn't do it then."

"I know that. It just - the way Amentans would handle a situation like this normally, what with no way to stop him, is work up a psych profile and then send some people to go be his friends and try really hard to keep him distracted."

"Is that what you've been doing?"

"Nope. They've decided he's not a threat to them or to us. It sure does look like they're right, but -"

"What's he even doing in the - magic bar?"

"Waiting for contact with a world that can do resurrection."

"...so he waged an entire war in what may have been the most sadistic way possible short of dropping World War Two chemicals on civilian populations, and holed a planet, and now he... feels bad about it? Wants to do it all over again?"

"You see why I've been having a hard time leaving this alone!"

"It's sure mysterious but one wrong move -"

"I don't think there should be anything else published about the case. I shared the first things I learned, that was probably a mistake. I know we sometimes do open-case updates, let's not. If he's looking for his name..."

"He'll already be able to find the report. You might be in danger."

"I realized that when I figured out who was holding the door, yes."

Niari shivers.