"Gosh, do we have any analogy in our world?"

Cam laughs a little weakly.

"Well, maybe someone from that world will walk in and then we can have a go at our daeva-making scheme."

"Mmhm."

"I have a list of things it'd be fun to have for dinner!" It's a long list! It's in eight different alphabets.

Milliways is convenient. Cam makes dinner.

Amentans eat dinner and chatter about planets and aliens.

Cam is pretty quiet but answers questions put to him.

"Really seems like a shame not to use demons for criminal justice."

"I know but then we can't hide it from the neighbors and we've got to hide it from the neighbors."

He makes a face.

"I know. I would love to make a hundred billion new daeva. But the door has its own agenda, as far as we understand it."

"Do we have a complete list of examples of things the door has done -"

"Bar doesn't do complete, she'll do examples."

He goes off to ask for a hundred examples of behavior other than 'people come in from the door from their dimension, and eventually leave through it'.

People come in through the caves. Or the forest. Or fly in through the sky. Or leave through those means. People come in and stay; there is a giant squid in the lake and undisclosed quantities of patrons may or may not currently inhabit the upstairs. For a while it was fashionable for people to arrive in Milliways after their deaths as a sort of afterlife lite from some worlds, arriving via unclear means and leaving via equally unclear means, but this has not been happening lately. People get to worlds not their own, then find the door and go home. People find the door and go home with someone else. People appear in their dreams and vanish upon waking. People raise kids in Milliways who are native thereto. The door sometimes traps people but not for very long usually. The time pausing feature does not always work, especially if someone's return to their dimension is contingent on time passing there.

Do kids native to Milliways have the door open anywhere at all? If people go to worlds not their own, then to Milliways, the Milliways door opens home? Why doesn't it do that for Cam?

Sometimes their doors open to parental dimension(s) or they have idiosyncratic door-forcing powers or they just open to the exploding stars. (The air stays in.) Cam might be able to do stuff like that if he tried!

He goes upstairs. "We should have another kid!" he says.

"I think Makel wants his own at this point, dear. We can help pay for grandkids."

"No, we should have another kid because sometimes kids born in Milliways get idiosyncratic door-forcing powers."

"Uh, how sometimes?"

" - I don't know. I asked Bar for a hundred examples -" he reads them off - "and I asked why, given that some people get to another dimension some other way and then can go home through Milliways, your door doesn't do that, and she said you could maybe do that 'if he tried'."

"...I guess I should go try."

"I agree! If we had the kid here we could maybe argue we didn't need a credit," he says to Nertel.