Miles Naismith Vorkosigan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thisvorlunatic) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
glowfic2015-07-08 09:52 pm
thisvorlunatic) wrote in glowfic2015-07-08 09:52 pm
Entry tags:
letter to cam #3
Today has been a day.
At the rate that my trusted associates have been becoming daeva, there won't be anyone left to summon you by next month. Body count so far: my brother, rescue mission, now an angel; my mother, different rescue mission, also an angel; my father, innocent bystander at a violent kidnapping, now a demon with a bodiless ghost duplicate who narrowly escaped eternal torment in the space between worlds. I think I explained the first two already last time we spoke, but Da's incident happened last night.
Given that I technically have a higher-risk occupation than any of them, I'm not liking my chances of remaining human long enough to keep summoning you regularly, and anyway Da can fill my zorkmid crates just fine now. So how do you feel about coming for a visit sometime soon and raiding the comm nets for interesting books and other media to conjure when you get home? If I'm about to run out of humans to summon you with, there's no point keeping anything in reserve as trade goods, and I trust you to be sensible about what you pass on to other demons.
Miles
At the rate that my trusted associates have been becoming daeva, there won't be anyone left to summon you by next month. Body count so far: my brother, rescue mission, now an angel; my mother, different rescue mission, also an angel; my father, innocent bystander at a violent kidnapping, now a demon with a bodiless ghost duplicate who narrowly escaped eternal torment in the space between worlds. I think I explained the first two already last time we spoke, but Da's incident happened last night.
Given that I technically have a higher-risk occupation than any of them, I'm not liking my chances of remaining human long enough to keep summoning you regularly, and anyway Da can fill my zorkmid crates just fine now. So how do you feel about coming for a visit sometime soon and raiding the comm nets for interesting books and other media to conjure when you get home? If I'm about to run out of humans to summon you with, there's no point keeping anything in reserve as trade goods, and I trust you to be sensible about what you pass on to other demons.
Miles
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I assume your father will be making this letter for you? I like the idea just fine. Call me up whenever.
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Yes. Having a demon around is remarkably handy.
Expect a summons either in the next few days, or after a couple of weeks; the very minute I expect to have nine consecutive days of nothing needing my immediate attention, I'm going to run off and attempt to acquire some shiny new magic that wants a nine-day time investment, and I don't know whether I'll end up fitting your visit in before or after the trip.
(As for why I want this stuff so urgently: it's that nastily hostile universe that made my brother explode when he went there to rescue somebody. Its problems extend far beyond merely detonating interdimensional visitors, and a friend and I are amassing resources with an eye to eventually cleaning the place up. Let no one accuse me of thinking small.)
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I wouldn't dream of accusing you of something like that. Do you need more than one person's worth of demonic help?
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If I do, you'll be the first person I ask. Unless four more of my close friends die and become demons in the interim, I guess. Although I'll still probably ask you first because most of my remaining trusted nondaeva friends at this point are much busier than I am and can't afford to take time off to go save a universe.
I should probably point out that things like "eternal torment in the space between worlds" are actual potential risks of field work in this business, though. I wouldn't want you to assume that nothing can go too badly wrong because you're a daeva and then participate on that basis, only to take a hit from an unreality grenade and spend an indefinite amount of time Outside being confused and sensory-deprived until someone manages to rescue you. (Da's ghost double escaped to the rainbow goddess's realm pretty quick, but Da's ghost double didn't bring an emphatically attached body along and we don't know how that might complicate things.)
Miles
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I mean, I'd certainly want more details about this sort of thing before picking and choosing my missions, but opportunities to do anything really interesting are kind of what gets sacrificed in exchange for my cushy risk-free life in Hell, and I've been making that tradeoff for a hundred and fifty years.
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I'll see what I can do about that. A hundred and fifty years deprived of the opportunity to do anything really interesting would drive me insane; I commend you on your continued mental function in the face of cushy risk-free boredom.
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One catches up on one's reading.
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God save me from having that much opportunity to catch up on my reading. (While we're on the subject, though, I've been enjoying Asimov in the brief moments between disasters when I have time to read for fun.)
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One also flies! Flying kills time like crazy. It's swell. It's not awful, but I would rather not go on doing this for literally forever when an opportunity happens to summon me and introduce me to interesting music.
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It's very charming how you've taken to Ash and Stars. Did you like the rest of my recommendations too? What did you think of my military historians?
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Military history is not traditionally My Thing but either the state of the art has become very popularly accessible or you just curate well. The one who I suspect of being related to you has a particularly nice turn of phrase.
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How the hell'd you guess that?
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I liked his turn of phrase and indulged in some extracurricular conjuration to see what else he might have done. Nothing particularly sensitive, but you have been written about in connection to him.
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Well, I told Da what you think of his turn of phrase, and after the ritual grumbling about how that report was never meant to be published he said thank you.
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And he is welcome.
I'm deeply curious about what-all I will be doing if I sign on to your interdimensional shenanigans gig.
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Technically the quasi-official organization is the "World-Tree Coalition", and if you signed on as a field agent you'd be the third one after my brother and my mother. (The coalition at present is not much more than "Miles Vorkosigan and anybody he can talk into helping him out", but it's surprising how far I've been able to get on that alone.)
Current issues facing the coalition include:
The people kidnapped in the incident that killed my father are still kidnapped, and the people who kidnapped them are a nasty faction of people apparently controlled by a pseudomagical multivector virus that turns everyone and everything it infects into tools with which to infect more people. Only one of the kidnappees has Esthfora's protection. It's not looking good, but the locals haven't yet asked the Coalition for help, which I am just going to hope indicates that they're handling it themselves or at least that they don't expect adding interdimensional resources will solve the problem.
The nasty visitor-exploding universe continues to be nasty and in the habit of exploding visitors, and my brother continues to be stuck there. Tentative plan doesn't have any obvious places to put multiple demons, but you might be able to contribute something from your media library - we need to essentially optimism-bomb the population of a planet by sneaking a bunch of positive uplifting material into their various publishing industries, so a wider choice of material can only help.
I'm mildly suspicious of an interdimensional trading company that's recently made contact with my corner of the multiverse, and trying to figure out the best avenue to investigate their ethics and safety standards.
I'm highly suspicious of an individual who's been nosing around the interdimensional communication hubs trying to get people to let him into their worlds, and there's a non-negligible chance that if somebody took the bait I would have to pull together every effective field agent I could get my hands on and go shut him down before he decided to blow up a galaxy on a lark or some damn thing. (He is extremely powerful, at least if his casual references to the circumstances of his life are to be believed, and he seems to have trouble grasping that in some universes death is permanent by default.)
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How exactly is an angel stuck in a universe? Is he not on summon? Did he not go to Heaven when he died in the first place? Does dismissal not work from there? Did someone from there summon him and cannot be contacted (or killed)?
I can assemble media, I've been consuming media for a century and a half, but what language is it supposed to be in?
What does the company interdimensionally trade?
Has no one let him in yet? I hadn't been getting an impression of strict immigration controls. He's generally sketchy/dangerous-looking to the point where nobody's given him the means?
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1. He went to Heaven and then immediately arranged alternate transportation out of Heaven, and went to the World of Darkness (seriously, that's what the locals in the know call it) by the same non-summoning means. I would be deeply reluctant to tell anybody in that world how to summon daeva, lest it turn out that the summoner is the one who explodes in that case and is subsequently prevented from escaping to their appropriate daeva plane.
2. Language isn't much of a concern; we have access to copious translation magic. The planet is a more or less recognizable version of Earth, though.
3. I hesitate to quote you their sales material in case they turn out to have enticing wares protected by aggressive copyright measures. They deal in all kinds of weird currency, though, like "pain" and "ideas" and "years of healthy life" - apparently mere material currencies are too subject to, uh, exactly what we've been doing with zorkmids. (In defense of my zorkmid-related practices, I haven't been flooding any markets with them - they're essentially sacrificial material for a peculiar kind of magic.)
4. As far as I can tell, nobody's let him in yet. I would tentatively expect to hear about it if someone had. Interdimensional travel is not perfectly controlled by any means, but he in particular seems to face logistical barriers in travelling from his world to others. If I'm to believe him, his entire universe is scaled down so that it's smaller than the distance between two subatomic particles in an ordinary reality. (How he found that out without ever having been to an ordinary reality, I do not know.)
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1. I assume someone (you) has already tried summoning him? It is traditional to be summoned from Heaven but I wouldn't be too sure that a daeva elsewhere located couldn't be summoned as long as he wasn't on a summon right then.
2. What year is it? Am I going to be duplicating work if I offer cartoons from the 2010s renaissance?
3. 'Years of healthy life' sounds... concerning.
4. That's very strange and ought to run into problems with Planck distances or run on totally incompatible physics. Why does he want to frolic among the electrons, pray?
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1. I haven't actually been aggressively pursuing his retrieval, because he seems okay for now and it might be prohibitively difficult to get anyone else into the universe; the hostile barrier seems fond of escalating. It sent teleporting assassins after him last time he tried to move an object from that world to mine.
2. 2012, but they might be having a different 2010s renaissance than whatever one you're thinking of, because that world is bloody depressing.
3. Well, for example, our mutual acquaintance the elf summoner is planning to sell off her ten-thousand-year lifespan in a batch and then immediately become a daeva. So there are ways to sell lifespan without suffering for it. But yeah, it's a little disturbing.
4. I think he's mentioned wanting to import a lot of mass to his world for entropy reasons, which is a noble cause in theory, I'm just concerned about what kinds of large-scale destruction he might cause on the side if anyone takes him up on it. Apparently the scaling issues can be taken care of by magic? I'm less certain than he is about that. I'm less certain than he is about a lot of things.
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1. If you say so. "Not all avenues of retrieval have yet been explored, for reasons" is a little different than "stuck".
2. Noted. I'll ask some people with a curation hobby and get back to you; cartoons are not historically my bag either. (It's amazing how long it takes to consume all the media when people keep making more of it and you want to watch Atriama again. If you want a copy tell your dad the best production was the first recording of the Sorcarazine-directed run.)
3. I assume people who are already daeva can't sell it? How do the ideas work (do you stop having them?) The pain one? Are they all so amenable to cheating?
4. Why does he need to leave his universe to import mass?
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1. I don't know about you, but plenty of times in my life I have been stuck somewhere it was not literally physically impossible for me to leave.
2. I'll pass the recommendation along.
3. They seem broadly unamenable to cheating, summoner elves aside. You do indeed stop having the ideas, which is moderately horrifying. I haven't looked into the pain one in detail, but apparently they sell custom minting kits to enthusiasts. This implies that there are enough enthusiasts to form a market. (One mints one's own pain, I feel I must clarify at this point.)
4. Damned if I know. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe he has some completely unrelated ulterior motive.
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1. Point taken, but next time you're recruiting, "risks include verifiably irretrievable stranding" is a different pitch than "risks include it being kind of inconvenient to get home probably".
2. Fair warning, Atriama is in a natively demonic language; magic translation may be able to handle that where machine translation would need a dictionary, but just so you know to start it with your spell on.
3. That is horrifying, I am horrified. "Mints"?
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1. Oh, my apologies, that wasn't meant as a warning about being irretrievably stranded. I have not verified one way or another whether the stranding is currently irretrievable, but I expect it to stop being a problem either way once we've saved the universe. It's entirely possible that something somewhere will one day make a good show of irretrievably stranding somebody even against extensive rescue efforts, but since the multiverse is a very big place, I expect in the fullness of time someone will eventually manage to retrieve whoever it is from wherever they ended up.
2. Magic translation will handle it just fine, but thank you for the warning.
3. Through some unexplained magical process, things like pain, memories, hopes and dreams, years of life, and "time when you need it most" (???) can apparently be transformed into physical currency that then gets traded around and eventually may be redeemed for its original value. (The pain coins redeem for anaesthesia, I believe.) I haven't tried it myself, so I couldn't tell you how it works.
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All of those currencies are disturbing and I am disturbed and wish to learn more about the underlying metaphysics.
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I'll send you a copy of my report after I figure out what the hell.
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Lovely. Thank you.