"Do you have stock powers for people who want basic, deceptively complicated stuff like 'invisibility' or whatever?"

"Nah, I prefer to make it up new each time. I mean, not that I don't reuse things, but I don't just reuse things when somebody wants something like that. I see if I can come up with something even better, or more fun, or just different in an interesting way."

"Would you get bored otherwise?"

"Probably. If for some weird reason I had to do the same thing the same way every time, that would be massively boring, but lucky for me I don't! Lucky for everybody else, too, 'cause if I got that bored I might just not answer repeat prayers. It would really suck."

"If you keep giving out permanent powers won't you eventually run out of stuff to do? I mean, not necessarily soon, but say - Hell was quiet, so if everybody eventually acquired demon powers, then everywhere could be that quiet."

"It doesn't seem to work that way. I mean, maybe if I just spontaneously made it so everybody in every part of the world has all the daeva powers and then I vanished, if I came back in a hundred years there wouldn't be that many prayers. But people know I exist, in my original world and in Elcenia, and they want things, and the things they want aren't usually 'tons of superpowers'. So they ask for 'em."

"Who wouldn't want tons of superpowers?" Cam asks, starting to scout cool locations in the mortal world.

"People who want other things instead! I mean, maybe they'd want tons of superpowers if somebody offered, but what you'd take if somebody gave it to you is different from what you'll pray for on your own."

"I guess. So you intend on being a permanent fixture, distributing candy and - boomerang scarves -" (he glances at the Elcenia book for an example) "and very occasionally somebody gets a particularly keen suite of superpowers, all right."

"Candy, boomerang scarves, disease cures, rescue from shitty situations, handy magic stuff, polite refusals to people who wanna take over the world or something... that kinda thing, yeah."

"Well, the disease cures don't keep up forever, right? You seem to take excuses to cure things en masse when you can."

"Yeah. And if I don't know how, I work on it."

"If you let enough people teleport - especially if you let them bring stuff - I guess we get massive amounts of colonization outside the solar system and probably the population explodes and you will be able to fill time making magic puppies for a wide variety of children." He turns invisible and goes to hang out on Earth, above somewhere in Russia, and glides.

"Probably! Seems kind of superfluous because there's lots of planets people haven't touched yet, but I may just be overreacting to having lived in Hell for a century and a half where somebody's idea of obviously necessary decoration was a gigantic tacky plane of solid gold."

"Most of the planets people haven't touched yet would take some work to make habitable, is the thing. I can just make an entire galaxy of people-friendly planets. And just for you, one of 'em is going to have a gold core," he giggles. "I mean, if you let me. This is one of those things that's kind of dependent on having somebody willing to wish for it."

"Go for it."

Cam laughs.

Which he has time to do for all of, oh, ten seconds, before Teah gleefully announces: "Brand shiny new galaxy! That was a blast, it was great, wanna help me decide where to put some magic doors?"

"Sure, why not!"

"Awesome." And now Cam is on a different planet. Gravity is roughly Earth normal, but the planet is smaller - the horizon is noticeably lower. And the area Cam is flying over is covered in absolutely stunning rock formations - spires of branching translucent crystal in blue and pink and green and orange and red and white and purple, varying in size from towering to tiny. Very pretty, but not exactly habitable per se. The crystal forest has edges, though, and beyond those are some grassy areas striped with rivers and spotted with gentle hills.

"This looks like how I tend to imagine Fairyland, minus civilization," remarks Cam, swooping over the crystals. "Am I right? I should just visit Fairyland sometime and check, I suppose."

"Vaaaaguely right. It is weird and pretty and Fairyland is also those things. But I didn't just copy Fairyland's style, that would be boring."

"Of course," laughs Cam, landing in the hilly area and wiggling his toes in the grass. "You are so much faster than demons at making shit, I am pretty well outclassed, damn. Place is gorgeous."