"Aww, I'm glad you like it!" he says happily. "I love my galaxy."

"Are all the planets like this or did you come up with a few billion ideas for nifty rocks in less than a minute?"

"Most of the pretty stuff like this is different per planet, but not always a lot different. And the people-friendly parts are mostly just copies of nice Earth climates with the exact geography changed. And all the plants are Earth species, and somebody's gonna have to go through and build up the rest of the ecosystems, because if I'd had to come up with any complicated biology on the fly it would've taken ages."

"Yeah, that makes sense, copying speeds things way up. You could pretty up Limbo this way," he adds. "If nobody's prayed for it yet."

"People have prayed for some little stuff, but I dunno. I'd feel weird just barging in and covering places in trees and hills and pretty rocks when there are people there already. Maybe I'll do it to some places that are near people but not under 'em and see how they like it. There, I did one."

"There you go. It's just always sounded unbearably drab. The understood theory is that you show up there and you get exactly the one thing that you think an afterlife would be most incomplete without, but you don't get a chance to think that through, so people show up and they maybe get their favorite dead dog or a pond or an ice skating rink and it winds up being a pretty bizarre mishmash."

"Very tasteful, might not fit a truck through it though if they want to bring in stuff from offworld, where does that lead to?"

"Just another one of my planets. Different solar system, but close by. That one's just to see how the idea works. My problem with making doors to Earth is I don't know where on Earth to put 'em."

"Okay. I can make guesses, but I am probably not a good emissary to ask humans any questions, since demons are not well liked."

"Guesses are a place to start!"

"Okay, eventually you're going to want these near population centers, but for an initial proof of concept I'd think something maybe fifty miles away from the nearest good-size town - a town with, like, hotels in it as opposed to two bed-and-breakfasts, but make the whole thing remote enough that people don't swarm it and trample each other."

"That Earth? Where on it?"

"Yep! I found a town with a nice hill in the middle of its nowhere, somewhere in Canada I think, wasn't paying that much attention to borders. I figure it'll be more interesting if people can see the thing easily."

"Good thinking."

"Thanks!" Cam takes off and flies through the portal. "Demon on the loose, run, hapless Canadians," he mutters, though he's still invisible.

Teah's giggling follows him through.

"Besides revolutionizing transit between worlds - I wonder if anybody will even bother to attend concordances anymore? - got any big plans?"

"Not especially! Why, you wanna suggest something?"

"Well, if you're gonna fix Limbo up pretty and let everybody move around freely, death is no longer a huge deal, but it might be hard for people to find each other. I'm pretty sure Limbo's not common knowledge for live humans."

"That's gonna change. There've been people wanting resurrections, and all I have to do is offer to the dead person if they want to go back. And when they don't wanna go back I say so to the person who asked. Word is gonna get around."

"Cool. Uh, the non-mortal worlds could also really use standardized communication protocols of, like, any kind, I think Fairyland may have something worked out but Limbo doesn't have the materials and Heaven and Hell don't have the coordination to agree on how to use radio frequencies and encode signals and so on. If you one-time issued every dead person and daeva some kind of magic widget that would communicate with other widgets of the same kind and attach to any sort of computer, and threw in the computers too for the Limboites and maybe the fairies, that would be swell. Especially if they worked world to world."

"Ooooh. Interesting. If it's gonna work world to world anyway, though, why leave the mortals out of it?"