The person remains asleep. Firmly and unwakeably asleep.

Now Cam is confused. New demons might appear in his house but should not appear asleep - for that matter, the pajamas are also a surprise - and certainly shouldn't be comatose. He'd really like to know what's going on.

"Finally," says a voice out of thin air, age and timbre roughly matching the body on the floor. "Hi! I'm Teah! I'm a god! Do you need one around here? It kind of looks like you don't, which is surprising. Keep wanting to talk to me or I can't keep talking, that's how I work."

"...This is Hell, it's an unusual place to find a god, how do you work?"

"This is so weird, there are practically no prayers," he says. "Uh, short version: I can answer prayers. I can do just about any kind of magic you can think of, but I have to know what I'm doing first, so I'm not so good at things it's not safe to experiment with, like brains. But I can't do anything that's not answering a prayer. The body on the floor is me, but mostly in kind of an indirect metaphysical sense; I'm awake when he's asleep and vice versa, but we pretty much don't share memories. He's permanently asleep now because he figured out he's me and apparently that's what happens when he does that. This is Hell? No wonder the place is so dead. Is there anywhere around that's not Hell?"

"Uh, depends what you mean by around. Besides Hell you've got Heaven and Fairyland and the afterlife which goes by various names such as Limbo and then there's the mortal world. Fairyland and Limbo and the mortal world are probably better bets for you, how did you land here? Why Hell, why my living room?"

"Uh, okay. You can interact with all the others from here? We can't do that, we have to wait for infrequent conjunctions to meet anybody from Fairyland or Heaven or Limbo and we can only get to mortality via summoning."

"That sounds inconvenient," he remarks. "Yeah, don't know if I can move stuff between different worlds in your bundle, nobody's wanted to do it yet, but I can reach 'em all from here, they're just - a little farther away than normal. Ooh, I got to cure dementia already, that's a new record. Hey, and if I can move stuff between worlds, I might even be able to do fast resurrection, nice!"

"...I would like to relocate to Limbo, actually, if I can continue being a demon with demon abilities; most of what I like about Hell is the part where I am a demon with demon abilities. Including summonability."

"I would love to move worlds myself, I can reconstruct the house and its worthwhile contents in like ten minutes but if you care to spare me them I won't complain, just put me above New Pacific and I'll be fine."

"My suspicion is that I would very much like to be friends!"

"Fuck yes that," says Cam, "I will be the very first angelic demon, yes, I can stop abusing my pet black hole."

"I feed it, it's obviously a pet. A pet that in a few millenia would have gotten too big and I'd have had to toss it the entire house and make a new one from a safer distance. Now I can just - can I - yes, I can shrink my pet black hole. You are my favorite god."

"Why, what were you planning to be busy with?"

"Limbo-ites can't make stuff, they're basically stuck with whatever they land with, and it's one 'thing' to a customer - sometimes a medium-sized or large thing, but they can't move them or tweak them or add to them. It's not terrible, but it's certainly not the casual excess of Hell or Heaven or as interesting as Fairyland."

"What language is this?"

"Draconic. It's magic, it's from the world I was just in; that symbol says 'Teah', which means 'miracle' roughly speaking, but written as a name and not just a word. The inside's all English, though. Funny, your world has a lot of the same languages as the one I'm from originally. Same Earth, too, just with some details different."

"Weird! How many details do you mean?"

"A whole huge bunch of surface shit - none of the same exact people - a little older, too, looks like your Earth's got a few hundred years on mine. And of course until five minutes ago there wasn't any of my magic going around. I wonder when people are gonna start sweating about how to announce me?"

"I'm already thinking about how to tell Limbo what the deal is. People who summon me usually don't let me talk, so I guess the live humans will have to figure that out themselves unless you're making more friends."

"That sounds inconvenient," he says. A slight pause, and then, "...There's no such actual thing as a soul that demons can do a damn thing to, why hasn't anyone figured that out?"

Cam laughs. "Because no one lets me talk! I don't know, some demons think it's funny and the others haven't got a chance to blow their charade."

"Do you wanna just be able to talk anyway," he says, "seems like it would be convenient but maybe it'd just freak people out? Still working on giving you free travel between worlds, by the way. They move around, it's tricky. I can do one-time moves no problem; making a magic power for it is a whole different jar of candy."

"I'm pretty sure if I started talking to somebody who'd put a gag in their circle they'd flip and abandon the summon and then what would I do?"

"Do you not get to stay here permanently if you continue to be anchored to this one?"

"Debatably permanent. Technically if my extremely immortal dragon buddy back in Elcenia dies or decides to break the send for some reason, I pop back there right away and can't get here again on my own. In practice he's not gonna do either, but I still like to settle in properly. And I get kind of antsy if I go too long without some downtime. It's a problem."

"...Why did your extremely immortal dragon buddy send you here for forever?"

"Oh, he still has one of me with him! I'm a copy. I figured out how to do that. That's why the random sending. Teahs, Teahs everywhere! It's hard to coordinate two of me in the same world for longer than a few minutes, though. One of me's going to try it eventually somewhere, but probably somewhere a little quieter than here."

"Okay, this sounds - pretty great actually, I approve of the scope of your plans, presuming you are not actually a bad god pretending to be a super awesome god."

"I'm a me god."

"...Which means?"

"Means I'm probably not what you'd expect from a bad god, but I might not be what you'd expect from a good one, either. Read the book if you wanna get a sense. Read this one, too, even - " and a burst of rainbow sparkles and a copy of the prayer record for his first couple of weeks in Elcenia, with 'Teah' and 'Elcenia' on the cover in Draconic. It's pretty thick, even though he's condensed a lot of the less memorable prayers into 'X hundred children given nice safe candy or toys' or 'conversation with Kaylo about Y, Z'. Part of the extra is all the notes explaining (somewhat tersely, but comprehensibly) things like what a hearer is and the problem with shrens.

"Expectations. I'd rather let what I do speak for itself than try to figure out what exactly you mean by a good god and see if I fit the bill or not. Different people can have very different definitions of good, and I sure don't fit all of them."

"Expectations like...?"

"Like you might have an idea of what a super awesome god would be like if you could make one to spec, and I might not be exactly like that. So if you're doubting how awesome I am, I'd rather show you what you're getting and let you decide for yourself than just say I'm really great and invite all those expectations about what that means."

"Yeah, fair enough. I would've ascended to godhood ages ago if I could, it sounds like a fulfilling occupation."

"It sure keeps me busy!" he says cheerfully. "And it's fun."

"It looks like you - embellish quite a bit, is that to amuse yourself?"

"Pretty much, yep. And so people know something was me. They've got a saying in my original world, 'a coincidence with extra fudge'."

Cam laughs. "Is there some way for you to usefully eat fudge while your body's, you know, zonked out on my living room floor?"

"Nope. But I don't really miss it - I don't have clear memories of anything body-sensory like that."

"But you still have this peculiar focus on candy, it looks like."

"People like candy!"

"I will readily concede this, but they also like strawberries and shiny rocks and you definitely skew heavily towards candy."

"Yeah. Candy and rainbows. I dunno, it just feels right. It has the right - atmosphere? I'm a candy kind of person."

"And you have no idea what it tastes like. Bummer."

"Yeah, guess so," he agrees. "I mean I have some idea. Just in a really vague secondhand way, not so much with the direct sense-memory."

"Yeah. So, I'm going to haul your mortal coil here into my guest room if you don't anticipate wanting to drop it into the black hole in the next couple days."

Which Cam takes in a hot second. "Praise be," he laughs. "Everybody getting this many goodies?"

"Do people tend to do things that falls into the category of 'worshiping' you?" wonders Cam. There's nothing significant he wants to do to his person beyond the wings and the tail or he would have gotten around to it already, but he tests the ability by adjusting the length of his fingernails and grins.

"Not usually! Not never, but not usually."

"You're definitely going to interact funny with real-world religions. Possibly much more than the revelation about daeva did, since daeva historically do not bother humans unless summoned on purpose by a human."

"I'm already interacting funny with some of those in Elcenia. Sometimes it's fun!"

"How did you wind up in Elcenia with you dragon buddy, anyway, if you're originally from a place more here-like?"

"Just like I can be randomly sent, people can be randomly summoned too. Somebody did a random summoning just to show off, and they caught my body while it was asleep, and suddenly I was in this whole new world with all kinds of weird magic problems. This place has way fewer weird magic problems! I mean, the thing with the five different worlds that have such a hard time interacting with each other is weird and inconvenient, but it's not, like, dragons."

Cam flips to the part with dragons in the Elcenia book. "Yeah, daeva get pretty good powers," he agrees.

"Sweet," says Cam, collecting it. "Can I get invisibility too so people don't panic about a loose demon and start shooting at me?"

"Are people actually gonna start shooting at you? What would be the point?" Somewhere in between those two sentences, an invisibility power arrives. It's very tidy - he can see himself while invisible, but as though he is a lightly painted soap bubble, translucent and faintly shimmering and all surface with no interior; he can choose whether or not to invisible clothing and carried objects along with him, including things he puts on or picks up while invisible, but if he puts something down, its invisibility will fade after a few seconds; he will pass through mist or smoke or fog or assorted floating particulates as though he isn't there at all, and he won't leave footprints or fingerprints unless he deliberately intends to.

"I'm indestructible, not un-scratchable. They could make it sort of inconvenient to be in a particular area without slaughtering them, basically, which is stupid if the target's dangerous and rude if the target is not, but someone might do it anyway. This is a very nice power."

"I'm kinda proud of it, I'm glad you like it!"

"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."

"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?"

"You could include them, I just didn't list them because amongst themselves I think they have a satisfactory, what are they calling it these days, extranet. Get everybody on their extranet and let us serve our own files and we'll be grand."

"Sure. This'll be interesting, I've never designed a communication network before. Probably not as fun as a galaxy, but what is?"

"Probably most things are not as fun as making an entire galaxy!"

"You know," he says, "I think that might be true."

"So the deal if your body dies is that you get born into some other kid? And then somebody has a baby who is a god when he's asleep."

"Yeah. He or she or whatever, I don't think that part matters. But they'll be me when they're awake - my personality, I mean, even if they don't know it."

"Thaaaat sounds interesting."

"Which part?"

"The part where you wind up stamping your personality on somebody's baby, presumably obliterating normal inheritance, epigenetics, and nurture factors in the process."

"As near as I can tell, the reason there's sometimes a gap between incarnations is because I have to show up in someone who's close enough, in terms of what they're gonna grow up to be like. But 'close enough' can vary pretty widely."

"Such as in gender, I see."

"Yeah. I don't really have a gender."

"I suppose it's reasonable that an only very technically incarnated deity wouldn't."

"This is my favorite object, and I have had the ability to make nearly arbitrary objects for a century and a half."

"Awesome!"

Teah awws slightly.

Meanwhile, Teah is pretty busy, because quite a lot of people want to know where these gadgets came from and what is going on. He provides a scattering of answers in between answering the few prayers that continue to be about other, more urgent business.

"Well, that was cute," says Teah. "I'm glad you got in touch with your parents again. Want me to help with the fish, since you don't do creatures so good?"

"...Yes, actually, make some neat fish to populate the lake to relieve the mind-numbing boredom of fishing please."

"Sure thing! Go make a lake," Teah says brightly.