"Hey, that was Rayne's idea."

"And you don't talk to the demons he summons when he has them in to change lightbulbs and fix the sink?"

He rolls his eyes. "And he's never done that before either, but it's the sort of thing he'd do. Needlessly magical, needlessly dangerous solutions to ordinary problems that don't need them."

"What a swell roommate."

"Has his ups and downs."

"I'm going to have to take your word for it." Page page page. "Okay, this world is missing a couple key notable figures who I would have expected to appear in the encyclopedia and know for a fact were only notable because of things related to summonings they did. So either the magic's too different, those people outright don't exist, or it's not straightforward to go from being able to summon to being rich and famous."

"'Magic's too different' seems likeliest," says Ripper. "I think the only thing I've seen that's not different is 'there are demons and you can summon them with circles', and even that isn't all that similar if you get into any more detail."

"Well, I mean, an angel could turn you into a rat if they really wanted to."

"I'm getting the sense they wouldn't do it with an invocation to Hecate, though."

"Nnnno. They would just skip straight to the rat part. Does Hecate exist?"

"Yeah. In some form or another, a lot of the minor Greek and Roman gods seem to. Hecate and Janus, but not Jupiter or Athena."

"That's weird."

"Is it?"

"Well, to me. We don't have gods, just daeva."

"Mostly gods don't bother you if you don't bother them. Mostly. Unless somebody invokes one at you."

"What happens if two people invoke the same one at each other?"

"I haven't tried."

"Your magic seems deeply impractical. I'm not sure I'll be able to do anything useful with it at all, which means it's mostly just something that might be able to make my life really inconvenient in ways things back home cannot."

"Eh, I can't really argue."

"In which case my priority there is learning about how it could inconvenience me. If I manage to make a lot of magic people very angry, what can they do to me?"

"...Depends what kind of magic people," he says. "Heavily depends. Set you on fire, drain all the life out of you, imprison you in a statue for a thousand years, turn you into a rat, lock you in a hell dimension, curse you, get another demon to possess you... I mean, most magic people can't do most of those things, but some magic people can do some of them."

"Can you expand on that? Is the fire and/or statue in fact literally magical or can I solve those problems with water or aqua regia or whatever? What are hell dimensions like, what are curses like, how does possession work, and what precisely is life such that it can be drained out of one?"

"Fire can be magical or not, statue's almost certainly going to be magical - covering you in a layer of stone would be harder than turning you into stone or trapping your soul in a statue somewhere. Hell dimensions are all different from each other but they're usually not nice, usually full of demons, and often have a lot of fire. Curses vary, I could list twenty more things without covering half of it, and I don't have the right books on hand to make sure of the details anyway. Possession also varies, but the basic idea is that you're sharing your body with something other than you and it's more in control than you are. And there's always going to be things I can't tell you about because I've never heard of them."

"What books would you need?" inquires Cam. He has pulled out his computer and begun to make notes. "How did you learn about this stuff in the first place?"