"Kalgor?" Cam follows, hanging on to the banister.

"Gentleman with the neon trees. I'm sure he'd have a thousand and one citations if we had a neighborhood association, but thank God, we don't. But he's quite nice, he's in a couple of local community theater groups. They put on a native demonic adaptation of Faust the other week, it was a good laugh." The stair (the banister of which is as ornate and ridiculous as the rest of it) leads into a parlor filled with so many absurdly gaudy decorations that anyone with the misfortune to be inside it can hardly get their eyes to focus on the walls. "Sorry about the mess. It's been a while since I had a good spring clean in."

"Demon adaptation of Faust! That's adorable."

"It was! Faustus was a hapless idiot who summoned our lovable protagonist Mephistopheles out of the bath and put him in a binding just tight enough to keep him from putting him in a coma, but too loose to keep him out of general roguery. So Mephi does Faust's bidding in the most inconvenient way, along the way seducing the good doctor's bored wife Margaret, while Faust thinks everything's going just as planned. Then at the end, everything comes crashing down, Faust looses Mephistopheles to save him, and instead he puts him to sleep and drops him in a nursing home and runs off to Aruba with Margaret. Utterly hilarious."

"I should have expected it would be something like that. Demon fan-theater. Glorious. Speaking of Faust, can demons in fact do the soul thing, I suspect no but I couldn't even tell right away how to make an M&M."

Ari giggles. "Oh, souls. It looks like you've hit on the other mainstay of demon humor. Yeah, soul-barterers just like watching the mortals squirm. There's another comedy about a clever summoner who figures out on his own time that they don't exist and barters his off to five separate demons while acting convincingly dismayed about losing it, but the demons meet in Hell and figure out the plot and when he dies they stick him in a black hole for being a smartass. That one's a musical."

"I'll have to hit the theater scene. How do they allocate seats with no material scarcity to power a currency, is it all first-come first-serve or what?"

"Generally first-come-first-served, yeah. It all gets recorded too nowadays, though, there's no reason not to, and then you can appear a copy of the recording by being specific about the performance and the date. I've got the coordinates of the best versions I saw of those two memorized, if you'd like to see them some time. Or we could go to a performance of something in person. Some time. Together."

"I'm straight. And have not yet formed an opinion on tails. But flattered. I would like to know about those recordings, in fact."

"Never hurts to try. I suppose I'll drown my sorrows in ice cream and one of my other beautiful immortal acquaintances. Tragic indeed. And the coordinates for the recordings are Mephistophilis et Margareth et Error Faustam at the Galakon Arena on November 1 1959 terrestrial time, and Lonoro Galamana Thel'garana at the Ruklanat on October 7 2001 terrestrial. Neither's in English, but most theaters have some people go over the recording and subtitle them to the big languages, and if I recall there are such versions in English for both."

Cam makes a piece of paper. He finds that he can appear words on it without the piece of paper coming into existence with them. He records this information and pockets it. "Thank you."

"No problem! They really are great performances. Lonoro in particular, the lead is played by... somebody, I don't remember, he's very good and he's an ex-mortal and apparently he acted back on Earth too. He's excellent, whoever he is."

"How many demons are ex-mortals? Is it the same with fairies and angels? Is it only summoners, or everybody?"

"Just summoners, and yeah, it's the same arrangement for everybody. There's somewhere called Limbo where the other mortals go, it's not very interesting. The proportion of ex-summoners to natives is very low. I don't know the percentages, but I think there's a few dozen ex-summoners living in this entire ten-million-demon city. There's a group of them meets every couple of months, I don't attend because I just consider myself a demon at this point. You might go for meet-and-greet potential, I can tell them there's a new one in town. They like to know who's who."

"Do they all speak English?"

"Nah, but everybody in the region speaks Lagalann, and I can interpret for you. If you'd rather wait until you actually speak the lingua franca, I can tell them to wait a few years on the big meetup. Some of the English-speakers might stop by, though, and they're mostly nice. Not Cheryl, Cheryl's an asshole, if Cheryl stops by nobody's home."

"I'm sort of curious, but except for wanting to get summoned and try to talk to my parents as soon as - demonically possible - what does summoning feel like? I haven't noticed anything, yet - I feel no overwhelming desire to identify as an ex-mortal or hang out preferentially with ex-mortals. I should learn the language either way, though. Is it hard?"

"Talking is generally not an option, but good luck. Summoning feels sort of like- somebody knocking on your door when you're in bed, and saying that you leave for a trip in five minutes, and trying to pack your suitcase and get dressed and get out the door in time while half asleep. Except in a fraction of a second. And you usually fail. Not always, though, sometimes it goes alright. And a specific summon, one where they're just summoning you, is like having all the time you need for it. I don't know that you'll get a specific summon, though, they only really happen after you've been responding for a few years and you demonstrate a lot of skill in a specific area and somebody writes you up in their personal summoner Yellow Pages. I happen to be in one such book under 'incubi'." He waggles his eyebrows.

"Congratulations. So that's what that feeling was, I thought that was lingering anxiety from being murdered. Well, they should be coming in faster now than they were before, now that I've pulled off my thing."

"I'm pleased with that! I like summons, they let me help people, it's nice."

"For values of 'help' that mean 'incubus for'?"

Ari sniffs with dignity. "It's a form of help. No one's complained, certainly."

"Not being able to talk must make that tricky though."

"I have a certain talent for nonverbal communication."

Cam laughs. "Congratulations. So what happens in Limbo, which I gather is where my parents end up if I don't get ahold of them and they continue not to summon anything?"