For this statue, he's elected to use various shades of corundum. He managed to get the violet in her eyes into a pair of sapphires, and is now deliberating over how to render her skin. She changed it every so often, so he's got choices here.
Ari does not look particularly demonic. He has glittery butterfly wings, a fluffy but waggable tail, and long curling horns. (His goal in life is to confuse the shit out of as many summoners as possible.) Just about the only classically daevaish things he does not have are a halo, actually functioning wings, or pants.
"They don't. Functioning wings are for losers, I have a jetpack. The wings are for pretty. And yeah, they should, but half the time summoners have no frame of reference on anything but "this is how you summon these things and this is what they do, no more questions now." So, confusion."
"You're a demon now! You have the magical powers of making shit and not getting shot in the face anymore. Well, I mean, you can get shot in the face, I have been, but it doesn't do much. You can make yourself wings and a tail and whatnot if you like, too, I highly recommend them."
"Oh yes. I mean, English speakers make up a lot of the summoner community, but the summoner community is a pretty tiny subset of the population at large, which in this region mostly speaks Lagalann. Which is a lovely language, I highly recommend learning it, but it'll probably take you a while." Ari leaves his statue and pops a jetpack onto his back. (He spent almost fifteen years working on this design back in 1800; since then he's made upgrades to keep up with fuel technology, and by this point it's very sleek and space-agey.) "Want to go now?"
At the speed of vroom, Ari leads Cam to a city that looks a bit like what would happen if you let several million people with inherently contradictory design aesthetics and the ability to conjure arbitrary matter build a city together. It's... unbelievably tacky. Near the center there appears to have been something of a competition to see who could build the tallest unnecessary spire, which concluded when the top floors stopped being affected by gravity. Nearer the outskirts it's humbler, just a mess of elaborate mansions made entirely out of gold or rubies or human bone.
There are not drivable streets in Hell-cities. This may present a problem. In fact, by the looks of things it seems that there may not be streets at all, so much as occasional spaces between the mansions; there are clouds of demons flapping about, who land on the rooftops and descend when they land anywhere.
"Nope! You're as invulnerable as I am, and anyway you'll be pretty much shielded by my body so it won't even be that uncomfortable. It's a short trip to my place, I got into the real estate scene early but at the time I was a bit outside town so it amounts to me only being a little while into the city."
Ari hefts Cam neatly in a bridal carry and lifts off. Being this near to burning jet fuel is certainly not comfortable, but true to Ari's word Cam does not catch fire. From this vantage point it's pretty apparent that there's no insulation around Ari's legs or anything. He doesn't seem to mind, though.
"Some time around 1426, I was dropped off on the doorstep of Halifax Abbey and raised by the monks. In the store cupboard there were some odd books; I took a look at them and they were about the summoning of demons and angels and fairies, which was all very heretical but also very intriguing. I decided to summon an angel in the attic, and when she appeared she was very sweet and kind. After a few hours of her being sweet and kind she convinced me to unbind her, at which point she vanished several key portions of my brain and cackled wickedly all the way to the bank. I read in a history book somewhere that a woman matching her description married some duke or other who later died under highly mysterious circumstances. I imagine she kept me vegetative in her attic under the care of some competent nurses. And then I died and she fucked off back to Heaven, where I believe she has pulled the same nasty trick a few dozen times."
Ari cackles. "I like you, new guy. What's your name, anyway?" He lights on a roof, which manages to rival the tackiest of its neighbors; it's a frenzy of shining platinum spires inlaid with explosions of multicolored gems and bands of mother-of-pearl. There's a golden spiral staircase leading down in the center, surrounded by a blackened silver sunburst.
Cam is going to fuck off away from tacky demon cities as soon as he's figured out how to be a demon and then he's going to live in a house. It will be made of rocks. Gray ones. And some wood. He will introduce demons to minimalism.
He might have a swimming pool though.
"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."
"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."
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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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.
"Aw, I'm sorry. Apparently it's not, like, classical hell or anything, but it's not all that fun. You get one object, the thing you valued most in your life, and the rest is just an infinite plane of beigey dust. People who got houses and stuff get all the contents, which is handy, and there's some stuff you can do with, like, mud bricks made from the soil and water from someone's sink, but overall it's kind of bizarre and terrible. I'd have been alright, I'm more about people than things, but I'm definitely glad I got my summon in. Even though it led to, you know, unpleasantness."
"Yeah, improving things for dead people winds up being more important than doing it for living people a lot of the time. We spend more time this way. Hell does its collective best to make Limbo as livable as possible, every time there's a concordance we send through necessary goods. I imagine the klen-takk do the same, to whatever extent they can do that with their fiddly little powers."
"Oh. Yeah, it means- eh, it's nuanced. Sort of a fusion of words that implies that half the time they set their halos to shine our of their asses instead. It's a pretty recent construction, the slang gets shifted around periodically as people think of new nasty things to call them."
(As an afterthought, Ari's other hand contains a similar cracker, which is happily consumed.)
"Usually once she's loosed on the world, she acquires a great deal of money by various awful means and sets herself up as a socialite. Once she's in society, she mostly just enjoys her life, though I believe she also has a fondness for turning people into horrible living sculptures. Very artistic type, Belinda was."
"We can make black holes, you know. Probably want to do it outside the immediate neighborhood, but it could be done. And I'd hesitate to drop her in the sun in case she decided to start hacking away at its lifespan by changing it to iron as quickly as she could, which I wouldn't put past her."
"Mmm... There's theaters and arenas and such, and I believe one of the ex-summoners has something approximating a restaurant, at which you can pay by telling him in great detail exactly what you thought of your meal. 'Shops' exist where the very creative conjure things for the less creative, but generally you'll need some piece of media to pay for those. And there's a library with some decent lists of books and music, you can contribute to it if you like but you don't want to publicize too many titles if you're ever going to want to buy something around here. Government-wise... in a word, no. If something comes up, occasionally there'll be some kind of council that meets on it, but there's nobody with real authority."
"Yep! There's less friendly types, but generally they don't go for us too much. Too busy warring endlessly with each other in the void. Every so often some jackass tosses an unrestrained black hole into the middle of the city or something, but that's only a temporary problem. Most of the jackasses don't have much persistence."
Ari causes such a map to exist! It's on a state-of-the-art (given the state of the art) holographic projector. The center is a wobbly thing that appears to be the plane of gold. "There," says Ari, pointing to a cluster of somethingorother in space opposite their side of the plane, "is Amngaroth. I don't recall what supposedly started the feud, but there's a few thousand demons over there who've been warring with each other for much longer than I've been around. By this point they hate each other more than the angels."
Ari points at a red dot on the plane. It's about as far from Amngaroth as it's possible to be. "Scenic Nagala. I think the story is that a bunch of the Galegans and Kelkaron who hadn't been around for the start of the war got sick of the whole thing and decided to go to the opposite side of the plane. The Kelkaron mostly live in Talrakk, a few hundred miles east, they're nice enough."
"My most recent summoner was rich and knew things about technology and he wrote me up a list of his favorite toys," grins Ari. "I have no idea what half of them do, but whatever it is, they do it well."
"This TV will do nicely." Cam conjures up a Wii and its various hookups already in place, and controllers (the wheel kind, because why not), and a copy of Mario Kart. He goes briskly through various setup procedures while explaining the general phenomenon of Mario Kart to Ari, and then hands him one of the wheels.