"Yes, I've been getting that impression."

"You're a refreshing change from the usual summoners."

"Mm?"

"Well, they weren't exactly consistent, so I don't know if it's fair to group them like that, but they were uniform in not letting me talk even if they summoned me several times and I didn't exploit any of the loopholes in their bindings."

"And did they know the loopholes were there? Because if they didn't, that right there is an excellent explanation for how they missed that demonstration of trustworthiness."

"Darn it, that's probably it. Foiled by my inability to talk and tell them that their Summoning 101 teachers failed them."

"Alas."

"Even the one time I was summoned as an example into a class. Couldn't say a word and be all, 'excuse me, Professor Idiot, consider working in your first language and stop teaching your students this crap, just because Latin is cool doesn't mean you will not miss grammatical gaps so big you could drive a steamroller through them'. And the only way to take advantage of the gap he left in my circle would have been to actually hurt somebody."

"Damn," snorts Miles.

"Yeah. I have vague worries like that about a number of people who've summoned me. And there was also the time somebody died because I was too tightly bound to do anything about it."

"...oh dear. What...?"

"There was a forest fire. A few demons were summoned to dump water on it in extremely constrained paths and amounts because they didn't want us flooding anything or otherwise wreaking havoc with the water. The summoner who was working next to mine wandered too close to the fire and a branch fell on him and I couldn't put it out or knock it aside or yell, but the fellow who summoned me - I wasn't entirely clear on whether he thought I'd managed to cause this indirectly by spraying the water in a specific way or if he just didn't understand what he was doing to the point where he thought I could have saved the guy. Either way I got yelled at a lot."

"Ouch," says Miles sympathetically.

"Yeah. That was probably the worst summon I was ever on, all told."

"I can imagine."

"Could have been worse. There's nothing stopping a summoner from calling up a daeva and then leaving them in the circle, no task and no dismissal, indefinitely. There was a literal zoo that did that, they got shut down after a couple years of operation, I met a girl who was one of the exhibits when she was doing a speaking circuit back in Hell."

"Damn."

"The fairies they had couldn't do much about it, but they were all positioned so they could see each other, and the demons and the angels got rid of their interesting-looking extremities in protest."

...Miles snorts.

"Which was particularly interesting as a collaborative boycott of interestingness, because most of the time demons and angels don't like each other. Can't even send mail between Heaven and Hell during the concordances because the place is inevitably mobbed by idiots who want to have a tiny war."

"What is the point of a tiny war between one bunch of indestructible people and another? Do you even have some equivalent of stunners with which to knock each other out?"

"No. It's entirely stupidity and theater. Although if I'm home for a Heaven/Hell concordance sometime in the future I'm extremely tempted to go stun all the idiots and see if there are any sane angels around who want to establish a mail route."

"I'm having trouble envisioning this because I don't know what a concordance looks like, but from what I can picture that's beautiful," snickers Miles.

"A concordance is a sort of pocket that opens up between any two of the non-mortal worlds. It doesn't look like much until you go into it, and then it still doesn't look like much except there's daeva and packages everywhere. They're saturated with correspondence in every other case, but if for some reason I wanted to send a letter to an angel I'd have to route it through Fairyland or Limbo - preferably Limbo, fairies lose things."

"And Limbovians don't?"