"I'm very convenient! I mean, I know demons who wouldn't have destroyed your planet, but they'd have probably gone wings-on into downtown Vorbarr Sultana and taken issue if people had thrown fruit at them and even if you'd gotten into a friendly-like conversation most of them have only seen the kinds of circles that get them and can't tell you how to omit the gag order or negotiate with a fairy or whatever."

"Thrown fruit? Hell, the only reason I wouldn't expect you to get shot walking around the wrong parts of town with wings on is because the people who live in the wrong parts of town aren't frequently the same people who carry plasma arcs or nerve disruptors."

"Well, if someone shot me with a plasma arc they'd probably be very alarmed when I spent three seconds with a scorch mark and then turned around and raised an eyebrow at them. I'm not sure a nerve disruptor would do anything to a daeva, although I'm not leaping to check."

"Yeah, I advise not making the experiment. I'm admittedly curious about whether and how well a stunner would work."

"That one I'm willing to try and also suspect 'quite possibly nothing'."

"But you weren't willing to expect you'd shrug off fast-penta, so...? Where's the line? It's not like stunners cause much damage besides the hangover you get after you wake up."

"I'm not sure you could get fast-penta into me at all without my cooperation, and we were talking on the level of 'would you be okay with this', not 'will you introduce dry ice to our abdominal cavities if we jump you with medical equipment'. I know needles won't go, I'm less sure about hyposprays. But if I cooperated, in it would go, and it'd affect me just as much as caffeine I voluntarily drink does, I assume. Stunners don't interface as much with bodily integrity and might well work without permission."

"Huh. I think I find the implication that your body runs on a permission-based physics more bizarre than the idea that you can create black holes and Orders of Merit out of thin air."

"Well, if I were indestructible at all times whether I liked it or not I wouldn't have been able to take my wings off."

"Which would have been highly inconvenient for everyone."

"I could've maybe hidden them under a coat. I kept my tail for a while that way, but got rid of it after I got wind of the anti-mutant thing."

Miles envisions what would have happened had the tail been discovered at an inopportune moment. "Good thinking," he says.

"Something on which I pride myself. I miss them, though, the tail's very expressive and the wings help a lot with my balance, which," stumble, "is otherwise not good."

"Yeah, I've been noticing. You can probably get away with reinstating the tail if you hide it around anyone who is not Illyan, Gregor, or a member of my family or our armsmen, but unless the wings were very small I can't imagine a coat would be enough."

"Well, they're not very small, but they fold up and I wouldn't think 'gigantic blue functional bat wings' would be high on anybody's hypothesis list."

"No, but 'what the fuck has that man got under his coat, is he some sort of hunchback' could have similar if less dramatic results."

"True. Oh well, they're out of the picture for now."

Cam follows him.

"Mother, this is Cam, a magical time-travelling demon who wants to terraform Komarr. Cam, this is my mother, Countess Vorkosigan."

"I'm pretty sure I didn't strictly time travel," Cam clarifies. "I think I'm from an alternate universe, in which, by coincidence, it is an earlier calendar year. Hi, Cordelia."

"I hope you'll forgive me if my first question is Miles, what did you do?"

"I didn't know I was summoning a demon!" he protests. "I didn't even actually know I had summoned this particular demon until ten minutes ago, well after I met him!"