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Cam is dipping a grilled cheese sandwich into a bowl of tomato soup when he feels the summons. He goes ahead and grabs it. Doesn't even drop the sandwich.
unmarred
The room he arrives in is a small but comfortable-looking hotel room, its decor subtly unfamiliar - the holoprints on the wall are the most obviously weird thing, but there are other little details along the same lines.
The circle he arrives in barely qualifies for the name; a short man wearing thin gloves is just applying a few last touches to a beautiful abstract drawing laid out on a square of oddly textured paper on the fake hardwood floor. Amid the miscellaneous swirls there is indeed something that's more a circle than anything else, and enough beautifully calligraphed words in various languages to qualify it to summon demons, but it seems likely to have been unintentional.
The short man looks up from his work and regards Cam with a perplexed expression.
The circle he arrives in barely qualifies for the name; a short man wearing thin gloves is just applying a few last touches to a beautiful abstract drawing laid out on a square of oddly textured paper on the fake hardwood floor. Amid the miscellaneous swirls there is indeed something that's more a circle than anything else, and enough beautifully calligraphed words in various languages to qualify it to summon demons, but it seems likely to have been unintentional.
The short man looks up from his work and regards Cam with a perplexed expression.
from_scratch
Cam looks at the circle.
He looks at the short man.
"Didn't anybody ever tell you it's dangerous to draw on the floor?"
He looks at the short man.
"Didn't anybody ever tell you it's dangerous to draw on the floor?"
from_scratch
"Then your educators were remiss. It is dangerous to draw on the floor. You might accidentally summon an unbound demon. But it's okay, I'm a nice unbound demon. You want anything before I go home?"
unmarred
"...Are you speaking rhetorically or do you actually expect the existence of demons to be common knowledge? It isn't," he says.
unmarred
"It's 2998," he says. "And we are on Escobar. And likely to be interrupted by a confused and alarmed intelligence agent if we don't get out of his hotel room in the next half an hour."
from_scratch
"Okay... And to the best of your knowledge demons didn't use to be common knowledge?"
unmarred
"To the best of my knowledge, they didn't," he agrees. "And I grew up on Earth and I liked history; I have more cause than most people to be confident about what was and wasn't common knowledge in 2159."
from_scratch
"Okay. You have managed to summon me to an alternate universe. That's interesting."
unmarred
"Yeah, I'll say..." He looks at the circle on the floor. "How would I go about defacing that past functionality? Or would that send you back? I don't especially want Barrayaran Imperial Security to get their hands on an active demon-summoning diagram, if it's so dangerous. But I do still want to leave behind some token of my presence."
from_scratch
"Oh, this one's used up, circles only work once," says Cam, inspecting the design. "If you think they'd copy it I can fill in the design so it's just solid for you, since you're on a time limit. Why are these security folks after you?"
unmarred
"It's a long story; I'll tell you when I'm reasonably assured of uninterrupted privacy," he says. "They'll definitely take holos of it, and it's unlikely but conceivable that someone will decide to reproduce it on some other floor. Fill it in how?"
unmarred
The short man smiles.
"What fun," he says. "All right. Are you magic enough to hide those wings? They're a little conspicuous, and I'd rather not be memorable to anyone on my way out of here. Ruins the mystique."
from_scratch
"I can put 'em under a coat, or I can cut them off and then there's a pair of wings to dispose of."
unmarred
"We could leave the wings for ImpSec to puzzle over," he suggests. "If you don't mind, I mean."
from_scratch
"I don't know why you have it in for these people, but I can always make a new set," says Cam.
unmarred
"Then let's do that. And I will do my best to take you somewhere we can have a private conversation."
from_scratch
"Right. Here goes." Cam materializes sharp wires around the base of his wings, and yanks. Flumph. "Tail too, d'you think?"
from_scratch
The tail goes too. Cam waits a few seconds for his back to heal, then unpeels the gauze that caught the blood before it got on his jeans. "And this is more grotesque than confusing, what have we got in the way of waste disposal in 2998?"
unmarred
"Waste chute leading to disintegrator," he says, pointing at its aperture.