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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.
iwillgetyou
Now he is in a large room with stone walls and a stone floor. There is a woman wearing an embroidered robe and holding an iron staff, and the floor under his feet is covered in a thin coating of frost; random patterns in that frost have happened to form a circle, which is already beginning to melt in places.
The woman with the robe and staff regards Cam with a thoughtful, slightly perturbed expression. Assuming she is his summoner, she has given him several new languages: one which is mutually intelligible with English but varies substantially in its details, one which seems to be a kind of crypto-Latin with an attached runic alphabet in addition to the Latinlike one it shares with pseudo-English, and one which has no roots in anything Cam has ever heard of. She speaks pseudo-English natively, and reads and writes the others with scholarly fluency.
The woman with the robe and staff regards Cam with a thoughtful, slightly perturbed expression. Assuming she is his summoner, she has given him several new languages: one which is mutually intelligible with English but varies substantially in its details, one which seems to be a kind of crypto-Latin with an attached runic alphabet in addition to the Latinlike one it shares with pseudo-English, and one which has no roots in anything Cam has ever heard of. She speaks pseudo-English natively, and reads and writes the others with scholarly fluency.
from_scratch
Cam peers at the frost.
And says in her native Englishy thing, "Well, that's new."
And says in her native Englishy thing, "Well, that's new."
from_scratch
Cam could make a circle like this, but it wouldn't work. How would a human make a circle like this? Or even finish one that an out of sight daeva made? They wouldn't.
"I have never heard of this sort of... event... before. The summon felt normal, but..."
"I have never heard of this sort of... event... before. The summon felt normal, but..."
from_scratch
"Oh, I would have shown up in a circle, but the circle would not be made of ice and you would speak some different complement of languages - this one is like my first, enough that it could have been some strange dialect in some obscure location that gets little press, and one of 'em's like Latin, less explicable, and I haven't even got a guess about language the third. Also I usually wouldn't be allowed to talk and you would want me to make you something and you'd probably give me a list of books or movies for my trouble."
iwillgetyou
"I see," she says. "And on my end, I've cast many a frost spell before and none of them has ever resulted in any strange half-naked winged men appearing before me. What do we make of this pair of mysteries?"
from_scratch
"I can put on a shirt if you like," Cam says. "Do go on about frost spells and how you can do them."
iwillgetyou
"A frost spell is a spell which brings about frost. I can do them because I'm a mage. What sort of person are you that shows up in circles speaking all the same languages as nearby people?"
iwillgetyou
"You don't look much like the type of demon I'm familiar with. Nor do you act like them. I suspect you also don't have very many properties in common. I suggest you think of a different word and use that one exclusively from now on."
from_scratch
"I can supply other strings of sounds in demonic languages if you like. Apsel? What are local ones like?"
iwillgetyou
"If you were a demon and not an apsel, you would be a spirit from the Fade, unable to take physical form in this physical realm without possessing a host. You would not naturally look like a perfectly ordinary human who happened to have wings and a tail."
from_scratch
"I do not possess people and have never been to this Fade place of which you speak and am thoroughly attached to my very own physical form here."
iwillgetyou
"Yes," she says. "It's very clear to me that you are not what I am used to calling a demon. Which is a good thing, because if I had brought a demon into the world even by accident I would be facing some uncomfortable questions from the templars."
iwillgetyou
"The templars are the people whose job it is to make sure that any mages who start communing with demons or practicing blood magic are discouraged from continuing. Fatally discouraged, most of the time."
from_scratch
"Apsels are indestructible immortal persons who look thus, modulo coloring and some other cosmetic this-and-that, who can magically create arbitrary matter."
from_scratch
"Yeah. Not antimatter, nothing that breaks the laws of physics, no vacuums, nothing that starts in motion, but yeah."
from_scratch
"I can't make it, so... don't be disquieted about that in particular."
iwillgetyou
"I suspect I'm not going to be short on things to be disquieted about. For example, if one apsel has appeared accidentally, does that mean there might be more?"