"Hi! You're friendly for a demon-summoner. What can I do for you?"

"I would like you to fill this container with two hundred thousand zorkmids; they're a particular type of gold coin," he says. "In return I can tell you the names of some nice songs I promise you've never heard."

"How many is some?" asks Cam, wagging his tail.

"...that's adorable," says the summoner. "How does five sound?"

"Five songs. Okay, so you're just friendly, not generous. Eh. Can't be too picky. Sure."

"Might be more if I hadn't been warned against writing the list down ahead of time. All right, it's a deal."

"It would be a little tricky to get your written list if all I knew was that you might have one composed and you didn't tell me the title of the list," remarks Cam, stepping out of the circle towards the container. It begins to fill with zorkmids.

"Cam." Cam takes and pockets the slip of paper. The zorkmids cease to appear.

"I'm Miles. Nice to meet you. Mind if I call on you again with further business?"

"Not at all, but I will abandon you if someone starts calling me up offering libraries in exchange for terraforming Mars."

Wag, wag.

"See you later," Miles says cheerfully. Dismissal takes effect shortly afterward.

Wag wag wag wag. "Hi. More zorkmids? What are they for, anyway?"

"Mysterious purposes. Mysterious purposes that consume large quantities of foamed gold coins in a surprisingly short amount of time," says Miles. "How'd you like Ash and Stars?"

Wag wag wag. "They're great, though I hope you have other bands to pay with today."

"...Because you're fond of variety, or...?"

"Variety's very important."

"I do have more Ash and Stars, among other things, but I can leave them out if they would be redundant."

"I liked 'em so I collected their discography."

"Not especially. The sheet music, now..."

"And what did you conclude from the sheet music?"

"Ash and Stars have some very peculiar ideas about how to format musical notation?" says Cam innocently. Wag, wag.

"Yes they do. By coincidence, so do all the other bands whose songs I've collected since yesterday. Unfortunately, it seem there's going to be a bit of a problem with my carefully curated song lists."

"What, do they say Published 2985 Standard under their titles too?"

"Adorable tail-wagging aside, there's a reason I went to such apparently ineffective lengths to conceal what year it is and what planet I'm on," says Miles.

"I didn't actually know the planet part," says Cam. "Although I would have guessed if I were more willing to assume that song lyrics referred to historical events, or if I'd invested more time in poking at your mysteriousness. I already added Ash and Stars to my library contribution but there's a chance nobody's picked it up yet; I can make a revised version and swear my lips are sealed if you'll tell me what's going on."

"Many things are going on. One of them is that I'm summoning you from a different universe than the one you're used to - if it's 2159 or 1995 where you're from, you're probably from a world I've at least heard of, but I've heard of two separate such worlds so it's not out of the question that there might be more. Another is that it has been decided by... let's call it an extremely informal interdimensional security council... that letting any daeva know about the existence of worlds beyond their current reach is to be stringently avoided on the grounds of potentially apocalyptic consequences. I'm sure I don't have to draw you a picture."

Cam conjures up a revised list, tosses it into the air once (it's rolled-up paper), and then tosses it a bit higher and sets it on fire. "List revised. 2159. But we're not the hazard. We can't move around on our own. It's those summoners from extra worlds you've got to look out for."

Wag wag wag. "Suits me. What are the zorkmids for?"

"A personal project I cannot yet tell you about for interdimensional security reasons. But it's not out of the question that I might tell you more once I know you better. Now, on the other hand, I do have a secret project I could use your help on: if I were to offer you the design for a device to safely contain black holes, could you take it home and test it and successfully conceal its origins from other demons? I don't have one yet, but it's coming any week now, maybe any day."

"Yyyyes. Depending on how tight you want your infosec it might take me a while to get far enough into uninhabited void for nobody to detect my shenanigans, but yes. May I then pretend to have designed it myself so that demons in general can provide in my home universe if called upon to do so?"

"Of course. If you're good at math - and I mean really good at math - I can even provide you a couple of textbooks so that you can study up and plausibly pretend to have designed it yourself, but 5-space calculations are an enormous pain to anyone who is not passionately in love with math or physics or both. Anyway. Care to fill three more crates with two hundred thousand zorkmids each in exchange for my carefully curated song list? There's about thirty on there, from two bands and an orchestra."

"I am both very smart and a hundred and seventy-two, but I have not in that time specialized in math. I know a demonically respectable quantity of physics. I'll take the textbooks, anyway. And your musical zorkmid payment."

"I'll have the textbooks for you when I get you the design. In the meantime, zorkmids for music."

"Sounds good to me."

"Go on, then."

Wag wag wag. Crates fulla zorkmids.

This time he did write the list in advance, and takes it out of his pocket to hand to Cam. (The bands in question are Αστρα Πλανητα, Green Glass Worms, and the Mountain Scholars. The orchestra is called Третсимфанс.)

"Fun stuff. This is an interesting set of dialects you have, by the way."

"...Oh?"

"The person who helped me out with infosec, who was from 1995, didn't profess to any difficulty reading modern books - I thought it was a little weird that the language would've stayed so mutually intelligible with its past selves, but I checked and indeed it has, on which premise it's not that strange that I can talk to you. And no. They didn't warn me about the languages thing. What is the languages thing."

"It happens that I already spoke English or I would have had no choice but to use one of your accents, but usually when you get a daeva, in so doing you grant that daeva all the languages you speak. Prevents issues with someone who only speaks Martian Portuguese from getting an angel who was last summoned in ancient China and having a communication barrier."

"I see. I lament my incomplete education, but I see. Thank you for warning me."

"You're welcome. So, I know your two and a half dialects of English, and how to write one and a half of them in Cyrillic, and your bits of Russian and Greek and French and how to write them in Cyrillic too."

"How convenient for you. Especially if you're going to listen to all the Barrayaran music with lyrics I carefully and pointlessly avoided giving you. Uh, some of Astra's Greek stuff gets pretty filthy, I feel I should warn you in case you don't like that sort of thing."

Shrug. It makes his wings ripple.

"Any other important information you feel like giving me before I send you back?"

"I don't know what info you had to start with. Your circle's very nicely done, so you had somebody who knew what they were doing, but they didn't tell you about languages, so I don't know what you're missing."

"My education on how to bind daeva went into great depth. I am also forewarned that there is no such thing as a soul, at least not for you. Relatedly, I have no education on gagging daeva, not that I want any. I have overviews of the three kinds of powers, but not details such as 'he can just conjure their entire discography anyway'."

"I can conjure an entire discography anyway. I can conjure this entire planet if I want, but demons are shit at minds, so if I tried conjuring the humans on it they'd just sort of loll around brainlessly. Going big is a general substitute for knowing what I'm after."

"Please don't conjure an entire Barrayar populated by mindless quasihumans. That sounds immensely creepy."

"Oh, yeah, I steer clear of manufacturing basement-dwellers, that part was meant to be reassuring that I cannot duplicate you in any meaningful sense."

"I actually did know that part; my contact mentioned that the daeva realms lack any way to acquire a human population. 'Basement-dwellers'?"

"That's what mindless human-shaped things are called, in Anglophone demonic parlance, because it's polite to keep them in the basement or similarly squirreled away."

"I'm going to regret it if I ask what one keeps mindless human-shaped things in one's basement for, aren't I."

"I don't know, are you?"

"It seems likely."

"Then don't ask."

"I wasn't planning on it. Anyway, I think that's all for now, thank you."

"Sure." Wag, wag. Wingstretch.

Poof.