"No, but they're also aliens, and weird hive-mind aliens sapient only in the aggregate, so that's not surprising...are yours?"

"I didn't interact much with the exactly three I met - and Melian I didn't actually see in person, they wouldn't let me in Doriath - but my impression is no. Except maybe Thauron who mostly used this ability to be a creep."

"Thauron?"

"Melkor's right-hand man. Went to a parley with him one time with your Singularity alt, after I could verify oaths and was sure it wasn't merely an obvious trap. Such a creep."

"Just in the sense of being affable while discussing his torture factories with you, or -"

"Oh, also the part where he handed me Finwë's chip, which obviously I couldn't embody because who the fuck knew what had been done to the man, and the entire setup - I was recording, you want to see?"

"Love to."

Cam pulls up the annotated transcript, prologues it with the wording of the oath extracted in advance.

"Clever," he murmurs, and reads, and - "wow. I wonder what he'll get up to now that he's thoroughly proscribed from being evil, he doesn't give off the impression of having other hobbies..."

"He can do evil politics or vivisect kittens or something, just very restrainedly by comparison."

"Maybe we should kill him anyway."

"Yeah, probably."

"Do you have a complete list of Maiar in the service of the Enemy -"

"No, sorry."

"It's fine. Targeting the ones in my world off intelligence from yours is dubious anyway, considering that alts apparently vary quite a lot -"

"Yeah. It'd be worth looking them up, and I wouldn't trust anybody named Thauron if I were you, but yeah."

"Maybe my Thauron's a lovely person as appalled by his evil alt as I am by mine, but I will not plan on it."

Nod.

Cam peers at the transcript.

"I swear that I don't have any discontinuities in my memory and haven't sworn anything since we last spoke," he says, "was I gone long?"

"Not at all. Come here. Book?"

"Cam wrote it."

"Interesting. In the future when you go downstairs you will let me watch through your eyes."

"Yes, my lord."

And the sound of pages rustling.

("God that's creepy," Cam says, and he notifies to-whom-it-may-concern about this extra layer of assuming anything Findekáno learns will make it back to Evil Maitimo.)

---

The editor's introduction reads like the person who wrote it has a crush on Cam. There's a black and white photo of him at a chalkboard, absent wings and tail, wearing a shirt, looking about as young as he does now, mid-drawing a summoning diagram and gesturing with the other hand; and the editor writes about the irregular teaching arrangement as, shortly post-Revelation, institutions scrambled to be able to claim to offer educations in summoning and allowed people with preexisting knowledge of daeva who didn't have existing credentials (for there were none) to teach classes. Cam, who preferred that address to being called Professor or Mr. Swan, was younger than half his students, audited classes when he wasn't teaching them - apparently he sat near Thea in econ and she fondly remembers glancing over his shoulder at the phrase "gains from trade!" in his notes surrounded with little stars as though he were contemplating marrying it.

It is very sad that he died because Thea observes a trend these days of declining to think of daeva as people and Cam was always as interested in what daeva were like and what they got out of taking summons as he was about the permanent end to the energy crisis, the suddenly much nearer and cheaper prospect of traveling to other planets, the fact that the supply of charitably inclined people in the human population was suddenly enough to carry the burden of the need now that anybody could draw on the floor for twenty minutes and trade with people who wanted music and stories and other infinitely copiable returns in exchange for limitless bounty of medicine or food or -

Thea explains that she was in the habit of recording the lectures and putting them on the internet for correspondence students, as the class was always packed, and has finally received permission to compile those and classroom handouts into this textbook, which she's been very eager to do because so many more people should have gotten to learn from this person and the human race was robbed when that crazy guy came in and shot him for "ruining his livelihood".

Well. It is not surprising that the editor of this book would have developed a crush on Cam. Given that information and not the information that he killed a world on the orders of the Enemy.

"It's sad he died. I hope he was reembodied quickly - she doesn't seem to have been optimistic -"

"She seems very enamored of him."

"Well, he comes across as pretty amazing."

"You two would get along," Maitimo says, watching him intently. 

"We haven't, really. I - think as far as he is concerned I am your puppet, there's no one present to interact with - and there's the destruction of Valinor - I asked him if they died quickly, I didn't have the nerve to ask him anything else -"

"You were smiling."

"Because their world had limitless medicine and food and energy, nothing to do with Cam except insofar as he was also happy about that - am I making you jealous -"

"It's been a long time since I've seen you smile like that."

"We should figure out how to summon, give our world limitless food and medicine, then I'll smile like that for you all the time -"

(A page turning.)

("Enamored of me? Thea? Really?" Cam conjures up his own copy to read the introduction.)

---

There are lectures presented in curriculum order. The first one is an introduction to the basic concept: three kinds of daeva and what's known about their worlds, the broad strokes of their powers, the steps of summoning including that daeva choose to answer calls, stern safety warnings on only completing circles after you've written (in your native language!) the binding and checked it over, trades and negotiations and dismissals, language acquisition and lack of cultural acquisition upon summoning, homework is to write a page on what you'd want out of being summoned if you were a daeva pick-a-kind.

He summons for class demonstrations; he hands out interviews he's conducted with daeva he's summoned before -

- someone asks him in lecture 15 if he's been summoning for years why did he only pop out in public as a summoner after Revelation -

Ah, goes Thea's transcription of his answer, I've asked myself that a few times... it's the sort of thing where you wonder why no one else has already done it, you'd have to think you knew better than all the other summoners before you'd try it... getting back to specifying daeva by criteria other than name...

"Who was Revelation -"

"Says in the introductions that it's a mystery," Findekáno says. "You would have to know better than all the other summoners, that'd be a reason for a lot of people -"

" - not him, unless I'm very much misreading him," says Maitimo.

"And how often does that happen?"

"More often when everyone hates me, probably, it's not optimal conditions - send me your first interaction with him -"

A minute's pause. 

"Not his real reason," Maitimo says.

"Your alt -"

"Would have found that appealing. Good people have so many more strings to pull."

Findekáno makes a soft muffled sound. 

("Annnnnd now they know that.")

---

It's a good textbook on the practicalities of summoning and provides lovely context on what Fairyland is like, what demons want, what kinds of training to ask if your angel has before getting them to do this or that - digressions into daeva in current events (Cam's so excited about the Mars landing - Cam's spending half of a lecture talking about seasteads and the economic upheaval in Africa and skyscrapers higher than they know how to build conventionally - Cam's annoyed that people are listening to that television personality who advises gagging demons -)

"Alright, let's try a circle."

And half an hour of frustration before they conclude it doesn't work in Milliways, express intent to go try back home if the bar's ever unoccupied but it seems that they're making a point of not leaving the bar unoccupied.