"Earth fiction and religion features beings popularized as superficially resembling fairies and demons and angels - fairies not so much the religion part - and our common names in most human languages are cognates with those beings and people accordingly expect tricky alien fairies and benign generous angels and vicious evil demons."

"Well, that's dangerous and inconvenient. Edie mentioned that gag bindings were standard for demons on Earth, which. How does anyone negotiate anything."

"They propose a deal and we can say 'yes summoner' and 'no summoner' and I have a tail because that doesn't count toward the gag if I wag it or whatever."

"Is that why the tail? It's cute. Very expressive."

"That's the idea! Didn't get me much practical improvement in summon negotiations but I was always a pushover anyway."

"I asked Edie for a fleet of ships, and she said lovely but could I summon her sister, and then she looked at the blueprints and went 'some of these are definitely warships, can you explain yourself?' and I said 'well, we might have a war if we can in doing so distract the Enemy enough to partially evacuate the planet," and I cannot imagine how any of that would have worked with 'yes', 'no', and a tail."

"Yeah, this is why my parents didn't know I was okay until they died too."

"You died sooner than your parents?"

"I was twenty-two."

"Even for mortal races that's really young, right?"

"It's a few years into adulthood, but yeah."

"What happened?"

"Guy who didn't like that I'd publicized summoning figured out who I was - I think maybe a daeva identified me to him - tracked me down, walked into the university where I was teaching intro bindings, shot me in the head. I usually save this story for occasions where I can begin a sentence with 'speaking as a murder victim, I' but it hasn't felt appropriate recently -"

"I'm sorry.

Twenty-two. What a loss to your world."

"Didn't really have a sequel to Revelation lined up."

"I have this feeling you'd have eventually come up with something."

"Maybe."

Aaaaaarrrrrrggghhhh dear alt from stupid magic Valar world did you realize what you were doing to me this is all your fault.

"Want to keep developing this or does too much hinge on details we won't be able to know until we've got interdimensional travel up and running?"

"Put it on the back burner, I guess. No plan survives contact with the multiverse but we might come up with something, at this point it just doesn't seem to get likelier with concerted effort."

"Sure. Game?"

"Sure."

Game!

Yay what fun a couple decades of this are going to drive him spare that tail that person who is incidentally Revelation

- they could at least, like, hook up or something, but he has no idea how to pull that off either and if he's going to be dwelling on things he can't pull off they may as well be what he actually wants -

- the age-old problem, what do you offer a demon -

Apparently you offer a demon all the riches of your island nation in tribute, that seems to be what he's angling for here.

Yeah, he's definitely not playing his best, he's distracted, why would he possibly be distracted, nope, the island nation's not paying all their riches in tribute, does whoever suggested that understand how capital works, I am literally doing you a favor by offering 5% tribute, you will get more riches off this island nation, look, here are charts. And incidentally I am going to convince your heir to stab you in your sleep.

And incidentally - no, it's really not incidentally - stop wagging your tail I can't play like this...

Tail continues to wag! The heir was poisoned weeks ago according to this forensic report on why he dropped dead in the hallway and it super looks like Maitimo did it! Gosh!