"Yeah. Although I suppose it's possible it won't work for daeva or something."

"Something else we should test."

"I can get you the book with the stuff I started trying first."

"That would work. We should clear off these circles first."

"You can probably do that more easily than I can."

"This is true."

Chalk dust: is swept into a neat little pile in the corner of the room.

"D'you have enough oomph to compress it back into usable chalk? How's this work?"

"I could." The pile rises into the area, then shrinks into a cylindrical shape, slightly smaller than the chalk was before it was drawn with. "I have to pack it more tightly to compensate for not having any water to mix in. But it should still be usable."

"Neat! Can you make stuff catch fire by friction without having to visibly move anything?"

"Hmm. That would not be impossible in principle, I suppose, but I have never tried."

"I assume the commonest uses where you're usually summoned to are generating electricity and moving cargo, maybe passengers too, around?"

"As broad categories, yes."

"Any cool niche applications it's taking me more than a few minutes to think of? Snowplow fairies? Clearing the Pacific garbage patch? Digging tunnels? How common is summoning, how frivolous do people get with it?"

"Moving snow and earth, yes. I have not personally been called to clear out any trash. Also lifting satellites or habitats into orbit or beyond. For fairies, the reasons for summoning can be very frivolous. We are easy to pay and the bindings are less complex than for an angel or demon. Whenever something needs to be moved somehow and it would be more convenient to draw a circle on the floor."

"It must lead to a really weird sort of employment market when you get a random person who was willing to spend a while investigating a random job, every time..."

"The sort of daeva who take summons tend to be the sort willing to perform arbitrary tasks."

"But it's probably hard to find specialists, to the extent specialization is a thing, and without a standard fungible currency you're gambling on what you get for it, too, and how long you'll be gone."

"Specialization is mostly for things like angels with medical training, daeva are largely interchangeable otherwise. Around the time period I was learning, there were lists of medical angels available on the Internet, and you could target one of those specifically if you had the need. Daeva can and do negotiate for what they'd like to receive, and can refuse to make a deal if they want to perform the task. If something was going to keep me away for years such that I'd miss concordances, I wouldn't do it, but for shorter time scales there's not much I'd be missing out on in Fairyland."

"But you'd kind of have to structure your life around taking summonses."

"Yes, and that's a trade-off I am willing to make. Not everyone is, of course, but taking a summons is a voluntary action."

"That's good at least."

"Yes. Do you want to learn more about summoning or shall we investigate magic?"

"I have to break into the school library to get the magic books and prefer to do that after dark, so more summoning, please."

"Very well."

More summoning lessons!

Bella takes to it like a natural. She does need to break for lunch at one point.