"I'm 'the Slayer', I am supposed to kill evil shit, there is one of me, my predecessor was presumably killed by a nasty bitey and I will have a successor when one gets me - it was the middle of the night, I was in bed, I did write things down afterwards but I didn't have a chance to get exact words."

"I have many objections to this system, most of which I'm sure you've already formulated."

"I don't even get dental."

"But now you can summon daeva, so that's no longer as relevant as it might have been."

"Yes. This is a much niftier skillset with which to attempt world-saving. I will want further lessons."

"Those I can provide. Do you want to that before or after we investigate possible ways to pay a demon?"

"Depends, what's the curriculum look like?"

"Go over the elements of a circle in more detail, explain what makes up a binding, explore more of the standard bindings and how they fit those criteria, and how to construct a binding yourself. Different ways to target the summons, how to summon a random daeva, how you can specify a specific one. What sort of agreements you should make once you do summon someone, common errors to avoid, more sophisticated errors to avoid."

"Do 'em in parallel? I show up with library books and then do my summoning lessons for the day while you skim the books for discrepancies?"

"That should work. Oh, I remembered: one limitation to demons' conjuration is that they cannot make magic items. If there are any useful magical trinkets we can obtain easily, that's another possible avenue."

"I will have to bootstrap as far as the possession of a meaningful budget to buy anything out of the Magic Box that is reputed to be, in itself, genuinely magic."

"We'll keep it in mind for later then. Likely more scalable at the high end than books, information tends to propagate through Hell after a while."

"Yeah, I can imagine that would happen. And I'm not myself equipped to work on artistic commission such that anybody would be entertained by my work."

"Nor I. It's possible we may find someone entertained by the work of such rank amateurs, tastes do vary, but I do not think it likely enough to consider as an option while we plan."

"Yeah. And I bet any demons with a reputation for helping people out 'cause they're just really nice demons are already booked all the time."

"It's hard to display that quality when all you can say is yes or no."

"So the population of thusly reputationed demons may be zero, which would prevent you from knowing about them, too."

"Precisely."

"What inconvenient superstitions these alternate Earthlings have."

"Demons can be genuinely dangerous, just not in that specific way."

"I believe you. All of the described powers are legitimately terrifying. But y'all seem to have human-range psychologies, which is more than I can say for most nonhumans I meet."

"It helps that I was human once. Eli was not, I have no excuses for Eli."

"He seems nice. How'd you meet him?"

"A student was measuring the relative efficiency of an angel versus a fairy at purifying water of various contaminants. Not one of the more exciting summons I've ever taken. Eli was the angel summoned, we got to talking, kept up through concordances afterwards."

"I don't suppose you have a demon friend by similar means."