"Uh huh. So send them home and I'll get you some better books and you can summon them again once you have a nice space for them and a plan to treat them well."

Tucker frowns and sighs heavily and mutters something under his breath about people for the ethical treatment of demons, but he goes upstairs and gets his spellbooks.

It takes him a couple hours to reverse all of the summoning spells, but he does it.

"Thank you! I think you'll be much safer if you learn how to summon responsibly."

Tucker seems pretty disappointed by all of this. His brothers let him know that he's very smart and he'll definitely be able to do it better next time.

Karen is outside staring at the sky, because at some point she got bored of watching people chant at monkey-dog-things.

"All better?"

"They're home."

She nods.

"Where is home, for demons? I mean, for the ones that aren't... demon-demons."

"There're a lot of different dimensions. Some of them are hell dimensions where everything is terrible and some of them are just different. Most of the hell dimensions are complicated, not the kind of place you could invade and do better. I think whether it's called a hell dimension or not in our books is as much a matter of who was there taking notes as of the world itself. If you were a chicken and you did some magic travel to a factory farm here, you'd figure this was a hell dimension.

There's one I know of that's pretty nice but not many people are the kinda people who can be happy there."

"This one's pretty OK. Apart from all of the random death and factory farms and dead babies and wars and poverty and - maybe this one's a fixer-upper. We're gonna fix it up some, though. Right?"

“That’s the plan.”

"OK. ...thanks. For helping fix it up."

"I mean, I tried the thing where instead you comfortably ignore it and it's not all that comfortable really."

"It seems like it wouldn't be."

So she goes home, and she fixes the little broken pieces of the world that she she can reach. She writes a music review and alerts students about where they can pick up their own recordings; it won't immediately make them popular, but maybe a few kids will pick up copies, and maybe a few kids will suggest it to their friends. She's still stuck on the Amy Madison situation at the end of the day, though, and at the end of the day it is common knowledge that Cordelia Chase - a cheerleader - was suddenly blinded and had to be driven home early by her parents.

"Do we... confront her?" she asks, after school. "Because I'm good with confronting her if you think it's the best idea, but I'm sort of worried that she's going to jump into one of our bodies if we do, and that sounds super hard to deal with for everyone."

"Yeah, it'd be a little messy. Potentially a lot messy, if she gets memories from people she imitates. This is probably a job for someone who knows how to do the counterspell that sends her back to wherever she came from."

"Fair," she says, in the tone of someone who sort of feels like fate has set out to make sure that she, personally, gets to look as useless as possible from now on. "You know someone?"

"Yeah, I'll call. I can hook you up with someone who teaches magic, too, if you wanna learn it."

She makes a little bit of a face. "I want to know things. And know what I can do in the world myself. I don't want to... go worshipping Star Trek aliens with delusions of godhood."

"It's not really my thing either but plenty of spells are more 'we welcome your presence' than 'we think you're great', for what it's worth."

"I can talk to them, I guess. Maybe some of the Star Trek aliens are all right. It'd be a little unfair to automatically discount someone if they just want to help, but they can only notice people who burn flowers and not people who think the words 'paging Alex'."

"I think there's probably some beings described by that."

"OK. But moratorium on magical nonsense until I know anything about it, I agree. Do I at least get to talk to Chris Epps and figure out what's going on with his brother?"

"Seems fine to me. At minimum it'd be good to know if it's something different than what's going on with Jack O'Toole."

"...fine, I will also face down Katie. But I want a cookie for pushing myself after."

Hopefully if this is completely ridiculous it'll automatically be parsed as a joke. Hopefully.

"All right, noted."

Karen doesn't have any friendship points with Chris Epps. You know what Karen does have, though? Dead parents.

"Hey," she says, at lunch the next day, before Dennis can intercept her. "I - um, don't think this is crazy or anything? You won't laugh?"

     "Sure, what - "

"I heard that you can raise the dead."

     " - I don't know what you're talking about," says Chris, who clearly knows what she's talking about.

"Oh," says Karen. "I just - sorry, it was stupid. I just - my parents died a couple months ago. But obviously they're just - I mean they're gone."

     And now Chris feels like a dick. "Oh, I - I mean I'm not saying it's impossible, just - raising the dead, you know, that's heavy stuff - "

"You've looked into it?" she asks, sitting down at the table.

     "Well - not extensively. People have theorized about it. But even if it could be done, a couple months is way too long - you have to get to people before the tissue damage sets in. A few days, maybe, at the absolute most - much better if you can get to them within twelve hours."

She takes notes. She keeps the conversation going. She gets an invitation to his house to look over his books.

Paging Alex. This is a report, not a request for immediate assistance. Very likely doctor Frankenstein. It must be a Hellmouth thing, if it were easy enough to reanimate the dead that a high school student could do it then it wouldn't be something that everyone thinks it impossible. But Epps thinks he's using pure science; he's not casting spells.