Oh no, this an unfamilar indoors space did someone see him tele-

"What the hell!"

"- hello. Welcome to Milliways."

None of his wards are pinged which eliminates a bunch of the known options. The magic sensitive ink dot he painted on his hand has gone completely black so this guy is definitely something pretty powerful. Tail and wings pull in an obvious direction but the blue skin points otherwise.... and distracting abs which indicates some sort of mental effect so, most likely option...

Lucien pulls a glass vial of holy water out of one of his jacket pockets and hurls it at the possible-incubus.

It splashes on his chest to no effect whatsoever. The vial itself bounces off him and plinks to the floor. ".......what was that about."

"Holy water. Um, do you mind telling me what you are?"

"I'm a demon, but holy water is just water."

"Ah "

.... This feels terribly impolite but he literally just said he was a demon so Lucien is going to ignore his feelings and start uncapping and throwing additional vials, in case quick silver, garlic infused oil, virgin blood, or hydrochloric acid seem to have any effect. 

"Dude, if I wanted to hurt you I'd -"

When he gets to the hydrochloric acid somebody emerges from a side hallway, rushes him too fast to track with the eye, seizes it from his hand and flings it behind the bar where it vanishes, and whisks him into a room down that same hallway where she sticks him in a forcefield-barred cell.

What.

"Um. Hello?"

"No violence in the main bar area," she says, stomping over to the desk at the end of the cell-lined corridor, where she takes up position in a swivel chair next to an obsidian pillar.

"I- um. Okay."

Lucien is trying very hard not to feel guilty! Feeling guilty for throwing things at an unexpected demon is how he ends up dead, which remains very ethically dubious to undo.

"Would you mind me asking where this is exactly."

"You know, if you went up to the bar and waited for a napkin like a normal person, she would've told you."

"I'm....I didn't realize that was an option."

"Also there was a demon."

"Yeah. Lotta people come through here. He's not allowed to do violence either."

That's good to know.

"And you're capable of stopping him if he tries?"

"No, that's why I'm on double shift with that." She aims a thumb at the obsidian pillar. "It doesn't talk though."

Sure, why not.

"Okay. I'm uh, sorry for disrupting the peace in that case."

"Two hours subjective and then you can come out."

"Very reasonable. Thank you."

She picks up a newspaper and ignores him for two hours.

Lucien does not have any reading on him but he has a notebook and pencil and he can do some arithmetic to check if his brain's been tampered with, and when that turns out fine he can useless worry about the situation for the remaining time.

The forcefield disappears after two hours.

Is the apparently harmless demon still in the main bar area?

Yeah.

Stars explode violently and without sound beyond the window.

....Was that there before? Probably. Lucien was rather distracted by the demon.

He... has no further guesses as to what is going on. Which means his brain has been very very badly messed with - so badly he can't notice any sign of it - or this is genuinely something completely unexpected. The latter is basically useless to reason about, so he'll assume the former.

"Uh, I'm sorry for throwing all those vials at you. I was not aware there were safe alternatives."

"No harm done."

....

What if Lucien waits at the bar. And hopes a napkin shows up to explain what is going on. Like the weirdly fast lady suggested.

Hello there. Can I get you a drink? First is free.

"Uh. Water would be fine."

A glass of ice water appears. Water doesn't use up your free drink, so you're aware.

"I. see."

"Would you mind me asking where this place is?"

It's not anywhere besides itself. Milliways is an interdimensional meeting point.

"Huh, this is much nicer than anything outside of my dimension I've heard of."

This is not a very high bar - the Scape of Screaming Mouths is nicer than most places he's heard of.

One does one's best.

"I fear I'm a bit out of my depth here, can you tell me about the other dimensions that are connected to here?"

There are simply far too many of them to describe in general terms.

"Could you describe... let's say the dimension the demon is originally from? If that wouldn't be any trouble." Lucien asks for lack of a better option.

Why don't you ask him?

Well, he's a demon.

"I'd assume he isn't very interested in talking to me right now."

Well, I usually don't give out personal information on a patron to another patron without their being amenable.

Lucien glances over at the demon.

Reading something on text made of insubstantial light that's projected out of a weird metallic stick.

Is that ... a miniaturized slide projector?

"Umm, would you be able to tell me if all the dimensions are at similar tech levels to mine?" Lucien asks the bar.

I can't imagine why they would be. There are many at higher and lower and orthogonal tech levels however you construe the phrase 'tech level'.

Well, that settles it. Talking to the demon might be embarrassing after what happened, and possibly also very dangerous, but access to advanced technology is definitely worth it. 

He thanks the bar for its help and excuses himself to go and talk to the demon. 

"Uh, hi."

...Lucien resolves to not make any ab related decisions.

"Hi, I uh, know we got off on the wrong foot but I was wondering if I could trade you something for your world's technology - assuming it's non-magical in nature."

"The technology is nonmagical in nature though if you want a computer like this one it requires brain surgery that's really a lot safer and tidier to have done magically."

"You... had brain surgery to install a person in your head?"

Why is the world always like this.

"The computer is not a person, it's a device. And it's mostly here," he waggles it in the air, "I just control it and encrypt it with a smaller item in my head."

"Huh, does it do anything besides books?"

"It does lots of things. Uh, perhaps you could go on in any more detail about the demon situation in your universe and why you felt throwing things at me was an appropriate response to that situation, so I can calibrate at all before attempting to give you a tech uplift."

"Largely priors - very few magical entities I've encountered have been safe and even fewer have been well intentioned. I've never actually met a demon in my universe and was not confident they existed, but the myths surrounding them feature quite a lot of torture and fire and I'd strongly expect the reality to be at least as bad as the myth."

"Well. I can't actually vouch for the demons in your world if you have any, but it's, like, rude, to attack people who are just sitting there, in most situations. What magical entities have you got out by you?"

"Ghouls, mi-go, drowned, ghosts, young things, and a bunch more? Um. I'm sorry for attacking you but I think if this were my world I could plausibly be dead or worse if I hadn't tried something."

"Well, that sounds really racist to me but maybe it's rational and maybe being racist isn't even unfashionable in your place and time."

"A lot of people are racist in my world but they are wrong about that. People are also probably too anti-magic but it's a much harder call."

"You sound to me like you're speaking English but this place has a translation effect, are you actually?"

"Yep."

"From planet Earth?"

"Yeah."

"What year is it?"

"1933."

"Wow, okay. Congratulations on noticing racism is bad I guess. I wonder if you're in a position to avert World War II."

"I might be - any particularly identifiable cause?"

"The rise of fascism in Germany, which if you're an English speaker may not be remotely in your power to affect but maybe you could go assassinate Hitler."

"I can probably sway public opinion some - I own a newspaper - but I'm not sure how helpful that would be. I could... maybe assassinate Hitler - I'm not entirely certain how dangerous the sorcerers who are backing him are."

"He didn't have those in my world so I could not begin to tell you."

"How bad is the war?"

"Civilian deaths fifty to fifty five million, military casualties upwards of twenty."

...

"Wow. Uh, I can definitely try assassinating Hitler to prevent that."

"You could maybe get Stalin too."

"I um. Am not actually a fan of assassinating world leaders as a general rule but if it's important to preventing tens of millions of deaths I can make exceptions I suppose."

"I don't actually know how much the geopolitics turn on specific dudes and you probably want to at least read some books to both confirm that the dudes suck and that you don't have a better lever. Maybe you're actually in a great position to create a Jewish ethnostate somewhere in Canada and get industrial technology accelerated so fast that Communism doesn't kill a ton of people. It's just, you know, for the next couple hundred years every conversation about time travel inevitably derails on 'but of course you've got to kill Hitler, first thing', so it popped into my head."

"I could plausibly set-up a small Jewish ethnostate somewhere if I dropped everything else - though I doubt I could get it stable enough to survive people finding out I'm a sorcerer so it's not very viable. There's a famine in the Soviet Union right now that I think an industrial revolution is too late to fix. Also wait did you say next couple hundred years."

"Where I'm from it's 2159. - or, it was when I left, I've been gone for a while, I guess it's like 2161 now."

"You've spent two years in this bar?"

"No, I spent a while conducting a war against an evil god with some cyborg Elves in another universe."

"Did you win?"

"...basically."

"Do you have a way of killing evil gods that might translate to my universe?"

"Uh, maybe, though I find I have very little taste for killing gods actually."

"Huh, why?"

"The evil one isn't dead. We, uh, came to terms."

"Because you didn't want to kill him?" 

"No, because he could see me coming, it wouldn't have worked if I'd tried."

"Were they reasonable terms?"

"Well, we didn't think we were going to get better ones."

"I can move figuring out a way to neutralize evil gods up on my to-do list if it's particularly bad. Not that I can definitely do it but up till now I've been prioritizing other problems over my world's relatively unsuccessful evil gods."

"I believe he is now neutralized. Getting him that way was awful but I have no specific reason to think it won't stick."

"Ah, that's better than alternative I suppose."

Nod.

Lucien takes a moment to gather his thoughts.

"Uh, back tracking a bit - I'm interested in technology from the 22nd century if it's on offer."

"You probably don't have to go through me about that if you'd rather not, Bar can get you books."

"It didn't seem interested in telling me about your home dimension when I asked?"

"Bar, what's up with that." He gets a napkin. "You can tell him stuff about my dimension if you want. But also, like, lots of places are probably having the 22nd century, it doesn't have to be mine."

Sure, Lucien can go ask for some introductory history and medical textbooks from Earth 22nd centuries. Both the demon's and somewhere that doesn't have magic if that's an option.

There are lots of Earths that don't have magic! They... might have different physics from each other... but most of the basics persist!

He'd prefer physics similar to what his universe has but he'll take what he can get.

Well, his universe has physics which permit magic, so, you can see how this would be in tension.

Is there an option for a universe whose physics is a subset of his and lacks magic?

You have to understand that I can't directly apprehend the physics of any of these universe. I can only go by their published material and available consumer goods, particularly comestibles.

"Ah. Can you find a recent non-magical textbook on history from a universe with no magical books, the same textbooks that mine currently has, plus additional textbooks that go up until at least the 22nd century?"

I'm afraid your textbooks don't appear to co-occur in their exact forms anywhere with a lack of magical books.

In retrospect this makes sense - several historical events are downstream of magic.

"In that case would it be possible for me to just get non-magic introductory history and medical textbooks from the demon's Earth?"

Up until the year 2006, yes. Thereafter medicine often features summoning magical beings.

"So long as the textbooks themselves aren't magical that's fine? I am just avoiding reading a book that is going to turn into an insane cultist or similar." 

Ah, I don't give out hazardous items. Here's some history and medicine books from Cam's Earth.

Lucien skims through the medical textbook to see how they deal with infectious diseases.

Antibiotics and antivirals, sterile instruments, UV and air filtration, handwashing.

Lucien acquires more detailed information about these from the bar and then sits down to read through the history textbook. 

Revelation occurred in 2006 and it is arguably the most significant individual historical event of all time. But lots of stuff also happened before that, like WWII.

Wow World War 2 was actually that bad. What exactly was Revelation?

That was when it became public knowledge the world over that you can summon demons, angels, and fairies, and get them to do magic for you.

What sort of magic?

Demons create things, angels transmute things, and fairies move things.

What sort of things can demons create?

Most of them really.

That... sounds handy. What are the downsides?

Does he want a textbook on summoning? Here's one of those. Any kind of daeva can kill you, of course, if they're not properly bound. Bindings prevent fairies from decapitating you and angels from turning you into goo and demons from interpolating you with air. The more serious risk is actually that they won't kill you, and will instead incapacitate you alive and go run amok - if they kill you, they go home. Fairies are less dangerous in this respect in particular especially if you have a state of the art chiplock.

"Bar, do you know if the security here prevents harm from demons of the sort I was talking to earlier, even given their powers?'

Yes, the security is categorically adequate within its scope.

Which means this is probably the safest place to talk to a demon. 

Lucien scans through the literature on medical advances again, taking notes. And then it's time to go and talk to the demon, again. 

"I'm sorry to bother you again but I was wondering if I could trade with you for some items."

"What do you need?"

Lucien has a list of future medical tech, mostly for reverse engineering purposes though some items are feasible to make and transport from here in large enough quantities on their own (like some vaccines, so long as they come with refrigeration units). 

"- though I'd probably find more items I'm interested in given more time."

"What are your reverse-engineering resources? Like, a lot of this stuff is computerized, for one."

"I put the prerequisites I could find further down in the list, here, though I don't think computers made it on to the list. I was thinking of distributing the vaccines directly and then using the profits to reverse engineering the rest. Maybe leak some things to competitors so there's someone independent to work on it after I get accused of witchcraft."

"Where does your door open to? I don't know how many vaccines you'll be able to store - or how you'll convince people to take them -"

"Door open to? My lab has a basement I can store quite a lot in - the vaccines in particular I don't think will take up much room so long as I make the needles and syringes and such myself."

"I think I can get people to take them if I pass it off as a new discovery and use my newspaper to advertise. Which I'm not normally comfortable using my newspaper for but it seems worth it in this case."

"When you open the door it will put you back where you came from. - you know you can't safely re-use needles, right?"

"Where I came from was a flat near Istanbul I rented for the night - I was planning on teleporting to New York instead. Probably I'll need to do multiple trips."

"We sterilize needles I think, does that not work?"

"They accumulate microscopic defects. I mean, it's probably better than not being vaccinated against things, I'll give you that."

"I'm not sure why we don't use reusable ones - might just be the price. I'd rather not wait on driving down the cost of steel production a bunch but maybe I can get it affordably as is. Or if there's a reasonably sized equipment to produce them cheaply I'd take that."

"I can maybe get you a usable model of stuffprinter, though hypodermic needles would be a very weird use case, they're mass produced and for that people in my world summon demons, stuffprinters are for one-offs."

"I think if people found out I was regularly summoning demons to produce needles they would freak out and maybe, I'm not sure, stop using vaccines indefinitely or something."

"Right, I'm just saying, it might be kind of hard to find a model of stuffprinter from my world that will do well at making hypodermic needles, people mostly use them for costume pieces and stuff like that where it's likely that nobody's already summoned a demon, gotten a batch of ten thousand made, and put them on the open market."

"Maybe there's something pre-Revelation that would work? I'm not sure how your economy looked then. Worst case I can use my world's needles until someone figures out how to do better."

"Pre-Revelation had single use hypodermic needles but I don't know anything about how they were made and whatever it was might be hard to get through your door. ...would nasal spray versions be too weird for people?"

"Hm, I could probably sell people on nasal sprays. Might be easiest to be honest - people don't like needles even when they know it's good for them."

"Quite. And some can be taken orally, polio you can do that way. I don't know if anybody's actually reworked things like smallpox that got eradicated early on for non-injection modalities, though."

"We already have the smallpox vaccine, though I'd be happier for it to be easier to scale and export. Uh, do you know what you'll want in return for all this."

"...this is what I would be doing recreationally, more or less. I can't go with you to your world, I've got obligations in the one I came from with the Elves, but it's not like making stuff runs down a limited resource."

Lucien is torn between wanting to take this at face value (it makes perfect sense to him!) and finding it deeply suspicious that the interdimensional demon with a mind affecting aura would be so helpful.

"What sort of obligations to the Elves, if it's not rude of me to ask."

"...I can resurrect them. Only them and orcs, they have special properties that mean the body's all they need, I can't make minds."

Lucien.... Blinks. Several times. 

"Umm. Resurrect then with what sort of constraints and costs? Are they sapient?"

"They're sapient. I can do them in seconds, it's just there - were a lot of them - it really really won't work for humans though."

"Does it work on them repeatedly? Are there side effects?"

"I don't think I've ever had to resurrect the same person more than once so far but there's no reason it wouldn't. I can't restore in-progress pregnancies."

"I can do human resurrection - it just requires the death of too many sapient people to be worth it generally."

"...oh. Well, then I guess if you had a demon and a bunch of Elves and a Silmaril you'd be all set, but I did not bring a Silmaril here.

- just humans?"

"Should work for any sapient life?"

"Do you need remains or to be near where they died or - anything -"

"Nope."

"There's about a million - gods - dead -"

"I am probably against resurrecting evil gods but otherwise I am happy to help resurrect them."

"Not the evil ones. The evil ones are alive. It's - it's what he wanted more than everything else."

"He?"

"The main evil one. Melkor."

"Ah."

"You can see a copy of the oath I got from him and his, if you want. - they can make binding oaths and I can verify that they did that."

"Sure,"

Here it is.

Lucien starts reading.

"Are you the demon mentioned here?"

"Yeah."

He finishes reading.

"Oh, wow."

"This seems like it must have been an excruciating decision. Um. I'm pretty sure we can get them all back and it won't void the deal it looks like?"

"Right. He didn't know I could get Elves back."

Nod.

"He sounds worse than any evil god we have as far as I know."

"Yeah. Really bad. I don't know if you even have context to understand the magnitude, it involves a lot of computers."

"The oath didn't really mention..."

"The reason I can resurrect the Elves is because they have brain chips - not like mine, chips that store their whole personality and all their memories for them. And that also mattered to Melkor. He could take those chips, if he captured somebody. Copy them. Edit them. Make them have experiences without bodies to have them with. Any experiences he wanted. Faster than they would have been able to normally. He had trillions of them."

Lucien attempts to wrap his mind around a million instances of this. And then multiply that by a million. It doesn't really work.

"Ah. ....I'm glad he can't do that anymore."

Nod.

Lucien gets the sense that this demon could use a hug. 

"Bringing them back shouldn't be difficult if there are Elves on board with it ... I'll need some spell ingredients and a place to do it in but probably you can just make those? Getting all of them on my Earth in very large quantities won't be feasible in the short term without a lot of hassle."

"If the ingredients aren't magical. How many of these could you do - also, uh, do you mind waiting a while, I don't know exactly what the Valar will want to do to me once they're back so I should resurrect all the Elves first."

"Ingredients aren't magical. The entire process is scalable - right now it takes a few hours to sacrifice fifteen people to get back two but I can teach people how do it and run as many as needed in parallel. Might need more sacrifices to get back some gods I suppose."

"How long is a while?"

"...months, not more than a year probably. I'm about halfway through putting back the ones I killed but then I wanted to go resurrect a bunch of war dead."

"Yeah, I can wait for that. How many can you resurrect per day?"

"Ballpark five thousand per day."

"Hrm, so given yields on my ritual that would give something like a thirtieth of the deaths on my planet per day I think. Would other demons help?"

"I'm sure some who'd help could be found but they can't be summoned in Arda, that's the Elf world."

"Can you use my world for the resurrections then? Or your Earth." 

"...unclear if Valar can go through doors in the right way but maybe? Except I really don't want to let time restart without me in Arda - I should bring some Elves in here."

"Time restart?"

"While you're in here time is paused in the world you came from."

"Oh, that's convenient."

"Yeah. My plan was to just wait here till a solution to my problem walked in, and - I guess maybe that's you."

"I was planning on spending the next several decades researching the ritual until I got it to the point where it resurrected more people than it required to sacrifice. I guess I could still do some of that here though honestly I expect it would go a lot slower without access to my world."

"Why's that?"

"No tomes to find or magic users with secrets I can barter for - I'd have to figure out more things from scratch."

"I mean, Bar or I could probably help on the tomes front."

"Hm, a bunch of them are going to be magical but I guess not all."

"They might have nonmagical working drafts or something?"

"The best ones are transcriptions of strange visions and such, sadly."

"Have you tried resurrecting the people who had the visions?"

"It has not previously seemed worth it given the cost of the resurrections... which I suppose is no longer the case." 

"Have you in fact done... any resurrections."

"Yes - twice."

"How'd you source the sacrifices?"

"Terminal patients who agreed to donate their bodies to science in return for money for their families. I don't feel good about it but I think it was the right call each time."

"Sounds like the way to do it if you're gonna, certainly. - I should bring in some Elves, reduce the risk that I lose my door."

"Should I be bringing in people from my world too?"

"Do you have any you'd trust in shouting distance?" Cam gets up and heads doorward.

"No... my cat, maybe?"

"...your cat."

"Yes. I trust her and she might be both near the door and a person. I'm not sure."

"Well, I'm not sure a cat could open the door if you couldn't but I like cats if you want to bring her in." He pulls open the door. "Alassëo, come here."

A tall dark-haired man with pointed ears and beautiful drapey clothes glides into the bar.

Lucien can have a go. 

"Fi-" he doesn't actually finish saying her name before a furry brown cat darts into the bar. "-ka. Ah, there you are."

Fika looks around the bar appraisingly.

"Hi, Fika," says Cam, and then he catches Alassëo up softly.

Fika looks up at the demon briefly, before deciding that there's more interesting things to investigate at the moment. Such as this Bar that she has just climbed onto.

Welcome to Milliways. Would you like your free first drink?

Fika licks the napkin by way of an answer.

Bowl of milk.

And a happy cat to drink it.

... This presumably means the bar is safe to drink from. He'll order an iced tea while he waits for the demon to finish catching the elf up. 

Iced tea! It's really good iced tea.

The thing is Lucien didn't actually bring Fika with him to the flat in Istanbul his door opened up to. And yet.

Alassëo lets himself into the backyard after he has his summary.

Fika finishes her bowl and looks at Lucien.

"Hm?"

She licks the bottom of the empty bowl longingly, without breaking eye contact. 

"Oh. Um, could I order another bowl of milk?"

23¢.

Sure.

More milk!

More happy cat!

"A cat walks into a bar," mutters Cam.

"I got her because I heard rumors that cats could detect magic and as far as I can tell this is true but I'm pretty sure there's some other stuff going on but I still don't know exactly what."

"What's she do when she detects it?"

"Depends - hiss, run away, do nothing, or ask it for milk apparently."

"Apparently." Cam looks at his computer and does some computing; looking over his shoulder will reveal messages exchanged with Alassëo.

Lucien is not particularly prone to looking over people's shoulders.

"So is the plan for you to do more elf resurrections while I do spell research, until you're ready to resurrect some gods?"

"That can be the plan if that works for you. I think I'll set up a resurrection workflow here and see if Alassëo can recruit your hundred volunteers from those batches, cut down on time running in Arda."

"That works - I suppose if time is otherwise halted in my world there isn't actually a cost to waiting to fix death in my world until I get a version of the ritual that resurrects more people than it kills."

"Is that on the horizon? The Elves are recyclable, in principle."

"You mentioned you could only do a few thousand per day, right?"

"Yes, but there are more demons. Admittedly I'm not sure how easy it would be to recruit them in quantity."

"What sort of recruitment problems would you imagine?" Is it that demons are evil and this guy is some extremely fortunate exception.

"It's not very intellectually stimulating work."

"Are demons payable?"

"Yes, just, you have to be slightly more flexible about it because we can make arbitrary material objects so most will want to be paid in, like, experiences. Which would take time away from resurrecting people."

"What sort of experiences?"

"Varies. Hiking the real Alps, going to the theater, sexual favors are traditional, meeting celebrities or something would probably work..."

"I think it would probably be easier to spend a century figuring out a better resurrection spell than to convince my world to scale-up massive necromantic rituals powered by trading sex to demons in order to resurrect the dead. The rest might be promising - celebrities don't scale but we can put on theatrical productions for demons who help."

"So one drawback of this taking place in your world is that demons don't already know about your world, so they're not already excited about your theatrical productions and celebrities, though I imagine with most your Alps would pass muster. We might wind up having to filter for history nerds who'll be really excited about the whole 1933 thing and I'm not sure what they'll want."

"Assuming our composers and writers and such match dead artists in yours, we could have them make new media that they never got to in our world? Alternatively we can pay in resurrections if there are people demons want resurrected."

"Oh, you can totally sell it, it just - requires selling, instead of being something that every demon will already have on the tip of their tongue as soon as they notice they've been allowed to talk on summons. - people in my world get an afterlife, I don't know how that would interact."

"My world has an afterlife too - it nabs people out of it and puts them in mortal bodies and I'd expect it to do the same for yours?"

"What's your afterlife like?"

"Eternal dreaming type thing? Not everyone goes there. I think it's unpleasant if you had a traumatic life and not great even if you had a nice one but people aren't actually aware enough for it to be too horrible."

"Huh, ours is different. Some of us become demons, for one thing, so that's pretty sweet, please don't resurrect me."

"Huh, you used to be human?"

"Yeah, till I got murdered."

"Ah, I do hate it when that happens."

"It's a bummer. I mean, being a demon is great, but I couldn't get in touch with my parents till after they died."

"Huh, I could probably figure out transport between worlds if that is useful?"

"- yes, that would be amazing, Limbo is pretty impoverished and the team that loads up the train to send them whenever we have a concordance between the planes could make it just about as nice as the daeva worlds!"

"How much transit would be helpful?"

"Sending a single digit number of demons across once would do ninety percent of the work, we can make a shitton of stuff really fast."

"Hm, assuming people also go to limbo when they die sometimes, would resurrecting a limboite to milliways work for this? With you letting demons in through the door and them letting the demons back out into limbo."

"...maybe. I don't want to do either of my parents, though, they both got unusually good Limbo results - uh, dying to Limbo gets you one indestructible thing, like your favorite dog or a tree or a musical instrument or something, and she's got a camper van and he's got his entire house, and if this plan fails at some stage I don't want to have messed that up for them... My mom fostered some kids in Limbo, I can dig up what I know about those and see if any of them are good candidates. Pity we can't actually ask anyone..."

"I can try to wrangle teleportation to limbo? I'd expect it to be possible in theory. Targeting can be finnicky though - I didn't end up here on purpose."

"And I cannot replace you if you should go astray never to return, now, can I. - actually, can you teach your resurrection thing or do you need to be inherently magical in some way to perform it."

"I can teach it - though people being irresponsible with my world's magic system can have extremely bad consequences, so I'd want to be careful about who I'm teaching it to."

"Me?"

"Um. I'm a little bit wary of teaching powerful magic to someone who identifies themself as a demon but you otherwise seem pretty great. Except for uh, whatever mind affecting aura thing you have going on."

"...demons don't have those. And I don't think I have picked one up in my travels. Though if I have somehow I'm very concerned, what is it doing?"

"Uh, making your abs distracting?"

"Was that just a really weird way of asking me to put on a shirt, I can put on a shirt."

"That would be appreciated but it was not meant to be a weird way of saying that?"

"If the only thing my apparent mind control aura is making you want to look at my abs I think it's probably a consequence of me not wearing a shirt," a shirt appears, "and you being from 1933 where they haven't invented gay people yet."

"Uh, I know same-sex attracted people " - namely both his parents - " but I'm attracted to women?"

"Ah, sorry. 1933 where they haven't invented bisexuals yet."

"What. Is that... common?"

"Seems pretty culturally dependent really, but yeah."

Now apparently it is time to feel incredibly embarrassed. 

"Ah."

"No big deal. My only problem with shirts is that I don't like how they interact with wings when they're put on or taken off, it's not uncomfortable to wear one."

"That's convenient I guess." 

Lucien ... is going to push the embarrassment into a box in his head. It is not helpful and he can deal with it later.

"I think than my only worry is the being a demon thing, even if you aren't native to my universe I am used to almost all magic things being at least as bad as there reputations and generally worse, even when this isn't obvious at first. I can probably address this by truth spelling you, I suppose?"

"You can do that? How's it work?"

"I point a branch at you and hold a vial and they react if you lie, for a notion of lying that is relatively broad. I'd need a piece of you for it to work - a fingernail or hair would do."

"It doesn't mind control me at all, just detects it? Despite what my fantastic abs would have you believe I'm very much against mind control."

"It might feel a bit weird but in a - tactile sensationey way and not in a forcing you to tell the truth way."

"Okay. You can truth spell me then."

He actually has all the materials with him, - it's a useful spell. It will take a bit to assemble them since two of the ingredients need to be mixed shortly before casting and the small tree cutting needs to be refreshed with a technically separate spell involving a weirdly large amount of blinking but after a few minutes he can be holding the aforementioned branch and vial.

"Uh, you can refuse to answer questions if you don't want to - if you lie about minor things it might pick it up just as much as lying about major things. It also sometimes picks up misleading things as lies."

"I will try not to be too sarcastic."

"Fingernail or hair?"

Cam plucks a hair and hands it over.

The original version of this ritual would involve eating the hair but Lucien managed to get adding his stomach acid to the vial to count instead so into the vial the hair goes. The liquid inside bubbles and turns silver and to a consistency somewhere between oil and mercury. 

"So uh, have you, through action or your presence, affected my mind in ways other than the ones I am aware of and am accustomed to."

"...it sounded like you were not accustomed to being distracted by guys' abs. So far as I am aware I have never magically or supernaturally affected anyone's mind. I do know of some mind-affecting drugs I could in theory administer at range but have not done this to... I think anyone outside of medical school volunteer test subjects, but in particular not to you."

(The liquid bubbles but doesn't tilt to either side and the branch rustles but doesn't bend.)

Lucien has in fact been distracted by guys abs before like that but those were statues made by great artists so he assumed that they were meant to evoke that sort of feeling! Possibly he should reevaluate that assumption.

"Were you in fact a human, and if so did becoming a demon change how you think or feel in any supernatural or otherwise non-mundane ways?"

"I was. Being indestructible has some downstream psychological consequences but they're on the order of 'I spend a lot more time caffeinated' and 'I don't get sick so I don't spend any time in mental states influenced by being sick'; since being indestructible is magic I don't know if you mean for that to count as non-mundane or not."

"I would count that as non-mundane. Mundane is only for things that are... ordinary, I guess."

What else....

"What are your broad intentions towards me and towards my world?"

"...universal sapient flourishing as mediated by the commitments I have elsewhere and applicable practical limitations and opportunity costs?"

... Lucien stares at the vial.

"Uh, can you say that again?"

"Probably not verbatim. Universal sapient flourishing, except where mediated by my commitments elsewhere, and resource constraints and opportunity cost."

"Is what you want regarding me and my world?"

"Everywhere with you and your world as a special case."

And not the slightest tilt in the vial. 

"Wow, you're uh. Rather good."

Is there anything else...

"Have you lied or attempted to mislead me today?"

"I've probably said flippant and sarcastic things but I can't remember taking any actions or making any utterances based on a preference that you be ignorant or misinformed."

Lucien says an incantation and puts down the vial and wilting branch.

"That should be enough. More than enough, really."

"You didn't want me to try lying to make sure the spell worked on me in the first place at all?"

"The vial bubbling means that it worked, though I guess it can't hurt."

And another incantation to reactivate it...

"I am the very model of a modern major general."

Neat that Gilbert and Sullivan are still popular in the distant future.

The liquid in the vial tilts to the left as if gravity were off-kilter. 

"It works."

"Oh good." Tailswish.

... That sure is a tailswish.

It sure is. Cam turns to ask Bar questions about setting up a resurrection facility in the backyard and about whether blood sacrifice is allowed there.

"We'd want some amount of privacy and maybe a 400 square feet of space. Oh and uh. Anywhere we used will eventually become a bit haunted - though it'll take a bit to be noticeable."

"...haunted. By what?"

"A general sense of unease and fraying of the fabric of reality. It takes a lot of haunting before it becomes an actual problem but I don't know of a way to unhaunt a place yet." 

The fabric of reality here has had worse.

"In that you're okay if we haunt a bit or that it won't get haunted in the first place?"

Either, both.

"Well, worst case we can add stories if the ground floor gets too haunted, I guess."

"What form does the fraying of the fabric of reality take? On, uh, normal planets that aren't Milliways."

"Makes it easier for certain sorts of entities to break through, can mess with topology, if you spend too long there you might go mad, that sort of thing? Uh, if you keep going some texts say it will eventually collapse into a raving dimension of mindless hate and chaos but I've never manage to find anyone who can operationalize what that looks like."

"...wow. Is 'go mad' operationalizable, like, what kind of mad."

"Uh, I've seen obsessive fear, someone who wanted to eat everything, a guy who wanted to blow up the Earth for reasons I don't understand, someone who tried to have their family reenact the lives of the people who last lived in their house, and probably some other things I'm forgetting?"

"...wow, you've only done the resurrection thing two times, are there other spells that also hauntify stuff or was I way off in understanding how quickly this happens?"

"Oh these are from other people doing different spells that hauntify things. It would take thousands of uses of the resurrection ritual to even get to the growing sense of unease point, and way longer to get to the madness point."

"Oh good. I'm actually optimistic that if we get one Maia, or the right one anyway, they'll be able to do the rest of the work."

"Huh, how?"

"They're magic too."

"In a ressurectioney way?"

"So, the dead ones are actually in a - complicated physics situation. As good as dead, but possibly recoverable with magic that isn't specifically resurrectiony."

"Ah, which presumably won't apply to helping with people on my world."

"I wouldn't guarantee it couldn't but it'd be fraught since they will probably be very upset that I murdered them and might have their own opinions about how to approach anything in your world."

"Ah, how reasonable are their opinions likely to be?"

"I don't know, which is why I'd like to get all the dead resurrected first - there are probably some humans and also Dwarves who I'll need your ritual for."

"Are they likely to interfere with resurrecting people from my world too?"

"You don't have to let them in if they can't convince you of their benign nature. But this might be one reason to teach me the ritual so you never have to be in the same universe with them at all."

"Are they likely to notice if my world is using space elves as intermediate steps in the resurrection ritual?"

"They might. I don't think they will be able to interfere from a world away, and we only need a hundred volunteers, and I haven't been getting the impression that they needed to wake up at any point in the process so there's no worry about getting their memories back to their mainline instances, right?"

"Their bodies need to take actions - I enchant human bodies to do that without waking and if elf bodies are broadly similar I wouldn't expect an issue?"

"You saw Alassëo. They're made of bones and meat and stuff."

"Then I expect the spell will work fine." 

"That's good, I imagine it'd be very tedious being resurrected and sacrificed a bunch of times."

Lucien can provide further specifics about the dimensions and necessities of the resurrection space they'd want - they'll need enough space to build what amounts to a small indoor swimming pool.

"Why the - depth? Is it going to be filled with something that'd spread out too much on the floor?"

"You need the blood to be a few feet deep for the tentacles to unfurl properly. I guess if you can create blood from nothing we don't need the tentacles to refresh it for multiple uses, but we'd need some way to remove the blood after each ritual."

"Tentacles, wow. I can create blood from nothing but draining it would be a production."

"Can we build piping out the front door? We'd need to replace the blood eventually even if we do go the tentacles route."