« Back
Generated:
Post last updated:
call me maybe [admin]
Permalink Mark Unread
Cam is out flying. There's a decent cloud of atmosphere around the gold plane, now, millenia of demons making air around themselves for comfort and not sealing it up because why would you bother. There's a small forest, here - the effect is kind of ruined by the lamps it has to grow under, but it's still pretty.

He feels an open summons and lets it grab him -
Permalink Mark Unread
- and he appears on a nearly featureless expanse of dark grey rock, in a circle drawn in dark blue ink on a thick pane of glass laid on top of the rock. The poor lighting conditions - moonless, starless night sky, with only a faint strange glow in the distance, lining the too-high horizon - make it difficult to see details of the circle.

There is absolutely no one in sight, and no binding on him whatsoever.
Permalink Mark Unread

...Oooookay. That's new. Cam steps out of the circle and makes a little lamp to have a look at it.

Permalink Mark Unread
He will just about have time to observe that it's drawn with mathematical exactness before he is abruptly transported to a different setting entirely.

There is a plain white floor underneath him, and a single pristine glass window ringing the perfectly circular room, leaning slightly outward on all sides so that an observer can stand at the edge and look out easily at things beneath the room; Cam, however, is in its exact centre. The ceiling is also plain and white. To his right, the sky visible out the window (the room is very high up, and shows little else but sky at this angle) is dark; to his left, it is the pale blue of a cloudless summer day.

Directly in front of him, there is a comfortable chair at the very edge of the room, facing into the centre. There is a woman sitting in the chair.

"I find the configuration of your universe very unaesthetic," she says calmly.
Permalink Mark Unread


"Yours is kind of throwing me for a loop too."
Permalink Mark Unread

"In what way?" she inquires.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, where I'm from, teleportation has not been invented and I don't think there are any tourist attractions where the sky looks like this. This'd take, what, tidal locking on a really little planet so the twilight band was about building-width? Nothing like that in the solar system off the top of my head."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not quite," she says. "My domain consists of an infinite plane split into two levels. One half is day while the other half is night; periodically they switch. You arrived on the current nightside, distant from any existing structures."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, so it's more like Limbo. But not exactly Limbo. I think Limbo's all one time zone. Okay. How and why am I here?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I believe the object I instantiated to cause you to appear was of the usual kind. I would like you to give me access to your universe so I can reconfigure it to a more pleasing form."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The circle you instantiated was not usual. A usual one would have either summoned a different kind of daeva or had me under a heap of restrictions. And: what?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I did not prefer to restrict you in that way, and your kind has the most aesthetically pleasing ability. The current configuration of your universe displeases me. I would like you to give me the necessary access to change that configuration."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What about my universe is displeasing you specifically?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The afterlife sections are separated in an unaesthetic way. I would prefer stable transit between them. I have not yet decided whether or not to extend that transit to my domain."

Permalink Mark Unread


"You want to patch the concordances?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"Is that the name for the periodic overlap between the sections? What do you mean by 'patch'?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's what those are called, yes, and I mean - make them suck less? They're too short and too small."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ah. No. I believe I would design stable transit between the sections in a way similar to the transit system of my domain. The concordances lack... scope."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay, I don't know anything much about your domain, so - details?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am proud of my transit system," she says. "At the most basic level, it consists of a network of numbered stations in which each station in the network can send travellers instantaneously to any other station. The speed and scope are necessary for a continually expanding domain. Your afterlife sections are similarly infinite, and would require a similar solution."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay... this sounds good, although I'm sort of concerned that demons who aren't as nice as me, or for that matter angels and fairies who aren't as nice as me, would insist on terrorizing each other and the Limboites."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That would be inconvenient," she agrees. "The local solution to that type of problem is to sort potential troublemakers into their own section, but it is imperfect. Perhaps you have alternate suggestions."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, that seems to have the obvious problem of the troublemakers causing trouble for each other with no well-behaved people around to mediate. Are you as arbitrarily powerful as you sound?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"How arbitrarily powerful do I sound?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Arbitrarily so."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can cause arbitrary reconfigurations of matter, and implement arbitrary magical rules if they are sufficiently well-specified. The specifications recognize aware beings and their decisions as fundamentals, and everything else has to be described in terms of the interactions of matter and energy on the most basic levels. It took me a very long time to specify a rule to inhibit the settling of dust onto surfaces in sufficient detail."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. So my first idea, although I won't say I couldn't eventually have a better one, is that you give everybody a personal concordance-like place that they can enter at will and invite or eject other people from."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Interesting," she says. "That certainly has scope."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe throw in the option to make properly joint concordances in case people want to live in mixed cities that don't have one person as the ultimate arbiter of who's in and who's out."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Interesting, but increasingly complicated. Suppose that every person has their own area with its own transit station. Should the areas be contiguous with one another and limited in size, or separate and infinite? What should each area contain to start with, besides at least one transit station?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Air, something to stand on - how customizable past the defaults can you make 'em for people who aren't demons? Demons are covered if you give us vacuum, but not everyone's so lucky. If contiguous, does shooing people keep working if the owner of an area is asleep? And people change their minds about things, if the only ones of these places belong to individuals they'll be in a pickle if they let a little commune sprout on their turf and then get sick of their roommates."

Permalink Mark Unread
She considers briefly, then says, "Here is an example of a configuration I could achieve with minimal effort."

Cam, and the arbitrarily powerful woman in her chair, are transported to a new location. The sky above them is day-bright. The infinite plane on which they appear is made of the same dark grey rock from when Cam originally arrived.

To Cam's right, there is a building with a sign that reads "TRANSIT STATION 1:1" over the arched double doors. Just outside the building, there is some kind of kiosk, a waist-high shoulders-wide cylinder of unreflective black material with the words SELECT CATEGORY displayed above it in holographic white letters.
Permalink Mark Unread


"Select category?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"I have a very large available selection of structures categorized by size, function, and number of rooms both in total and by category. That interface will show you a random structure within your desired specifications of those parameters, and allow you to discard it, save it for later consideration, or instantiate it in a specified location."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Will it let you tweak it? Like, 'this is nice but lose the wallpaper and I want that loveseat to be a recliner'?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"That degree of specification is not available."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay, then this qualifies as, like, 'noticeably nicer than Limbo for most people' but there is room to improve it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It is not apparent to me how the sorting between the sections is accomplished. Limbo is the one structured a plane, correct? The type of people who appear there do not have any magical ability to affect their surroundings. It is possible, although I will not know for sure until I have access to your universe, that I could offer those people a choice to re-sort themselves into whichever of the other three categories they would naturally occupy. That should reduce the amount of inconvenience involved. The problem with further specification of the library of structures is that someone would have to manually peruse the library to categorize all of the furniture and wall coverings, and I would need to design a rule to allow for the interchangeability of wallpaper."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think Fairyland might be a plane too. Limbo is a boring plane, with, yes, no magic for the people. Limbo gets people who died without ever summoning daeva, is my current guess. Can you give these kiosks access to an extranet or extranet-like thing that will let demons design wallpaper and so on at them? Or angels or for that matter enterprising fairies and humans that want to do it the long way around."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The library is currently held in common between them. It would be possible to extend functionality to allow individuals to edit structures and share the results." She looks contemplative for a moment, then says, "Try that."

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam pokes the kiosk experimentally.

Permalink Mark Unread

"SELECT CATEGORY" sprouts a short list - 'Residential', 'Commercial', 'Industrial', 'Miscellaneous'. Each of these, if he desires more detail on it, will in turn sprout subcategories. If he gets as far as 'Residential: Multi-Residence Building' or 'Residential: House', more options appear, inviting him to specify size (in height/width/breadth or in square footage of usable area) and numbers of various categories of rooms. Once he has specified those parameters to his satisfaction, he can proceed to 'Display Random Structure' from either 'Base Library' or 'User Library (Empty)', the latter of which is greyed out and doesn't work. The interface is very fluid, responding to his intentions rather than to any physical input.

Permalink Mark Unread


"I like this interface."

He rolls up a random house and starts messing around with it by pure intention.

"Okay, now, in Hell we have this problem where everybody can make stuff and nobody can get rid of it. If I instantiated a house and this wasn't a test run would I just have it forever until I set it on fire and then have a pile of ash, or what?"
Permalink Mark Unread
(As soon as he makes a change, the interface invites him to save the variant to the user library. That option remains patiently available while he works.)

"If you instantiate a house and do not substantially alter it, you can remove it using the interface. If you do alter it, the interface will request that you first categorize its contents and any structural alterations and save the result to the user library, which may be somewhat tedious but can be skipped if you insist. It will also refuse to remove structures while they contain aware beings. The interface will also remove items and structures it did not create, but will insist that they be categorized and added to the user library first."
Permalink Mark Unread

"I can kick out any loitering aware beings from my own concordance-like thing if they're parked and won't shoo voluntarily, right?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes. Although presently you will have to take my word for it, because you cannot do that to me."

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam laughs. "Wasn't planning to test it. Okay, so this is a perfectly nice house, but it's kinda dated, does the library have anything more twenty-first or twenty-second century?"

Permalink Mark Unread
"Structures are not presently filed by time, but it would be possible to do that." Brief thoughtful look. "I have done that."

There is now a 'Date of Sample' field which will allow him to specify month, year, and day - and a 'World of Origin' field just above it, which consists of a number. The world of origin for this particular house is 26, and its date of sample is December 1997.
Permalink Mark Unread


"World of Origin. Okay, that makes... some sense. How many are there?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"Yours is the latest addition, for a current total of seventy-four."

Permalink Mark Unread

"How did you add mine?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I did not. It recently appeared. It is unusual in that it provides only objects to me directly, since its aware life are already adequately eternal."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So sometimes a world just sidles up to you and is like 'here have some objects'?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"In the previous seventy-three cases, the world appeared with all of its past objects and aware beings available, and all subsequent destroyed things were similarly available as it proceeded forward in time."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What does 'available' mean here?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"An object being available to me means that I am aware of its physical structure and can therefore instantiate it. Or categorize it in a library of items and structures. I personally categorized every structure in the base library of the instantiation interface. Aware beings are more complicated; I can instantiate those as well, but I have automated that process because doing it one by one as they died would be extremely tedious."

Permalink Mark Unread


"Okay. So previously you've basically been doing Limbo-with-oversight and now you're going to switch to the personal-pocket-dimensions model, cool."
Permalink Mark Unread

"My domain currently has both more individual convenience and less of my personal attention than that phrase implies, but broadly speaking yes. To be clear, I also intend to leave my current domain and your current afterlife sections more or less just as they are, except for adding transit systems to the sections and interlinking them with the existing transit systems of my domain and the individual transit systems of the personal pocket dimensions. One of the options under 'Miscellaneous' in the interface is a transit station; they are somewhat more rigidly constrained than other structures, because their functional parts cannot be changed."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, yeah, there's - civilization, in Hell, presumably in Heaven, definitely in Fairyland, it's kind of haphazard in Limbo but it exists, it'd be a pity if it evaporated even if the personal dimensions have advantages."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes. Hmm. Do you have any other suggestions to make before we begin? I suppose it would be convenient to add an information exchange network." A second kiosk appears. "And it should not be necessary for a person to access a transit station in order to return to their personal domain." That change is silent.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Will the extranet hook up to the one or ones used by live people? Because that would be grand."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I cannot think of a way to make such a connection that would not be prohibitively tedious."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Rats. Oh well, one for dead folks will have decent quality stuff on it soon enough - can this interface with conventional computers from various relevant eras?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It is possible to transfer information to it from external devices using the intention-based interface."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Awesome. So, use case, from this pocket dimension here or whatever one I wind up in after the complete system is rolling - I will have my normal powers intact, I will be able to go visit my parents, both parents will acquire probably-fairy powers if they are open to this plan and will have their own little planes, I will be able to email them, I will be able to visit Fairyland and Heaven and Limbo too if I want in addition to Hell, and if I spontaneously undergo a personality transplant and decide to demonically lay waste to Fairyland, the fairies can do... what, about that, since it's not any of their personal turf?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Very little. But of course, anything that is destroyed can be recreated in my domain, and most things eventually will."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So if you do this somebody's gonna lay waste to something sooner or later, there's currently a balance of daeva not screwing with each other's belongings but this will upset it. I would like to visit Fairyland, but not if my ability to do it guarantees that someone else will eventually take it into their head to wreck it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"How do you propose to solve this problem?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Simple version, don't let daeva into each other's domains or Limbo. The pocket dimensions have visiting covered. Alternately, suppress daeva magic while we're visiting, if you can do that. I would have a much harder time laying waste to anything in Fairyland if I only had stuff I could carry and not even teekay while I was there."

Permalink Mark Unread

"This seems like it would significantly decrease potential convenience as well as potential destruction," she observes. "As an alternate method..." She gets one of her thoughtful looks again. "Go create and then wreck something, and see if the solution I have just provided appeals to you."

Permalink Mark Unread
Cam makes a tower of blocks.

He kicks it.
Permalink Mark Unread

If he has any desires in the direction of restoring the blocks to their un-kicked state, he will see a ghostly preview of the tower as it was when he created it. The preview can be scrolled forward or backward in time, including to times when the blocks did not exist. If he decides to revert to a particular state, the world is edited accordingly, but all previous states remain accessible.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh." Cam reverts to a mid-fall state, watches them fall again, puts them back in an unkicked tower. He vanishes them. He puts them back in a heap. "Everybody would get this?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Everyone to their own domains. Everyone of a particular section's type to that section but not the others. No one but me to my domain; I can revert large-scale vandalism myself more quickly than any other inhabitant, and easily ban the vandals at the same time."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It seems abusable, especially since there's going to be huge influxes of new daeva once the Limboites get the option to promote themselves. The daeva realms are used to one or two new ex-summoners at a time and can absorb us, but this is different."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Surely any place will reach equilibrium eventually."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, like, demon and angel powers have comparable applications and we've stabilized, but it could be a very long inconvenient eventually. I guess the pocket dimensions mean anybody can opt out if they get sick of playing Should This City Continue To Exist... The thing about declining to unexist structures with aware creatures in them, can you do that for the reversion power too? That'd limit scope and direct conflict. No reverting an inhabited neighborhood of fairies."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It already refuses to revert if an aware creature would be made to intersect with a solid object." Brief thoughtful look. "Now it also refuses to revert if a surface which an aware creature is touching or resting on would be substantially moved."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. Fairyland in particular is looking at kind of a mess. Can you put new ex-Limboite fairies on the edge of populated Fairyland so they can have it out with each other and not wreck the attractive landmarks and cultivated areas and so on?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"By default, no one who chooses to sort themselves into one of the three active types will be automatically transported to the relevant section. They will need to use the transit system to visit there."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Which will tend to land them smack in the middle of populated Fairyland. Hm."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That depends on how the transit system is installed. Which is its own complicated question."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, true. Are demons going to be able to copy these things?" He waves at the kiosks.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Try it."

Permalink Mark Unread

So he tries it.

Permalink Mark Unread
The result: a kiosk with no functionality whatsoever, basically a short black pillar.

"It seems not."
Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay, so manual installation by demons is out."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes," she says. "Although I could provide you with the ability to instantiate transit stations if you wanted to handle some part of that task yourself."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean, I'll take any voluntary powers you care to bestow on me. I do somewhat doubt I can personally and manually handle immigration to Fairyland."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Perhaps," she suggests, "the initial transit systems could be installed in currently uninhabited areas until the majority of existing people who desire to sort themselves and visit other sections have done so."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah. I mean, this is mostly a Fairyland problem, Hell and Heaven could probably take it if you plunked transit points in the middle of each major city, but Fairyland with transit systems out in the attractive but at least not heavily developed wilderness for the first while sounds good."

Permalink Mark Unread

She nods. "In that case, by what method do I return you to your section of origin so that you can bring me there?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"About that, how exactly am I supposed to bring you anywhere?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You invite me to appear in your current location, wherever that may be, by deciding to do so. If you frequently make use of this ability after we have finished reorganizing your universe, I may become annoyed and remove it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And then you install these changes as discussed without doing a whole lot else and then you go home?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If I run into a glaring flaw of some kind can I email you or invite you over or whatever to point it out?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You may visit my domain - any transit address beginning with 0, in the new system - and approach the top of my tower. It is very obvious and easy to locate. Lower-numbered transit addresses will be closer to it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay, fly to top of tower to register suggested adjustments to new setup. Cool."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So. How do I return you to your point of origin?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Concentrate on wanting to do it for like a minute."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That sounds extremely tedious," she says, but she does it.

Permalink Mark Unread

And after a minute, he is back in Hell. He flies back to his house and invites her over.

Permalink Mark Unread
She appears.

"Yes," she says almost immediately. "I will be able to allow people who do not currently belong to one of the active types to sort themselves into whichever one they would naturally occupy. In that case... I believe I will restructure my own domain first."

This, apparently, takes a few seconds of thought.
Permalink Mark Unread

Cam waits patiently.

Permalink Mark Unread
"And now I will attach personal domains to all residents of your four sections, and make it so that future residents will be likewise provided." Maybe half a second. "And offer the choice of becoming an active type to Limboites." Barely an instant. "And install transit systems in the four sections."

That one takes several more seconds. No wonder she thought it would be so tedious to do a thing for a whole minute.
Permalink Mark Unread

"You're very efficient."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I do not like to do more than necessary or take more time than necessary about it. There. You are provided. Do you have any further requests before I return to my tower? It is unlikely that I will leave my domain again, but I will continue to be able to modify the four sections of your afterlife and all of the personal domains, so if you think of something later rather than now the only thing that will be lost is convenience."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can't give live people the same stuff?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"If I were similarly invited there, it would be possible, but I do not know if I would like to interfere directly in a live world. It seems untidy."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm in this world's mortal part sometimes, so maybe I could invite you there, although it's possible I'd have to wait for a sloppy binding. Even just giving people the pocket dimensions would be big, even if it didn't hook up the extranets or give them daeva powers or let them at the transit system."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If I did the one thing I might as well do the rest. But then it would be possible that your live world might cease to generate new aware life."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, you couldn't give out the powers without also sterilizing them? That would be - unwelcome."

Permalink Mark Unread
She ponders this.



"It seems," she says, "that I can make that aspect of your world's afterlife-types optional."
Permalink Mark Unread


"Yep, you sure can. I think I'm going to stay like so for the time being, having no prospective mother for my children."
Permalink Mark Unread

"Still. In that case, there seems to be no remaining barrier in principle. I suppose the live world is more vulnerable to vandalism since its inhabitants are more fragile; perhaps I will not give it a transit system of its own, and instead allow only live persons in particular to return to it from their personal domains, and distribute no reversion powers for it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds like a plan. If daeva start reproducing what are the children going to be?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Live, to begin with."

Permalink Mark Unread


"Naturally occuring daeva are not going to know how to handle live, destructible infants. Maybe make them like baby Limboites?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"Reasonable. I have made the change."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. So, next time I get summoned, if I can, I invite you into the live world and you propagate personal dimensions, hurray?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes. If I am understanding the rules of this world correctly, it will be possible to invite me as long as the circle in which you appear is large enough to hold us both."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They usually are. I will not be able to comment, if it's like a typical circle, though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Once I have appeared, I expect to be able to alter that circumstance."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Cool. You are very arbitrarily powerful."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes," she agrees. "Nothing else, then?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nothing coming immediately to mind. I'll check it out, see if I hear anybody complaining."

Permalink Mark Unread
She nods.

She vanishes.
Permalink Mark Unread
Cam slips into his pocket dimension. He makes a house, mostly like his current house but without the black hole setup. He talks to his parents, who are flailing with excitement. He has them over and makes them soup and pasta salad and little molten chocolate cakes and gets to hug them for the first time in a hundred and fifty years. He goes back to Hell and flies down to the city below his house and wanders around, listening for gossip. He transits to Fairyland and flies around and looks at the pretty scenery and gets as far as a little village of near-hermit fairies who are aflutter about the changes. He goes back to Hell again and drops by the office of the volunteer postal workers and finds it completely deserted and slightly on fire.

Eventually, he catches another summon.

Promptly he invites the admin to join him.
Permalink Mark Unread

The admin appears. There was not room for her chair in the circle, so she is standing. She steps out of the circle and instantiates a comfortable chair and sits in it.

Permalink Mark Unread

"EEP!" exclaims the summoner. "How - how are there two - the circle should have - EEP!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It seems I cannot lift the restrictions on your behaviour without altering this person's section affiliation," she says to Cam. "That's inconvenient."

Permalink Mark Unread
Cam looks kind of alarmed at the prospect of altering the summoner's affiliation.

The summoner is now EVEN MORE EEPY.

"EEP!"
Permalink Mark Unread

"It is mildly irritating that you keep making that sound," she says to the summoner. "Would you like to lift the restrictions on this person's behaviour so I can speak with him?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I - but - loose demon - lose my license - how did you get out why are there two of you -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am not a demon," she says. "I am the administrator of an afterlife with which you are not acquainted. I am here to offer conveniences to the people of this live world, which I have just done. Perhaps you would like to inspect your new personal domain before continuing to sputter."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I - that was - you did that thing?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And now humans are getting it too? What's the demon for?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"This demon suggested several aspects of my reconfiguration of this universe, including the personal domains themselves. I appreciate his suggestions. They are very helpful. It is inconvenient that I cannot speak with him now."

Permalink Mark Unread
"And what - you want me to just - loose him completely, he's a demon, this is a planet."

Cam sighs.
Permalink Mark Unread

"He is extremely unlikely to vandalize your planet, as far as I can tell. If you do not lift the restrictions, my only other option for lifting them immediately would be to alter your section affiliation, which you might find inconvenient since you would be unable to summon anymore and would not be able to return to this section unless I personally retrieved you."

Permalink Mark Unread


"A-are you threatening me?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"Not intentionally," she says after a moment's thought.

Permalink Mark Unread
Cam sort of snorts and lashes his tail.

"I -" says the summoner. "I could resummon him bound but not gagged?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"That would be adequate."

Permalink Mark Unread
The summoner... nods, dismisses Cam, and then starts drawing a replacement circle, casting nervous looks in the admin's direction.

Presently Cam is back. "I'm a nice demon, I wouldn't've hurt anything," he tells the summoner. "Anyway. Do you need specific things critiqued for the setup for the live humans?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"It does occur to me that presently, humans who alter their section affiliation will be unable to return to the live section afterward. I have not been able to think of a solution that does not invite vandalism," she says. "Do you have any thoughts on the subject?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Could go with the power-suppressing model I suggested before, or maybe inform people of their choice that they're summonable if and once they are?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hmm. The second solution has the advantage that it does not require direct intervention, since they will be able to communicate through the personal domain information network. I think I prefer it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"There you go, anybody who wants to return to the live world once dead should be or become a daeva and then notify their friends. Friends can shoo them if they are problematic without being unusually evil."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Good," she says. And to the summoner, "Out of curiosity, what did you want him for originally?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I - I wanted to - put solar panels in the desert around here," stammers the summoner. "Th-the ones that are there are out of date. I had an angel get rid of them th-this morning."

Permalink Mark Unread
"I see," she says.

She and her comfy chair vanish.
Permalink Mark Unread
"You want me to put down your solar panels still?" Cam asks.

The summoner looks out the window.

"It looks like - they're - did she - how," he says weakly.

"Ah, all set then. Anything else?"

"N-no that was all."

"Okay. Home I go, then."

The summoner nods mutely and concentrates.

Home Cam goes.