"My life is an increasingly bizarre set of improbabilities?"

"So this is 'improbability' - the wings are fake - not 'impossibility' - you are a fairy?"

"Uh, no. The wings aren't properly mine, they're a magic artifact thing." She reaches behind her and tugs the wings off.

"Magic, you say."

"You have wings and a tail and you appeared out of nowhere, please don't tell me you don't believe in magic."

"No, I believe in magic, but I believe in a fairly constrained variety of magic which doesn't do fairy wings that convincing which also come off unless someone's been making really interesting advances in textiles and deploying it for cosplay. I am very intrigued by the possibility that you are about to de-constrain my belief in magic; do go on."

"Well, while my sister and I were traveling through universes we stumbled across one world that seems to consist of a bunch of islands separated by strange telepathy-dampening walls of cloud that contained a number of nifty magic things. There we met a helpful person who'd been stuck there for a while and had the system pretty well figured out who gave us nifty magic objects like the wings." She puts them back on and flaps them a few times. "My sister got brown and blue feathered ones."

"Okay, I'm familiar with a small number of universes which under most circumstances people do not travel between except when summoned by a mortal as you have just unprecedentedly done outside the standard area code. None of which feature telepathy or fog that dampens it but now I'm curious if I can manufacture that fog because yikes. And my wings and tail are only magical in the sense that they were made in the first place by magic and now count as a part of my body and I'm magical."

"So you aren't a demon of some kind like the last shirtless guy with bat wings and a tail we ran into?"

"I mean, I don't know, shirtless guys with bat wings and tails are reasonably common where I'm from. What kind of demon is he?"

"Literally the only non-evil member of a species called the Endarkened, over ten thousand years old, the rest of his species was destroyed which saved my sister the trouble of hunting them down and making them wish they hadn't done the things to him they did because he wasn't evil..."

"Okay, different kinda demon then, we aren't called 'Endarkened' in any languages I've met, most of us are perfectly nice sorts, and you'd have a hell of a time getting us down to one instance because we're indestructible."

"...I am concerned by the possibility that I might get got magic of some kind. That is concerning. You are welcome for the pants."

"I mean, you shouldn't have to worry about that magic at least, it's even less likely to get you than it would have been to get him, and it didn't. You don't have that universe's...I don't know which direction the causal arrows point, if you get it if you're a certain kind of evil or if it makes you be a certain kind of evil, but there were definitely causal arrows going in at least one direction."

"I do like to think of myself as non-evil. How worried should I be about the telepathy?"

"You shouldn't. My sister doesn't read nonconsenting minds without a really good reason, and anyway we're currently in a different universe from her. That being said, if I'm wrong and you're lying and you secretly are evil and kill me or something she will find out and she will find you and she will wreck your shit. Telepathically or otherwise."

"Oh, if I were evil I'd put you in a coma, not kill you. ...That may not have been the most reassuring thing to say. Summoners don't usually let demons talk."

"I mean, if you put me in a coma the results would be more, 'I am fixing this and don't care if the perpetrator gets squished in the process' than 'My name is Edie Lehnsherr, you killed my sister, prepare to die horribly,' but it still wouldn't be fun for you."

"So, does your world have The Princess Bride or is that a coincidence?"

"My original world has The Princess Bride, as do several I've visited in the interim. It's kind of Earth standard."

"So Earths are a plural thing. Curious. ...My name is Cam, by the by."

"Emily. What, that wasn't obvious from the fact that I'm speaking late twentieth century English?"

"You speak a lot of languages. I couldn't necessarily rule out you having gotten English from me in the instant I was summoned, or something. I got some new ones from you, it would only be fair."

"I doubt you'll get much use out of them, presumably not having access to an Aluvanna or whatever Tialle's Demon's world was called if it had a name or any of the other extremely not Earth worlds where Edie's convinced someone to let her download a language out of there head."

"Sure, but I do like languages."

"Fair enough. I guess they'd make a pretty good code, what with how good the Navajo Code Talkers were and the fact that almost none of those are in any way related to anything you could find on an Earth."

"I try to avoid the need for such things above and beyond having a computer you can't operate unless you own my brain, but yes."

"You could teach 'em to someone else and send encrypted messages!"

"The only people I might want to send encrypted messages to are a little difficult to teach languages without leaving the instructional materials pretty trivially accessible, but I do understand the concept."

"Ehn, it was a thought. Use it or lose it, you know, it hasn't been all that long since I got most of those but I don't really expect to keep most of the non-Earth ones in the long term. Sivath's, probably, and the two from Tialle's Demon's world, but not most of them."

"What a curious sort of name is 'Tialle's Demon'."

"He doesn't really have a name. I expect the other demons would have given him one, at some point, but I think he forgot it after about ten thousand years alone on an island. Pretty much alone, anyway, there was a dragon, it's complicated. Besides, would you want to keep a name given you by people who tortured you for not wanting to torture people?"

"I might judge the name separately, but the impulse not to is understandable."

"And, again, ten thousand years with no one to use it with, I honestly think he forgot."

"Makes sense. I'm not that old yet and I take a lot of notes and like my name, but in the absence of these factors it might be very unmemorable. So how do you travel all these universes?"

"We have a technology thing, which I think I shall decline to demonstrate at the moment on the off chance that you are in fact evil and would attempt to wreck it to prevent my sister from wreaking vengeance upon you."

"You know what, that's fair. What are your usual methods of determining whether people are evil?"

"Hang out with them long enough to be pretty confident that they're not. If we're lucky they consent to telepathy and we can just skip that, but it doesn't usually happen. Also in most cases my sister is right next to me and if someone does start eviling she can just make 'em stop without having to dimensionally travel in. We trusted Sivath faster'n most because he gave us magic and Tialle's Demon because his brain is apparently gorgeous and also he goes on the shortlist of people who didn't object to Edie reading their minds."

"I do object to mind-reading. I don't... think I can make inherently magical objects, although it's possible I would be able to circumvent that if I had some to copy."

"Go ahead and copy the wings. Or the armor, or the circlet, they're all magical."

"What do they do?"

"The wings...fly. The armor is very good armor despite looking like it was constructed by someone who has no idea how armor works. The circlet makes you better at hitting things, for some reason."

"Already got wings, armor wouldn't fit me..." He attempts to make the circlet. "Cannot copy circlet."

"I could reshape the armor. It wasn't originally this photogenic. But moot, alas, if the circlet didn't work."

"Alas. Do you need any nonmagical objects?"

"I mean, we were planning to go back to the world where we got the dimensional travel thing for some tech support, but I imagine if you tried to make the things you might create a different network instead of adding on to the one we've got. How do you specify these things, anyway?"

"Depends on the thing. I could make an exact physical duplicate of a specific instance of a thing, but that doesn't guarantee access to network sorts of things, depending on how they have their security set up."

"Security is not exactly the point, they're all quantumly connected."

"Might or might not work, then, I don't know enough about how quantum thingamajigs work."

"Actually when I asked the question I was more curious about what you could make when you didn't have a thing right in front of you to copy."

"Oh. I can do books with title and author? Sometimes other information can fill in."

"That seems like a very conceptual way of doing things. Hmm...If I said 'one of the blue fruits that was made for my sister' would that be enough specification?"

"Probably not. I also can't do 'most recently updated fanfiction of the Lord of the Rings', say, even though that should be a unique specification."

"Huh. Well, she hasn't named it yet, so I can't tell you what it's called to check if you can do things from other universes..."

"Haven't run into any extrauniversal books?"

"Well, the problem is that this is the only place in this universe I've been so far, so any book I named I couldn't be completely sure they didn't have it here or something."

"Oh. That would present a problem, yes. Although we could still demonstrate whether or not things need to be from my universe or not."

"Umkay...Sivath didn't mention any books, the unicorn didn't mention any books, you're from an Earth...d'you have mutants?"

"...We have people with various genetic abnormalities? You are saying it like that's not what you mean."

"My sister's a telepath and I control one of the four fundamental forces of the universe. This is because we are mutants, people with a specific gene that gives us nifty powers and/or physical anomalies. Some Earths have us, most don't, I was checking."

"Mine does not have that."

"Okay, let's go with A Study On Recent Human Genetics, by Professor Charles F. Xavier."

Cam makes it.

"Welp, you can make books from not your universe, it looks like. Probably from 'not this universe' too, considering that mutants seem to be a statistical rarity."

"Sounds like a reasonable guess."

"I am not actually sure what practical value that information has!"

"I'd still rather know than not. Are your wings, circlet, and armor all from the same universe's system of magic?"

"Yep."

"I could try magic things from other systems, if you can think of any."

"Lessee...nothing from the one that wasn't a person...no..." she considers and rejects several objects before saying, "I have not really been paying huge amounts of attention to the names of individual magical objects, apparently!"

"Oh well. ...One that wasn't a person?"

"In the one universe, I encountered nothing inherently magical that wasn't a person."

"Oh. Even if I wanted to, I can't make minds."

"Good! Randomly duplicating people without their consent would be massively unethical!"

"Yeah. I can't even do animals - I mean, I can make them, but they're dumber than they should be."

"Dumber like how?"

"Bugs and snails and stuff are about normal - you can notice differences if you give them elaborate tests, but they still basically function. If I make a cat, it'll have a hard time figuring out how to walk or meow."

"Poor cat."

"I don't think it's smart enough to contemplate the awkwardness of its situation. But I tend not to deal in cats etecetera."

"Yeah. Not sure why you'd even want a cat that couldn't walk or meow or whatever."

"They can have normal kittens. There is now a decent population of all the more appealing animals, in Hell."

"Huh. That makes sense, I guess. How worried should I be about the fact that you are apparently a demon from a Hell? Not in terms of your personal evilness, but about the fact that your world has a hell that has demons."

"It's a perfectly nice place to live, if a little tacky. Okay, a lot tacky. And there are only demons there - the 'normal kittens' property does not apply to mindless made humans, for some reason, I think there are similar problems with cetaceans and great apes and elephants, those had to be imported with what must have been considerable awkwardness."

"But there aren't dead humans there either?"

"Everybody in Hell is a demon. There are some mindless human-bodies around but I assume that isn't what you mean. ...Some demons are ex-humans, but most are not."

"I meant are there humans who go to hell when they die. And apparently the answer is 'yes, but then they become the category of person for whom it is not metaphorical hell.'"

"Yeah. The lakes of fire are not and have never been intended to contain people."

"What are they for, then?"

"Garbage disposal. Demons can make anything. We cannot get rid of it. I use a black hole, myself."

"And what happens if you need to get rid of the black hole?"

"I go somewhere which does not have a black hole to pass the time while mine dissolves into Hawking radiation."

"Okay, I don't actually know enough about that particular kind of science to know exactly what that means but I'll take your word for it."

"Relatedly, I do feel I should warn you: while to the best of my knowledge no one has ever turned up dead in my world having previously been alive anywhere other than the Earth I'm familiar with, if this is for some possible reasons as opposed to other possible reasons, you as a summoner, however accidental, may become a daeva yourself when you die."

"Great. If that happens, how does my sister summon me?"

"She draws most of a circle on a floor with room for you to stand in but doesn't finish it, and then around the border writes 'I summon the whatever, insert your full name', where 'whatever' is whichever kind of daeva you are. The options are demon, angel, and fairy. Then, only after writing out all those words, closes the circle. That's for an unbound circle. You are very luck that this unbound circle got me and your sister presumably doesn't wish to magically enforce you behaving yourself. In the strongest possible terms do not ever summon random unbound daeva again."

"The basic idea is the same, but I have no idea in what language this might say 'I summon a demon'. Just avoid closed circular patterns on floors, I guess."

"That...is going to be slightly difficult, oh well, I guess I'll just make sure that any rugs I put down are rectangles. Or ovals, maybe, do ovals count as circles for summoning purposes?"

"The circles need not be perfect but they do have to be more circular than anything else."

"You should probably tell me your full name so my sister can summon you later so she's retrievable too if anything catastrophic happens. And maybe some other people."

Cam hands her a piece of paper. "I'm not sure that the usual summoning rules apply to this situation, because this isn't the place I'd normally wind up upon being summoned, but assuming all is as normal except now I can be summoned to and dismissed from here, this is how you do it."

"Good. So what determines whether you end up as a demon, an angel or a fairy if it's not eternal punishment or eternal bliss that decides your afterlife?"

"As far as I know Heaven and Fairyland are also reasonably nice places to live, although I'd definitely have picked demon powers over the other options. I don't know how people are sorted, but my guess is a personality affinity for the associated magic. Demons make, angels change, fairies move."

"Huh. So...demons are likely to be creative people, angels are adaptable, and fairies are energetic?"

"That's not how I'd put it, but your guess is nearly as good as mine. I'd say, demons like to work on things from the ground up, angels like to work on fixing what's already there, and fairies prefer to simply shuffle things around."

"...Man, Edie would so be a demon."

"Being a demon is pretty great."

"For reasons of practicality and restraint, she does not advocate the overthrow of every government that doesn't do civil rights well enough. Not because she doesn't want to. I bet she'll be thrilled that this nets her the best hypothetical powerset."

"You know, if her magical mutant power did not terrify me down to the tip of my tail I imagine I might get along with her."

"Gosh I can't even imagine what that would be like."

"What what would be like, being afraid of people reading and/or fucking with my mind? I have no reason to believe my indestructibility extends to my non-physical traits and I value my privacy. A lot."

"I mean, I can't say I blame you, you have every right to not want to be telepathized, it just seems strange to have such a thorough fear reaction to it. I wouldn't consent to unrestrained telepathy from someone I didn't trust, but being all alone in your own head forever sounds lonely. I'm not saying that it's wrong or even unusual, but it's just not something that I personally get."

"I'm very introverted."

"Fair enough. And my own attitude is fantastically atypical, I'm aware, it's just that we're twins and we've been in each others' heads at least a little since before we were born."

"I'm... glad that happened to work out for you."

"It very worked out for me! Even if it does make the mushy even more overwhelming."

"The mushy?"

"D'you remember how I said the demon--the other demon, Tialle's Demon--apparently had a gorgeous brain and was very receptive to telepathy?"

"Ah. So now your sister is having telepathic fun and games with her crush and you are out wandering summoning another kind of demon by accident."

"Yep. Also, you know, in case it devolves into things I really don't want to witness. Again."

"This is reasonable of you. And hey, you got a friendly non-planet-destroying demon, so it all worked out."

"I mean, if you wanted to actually do things, destroying the planet I was on seems...counterproductive."

"Yes. It's just one of the more dramatic available failure modes."

"True enough. But then, I could probably destroy a planet if I worked at it hard enough, so maybe the possibility just seems a little less salient."

"How would you do it?"

"Find a way to amplify my power and rip the its core apart by its magnetic field."

"Well, that would certainly do the trick. Amplifying your power is a thing?"

"I haven't seen any amplifiers in particular for magnetism, but we've got one for telepathy back home and with all this magic we're running into lately I'd be surprised if I couldn't find a way to do it if I really put my mind to it."

"Telepathy amplifier. Grand."

"Well, if it had never been invented the world would probably be a radioactive wasteland, so..."

"Really."

"It's a long, complicated story, but suffice to say that it's only recently that mutants have been a public thing, and almost thirty years ago it was necessary to use Cerebro--that's what it's called--to comb the country for mutants who would help my parents, one of whom is a telepath, thwart another group of mutants who were trying to turn the Cold War hot."

"...So the telepath used the amplifier to investigate an entire countryful of people deeply enough to find out if they had useful powers and helpful dispositions or not."

Sigh. "No. Everyone has a unique mental signature that tells you almost nothing about how their brain works, but mutants have a distinct," she waves her hand, "thing. Languages not built around the existence of telepathy don't have a word for it. And the kind of telepathy my parent and sister have has a spatial aspect. So they wrote down where a bunch of mutants were and then my parents went on a road trip and asked them, 'will you please help us avert nuclear annihilation.'"

"Okay, 'so the telepath used the amplifier to track down members of a closeted minority they'd never met and assert that their wartime help was necessary to avoid armageddon'."

"Closeted implies that they knew what they were, or that they were part of a minority instead of one-off anomalies. My parents were the only reason most of them had any idea what they were. And they put it quite a bit gentler than that, and they did get turned down plenty of times, and when someone told them to go away they went."

"...Apparently this is a sensitive topic."

"When you're facing down nuclear holocaust being brought about by someone who was complicit in the actual Holocaust, prioritizing not accidentally upsetting anyone over saving the world is a pretty bad life choice."

sigh "And most of the people who've been criticizing my parents for their actions at the time are doing so less because they actually believe they handled it badly and more because mutants, as a new minority, have had to deal with some of the things minorities in the United States typically have to deal with, and you were sounding kind of like some of the bigots we've got back home. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have snapped at you, I just...kind of have a Pavlovian dislike of that kind of thing."

"I have no basis to be against mutants in general. And demons have a pretty bad reputation among mortals at home which I deal with all the time. But you might have better luck modeling my reactions to your family anecdotes if for 'any telepathic contact not consented to beforehand' you substituted 'sexual assault', say."

"Okay, congratulations on accusing my sister of automatically raping everyone she's in the same room with, I don't think I've ever actually heard someone say something so terrible about her before."

"...Never mind, I guess."

"I'm sorry, I get that you don't want your mind read, but is it really that terrible for her to observe that it exists? Not that I'm suggesting putting you in the same room as her."

"I really know nothing about the mechanics of her kind of telepathy. That's not something I normally have to worry about, whereas I do in fact accept a small risk of sexual assault every time I take a summons. Observing that my mind exists sounds fine. I could extend my analogy but I don't really have the sense here that you're actually interested in my perspective on the matter, so as long as you aren't proposing to introduce me to your telepathic sister I can let it drop."

"I'm only willing to tell you how to summon other daeva if I'm reasonably confident they can be sent back. I can't think of anybody I know who'd like to be bound forever, or would be guaranteed trustworthy unbound, in case the rules are suspended. I'll be okay more or less if I can never go back to Hell but I don't exactly belong to a club of like-minded demons on that subject."

"If I tell you how to avoid being telepathized can you be in the same room as my sister long enough for her to summon and dismiss you without insulting her?"

"If you're that worried about it I can tell you how to summon me gagged. Nothing that isn't par for the course."

"I kind of object on principle to limiting anyone's free will any more than is absolutely necessary. If you insult my sister that will make her angry and sad but it won't hurt her, not in the long term."

"My point is I usually don't talk to my summoners and as long as she isn't going to read my mind I don't have to pick up the habit long-term today."

"And I'm saying that depending on how it works I don't want to do it because I don't want that to be a thing I have done, not because I expect you to object to it."

"Okay, no gag in the circle, I can't say I disapprove as far as that goes, but I can keep my mouth shut voluntarily, too."

"I mean, you don't have to say nothing. And there is a metal that has telepathy blocking properties if you don't want to take my word that my sister is an ethical person."

"What is the metal's name, and how much of it do I need where?"

"It's an alloy, it's usually just called 'telepathy blocking metal,' I know a helmet made of it shaped like so," she shapes a mock helmet out of the stuff she was using to make the doily, "will do it, but we don't have any more of it back home and the person whose helmet it is isn't interested in having experiments done on how much of it is necessary to do its job."

"Do you want more of it?" Cam asks. "Give out foil hats of it at a lemonade stand?" He makes a copy of the helmet. "Because if you want to do that I will help."

"I don't suppose it would hurt. Maybe not all in the shape of that helmet, it's kinda ridiculous looking and we could do experiments on how much of it is necessary."

"Yeah. If it turns out not much of it is called for I might just replace a small portion of my skull with it. This is trickier for a demon than an angel, which is why they're the ones with the halos, but not impossible."

"...Well, given that you don't want to be in the same room as my sister, we'll have to do the experiments after I hopefully manage to send you back where you came from, but if we've got it done when you're resummoned so other people don't permanently die then we can tell you, I guess."

Cam puts the stupid helmet on. "Assuming I get to wear this fetching hat, and assuming you aren't lying to me, I wouldn't mind being in a room with her to help furnish you with experimental headgear."

"I'm not sure if Sivath will be interested in helping with this experiment, I sure as hell don't want to, and I think results we got from the demon and dragon might be inconclusive for more normal-brained folks."

"Well, since I'm still operating under the assumption that you aren't lying to me - or otherwise mistaken - then I and my as-far-as-I-know normal brain can be the test subject, provided under normal conditions the fetching hat does block even the 'can tell someone's mind is there' feature and nothing more invasive need be tried."

"Oh, sure it does, nothing more invasive is necessary at all. But--no offense--I think I'd rather explain you to her before randomly introducing her to, 'another demon, he's almost certainly not evil, and also you cannot tell that he is there.'"

"This is reasonable. I'm just rather concerned about the fetching hat shortage you claim to be experiencing and wish to distribute hopefully-more-fetching circlets or whatever as soon as possible in case there is anyone like me where you're from."

"Where we're from is not on the menu at the moment. The reason we're jaunting through as many universes as we are right now is that we are trying to find the universe we're from."

"Even so. I can give you a warehouseful of fetching hats in some sufficiently empty universe for you to retrieve and give away at your leisure."

"I can make metal behave how I like. It doesn't need to be in hat form."

"So a warehouse literally full of a solid block of the stuff. ...Would you mind helping with a small experiment?"

"Depends on the experiment."

"Well, do you detect any metal on my person right now?"

"You have a tiny bit embedded in your brain. I assume that has something to do with what you said about your computer not being usable by people who are not you. Aside from that, no."

"Yeah, that's what that's for. I would like that to stay where it is, but would you be willing to see if you can forcibly remove a small bit of metal from, say, my fingertip? I'll heal in moments and will also numb it first."

"Sure."

Now there is a small piece of metal in his left pinky fingertip.

"Numbed?" she checks.

"Yup."

She tries to yank it out.

She tries it again.

"What was the difference the second time?"

"Second time I let you."

"...I think you are more indestructible than Tialle's Demon or any of the rest of his kind. So that's something."

"I like my indestructibility. It is very reassuring."

"I'm sure."

"And I would be very sad if all the other demons of my kind were to go extinct. There is a thriving demonic culture."

"Presumably your kind of demons aren't omnicidal rapists."

"Not usually."

"It was literally unprecedented for Tialle's Demon not to be."

"How'd he manage the trick, then?"

"We're not sure. We met him less than twenty-four hours ago."

"But you're quite sure that he isn't just a very subtle sort of evil because telepathy."

"And because unicorn. But yes."

"Unicorns. Something new every day. I assume this isn't just a heavily modified mundane ungulate."

"He was sentient and had a psychic connection to what I think might have been that world's God and was uncomfortable around my sister and I because we weren't virgins."

"What an interesting sort of non-mundane ungulate."

"I mean, he wasn't that unusual compared to some of the other people we've met. He wasn't even the only thing describable as a unicorn, although the other kind we met wasn't actually discomfited by our non-virginity."

"What was the other kind like, then?"

"Good at cleaning out tainted water sources."

"Handy in some situations, I guess."

"The world they were in needed it."

"Is this an interesting story or just 'the unicorns had some trouble keeping up with the water contaminants'?"

"It was slightly post-apocalyptic. Stable, but they had a lot of tainted water sources."

"Post-apocalypse with unicorns: not a genre I have previously encountered."

"Have you encountered video game, because that's where the armor comes from."

"I am familiar with video games. I have a lot of spare time."

"There are these islands, and everything is made of blocks, and once Sivath finishes drawing up architecture plans and we've gone and retrieved everything from his island we're going to eat things called mana candies which will allow us to operate magic weapons like a gun that shoots bees."

"Just regular bees, or magic bees?"

"Magic bees, presumably. I don't think any kind of regular bee would survive being meaningfully shot out of anything."

"That's a fair point."

"Also, they explode when they hit things, so there's that."

"Normal bees don't have that property."

"That explains why people who die of bee stings are described as 'allergic' and not 'blown up'."

"Quite."

"There's also a harp that fires music notes that hurt when they hit you."

"...These are your standard Western representations of notes, like, eighth notes with the little flags and so on?"

"I did not actually ask, I haven't seen most of these things, this is just from Sivath's description."

"Because if it's eighth notes with flags, that alone is weirder than it being a harp that fires harmful musical notes."

"Oh, why?"

"Like... someone with magic and a sense of humor could invent a music-weapon. But someone from that universe doesn't have reasonable access to 'how European classical composers decided to represent notes'."

"What makes you think the universe itself wasn't constructed?"

"That's possible. Do you have any other evidence that someone is running around making universes for fun and profit?"

"Not particularly."

"Because that would be very interesting if somebody was."

"Sure," she says, shrugging, "but I haven't the foggiest notion how one would go looking for them if there was."

"Do something really loud in their video game environment."

"Well, when I left, the fantastically biokinetic demon was examining one of the little monsters to see how it worked."

"Might go somewhere, depending on what he turns up."

"Maybe. Not sure what else we could do. The place doesn't have magnetic fields for me to use to rend it and Edie can't even telepathize with the meat statues."

"Meat statues?"

"NPCs."

"No kidding. Especially since they get our names somehow."

"Oh dear."

"They addressed the demon and the dragon as 'confused silence.'"

"...Did they say the words 'confused silence', or just pause?"

"Paused. In a confused-looking fashion."

"You lead an exciting life."

"My sister spontaneously falling for an extradimensional non-evil demon is definitely the weirdest thing to have happened for a long time."

"Controlling for 'extradimensional' being an applicable adjective to anything, love at first sight is not as weird as video game land, I think."

"In your life, maybe. Improbable universes happen to us. And she hadn't laid eyes on him yet."

"Love at first - adjacency. Whatever."

"The fact remains that strange universes are a lot more common than my sister falling in love."

"Sure. I want to go universe-hopping! It sounds fun and educational."

"Mmmaybe. The kind of interdimensional travel we have relies pretty heavily on my mutation, so we'd pretty much have to take you with us, and...no offense, but I'm not sure I want to play taxi to someone who's just being a tourist and might not get along with my sister very well."

"Not getting along with your sister is... a point. But I can make myself useful, I wasn't planning to just take photos."

"If you can refrain from acting like she might be a metaphorical rapist just because she has a metaphorical penis it might work out fine. But we're not in such dire need of stuff that I would expect that I'd be hugely eager to take you along if it didn't. My point about tourism wasn't that you would be useless, it was that you didn't need to come along. If my sister and I weren't world hopping we'd never get home, and if before we picked up Sivath and Tialle's Demon they had spent six and ten thousand years respectively in near solitary confinement."

"I admit that while I have my discontentment with the accommodations in Hell, solitary confinement is not the issue."

"What's the discontentment? It sounds pretty great with powers like yours. The worst thing I can think of off the top of my head is not being able to see loved ones that ended up in a different afterlife, and I don't think we could help with that."

"Oh, it's very comfortable - and are you sure? I do have pen pals I'd like to see - but it's short on meaningful contributions to make. That's why I take summons."

"...Well, if you have a way of getting letters across, I could be wrong. I wasn't naively assuming there was any way of transferring matter between afterlives. The meaningful contributions thing is a point. ...Hmm. Can you make fertilized eggs that will grow up to be intelligence-typical members of their species."

"...Yes."

"Dragons," she says seriously. "Are a fantastically endangered species, in the world Tialle's Demon is from. By which I mean that one dragon, Ancaladar, is the ancestor of almost all of the others."

"That... sounds inconvenient for them. However, dragons sound like the sort of thing that might be inherently magical. I might or might not be able to make dragon eggs. And I won't try until I know more about how the hatchlings will be brought up, because I feel responsible for any people I bring into the world regardless of whether I am doing so conventionally."

"I mean, absolutely yes we'll consult the unicorn with the psychic hotline to the god thing, but it seems like the kind of thing that we definitely should ask about."

"...What are we consulting the psychic unicorn about?"

"Whether it's a good idea for you to try to instantiate dragon eggs."

"I mean, I'll listen to the psychic unicorn's advice but I probably want to meet whoever would be raising these baby dragons."

"Makes sense. Well, I met Saravasse, she seemed perfectly nice."

"Nice dragons are certainly preferable to the alternative."

"Dragons in general are good, which is good because when they bond to someone they get All Of The Magic."

"All of it?"

"Well, not all the kinds, but a lot of what you have. I think? It would definitely have been an apocalyptic event if an Endarkened who was not a special snowflake had bonded to one."

"But the dragons are good, you said."

"Yeah, in general. I don't think they have special being good no matter what powers compared to other sentient beings, they just have a reasonably not-crap culture. And from what I've put together, they don't have a choice about providing their Bonded with magic. Take this all with a grain of salt, I spent less than a full day in that universe, but what I do know for sure is that this dragon and his demon are basically the same person."

"That's... weird. What do you mean, basically the same person?"

"I mean when we showed up on the island my sister's impression was of one mind in two bodies."

"This is atypical for dragons and their - people?"

"Yeah, there's apparently telepathy going on no matter what but normally it's more like my sister and me than that."

"Oh."

"Oh, relax. No one's going to try to bond you to a dragon."

"I didn't say they were."

"No, but you didn't see the look on your face."

"What makes you think all my nervousness is on my own behalf?"

"I suppose. I don't know enough about that world to say but I'd be surprised if the phenomenon was little-known enough that anyone who wouldn't want that kind of thing would have difficulty avoiding dragons."

"I suppose that's something."

"And your own level of not wanting that kind of thing is pretty atypical."

"How do you know?"

"Because when my sister asks someone if she can download their language out of their head, the typical response ranges from 'sure' to 'no.' 'I am not comfortable being in the same room as you' doesn't come up that often."

"I'm not sure that leads to the conclusion you think it does. I might let her have languages, if she can pick them out neatly. I don't mind if she knows that my mind exists. I'm just inclined to be very, very clear about where she is and isn't welcome, and not thrilled about this being seen as just my being uptight even by someone who claims to understand that there are ethical issues in the neighborhood."

"Or better actors. Or afraid to push it in case you got angry. Or didn't believe you were talking about a real thing - I can talk about fantasy novels without discomfort. I might very well be unusual. I'm not sure I'm that unusual."

"I mean, my sister talked to most of these people in their heads. 'Didn't believe we were talking about a real thing' isn't really likely for most of them. Trying to be polite even if they were uncomfortable is...plausible."

"And if she can also, very neatly, just talk - take only what someone's trying to tell her, give back words or concepts no more influential than what people might hear or see just having a conversation - then even I might let her do that."

"She can absolutely do that."

"Maybe most people just aren't as creative as I am about what telepathy could do that isn't these harmless utilities."

"Maybe. I know some of them know what she could do..."

"Or maybe they just trust her as an individual more than I like to trust people I've never met whose powers plus creativity and a lapse of temper could be worse than anything else."

"True enough. Most people haven't witnessed her responding to becoming very very angry by curling up in a little ball until she could trust herself to be rational again."

"A reasonable reaction, if you are a telepath."

"Uh huh. If it makes you feel better, on the extremely rare occasions I have seen her lose her temper enough to do something about it, her reaction was to punch the asshole, not do anything with her mind."

"Well, I'm sure there are some people who wouldn't prefer to be punched over a telepathic lashout, but I am not one of those people, and probably wouldn't be even if I weren't indestructible."

"None of 'em were indestructible, and Edie has a mean right hook."

"Good for her."

"She really did have good reasons, though, she extremely does not just go around punching people."

"You spend a lot of energy defending your sister. I'm not even freaking out about the punching people thing, here."

"I have actually had more consistent negative reactions to the punching thing than to the telepathy."

"It's not great, an unluckily placed sock in the face can cause brain damage, but it won't usually."

"The part people react worse to is 'is known to do it.' Edie has never lashed out with her mind because she was angry."

"Never in her life?"

"Nnnnot since we were little enough she couldn't do anything with it."

"Telepathic toddler. Yikes."

"Telepathic fetus."

"You had mentioned that. I think the toddler version is scarier. To the best of my knowledge fetuses are less insistent about wanting things and having emotional states."

"I don't know about wanting things, but she definitely had emotions."

"Well, I haven't had a lot of close contact with fetuses in my lifetime, so perhaps I'm wrong."

"To be fair, we don't really have a large enough sample size to know if it's universal."

"But you did say there were other telepaths; were they not so as fetuses?"

"I don't know. Probably not. I had my magnetism as a fetus, and that's definitely abnormal."

"...Sound potentially messy."

"Think steel pennies and bobby pins stuck to the outside of someone's stomach. I didn't have control over it at the time."

"Okay, inconvenient but not messy."

"Apparently it was more adorable than inconvenient. But yes, a bit inconvenient."

"No puncture wounds or bizarre anemia, sounds all right to me."

"I can't even do anything with blood now, let alone when I was that little."

"It's the sort of thing you get better at over time?"

"Yeah. The iron in blood is really, really small. You have to get very fine control before you can do anything with it."

"Fair enough."

"I haven't managed it yet but I'm getting there."

"Was this summoning circle some kind of training exercise?"

"Ish? I think I mentioned I was trying to get a break from my sister being mushy."

"You did mention. You didn't say what your break consisted of; going off to play with your cool powers sounds like a good time-killer."

"I was absolutely playing with my cool powers, but it was more 'designing a new lace pattern' than 'trying to get my control a little finer'."

"It is a pretty lace pattern. Shame you must never replicate it."

"Yeah. And next time I'm doing design work that involves circles I make sure Edie's in range, I guess."

"Just... don't do it on the floor. Or don't close the circle."

"Not sure how exactly I'm going to manage the last one when I'm making doilies. And if randomly summoning things when I make lace is going to be a problem, I need to know while there's a way of incapacitating anyone hostile so no one gets a nasty surprise if the thing gets knocked off the wall or someone decides to steal the design for a rug or something."

"If someone steals the design for a rug, 'have Edie in range' is not a solution anyway."

"If Edie's in range when I try it the first time then I know I can't use that particular design, and no one who might steal the design ever sees it."

"True. Can she just knock people unconscious? Nice and neat?"

"Yep."

"Then, assuming she can do that to daeva at all, that's probably not too terrible. You get rid of your unwanted daeva by concentrating on wanting to for about a minute."

"Okay, good to know."

"...And now I'm wondering if she can do that to daeva at all. There has never been a way to test if our indestructibility extends to telepathic attack. And if it does you need a plan B if you summon one by accident again."

"Well, I guess I don't do any more design work until I'm ready to introduce you to my sister, then, and I hope you're willing to let her test if she can knock you out."

"If that's all she does, nice and neat, yeah."

"All she does. She can also make someone stop in their tracks without actually falling unconscious, usually in situations where it would be bad for the person to just go limp, and that doesn't require any mind reading either."

"...That one sounds terrifying to be on the receiving end of. And might not stop a daeva; we don't have to move to use our powers."

"I wasn't suggesting you volunteer for it." She shrugs. "I don't disagree that it doesn't sound fun, but there are worse things. Deadman's switches exist, for example."

"I'm acquainted."

"Oh?"

"Not from personal experience, I just read a lot."

"Ah. That sounded like a tone of voice with a story behind it."

"I have stories, but none of them are about deadman's switches."

"None of mine, either." She considers. "A bunch of the storier stories aren't even really mine."

"Well, you get around a lot, sounds like."

"Oh, sure, but 'we went to this universe and saw these interesting things and engaged socially with people and helped out if we could and then left' isn't very storyish compared to, say, how my parents met, or how one of them had a profoundly terrible adolescence, or why neither of us look a bit like Aunt Raven, or The Cuba Incident, etcetera."

"Fair enough." He makes himself a little paper bag of popcorn and eats some. "And a lot of my stories are just things that just happened around me because I was on summon and couldn't talk or anything."

"Shame."

"It can be frustrating. I cope."

"I imagine so. Why can't you talk, usually?"

"Oh, people don't want demons to talk them out of their souls."

"Is that a thing that can happen?"

"Talking people into trading their souls, yes, actually collecting at any point, no."

"That seems...pointless."

"Summonings typically involve trade. Demons are a little hard to trade with, in a 'what do you get for the hellcreature who has everything' sense. The answers are, in approximate order of frequency: media recommendations, sex, and entertaining reactions to the prospect of soul loss."

"I can think of so many more amusing things to do to someone than convince them they've lost their soul."

"And your ideas, whatever they are, may have their fans too, but not so thoroughly popularized."

"It still seems idiotic, but meh, some people are idiots."

"I don't find it appealing myself. But it's a tricky equilibrium to shake, because this only comes up when a summoner is really desperate and a demon is really sadistic. If the demon knew that the summoner knew that the souls thing was fake..."

"And you get a lot of really sadistic demons?"

"Summoners get a lot of really sadistic demons. Demons who just want to do their own thing hang out in Hell and don't take summons at all; it's voluntary. Even if you want the latest music or movies from the Mars colony, we have a pretty efficient network for sharing that kind of thing around and you can let other demons do it for you. The demons who will show up when you summon them are the ones who want things you can only get that way, and these things are sometimes 'to be the first demon who hears the new album by this one band', but they are sometimes 'to watch mortals squirm'."

"And in your case, 'to do useful work,'" she says, nodding. "I'm a little surprised the gag thing hasn't stamped out the soul-selling thing even so. If I wanted to watch people squirm I don't think I'd be willing to show up who-knows-how-many times until I got a desperate one."