"Hey, did you summon me? This looks like a parking lot, I didn't think I'd managed that well - anyway I am the easiest demon to pay off of all time, what do you want, I will make it for you for half an hour with a working phone."

"Okay, look, this is easy, relax: who made the last mark in this circle?"

"...And you were driving, so I think you count as my summoner. But I'm not actually that interested in returning to Hell and I'm unbound so if you would rather I fucked off and you never had to see me again I am completely on board with that plan." He shakes his wings loose from their folded position.

"...Yeah, sure. Okay, so: magic is real! Surprise. There exist three kinds of 'daeva': demons and angels and fairies. Drawing the right circle summons us. Normally there would be more bindings on the circle than there are on this one to prevent me from rampaging but I don't feel like rampaging so it's okay. The standard deal is that you summon one to do some magic for you. Demons make things, angels change things, fairies move things. You have to work out something the daeva wants - fairies are easy to pay because they can't just make whatever they want at home like that." He snaps his fingers. "I don't know who was summoning an unbound demon if it wasn't you who drew the rest of this circle - actually, come to think of it, they should probably be found and scared out of doing that, unbound daeva are dangerous."

"...I have wings. I can put on a shirt if it bothers you, they're just easier to dispense with, because, wings. And you wouldn't have heard about it because somebody murdered me before I could make it generally known. I tried, dude, there are some serious economic incentives to keep it mum though."

"I don't want to keep your phone, I want to call some people. And I don't even really need to do that, because you have no idea how to send me back to Hell, so I can just go find a pay phone if those haven't died out completely and feed it counterfeit quarters, or outright visit them - whether you feel like letting me or not - but you're sort of entertaining. The circle summoned me. If you draw one exactly like it again you will get a near-random, completely loose demon. I really don't recommend that."

"So, I'm a demon. I can make stuff. If you had summoned me bound properly so I could not just flap off and do whatever I want, and said, 'I will give you half an hour on the phone if you will make me an exact duplicate of the original Mona Lisa', I would have made you an exact duplicate of the Mona Lisa, bam - ideally you'd pick a painting you could actually flip because I think everybody knows the real Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, but, you know - because I don't really care about the stability of the black market in paintings, see? So there are some people who know how to summon demons and angels and fairies, and if nobody else knows they can do that, then they can sell all the Mona Lisas - flawless emeralds, electron microscopes, outright counterfeit cash - that they want. Or if they prefer to work with angels they can get paid to take radioactive waste off people's hands and turn it into grilled cheese sandwiches, or if they want to summon fairies they can power an enormous generator for what it costs to keep the fairy in muffins and trinkets, fairies are cheap. But if everyone knows how to do it, they lose their advantage, so, when I started trying to look into how to go public with 'oh my god, you can summon magical beings', I got shot in the head. And died. And went to Hell, which, not a bad deal, it's pretty nice there."

"Transit is indeed live-human-initiated only. It's sort of just called Hell? I mean - there are demons and lakes of fire in it, but there's also a sense in which we're just called demons. And the lakes of fire are for garbage disposal, since we can only make stuff, not get rid of it. I have detected no evidence of a deity orchestrating anything. When I used to talk to angels they never mentioned one either. Demons and angels as groups don't care for each other for stupid racism reasons, it's annoying, makes the interworld mail system all screwy. Demons are the ones with bat wings who make stuff, angels are the ones with bird wings who change stuff, there's not a lot of fancy metaphysics on top of that unless I don't get briefed until I've been a demon for fifty years or something."

"And... is all this... which way do the arrows go with how... I assume it's not a coincidence that there's all this mythology about demons and angels and such, but... you said you went to hell when you died, so are... the bat wings and such... somehow reflective of unrelated cultural icons, or did Hell somehow... influence human culture such that... bat wings, I'd imagine it's the first thing, since you couldn't culturally influence the existence of bats..."

"Okay, I didn't actually have the wings right away when I died. Most demons aren't dead people, they just happen, I have no idea why or how, and those have bat wings. So when dead humans become demons we make ourselves matching wings, since, flying, awesome, and looking like an angel in Hell, not so awesome, and fairy wings don't actually work, they're for decoration, fairies are telekinetic, so that kind of limits our options. I'm pretty sure no real bats have blue wings."

"Hell is natively infinite vacuum which is not physically contiguous with - this." He waves, generally, at the entire mortal world. "Demons have added things to it; most of the civilization is on a gigantic tacky plane of solid gold. I am not a physicist, so I can't tell you much about whether any laws of physics are being broken apart from our ability to make stuff and be summoned, but when there is a source of gravity water flows downhill and my laptop works and stuff like that."

"I can copy things without knowing how they work. Angels have a harder time with the detail work - and they're slower - and they need raw materials, so being a demon is the best deal overall. But I do have to know something about what I'm copying. I can make a book I've never read with title and author, but I can't just guess that there must be a book with such and such an ISBN and produce a copy. Also, I'm pretty sure if I make a phone it will not start out subscribed to Verizon or whatever phone companies are popular these days."

"That's a... really strange limitation, actually. You can make a book using a title and author, but not if you make up a title and author, or an ISBN... your magic system would have to have some sort of... underlying search capability, so that you can ask for Moby Dick by Herman Melville and the magic does all the work of figuring out what that is and where to find all the words to put inside of it. Is there... does anyone know what does that, or is it-" there's a brief pause, he makes a face- "-an unsolved mystery?"

"If there's a solution to it, I don't know about it. There's not really a thriving demonic science community - not that demons don't do science, there's just dramatically less collaboration when you don't need to band together for funding in order to have all the sciencey swag you may want."

"And- do fairies and angels run on similar systems? Infinite void, some are people but others just appear, mysterious magic powers... or are they each their own kind of thing?"

"Fairies get Flatland with preexisting air and plants and geography and wildlife, it sounds like it's really pretty there from what I've heard. Angels get infinite glowy cloud-fluff that they tunnel through to make other things. I think both of them work on the mostly spontaneously generated, some dead humans, deal."

"Not everybody turns into a daeva when they die, I know that much, most people wind up in Limbo, but I don't know how the sorting works. Demon is what I would have picked, but I don't remember making a decision. I don't think I was bad by any conventional definition. And I would be a bit worried about getting killed if I were you."

"Limbo sounds - disappointing. It's a flat place with air in it, like Fairyland, but there isn't any of the stuff - I am informed that Limboites get stuff when they die and appear there, and they'll take presents from demons when we get concordances, but otherwise it's just dirt and sky going on forever. It's not like it's a disaster if they don't have water or food or whatever - they're just as indestructible as daeva, we can get thirsty but not really as far as parched, same with hunger etcetera - it's just. Boring."

"Yeah. I can get hurt, just not very much. If you shot me I'd bleed but not break a rib. Kindly don't try it."

"Oh, I'm thoroughly immortal, it's pretty great."

Max opens his car door and retrieves a notepad and pencil from a bag on the floor while Cam makes his call. He peers at the chalk circle and starts copying it down- two halves on separate pages, in case drawing it would actually summon another demon.

"Dude, that is not a good circle, it is not safe, I will teach you to do a safe circle later if you want," says Cam, conjuring water to rinse away the chalk. "It's - Dad! Dad don't hang up it's really not a prank I swear to - oh god this is a long story."

The demon hangs up. "I died five years ago. I was twenty-two. I've been taking summons since then hoping for a chance to get ahold of them." He dials a different number.

While the demon calls- his mom, he assumes- Max checks around the corner where the summoner fled, in case they're still around. There are people in the street, but none in the same outfit- if the summoner is here, they've changed clothes.

"So, now what? You said you were working on getting the word out- did you have a plan to do it without getting killed, that... failed, or did that part come as a surprise?"

"I had, like - some of a plan. It didn't go well, and I'd still rather not be shot even if it's not such a showstopper, so I want to rethink it some, especially since as a daeva myself I can no longer summon anybody myself and would have to enlist a human to do it. Where are we?"

"We're behind Brend- I mean, we're in... New Jersey, edge of Newark. West ward, I think, might be North but they keep redrawing the borders every election season. Gerrymandering, y'know. Any of that relevant?"

"New Jersey was all I needed to know, means I'm closer to her house than his and should start out southward."

"It'll take me at least, ugh, half a day, probably more, to fly to Mom's, so a couple hours won't make a difference if you continue to be entertaining. You want a safe demon circle?"

"General principles would be more useful than a schematic, unless it's all just specific diagrams you have to memorize. I... suspect it's not as precise as all that if this one was completed by running over a piece of chalk, though."

"It's not that precise. You need a circle that is more circular than it is anything else, and I recommend completing that part last. And around the circle you write what you want to get and how they're bound, in whatever language, English works fine. The one I described to my parents will work to summon me, specifically, but if you aren't acquainted with a specific daeva -" Cam gestures at Max's notebook. "There, generic standard-binding circles for whichever daeva types. And safety instructions, do not unbind random daeva you do not know, do not make stupid deals with them."

"Same thing, yeah. I mean, I could sort of do it with parlor tricks but it'd be preposterously slow and tedious and shorter range."

"...Parlor what now?"

"There's extremely tiny, nigh-pointless magic that humans can do besides summoning. It takes a lot of concentration - I didn't even bother trying all the exercises in the books I had until my first summon worked and I had reason to believe there was something to it, because even though it gets easier after practice you have to focus really fucking hard to do really fucking trivial tricks."

"What? How tiny are we talking? Does it require... some specific trigger that people aren't likely to stumble upon just by trying really hard, something that people wouldn't... notice, if they didn't have instructions beforehand? I can see people keeping daeva a secret, but why that?"

"I don't know nearly enough about, like, intensive meditation practices, to know if anybody's likely to have stumbled on it. And the tricks are all so stupid and tiny - would you believe somebody if he cornered you and was like "look, magic" and a blotch slowly appeared on a piece of paper, but he couldn't put it in a specific place if you drew him a target?"

"I think I am not the expert you are looking for on that."

"Yeah, that's it. You have to know who you want or take whoever answers first."

"Well, let me put it this way. A fairy can kill you. An angel can kill you easily. A demon can destroy the entire planet."

"A daeva that wants to wreak havoc won't kill their summoner," Cam adds. "They'll render the summoner unconscious and put them somewhere safe, so they don't get dismissed. Dead summoner equals instant dismissal, and you have to be conscious to non-instantly dismiss a summon. Tempermentally speaking - I don't think demons are, as a population, meaner than angels or fairies are. But demons are harder to pay. You can get a fairy to rearrange your furniture for a batch of cookies, because the fairy would have to make or buy the cookies back home, and rearranging your furniture is easier than that. You can get an angel to change stuff for you in exchange for anything complicated or that the angel doesn't have the skills to whip up, because angel magic requires doing your own detail work, an angel can't just create a houseplant or a new videogame for themselves like," he snaps his fingers, "that. The things you can produce to interest a demon are few and far between. Most of us don't want to make phone calls. So the demons who are going to bother with summons are the ones that want - let's say 'intangibles'. You are extremely lucky you got me."

"You wouldn't likely have died, you'd have been put in a chemical coma and stashed somewhere," says Cam. "And - even naturally occurring daeva aren't crystalline aliens or anything. Remember, summons are going to be a non-representative sample. Even some humans like killing people and causing harm. And I don't think the number of daeva who are into it is that surprising given how much you can tweak human psychology by making a human totally self-sufficient and magically powerful and immortal and indestructible, putting them in a social situation where nobody they have to live with will find out or care if they cause mayhem in this other place, and then turning them loose." Pause. "Oh, and the daeva generally have it as common knowledge that if they kill people worst case scenario the people go to Limbo. They don't, like, cease to exist, or burn for eternity for their sins, or anything."

"So my best bet, if I'm just looking for information, is to work with fairies, then- less dangerous, more easily bought. Anything I should know about them? You mentioned they... 'move things'?"

"Fairies are telekinetic. They can move as much stuff as they can keep track of at whatever speed and in whatever direction they like. You can get them to open doors that are locked on the far side or send things into low Earth orbit or take you flying or, if you really have something they want, sit in front of a generator and spin it for a few hours, but I'd recommend giving them a book if you want to do that last. Some of the really sharp ones can start and stop fires almost without doing anything else detectable, although of course they're really using friction and moving the oxygen away from the fire. Most of them aren't that creative on their own - for them it's utterly trivial and everyday that they can do this, it'd be like a tree going 'wow, human, you can walk, have you ever considered becoming a world class ballet dancer' - like, ballet exists, but most people don't do it."

"Earth still does that thing where sometimes it's dark, right?"

"I mean, even if it weren't, I don't think a couple of photographs on somebody's conspiracy theory website are going to make or break it. I can go up high. I'll look like a somewhat lower-altitude bat or a kite."

"I could put them under a coat?" shrugs the demon. "When I summoned daeva I did it without any witnesses while I was first setting up. I could also cut them off but that'd be messy and I'd just have to remake them to fly."

"I have a few suspects. I think one of the daeva told someone - there are so many fairies and angels who take summons that with this few summoners operative you aren't likely to get one that sees regular use by somebody else when you're taking randoms, but I summoned demons too and fewer demons take summons, so it was probably a demon. I haven't run into anybody I met while alive in Hell, though, so I can't confirm."

"So, I don't want to go around telling everyone I summon about plans to publicize summoning. But... you don't know, specifically- can you be sure that there isn't some way you could have been spied on regardless of whether you told anyone? The types of magic... there's parlor tricks, summoning, and the native magic of daeva, but none of those seem like natural kinds. Are there... any other types of magic to worry about, or is it well-established that those are the only tools available?"

"I am not aware of any other kinds. It's not impossible I could be missing something, but I've gotten a lot of reading done in the last five years."

"I don't have great numbers on that. It's pretty hard to get accurate census data. One thing I do notice is that daeva don't look quite like humans - they don't cluster ethnically the same way. You get blue eyes and brown skin and red hair on the same daeva just about as often as you get a trifecta of brown, where in humans you need exciting ancestry for that. So, if I assume that a representative population of daeva live in the city where I live and that this phenomenon is real and not a matter of deliberate cosmetic choices, I think I may well have never seen another ex-human in Hell in person, not enough to be sure that they weren't just normal-looking by happenstance - that there's thousands of natural daeva for every one that died. And the post office folks say if you want to talk to someone who's probably dead you just send their mail to Limbo, so if there's much like me going on it's not enough to affect the postal system."

"Well, some of them make alterations that I don't find that appealing. The ones who as far as I can tell just plain look that way - no fangs or spines or tattoos or pointed ears or anything you'd get kicked out of a piercing shop for asking about - they look fine on average, I guess? I don't stand out except for being part of an ethnic cluster, and that happens often enough by chance and I don't think demons automatically notice it anyway. We don't get acne or need braces or anything, which probably helps."

"I mean, if they don't like how they look, they can fill their systems with morphine and reconstruct the hell out of their faces, we do not have the same limitations as humans on cosmetic changes and I have never seen a brand new daeva appear. I didn't want to change anything except adding the wings, although I might decide to get a tail one day, but if somebody appeared and was weirdly asymmetrical or something they could just fix it."

"Sorry about your creationism theory."

"Well, I'm not done with creationism quite yet. Not ten minutes ago I was informed of the existence of Hell, so... the possibility space has widened considerably."

"There are demons but no sign of a Lucifer, angels but nowhere to leave a message for God, and fairies but no evidence of a Titania - well, that's not technically true, fairies form political units and some of those probably have queens and I can't guarantee you that Titania wasn't named after one, but anyway."

"Sure, not as such, but... demons? Fairies? Angels? All with their own special magic powers, in their own special worlds, without... without any plausible evolutionary mechanism to account for them? It's all so... storybook. And all I've got to explain storybooks, for now, is storytellers. If there are demon natural historians with other explanations, I'd love to meet them."

"The ones I've heard of don't take summons. And they tend to come off more like philosophers than anything, and they're damn shaky on mortal science in most cases... I remind you that there is significantly a sense in which demons are just what we are called."

"You are immortal people with bat wings and magic powers that you summon with magic circles. You mentioned angels literally live on fluffy clouds. I'm going to call that close enough to raise suspicion."

"They live in the fluffy clouds. In sort of caves in the clouds. Since the fluff goes on forever in all directions. Are you familiar with how long humans have had written language? And the ability to draw circles? It's been longer than the lifespan of any religions with which you are familiar."

"Oh, no, did you think- I didn't mean... lord, not at all, I didn't mean God, that'd be- that'd be- I'm not- I meant, it seems likely that these things exist as a product of... some sort of deliberate engineering or manipulation by someone, at some point in history, not... did it sound like I was implying that the whole time?"

"No, I get that you're leaning Creationist, I just think you have the causality backwards, I don't think anybody invented angels because they thought having angels around would be peachy keen, I think someone met an angel and that concept leaked."

"How many ways to have wings do you think there are? Also, just to totally confound you forever, demons and possibly really patient angels can make animals. They come out really stupid if they're more complicated than, like, snails, but we can still do it. I'd be fascinated if I thought there was a non-negligible chance that the creator you're postulating could be prevailed upon to do anything useful or was going to mess up my life in some way, but... no sign of such inclinations."

"Sure, just make sure you sell it before the market collapses. How much you want and shaped how?"

"Sure. Plain, not engraved Lisa heart Trevor or stamped with designs or anything?"

"I died five years ago, but I can conjure up newspapers. Those are not, however, McDonald's fries."

"If you're done quizzing me, I fly to Florida. And hope that whoever drew most of this circle isn't going to try again and get somebody less friendly next time."

"...Disneyworld rides less fun in comparison to the flying thing, d'you think? And... yeah, I'm going to want to wait around for that whoever-they-were, stop them from... summoning someone who can... I assume demons are more dangerous than the other kinds because... you can make nukes, or antimatter, or something?"

"There's nothing like really, properly flying. We can't do antimatter straight up, although we can make all the equipment you'd use to generate the stuff the long way around. Nuke's easy. An angel could do a nuke too, but they'd have to actually know how they're put together."

Max gets in his car and tells his GPS to search for a craft supply store. He's going to go through a considerable amount of butcher paper and chalk, in a little bit.