"What stuff, though?"

"Not antimatter. Or people, we can't do anything smart."

"The snakes seemed pretty smart," said Tyler. "Some of them took weeks to find."

"Then maybe it wasn't a demon."

" - I'll go look for Ryan." He vanishes.

Zach shuffles his feet. "Anything, huh? Why do demons, uh, bother to bother frat houses, if you have everything you could want anyway?"

"I can't tell the difference between a summon in a frat house and any other summon. But most of us do stay home rather than take summonses at all, if that's what you mean."

"That makes more sense. But you do this because you want to ...terraform Mars and eradicate malaria?"

"Yeah! Well, in the future malaria's handled, but Mars isn't, people are still living in arcologies, it's super frustrating!"

"It just doesn't seem like a very demonic ambition!"

Several men burst into the room arguing. "You idiot!" the unfamiliar one yells at Tyler.

       "We didn't know it'd work!"

"You didn't know it wouldn't work!"

      "I thought I did know it wouldn't work, actually, because demons don't fucking exist!"

"This is the fourth time this year!"

     "The blood, the snakes, the gangs on PCP -"

"No, those were vampires. Moron. The third time everyone had a week of dreams about a howling void whispering our names and woke up freezing cold, remember?"

     "I thought the heat was broken."

"That's not Ryan," Zach tells the demon helpfully.

     "Ryan was out," says Tyler. 

"Hello, not-Ryan," says Cam. "Does it help if I assert that I'm a friendly demon who isn't going to kill anybody or - anything? Vampires, really? We don't have vampires where I'm from."

"I'm Daniel," says not-Ryan. "A friendly demon, that's a change of pace. I have no idea if they have vampires where you're from but they have them most places, here. Sunnydale has extra for some reason."

"Okay, let me revise my statement about being from the future, I'm gonna update that to alternate - universe, timeline, something."

"They don't have vampires in Redwood City," says Tyler.

     "They do, they just prey on homeless people," says Daniel.

"We don't have homeless people in Redwood City," says Tyler.

     "That's because the vampires ate them."

"Goodness," says Cam.

Zach has his head in his hands. "Can you go away? You can go wherever as long as you don't fuck up the frat house or murder anyone or anything."

      "Nah, we gotta tell the government about him."

               "Ryan's out, though."

      "Well, where'd he go?"

"I can't walk out of the circle till you either negotiate a task with me or snap the binding. I literally have to hang out here in the boundaries of this here circle you drew on the floor. And the clues are adding up to 'none of you took Summoning 101 and know how to negotiate a task correctly' so it'll be a lot simpler if you just snap the binding, simple mental action."

"Don't do that," says Daniel. "That sounds like a bad thing to do."

"Your task is... to go away!" Zach says triumphantly. 

(It is becoming increasingly obvious that all these people may be a bit drunk.)

"That doesn't count," says Cam. "I am actually qualified to teach Summoning 101 but it's a four credit course, you know, though I could condense it into a half semester if I cut all the cultural stuff."

"What happens if we try to carry you out of the circle and outside?" asks Zach. "We could drop you off downtown or something. I have -" he fishes in his pocket - "money for beer - I guess you don't need that -"

"Why don't you just tell us what to say so that you can go off but you can't do anything that gets us in trouble?" says Tyler. 

       "You're already in trouble," says Daniel. 

"I saw you at the Bronze with a girl who definitely wasn't Melanie."

       " - right, because we broke up. You think you're really clever?"

Zach snaps Cam's binding. It's unclear from the expression on his face whether this was deliberate.

"Yeah, you know what, carrying me out of the circle actually works fine," Cam says. "You don't even have to get me all the way downtown."

"Oh, okay," They carry him out of the circle, a bit awkwardly, still arguing.

"Thanks!" he says. "I don't wanna turn heads walking down the street, can I duck into your shower to cut off my wings and tail without making a huge mess, before I go? It's okay if the answer's no, I can just do a snazzy leather coat, but if anybody looks twice..."

"Use the one on the second floor, it's full of blood anyway."

"- why's that?"

"The drain's stopped up," Tyler says patiently, "and the walls bled that one time."