He's not happy, as he sketches out the signs and sigils. He generally isn't, these days.
He ran out of better options with the last of the cows.
He finishes the circle.
He's not happy, as he sketches out the signs and sigils. He generally isn't, these days.
He ran out of better options with the last of the cows.
He finishes the circle.
"...okay. I'm a demon. Angels also exist. So do fairies. All three of us live in our own separate worlds but can be summoned to Earth-as-I've-historically-understood-it by humans drawing on the floor, and then negotiated with for our services. Demons make things, angels change things, fairies move things. Uh, also it's the year 2159."
"I'm reasonably sure that on my Earth people were not invisible even in 1928 - though the reverse isn't a compelling case; daeva like me were not well known before the early 2000s - so I think this is an alternate universe, not time travel."
"--May I have another cow? Or a deer or a pig or something? It's only I haven't eaten in days, and--" she breaks off, hesitantly.
Cow! "I can just keep doing that as much as you want. I mean, kind of. If you grow faster the more you eat then we'll have an exponentiation problem."
"...No. I don't think so. No more than--if I die I'll stop growing. Probably." Cow disappears in a briefly but intensely gory way.
"All right. Is two cows plenty? Did you have to give up rabbit because they were too inefficient to catch in quantity or anything?"
"Two cows is enough for now. Rabbits are really good at hiding and animals don't like me; the last time I tried hunting rabbits I was much smaller and I still tore up enough ground that Grandfather would have had to explain it if anyone had seen."
"No. People think Wilbur is an only child. They think he's just the product of inbreeding or something. It has to stay that way, people would kill us if they knew--"
"Are you kidding? Down south they lynch people for having the wrong skin color and looking at a white woman funny!"
"Yes, but that's different from being large and invisible! I don't know the current oppression status of large and invisible people. Do people know that large and invisible people even are a phenomenon?"
"So there is no actual oppression status, you're guessing conservatively - which is reasonable, to be clear."
"And I'm ugly. I guess it seems strange to say that when I'm invisible but I know how I'm shaped, I know what people would see if they could see me."
"I don't know. But Wilbur knows how I'm shaped, he's drawn me. If you promise not to--to hurt me for being a monster."
"I don't go around hurting people for being anything. I'm not perishing of curiosity if you'd prefer not to though."
"Unfortunately when I went to medical school I only learned to do things about conventional human bodies so I can't promise I'll be able to do anything about it. Not being able to see you would also be a serious drawback even if I were going to try it."
"Okay. So, your dad is a god called Yog-Sothoth, and you were trying to summon some... hornets? What did you want with hornets?"
"They're not sapient--they're not actually hornets, either, they're just called that--and I can kill them without getting hurt too badly. We ran out of cows months ago."
"...there's just... a summonable supply of hornets, somewhere? - is there a specific reason you ran out of cows and can't get more, what's your usual means of support here?"