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the common bulk of life and substance
Demon Cam meets the Cthulhu Mythos
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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. 

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A demon appears. He looks like a young adult human with dark blue wings and a matching knee-length tail, barbed on the end. Wearing blue jeans and oddly brandless sneakers.

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The man scrabbles backwards, face a rictus of shock and fear. 

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"- so, this is why they tell you to make sure you write all the words before you finish the circle part," says the demon. "It's okay, I'm not gonna hurt you. Can I get you anything while I'm here?"

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"What are you--do you mean it--can you do cows--"

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"Uh. Sure? Demonic cows, anyway, why do you want them?"

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"For food--what does demonic entail?"

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"They won't be very smart, which is really ideal if you're going to eat them. Is this some kind of religion I haven't heard of, don't care for vat meat?"

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"...I don't know what that is." 

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"...you can't just be completely off the grid, you've obviously had angel work done, where is this?"

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He hesitates. 

"Dunwich, Massachusetts." 

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"People in Dunwich, Massachusetts have definitely heard of vat meat even if they are Amish and the Amish do not summon demons. I'm confused."

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"We share that in common." 

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"- okay. Are you urgently hungry right now, should I be getting you lunch before we figure this out?"

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"It's not urgent on a scale of minutes." 

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"If it's urgent on a scale of hours we can talk while you eat, dude, what do you want?"

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"It's not me who's hungry," he says, slowly, seeming to have to force the words out. 

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"Okay, who have you got? If we're talking an entire small country it really might take me a while."

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"Me," a soft, papery voice says out of seemingly nowhere. 

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"I'm more confused now."

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A sound like an elephant stomping its foot echoes from a place on the floor not far from right under where the voice came from. "I'm invisible. It's normal. As normal as anything can be, with me. With us." 

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"An invisible what?"

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"We're both half-human. If there's a word for what our father is more descriptive or scientific than 'god' we haven't found it." 

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"Well. You eat cows? Do you care if they're braindead?"

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"I used to eat normal food," she says wistfully. "Back when I was small enough that a human-sized meal was more than a morsel. But cows work. Braindead is fine." 

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Braindead cow lying on the floor.

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A chunk the shape of a giant set of teeth disappears out of it immediately. In five more bites it's gone entirely, save for a puddle of blood, and that disappears too after a few moments. 

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"Bon appetit," he says belatedly. "Okay. So this is Massachusetts but it is not the Massachusetts I'm familiar with, do you by any chance have a guess about how to explain to someone who's heard of Massachusetts but doesn't expect anyone to be invisible the inferential gap implied?"

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"...I'm tempted to say 'there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,' but I have no idea what you are or what you meant by angel so perhaps there are simply different things. We don't know everything--Grandfather had books about things shrouded from the common knowledge of mankind, but they're old and in poor repair and in some cases incomplete. We know there are--places, besides Earth, places where things not made of ordinary matter dwell, things like the Hounds of Tindaloo and the Adumbral Hornets--the latter is what I was trying to summon when I got you--or like our father, Yog-Sothoth. We know bits of the language that beings like Yog-Sothoth and its kindred use. We know that Yog-Sothoth and other things like it are bound from fully entering this dimension and if they did it would mean the end of life on Earth as we know it. We know about an ancient civilization that used to dwell at the South Pole before its own created slave-race rose up and destroyed them. We know about an aquatic sapient race that inhabits the oceans to this day, or at least to the day the Necronomicon was written, around the eighth century." 

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"...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."

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"It's the year 1928."

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"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."

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"--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. 

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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."

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"...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.

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"All right. Is two cows plenty? Did you have to give up rabbit because they were too inefficient to catch in quantity or anything?"

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"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." 

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"Your existence is not common knowledge?"

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"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--"

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"Kill you? Why?"

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"Are you kidding? Down south they lynch people for having the wrong skin color and looking at a white woman funny!" 

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"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?"

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"No." 

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"So there is no actual oppression status, you're guessing conservatively - which is reasonable, to be clear."

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"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." 

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"Unless you show up in photographs, I'll have to take your word for it."

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"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." 

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"I don't go around hurting people for being anything. I'm not perishing of curiosity if you'd prefer not to though."

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"I don't like my body." 

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"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."

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"I really don't think you could fix the things I don't like about my body." 

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"Okay. So, your dad is a god called Yog-Sothoth, and you were trying to summon some... hornets? What did you want with hornets?"

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"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." 

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"...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?"

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"Grandfather had some money inherited and he used to use it to buy cows but--there wasn't a lot left, and--things...happened. We still have a little money, enough for Wilbur to eat, and if I can eat things like the Hornets he probably can too if it comes to it--" 

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"As far as we've been able to tell the Hornets are part of some extradimensional ecosystem. Or--transdimensional, perhaps, there are stories in the Necronomicon of things like Hornets and Hounds of Tindaloo being able to cross over into our world by themselves." 

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"And you couldn't get a big enough herd of cows going to sustain themselves before too many things had happened. I see. Is there any income going on here at all?"

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"...No." 

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"Why not?"

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"The townsfolk don't like us. And moving Lucy safely is a dicey prospect." 

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"Because of footprint-related concerns?"

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"...And I'm...not safe to be around when I'm so hungry I can't think straight." 

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"...have you ever eaten a person?"

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"I didn't mean to."

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"Christ. Okay. I'm gonna register my disapproval for your unsustainable animal husbandry and make you all the megafauna you want and maybe your own cottage vat meat operation so you can open a little butcher shop."

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"The herd was sustainable until I got so big. Grandfather didn't know I was going to get so big." 

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"It may be that nobody could have done any better but the time for emergency measures was the first year there were only as many new calves as you'd eaten cows in the last twelve months." Sigh. "I am going to... look up a ten minute presentation on American history, go through the highlights up until 1928, and see if there are any discrepancies that don't directly have to do with extradimensional hornets or deities, sound good?"

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"Alright. Even if we don't find anything, you might want to compare it against a history book from our world, or someone who knows more about history than we do--relatively few of Grandfather's books were on history, and most of them were old, so anything between 1860 and 1913 I honestly couldn't swear to." 

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"That's a good idea. This is just an overview against common knowledge." He produces an item made of metal and plastic and glass about the size of a small leek and turns it on, projecting a rectangle of light into the air. He looks at the light and it moves around while he nibbles his lip thoughtfully and finally pulls up what he wants. "Here goes An Abbreviated American History."

It's very abbreviated, and Cam only continues for the first two-thirds of the content, since after that it's past the current date. There are pictures.

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"What is that?" 

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"The Washington Monument."

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"...That looks very small and portable to be a monument." 

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"I think he means the picture. The obelisk. I think I saw a picture of it once." 

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"Oh. I mean the, uh, device." 

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"Oh. A computer. They are a futuristic device. This one requires brain surgery to operate."

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"...Why are you using a device that requires brain surgery to operate? Can you conjure that but not books?" 

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"No, I could conjure books but they'd be way less convenient. Also the nature of the brain surgery is I have another little device in my brain, so in my case, I just materialized it where it needed to be; it only needs actual scalpels if you don't have a demon. However, it does rely on specific brain architecture enough that I don't think I should try giving either of you one like this because I do not know if you may have oddly shaped brains."

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"We probably do, yes. --Can you conjure the Necronomicon?"

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"Probably. That one of your books that's falling apart?"

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Nod. "It's the most comprehensive one, and also the one with the most pieces missing. I still have unhealed wounds from when I broke into the Miskatonic University library trying to access the complete version--our version doesn't have the ritual to summon Hornets, we had just run out of cows, and I was desperate. If there's anything else in there that could help us--manage what we are--I don't know if we'll stop growing at eighteen like full humans but if we don't that's going to be a problem at some point no matter how many cows are available to eat--" 

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"You guys aren't eighteen yet?"

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"Fifteen. And a half." 

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"Well. Yikes. - lemme finish this history thing and then I'll get a Necronomicon, I guess. Why's it called that?"

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"I don't know. There's stuff in there that's dangerous, but it's not about death." 

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"The title in the original Arabic is Kitab Al-Azif, I don't know if it's a literal translation." 

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"No, that means 'the book of ignorance', that's weird."

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"It was translated into Latin in the thirteenth century, maybe the translator had an overblown sense of the arbitrarily dramatic." 

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"Perhaps. I wonder what else is different in the Arabic. Anyway, Civil War -" He proceeds through the rest of the slideshow.

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The histories match as best either twin can determine. 

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"Okay. Necronomicons." He makes two, an Arabic one for him and an English one for them.

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Wilbur immediately sits down and begins leafing through it. 

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Flip flip. "I'm Cam, by the way, I don't think I mentioned."

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"Wilbur and Lucy Whately." 

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"Charmed." What is in the intact book of ignorance?

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Lots and lots of really disturbing information. 

The section Wilbur seems to be focusing on has a lot to say about Yog-Sothoth. Including instructions for a ritual that will summon him completely to this world and wipe out all life. Wilbur has skipped that and is intensely studying a set of pages that have more to do with his biological properties, insofar as a creature like Yog-Sothoth can be said to have a biology as humans would describe the field. 

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"- have all the things you've tried from this worked as described?" wonders Cam.

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"Until I got you instead of a Hornet. But since I'd successfully summoned Hornets before I suspect an error on my part." 

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"Right, except that. There's a bit in here about resurrecting the dead."

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He physically drops the book in shock. (It stops before it can hit the floor, caught by some invisible appendage.)

"What?" 

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"It's page a hundred and four in my edition."

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He takes the book back from his sister and flips hurriedly to page a hundred and four. "--That's missing from our old copy," he says. 

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"Yes, I figured since it was so surprising when I mentioned it. However, as a note of caution, I don't think the person who compiled this was terribly concerned with ethics, what with there being world-destruction rituals and sketchy telepathy and whatnot, so I don't think we can be positive they'd mention if there was some terrible side effect to going through this long ritual."

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"If the side effects are worse than being dead we can just kill them again." 

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"Presumably, but I was thinking more along the lines of collateral damage. It's possible that, say, your dad wouldn't object to being fully summoned and ending the world, but the world would mind."

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"--We can limit the damage, probably. There are wards--" he flips to a different section "--here, see, they don't last long before needing to be re-done but I can use them to keep Lucy in the house--it's why there weren't more casualties when--when we found out what happens when she gets so hungry her higher brain functions stop functioning. I don't know if they'd work on an ordinary human but someone who was resurrected might not count and even if they did the wards could be modified." 

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"I was thinking more along the lines of doing a test resurrection somewhere in space."

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"--Well, be careful of the Mi-Go, if you do." 

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"The what now?"

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"I'm not entirely sure. The Necronomicon mentions them a few times but doesn't go into great detail. Apparently they come from space." 

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Cam's version is not paper. He searches for various spellings.

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The Mi-Go come from Yuggoth, which is not explicitly stated to be another planet but yeah it's another planet. Or planetoid. Or moon. It's a rock in space of some description, almost certainly. They fly through space. They do unspecified but ominously referred to things to people if bothered. Avoid.

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Scale model of Yuggoth, sans Mi-Gos?

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Pluto. 

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"Okay, I know where this is, it's not terribly nearby. We can just avoid it."

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"Good." 

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"If we're going to try resurrecting someone can we try Mother."

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"I'd recommend someone you aren't personally attached to as the test subject."

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"...Okay. I don't know anyone who's dead who I'm not personally attached to." 

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"Yes, I was thinking maybe Ben Franklin or something, since he's on record as having wanted to pickle himself for later restoration."

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"...It sounds like you need remains," Wilbur observes, frowning at his copy of the Necronomicon, now flipped back to the resurrection ritual. "I don't know if it has to be the original remains or just chemically identical, the phrase 'Essential Saltes' is ambiguous." 

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"I haven't read through the whole thing but I'm up for disinterring Franklin's bones if making a copy of his corpse in a fresher state doesn't work."

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"Let's try it the other way first." 

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"Much more convenient."

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"We've gone this long without provoking an angry mob." 

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"I wouldn't need to bring you along for the graverobbing part."

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"That's probably for the best." 

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"I've never robbed a grave before and it will certainly be less tedious to do this entire ritual if I don't have to. Hmm..." He reads through it a little more carefully.

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You can use either a basically intact corpse or the "essential saltes," which may be concocted using the ashes of the deceased. The spells are different depending on whether or not the body has to be reconstituted. In the latter case it's possible to banish the resurrectee back to the dead without infliction of further violence through use of a counter-spell. 

There are incantations. The incantations invoke Yog-Sothoth. 

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"You guys have any paternal rapport to speak of?" Cam wonders.

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"We've never met him. I wouldn't be surprised if the blood connection still helped." 

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"Is it rude to ask about the circumstances with your parents?"

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"There's a ritual to summon Yog-Sothoth incompletely and temporarily, in Grandfather's copy of the Necronomicon. Mother used it. She wanted...she wanted children who would have more power than an unattractive albino and her widower father, neither with any formal education, living on cattle proceeds and a dwindled family fortune and despised by their neighbors, could aspire to. Instead she got...us." There is a soft rustling sound, as of snakeskin on snakeskin. "She loved us very much." 

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Cam nods. "- what happened to her?"

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"I really really really didn't mean to."

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"Oh."

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She makes an unhappy noise. 

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Wilbur places a hand against what is presumably her flank. 

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"We'll test on Ben Franklin, perhaps from the Moon. Or Mars, maybe, the gravity'll be less jarring."

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"What's gravity like on the moon?" 

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"The moon's smaller so you weigh sixteen point five percent what you do on Earth. Mars is also lower gravity than Earth but not by as much."

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"I think I would prefer not to find out whether 'essential saltes' are harder to handle at one-sixth gravity." 

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"That'll get you thirty-eight percent. If you really want full Earth gravity I will have to make a space station with a little black hole inside it."

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"A what?" 

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"A space station is architecture that floats around in vacuum. A black hole is a lot of matter packed very densely, in this case to generate gravity."

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"...Huh." 

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"Have you been to Mars? Your Mars, I mean." 

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"Yeah, and the Moon too."

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"Is it hard to handle powders or liquids there? Either place." 

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"The natives are good at it but it does take some adjusting and for precision applications you sometimes need special equipment."

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"Being imprecise at this stuff is bad. Maybe the space station is a good idea." 

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"Sure thing."

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"So how do we get to space?" 

She sounds excited, and rhythmic creaking of the floorboards suggests she may be bouncing. 

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"In a spaceship! Lemme verify that your Ben Franklin is like my Ben Franklin and then I will make us one. I need to know roughly how much you weigh."

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"...I'm not sure. Probably more than a ton?" 

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"Less than an elephant?"

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"I think I'm bigger than an elephant." 

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"All right, I'll make us a nice roomy ship."

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"I'm not actually sure, I've never seen an elephant, but that's probably a good idea." 

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"Yeah, it's not like a big one is more expensive or anything. Elephants are at least a couple tons, full grown, sometimes more like seven."

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"I've never really been able to weigh myself." 

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"If you want to I can also do a big scale."

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"...It's not a priority but now I'm curious." 

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Scale. "It's set to pounds but it'll do kilograms if you flip that red switch."

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She steps onto the scale. 

Ten tons and a bit. 

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"Yup, bigger than an elephant."

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"Cool."

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Cam's tail wags. "All right, looking up local Ben Franklin publications, just a sec..."

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This universe's Ben Franklin is consistent with his universe's in predicting cryonics-or-something-like-it and being wistful about not living long enough to get there!

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"Okay, anything you wanna square away before we go try this?"

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"If you can re-create everything there's not much reason to bring the library but if we don't we should do something to make sure nobody stumbles across it and decides to summon something dangerous." 

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"You expect trespassers? We don't have to be gone very long."

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"If we're leaving anyway...I'm probably going to outgrow the house before much longer. And. The town really doesn't like us." 

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"Fair enough. What do they even know about you?"

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"Old John Whately had weird books and Lavinnia Whately had a child out of wedlock and there've been rumors about inbreeding for generations--it's what they chalk me up to--and all their dogs hate me." 

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"Why do dogs hate you?"

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"I haven't exactly asked but I think it's because of how I smell." 

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"Huh. I guess. Well. I don't think you want to live on a space station forever - it'd make you permanently dependent on stuff I make, and teaching you to maintain it all would be a big project - but we don't have to come back here in particular when we're done up there."

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Nod. "Somewhere else would be better." 

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"Maybe Mr. Franklin will have input. We shall see. Go ahead and pack up whatever you wanna bring, here's some bins and a float pallet." Voilà.

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Wilbur packs. It doesn't take long, apparently the whole house is just this one big room and a cellar. 

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Cam makes a spacious spaceship and reads more of the Book of Ignorance.

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Azathoth is really big and dangerous and at the center of the galaxy! He has an Other Name that can give you thus-and-such powers (the Other Name itself is not included). He may or may not actually be conscious in any real sense. 

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Are the powers any good?

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The description is a little flowery and roundabout but basically it gives you mastery over the kinds of beings that don't exist fully within this plane of reality. How complete the control is depends on the power of the being in question--the wielder of the name could strip all free will from some lesser beings, but only make greater ones go away and leave you alone. 

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What, pray tell, are the horrible side effects of having the name handy such that it was redacted?

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Not listed. The name itself is described as "unfathomably terrible" but that's not very specific. 

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He supposes he will hold off until he finds himself staring down an abomination of some kind.

When the twins are ready to go he closes the ship's hatch, makes some mist to cover the ascent, and takes off.

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If there are any windows Lucy will be extremely glued to them. 

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There are windows! They can watch the Earth fall away.

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"This is amazing," Lucy says in a hushed, reverent voice. 

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"Earth! It's lovely!"

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"Yeah. I could never have imagined..."

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"Well, you are the first people to see this Earth from space. Unless you count Mi-Gos, which may not have ventured this far."

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"They've probably ever been to Earth or how would we know about them?"

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"Azathoth's reportedly at the center of the galaxy, did he take a jaunt to Earth in particular too?"

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"I guess probably not. But I don't think the Mi-Go feature in occult chants the same way as the Outer Gods..."

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"I'll turn on all the paranoid scanners and whatnot and if we see anything we can bolt," he suggests, putting them into geosynchronous orbit over the Atlantic.

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Yeah there's something. 

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Okay! Let's aim a telescope at something!

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source

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"Yup. Creepy space monster. Do you want to carry on and see if it bothers us, or land and see if the sky's clear another day?"

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"How far away is it?" 

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"Not close, and moving away."

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"Let's keep going unless it notices us." 

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So Cam navigates to his chosen site for the space station, and then makes it.

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The Mi-Go fails to notice them. 

"That's soooooo coooooool," Lucy breathes. 

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"Thank you!" And he opens the hatch, having made the dock right where the ship is.

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Various footfall-like and slithery noises indicate Lucy is exiting the spaceship. 

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Wilbur follows in her wake, looking around with less energetic but still intense interest. 

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"I didn't design the station from scratch, so this is technically a cargo bay, but if you want furniture or anything I can jazz it up for you," Cam tells Lucy.

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"Oh, goodness. I don't even know what furniture I could use would look like. ...I could use a really big cushion and blanket, I think." 

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"Like how big?"

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"Umm. Can I have something to mark dimensions with?"

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Cam produces a marker.

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She traces out an area a little bit bigger than the floor area of the farmhouse. "And then maybe...three times that size? For the blanket?" 

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"Do you have fabrics in mind?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oooh I get to pick. Um. Um. Do you have really soft future fabrics?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You got it."

Very heavy duty springs in a giant mattress with maximally distress-tolerant foam on top of that, all wrapped in a nice demonic bamboo weave, and a folded-up blanket in a chunky modal blend.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ooh!" 

The mattress creaks as she scrambles on top of it and wraps herself in the blanket with a happy sighing noise. 

The blanket remains visible. The form underneath is sort of vaguely egg-shaped, with lots of tentacles, and some vaguely trunklike legs. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Wag wag. "You're going to have to duck to get through the non-cargo doors, but the ceilings in the standard living quarters won't hit you on the head," he tells Wilbur.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Thank you," he murmurs, gazing at his sister affectionately. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're welcome!"

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"What do you want? I know you've been--kinder to us than my wildest dreams could have imagined a stranger being--and that you're interested in resurrecting the dead, but--if there's anything I can ever do to repay you--"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can make arbitrary material objects, I don't really need much," Cam says. "I would find it convenient if you continued to operate in the capacity of a native guide, there's that?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I would be more than happy to do so." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thanks!"

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"The future must be a very different place." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It is, yeah. More technology. Friendly abundant magic, though that's not so much about it being the future."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is everyone as nice as you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, but it isn't weird to meet someone this nice."

Permalink Mark Unread

He looks at Lucy and nods. "I hope we get there." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It might be harder... depending significantly on whether the ability to summon daeva here was a one-off."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That might be hard to figure out. I don't know exactly what I did wrong with the Hornet-summoning circle." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Did you draw parts of it in a different order than usual?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wouldn't say that I have a usual order for drawing it..." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"That could be all, if something you'd left for later would make it an invalid demon-summoning circle or if hornet-summoning just takes precedence."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I had completed all the rest when I finished the circle, it wouldn't have worked otherwise--it seems more likely that I misspelled something without realizing." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"That might be it. I should've taken a photo before we left, I don't want to reproduce the circle and risk hornets appearing in the station."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can't make a photo that hasn't been taken?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, I can make things I invent and I can copy things that exist - I can also do format conversions - but I can't make accurate representations of things that have not been accurately represented."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Format conversions?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Like, my copy of the Necronomicon is here," he says, tapping his computer, "not on paper."

Permalink Mark Unread

"But you can't convert from the circle itself?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't want to create a new hard copy of it, in case that summons wasps," Cam explains. "I think a photograph might have been safe."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It should be safe if it's small enough--or for that matter if a Hornet did appear it wouldn't be very dangerous as long as Lucy was ready to pounce on it--but I don't blame you for wanting to be careful." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"How small?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"As long as the inner circle is less than a foot in diameter it shouldn't work but I'd make the whole thing only a few inches across to be very safe." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"All right then. Lucy, you ready to pounce?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Lucy throws off the blanket and gets off the mattress so they won't get hurt if she has to kill an Adumbral Hornet. "Ready!" 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam makes a teeny replica circle on paper on the floor.

Permalink Mark Unread

Nothing appears. 

Wilbur peers at it for almost a minute before making a face. "Yes, I see it. See, there--" he points at a word. "It says 'creator' instead of what it's supposed to, which is 'shadow'." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh! Well, in many demon languages the word for demon means something more like 'maker'."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That makes sense, then." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Any idea how you mixed those up?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"They're very similar in that language--Aklo--creator is n'k'til, and shadow is n'katl--if you give me some paper and a pen I can show you." 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam hands it over. "It's not likely to matter in the specific, but sure."

Permalink Mark Unread

He writes them down. The vowels are represented in such a way that it's easy to see how one could write the one as the other by mistake. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. The question is can you summon more daeva; and if you can, why hasn't anyone else. It's not hard. I suppose maybe other people have; 'valid daeva-summoning circle' is a conjurable parameter, but is all magic you accomplish locally by drawing on the floor likely to be harmless at small scale?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh god, no. If you were considering summoning a hornet without someone like Lucy at hand to dispose of it immediately, don't. I didn't even like doing it, but they're not as dangerous as Lucy when she's too hungry to think." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm indestructible. But yes, I'd like warning before instantiating potentially dual-purpose magic circles that might summon unfriendly critters."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If you're indestructible and can make arbitrary objects it's probably not a disaster but if you end up with one while on a planet kill it before it can get loose. If you show me a picture of a circle to summon a demon or an angel or a fairy I can tell you whether I think it would be dangerously dual-purpose." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can do that but I'm a little concerned that if summoning is somehow odd here, dismissal may be too. And the only way we could check that before risking stranding somebody here would be to dismiss me and I haven't even eradicated the malarial mosquito yet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Eradicated the what?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"The mosquitoes that transmit malaria? Do you have malaria on this Earth?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah. That's caused by mosquitos?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Parasites they carry, but it's easier to get the mosquito and they aren't an important kind of mosquito."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's cool. How do you eradicate them?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I release a bunch of extremely attractive male mosquitoes who cannot reproduce."

Permalink Mark Unread

Giggle. "And the pretty mosquitos aren't too dumb to fly?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, bugs and stuff about that intelligence level come out close enough to normal."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh. Flying seems complicated." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Bugs are pretty simple. I think you can put them through enough tests to distinguish a demonic and a regular mosquito, but this is how we got malaria gone on my Earth, so they're good enough."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is malaria really bad? Compared to, like, polio, or typhoid, or--I don't know much about diseases, we don't get sick." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Those are also bad but I have to fix them with vaccines, which is a social engineering problem as opposed to a unilaterally releasing clouds of mosquitoes over the Earth problem. Malaria is arguably worst, though, just in terms of body count - some less conservative estimates suggest it is responsible for as many as half of human deaths to date."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Whoah, really?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's almost certainly an overestimate but it gives you an idea."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think I'm glad we don't get sick." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nice deal if you can get it, yeah. Demons don't get sick either."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Because you're indestructible?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yup. It's very convenient. Well. Wilbur, you want something to eat and maybe a night of sleep before we attempt resurrecting Benjamin Franklin?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't need to sleep very much but food would be lovely." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Requests or do you just want two-three times as much of what I'm having?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, surprise me." 

Permalink Mark Unread

They will be having lasagna and Caesar salad!

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Wilbur has much better de facto tablemanners than his sister but it's not hard to figure out that he hasn't been eating enough lately. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"What is that? It smells so good..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Lasagna. You want a bathtubful?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yesplease." 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam makes her a big tub with surfaces a cleaner robot will be able to handle and fills it with lasagna.

Permalink Mark Unread

Not being a discrete object, she doesn't eat it as neatly as she ate the cows, but the mess that exists until she's managed to scrape all the sauce off herself and lick it off her tentacles is much less gory, at least. 

"That," she sighs afterwards, "was the most delicious thing ever." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm glad you liked it! I'm gonna make a little robot to wash the tub out so future dinners can go there without cross-contamination. Even if not getting sick also applies to food poisoning it seems the way to go." He sets a Scrubbaâ„¢ on the rim of the tub. It scrubbas its way down.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"I don't get sick from bad food but it still tastes awful." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Then a good thing the future has cleaner robots." He makes it a charging dock and a cleaning solution refill station for it to find when it's done in the tub.

Permalink Mark Unread

"What's that? Is that the cleaner robot? What's a robot?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"The thing rolling around in the tub is a robot. Which cleans, hence being a cleaner robot. A robot is a machine that behaves autonomously according to a program. The stuff over there is where it will go when it needs more soap and water and electricity."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The future has so much cool stuff." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It does!" Cam makes himself a cup of coffee and looks over the steps of the resurrection ritual again more closely.

Permalink Mark Unread

It involves a lot of drawn diagrams and invocations of gods, mostly Yog-Sothoth. You have to prepare the ashes a certain way. You can also resurrect someone from a fresh body, which is simpler and doesn't take as long, but is riskier for the resurrectee, mentally speaking. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Mentally speaking?

Permalink Mark Unread

There's a lot of flowery language about risks of the person being "diminished in spirit" but not a lot of explanation of what that...means. 

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Cam is going to hunt up... all the other written material that was in the author's house at the time the first draft of this book was written... and see if there's any useful notes or primary sources.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

If you attempt to restore a fresh body, brain damage is possible if you don't do it perfectly. The method that involves "essential saltes" can't just repair an existing structure, so its methods route around the brain damage thing entirely. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay... if you use a fresh body," Cam says, "- I'm basing this on stuff I'm assuming the author worked from, not just the Book of Ignorance here - they can wind up with brain damage. A demonically-created live body is not physically brain damaged, and certainly isn't worse at being alive than an actual corpse, but that at least tells me I should probably start with a dead one. I can probably get away with making it without whatever killed Mr. Franklin..." He looks that up. "Pleurisy. So he won't have to deal with an emergency lung transplant first thing, that's good."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What's pleurisy?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Inflammation of the membrane around the lungs. Lung transplant is not the standard way to treat it but it's by far the easiest one for a demon."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I guess replacing things is probably easier than fixing them for a demon." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yup. Angels are more popular for medical applications at home, they're less gruesome about it, but we're very good at some stuff, if the education's in place we're better than human doctors even if angels have us beat some ways."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Future doctors," she says gleefully. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's specifically exciting?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Future everything is cool and saving people is cool and fixing people's bodies is cool." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's why I went to med school."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wish I could go to school," she sighs wistfully. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I could teach you things, if you like? In between the malaria eradication and stuff like that. There's pretty good self-paced courses I can conjure up and then consult on the content if you get stuck."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Really?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure. Where are you starting from, like, how well can you read?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can read really well. There wasn't much else to do. I know English and Latin and bits of Aklo." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't think I've heard of Aklo back home, but English and Latin I've got. Where are you on math?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I...have mastered basic arithmetic." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. And even if you know science and history now the way they teach those in the future is completely different so I may as well start you at ground level on those. Now, let's figure out a computer you can use. What've you got in the way of manipulating appendages?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"My tentacles are about as dextrous as hands." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"On similarly sized objects?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm a lot stronger and I have a lot of them so I can pick up much bigger stuff and really little stuff is hard but I can do a pencil." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Let's see if touchscreens react to tentacles all right or if you need buttons." He produces a computer for her to try. "Poke the paler rectangle."

Permalink Mark Unread

Poke. 

Permalink Mark Unread

The computer projects a screen like Cam's. "There you go! Okay, it's a tutorial intended for brand-new daeva - daeva appear spontaneously as adults with no memories, so stuff gets nice and basic for them, won't assume any specific background in computers but in this case does assume you can read English since we get our summoners' languages when summoned and that's a popular way to start off with knowing how to talk and read. Poke around with that and it'll lead you to the educational material when you've got the hang of the interface."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Coooool. Thank you so much." She starts fascinatedly poking around the interface. 

Permalink Mark Unread

It will teach her how to input text and select objects and stuff! Cam goes back to looking at the resurrection ritual to make sure he will not be surprised by any steps.

Permalink Mark Unread

That's going to take a lot of research. The book of ignorance was written by a poet and none of these people had ever heard of scientific rigor. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, it's important to be confident of these things. After a bit he looks up and asks Wilbur, "Do you want a computer too?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes please." 

Permalink Mark Unread

Computer! "This one's pretty much like hers, let me know if you want anything that isn't on there."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thank you," he says, metaphorically swan-diving into future science texts. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Wag wag.

Resurrection ritual!

Permalink Mark Unread

There are some components that would be difficult to source both ethically and conveniently if he were not a demon. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Fortunately he is one! Any other pitfalls?

Permalink Mark Unread

Occasionally the reanimated crave human flesh. This is less likely the better you perform the ritual but no one has worked out how to eliminate it entirely. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Welp. What are the axes of ritual quality that affect that, and how much do they crave it.

Permalink Mark Unread

If you do the ritual perfectly then even if the resulting resurrected person craves human flesh they can do without and are likely to be perturbed by it. 

Since they've never heard of scientific rigor the notes on axes of quality are sorta sparse but the gist of it is that if you fuck up, instead of failing gracefully by doing nothing it will probably fail ungracefully by creating a revenant that will try to eat you. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Well. Cam will put a bunch of hours into getting all the sources he can on this and organizing them more sensibly until he thinks he can get it pretty darn perfect.

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam has many advantages in this area, such as previously unparalleled research resources and the ability to notice that refusing to pronounce phonemes not found in his native tongue is "stupid" and not "fine because ethnocentricism" 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam is very fortunate. But if this research project looks like it will take more than a couple days he's going to take a break to go for a malaria-eradicating shuttle ride.

Permalink Mark Unread

Depends on how exquisitely careful he wants to be about not having to feed Ben Franklin basement-dwellers. The low-hanging fruit can all be gathered within the first couple of days but the point of diminishing returns is not a point of no returns.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hey guys," Cam says after he's been at it for nine cups of coffee, "this is gonna take long enough that I don't want to wait to eradicate malaria until it's finished. Will you be okay without me for a few hours while I go place lots of mosquitoes?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm good," Lucy says, absorbed in her algebra curriculum. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"We'll be fine," Wilbur agrees, taking notes on his computer as he pores over the Necronomicon. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Cool. Here are some snacks in case either of you get hungry." He makes an insanely large bag of trail mix.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thanks!" A "hand"ful of granola flies out of the bag and disappears. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"If you need me back early, write 'letter to Cam' on a note and I'll get it next time I check my mail." Cam makes a smaller less obtrusive shuttle and heads Earthward.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

While cruising over Africa releasing infertile mosquitos, he may observe an inhabited area with a temple in an odd architectural style, with spiral pillars and a giant statue in front of a not-quite-human woman. 

Permalink Mark Unread

...he will fly a bit lower over this area.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

The people living nearby seem not quite human in roughly the same way, somewhere between a gorilla and a neanderthal in build, and covered in white fur. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Huh.

He doesn't expect Wilbur and Lucy to have the hang of sending e-mail yet, but he can send them one, he isn't that far away from the station. Found civilization of gorilla-ish people, investigating, let me know if you need me.

Permalink Mark Unread

Letter to Cam: Good luck. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam lands near the giant statue and gets out.

Permalink Mark Unread

Various ape-people are circled a respectful distance back from the ship, staring. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam tries some regionally plausible languages, though his African ones are a little sparser than would be ideal and it's plausible they don't speak anything that's spoken on his Earth at all. But maybe he's lucky and they have Arabic or French or something.

Permalink Mark Unread

They do not have Arabic or French. 

...A few brave souls come forward and try languages. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam's computer thinks one of these might be Bangubangu. He sets up Bangubangu machine translation and says, "Hello, is this intelligible?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's nice to meet you all, my name is Cam. Is this a good time for a visitor?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's not really a better or worse time than any other for someone to visit from the sky for some reason." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I was curious about you! I didn't know you were here."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I didn't know there were people in the sky!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not usually in the sky, I was running an errand that's easiest if I'm flying around."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What errand?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You know mosquitoes?"

Permalink Mark Unread

She makes a face. "Yes." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Some of them carry diseases. I'm getting rid of those ones."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Getting rid of--are you a god?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No."

Permalink Mark Unread

"How does one go about being in the sky and eradicating disease-carrying pests if one is not a god?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I do have magical powers, it's just not conventional to refer to people with my powers as 'gods'."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh," she says, disappointed. "What is it conventional to call you?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Djinn, in most Bangubangu dialects, but I don't know if you have separate djinn-related stories that aren't anything to do with me."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The word isn't familiar." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Djinn will do then."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"...So, did you...want anything, or were you just stopping in to say hi?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Just stopping to say hi, I don't need anything. I've never seen people like you guys before."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, we've never seen a djinn before either." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I didn't expect you to have. Most of us live very far away."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We all live here." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you interact much with the humans nearby?"

Permalink Mark Unread

She makes a face. "Not lately, no." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh? Why not?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"There was a conflict between the N'bangu and the Kaliri. We took the Kaliri's side. The N'bangu almost wiped us out." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"- I'm sorry to hear that. What was the conflict about?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I'm not sure. It was in my grandparents' time." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I see. I hope you're recovering well at this point. What do you call yourselves?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Linaika." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Pleased to meet you. Thanks for answering my questions! Can I get you any stuff for your time?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"What kinda stuff?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Physical objects. Including ones you used to have but that were destroyed, or you can suggest something it would be cool if you had an object that did it and I can see if I know of anything like that, like the spaceship." He points at the spaceship. "Except I won't give you a spaceship because you don't know how to pilot one."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hm. Things besides flying that are cool. Healing people?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I need to know what I'm healing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can't just do a thing for it? Okay. Books?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can do things for healing but they're specific per disease. I can do books! What books would you like?"

Permalink Mark Unread

She names some books. 

Permalink Mark Unread

And here is a stack of books tied up in a ribbon. "There you go!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thanks!" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're welcome!"

And he flies away again and resumes placing mosquitoes.

Permalink Mark Unread

Nothing else obviously anomalous presents itself during this time. 

Permalink Mark Unread

And he goes back to the station and docks and comes aboard. "Hullo!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hi! What were the gorilla-ish people like?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"They seemed friendly, although that could be because I showed up in a spaceship and stuff. Not obviously magical or anything, basically just a weird-looking countryful of people."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh. Not as weird as me and Wilbur, I bet." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Wilbur's just tall, but I concede not as weird as you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, he looks way weirder when he isn't wearing heavy coats and stuff to hide it." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I stand corrected, then!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Stand corrected about what?" Wilbur asks, walking in. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have been told you are weirder than the gorilla people."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh. Yes, I imagine so." He pauses for a moment, then shrugs off his coat. 

He's fully clothed underneath, but it's still apparent that his legs bend in a way more characteristic of a T-Rex than a human. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, neat. Digitigrade legs are fashionable among demons recently."

Permalink Mark Unread

"--You can just do that?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wouldn't say 'just', if I wanted to do it I'd have to amputate the legs I already have, but some people in fact do that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Peculiar. I suppose I would have been willing to cut off my legs and get normal ones if it would have made the difference between keeping the two of us alive and safe or not, but not for some lesser purpose." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"They do it anesthetized. It's bloody but not painful."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They're still my legs." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, I wouldn't do this personally either, I'm just explaining how the sort of person who gets trendy digitigrade legs - often with hooves - is looking at it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I suppose so. It still seems quite odd to think of." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Daeva get pretty casual about even extreme physical harm because it can't last very long."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I suppose that would follow." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Being a daeva sounds nice." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I like it! - uh, you should be aware that under standard circumstances, people who have summoned daeva in their lifetimes become daeva upon their deaths. I don't know if this is a standard-enough circumstance."

Permalink Mark Unread

"--Oh. Goodness. I don't know if either of us is going to die of natural causes but I should summon someone if I can." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Still worried about the possibility that the somebody wouldn't be able to go home."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I said if I can! --I guess it wasn't obvious what I meant by can." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"What I can do is write some letters to some other demons and see if any of them are up for the risk."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh! Cool! I thought it was going to wait until you had done everything really important and we had tried sending you home and bringing you back." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"If nobody volunteers, that's the way to do it, but ideally someone will want to come. I can start poking around. Other demons conjure mail like I do."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe someone will want to talk to the fish people." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm curious about the fish people myself, they're certainly a potential selling point."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I hope they're okay. It's been a long time since the Necronomicon was written." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I could check, but I got pretty lucky with the Linaika speaking an intelligible dialect of something my computer knows how to translate and I don't know that I can expect this with fish people."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can you check if they've gone extinct or not?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah -" He starts making plasticized minis of alive fishpeople but he will stop when he has a couple.

Permalink Mark Unread

He gets a couple. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"There are some!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh good! I was worried humanity would have wiped them out. They...do that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is somebody else extinct?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Just, like, birds and neanderthals and stuff." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ah, those. I dunno, the gorilla people looked a little Neanderthal-y. If there is a good time to reintroduce dodos I can do that, they hatch from eggs."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Whoah oh my goodness you can do that can't you." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah! It's harder but not impossible with mammals, but eggs I can make them in an early enough stage that they develop proper minds."

Permalink Mark Unread

"How do you do it with mammals?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The braindead ones are still biologically alive, and with enough medical care you can get them to carry to term at a decent success rate."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Does that work with people?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, the success rate drops off with how smart the creature is normally because the differential between that and bug-smart gets too big. I guess it's possible if you tried it in a million humans one would take but it takes nearly that many to get a chimp."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I hope not. That sounds...disturbing." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"No one's managed it in Hell, somebody would have noticed."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know if I should be glad or not. On the one hand, I'm disturbing. On the other hand, I'm not braindead and pregnant." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, that's not the part I'd worry about, the part I'd worry about would be how vulnerable the non-braindead baby would be in Hell."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Is that bad?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Demons are indestructible and live in total anarchy and new adults with full-fledged demon powers appear now and then."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And they might hurt the baby by accident." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"On accident's one way, yes."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Right. You did say not everyone's as nice as you." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Lots of demons are really nice, but there are billions."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Could demons make fish-people babies? I don't know if fish-people lay eggs," she says, suddenly concerned. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"...that's worrying, yeah, if they lay eggs demons can probably make them." He attempts a plasticized egg.

Permalink Mark Unread

Nope. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can't get a dummy egg if I try though, so hopefully we're good."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh good," she says, letting out a breath of relief. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Did you guys have fun with your computers while I was out?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Computers are so great. I know math now." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh? All of it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, no. But a lot more than I did before I met you." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Congratulations. I'm gonna have something to eat, you guys hungry?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes." 

Permalink Mark Unread

The Scrubbaâ„¢ is through with the tub now, so it can be full of salmon and pesto on one side and roasted broccoli and rice pilaf on the other. Wilbur can have some too.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Future food is so good," Lucy sighs later, after the tub has been rendered into a state where the cleaner robots can have at it. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's not especially futuristic. Well, boneless salmon is, but if you got somebody to really carefully filet enough salmon."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I guess maybe I don't know what's from the future and what's just not something I remember from when I was little enough to eat normal food without a demon being involved." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"If you want something more genuinely futuristic next time I can arrange weird edible chemistry experiments and fusion cuisine, but my food preferences were formed only about seventy years later than you guys in a lower middle class environment. I guess I'm acquainted with more foreign food than you'd be likely to have run into, Chinese takeout probably isn't a thing yet here."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do daeva have different food than humans?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, humans can summon daeva and be like 'hey, make me a sandwich', so not strictly, but the habits are different."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What do you mean?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can make whatever end product I have in mind any time. For a human it's more efficient to call in a demon to fill a warehouse with an ingredient, then sell it to people who will cook it conventionally, so some weird stuff only appears in high end restaurants."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That makes sense." She considers. "Do demons eat things that would poison humans?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"We can, but it's not the culinary frontier you might imagine. Most things that would poison humans don't taste that good."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Huh. I wonder if that's a me thing or a kid thing." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do poisonous things taste good to you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know if they still do but when I was small enough to fit through doors I used to go run around outside at night when Mother and Grandfather were sleeping and I ate lots of things that Mother freaked out when she found out about. Especially the mushrooms." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm sure there are demons - and angels and maybe even particularly determined fairies - who play around with eating poison as a hobby, and I've tried antifreeze once myself, and like literally everything someone could be interested in there are probably surprising depths to the pastime. The standard demon eatery has mostly food a regular human could eat though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. Well, I can't complain about the results." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh good. Here, have dessert." He can make a little ice platform for a big cheesecake in her foodtub so it doesn't touch the salmon residue, which the Scrubbaâ„¢ hasn't gotten to yet.

And he picks up his research on how they will be retrieving the late Mr. Franklin again.

Permalink Mark Unread

CHEESECAKE IS AWESOME. 

Permalink Mark Unread

He can continue to find useful tweaks for at least a few more days. 

Permalink Mark Unread

And when it's as good as can be:

"Ready to try to raise the dead?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ready and willing." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Eeeeeeeeeee." Bounce bounce bounce. 

Permalink Mark Unread

One fresh Ben Franklin corpse with patched up lungs, go.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

The spell goes off without a hitch. 

Benjamin Franklin opens his eyes. He inhales, then his brow furrows and he breathes again. 

He sits up and looks around. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hello, Mr. Franklin! How are you feeling?"

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"My chest doesn't hurt. Is this Heaven?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It is not! This is an orbital habitat above the Atlantic Ocean I made for doing magic experiments on. I suspected you'd be okay with being the subject of a resurrection experiment based on your writings on the topic. It's delightful to meet you; I'm Cam, that's Wilbur, and the invisible party over there is Lucy."

Permalink Mark Unread

...He looks at where Cam indicated an invisible party. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hi," Lucy supplies helpfully. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Ben Franklin returns his attention to Cam. "Who are you? Why are we over the Atlantic? How are we over the Atlantic? Why do you have wings and why is the lady over there invisible?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm Cam, like I said. The Atlantic happened to be closer than the Pacific. We flew here in a flying vehicle. I made the wings; I can make arbitrary material objects. She is invisible for peculiar heritage reasons."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean are you with a government or other organization or working alone. How can you make arbitrary material objects? How arbitrary is arbitrary? What kind of peculiar heritage reasons?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am working alone. Well, Wilbur and Lucy are consulting. I have magical powers because I am from another dimension; arbitrary is pretty arbitrary with limits like 'it'd take me a few weeks to make a planet' and 'not antimatter' - antimatter being stuff that is the opposite of matter and mutually annihilates it if they come into contact. Their dad is some kind of monstery god thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"--Monstery how?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Monstery as in if he were ever fully summoned to this plane of existence life as we know it would cease to exist. We're fairly sure the same doesn't apply to us." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I...see." To Cam: "So does that mean you can naively create machines to perform specific tasks, is that how--" and he sweeps an arm to indicate the whole room. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, that's not how - I have to know what I'm making, or copy something. In the alternate dimension I'm from it's 2157. Here it's only 1928, they've got some advances you haven't seen but I'm way ahead."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Oh." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Welcome to the future!" Wag wag wag.

Permalink Mark Unread

"What has happened to my country?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"The US enjoys a prolonged period as the most wealthy and powerful nation in the world. It also commits some atrocities but most powerful nations get around to that."

Permalink Mark Unread

Frown. "What kind of atrocities?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uh, took a long time to get around to ending slavery, and though it has happened by this year it takes a long time to calm down remaining racism. In my world there was this big war against among other participants Japan and the United States decided to round up its Japanese residents and put them in concentration camps, and also dropped two very destructive weapons on Japan about it, and there's not really a plausible story where this was connected to any of the genuinely bad things Japan was up to in the Pacific theater, that seems to have been a coincidence. Lots of invading random Middle Eastern countries and propping up dictatorships in South America for economic reasons. By 2157 things have settled down a whole lot, though, and I bet this world can skip a lot of crap."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh. Well. I'm glad that slavery has been dealt with." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Me too!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"What else happened?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Treatment of Native Americans was awful for an embarrassingly long time, the Vietnam War was real bad... perhaps you would like to hear about some non-atrocities, like the invention of the airplane, that was a couple Americans, and also you're credited with discovering electricity and boy howdy does that take off, lots and lots of inventions happen in America actually."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh good," he says, pleased. "What's an 'airplane,' is it what we're in now?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"This is a lot of steps past airplanes, but it does build on some of what was learned in the course of refining airplanes! This is a space station. I didn't want to try magic like resurrecting people planetside when it was reasonably easy to just not do that."

Permalink Mark Unread

Blink. "Why not?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The magic system this Earth is working with is very spooky and includes a lot of warnings about ending the world and hostile alien life forms. Plus there was a carefully minimized but perhaps not eliminated risk that you would awaken craving human flesh - it's not actually a serious problem if you do since I can make human flesh but imagine if you'd run off to eat somebody before I explained that?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wouldn't do that!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You seem very personable! But this was an experiment, we don't yet know a lot about how resurrectees tend to turn out."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Was hunger for human flesh a serious risk?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"These notes didn't exactly have graphs and likelihood ratios but it did come up. I was very careful, which is supposed to help."

Permalink Mark Unread

Benjamin Franklin looks at the resurrection diagram dubiously. "Well, I certainly don't feel any urge to consume human flesh right now."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Great! Do you want to consume anything more normal? I fixed your lungs before I made your body since I looked up what you died of and patched up various other things that tend to be wrong with people your age but I didn't attend to your appetite in the process."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, that would be lovely."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I hear Thomas Jefferson made terrible macaroni and cheese, do you want to try it in a better incarnation?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Yes, I think I do."

Permalink Mark Unread

Mac and cheese for everybody! Bacon wrapped asparagus on the side.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Yes, this is immeasurably better than Jefferson's slop."

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam giggles. "Delighted to hear it."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"So," he says, after the meal is finished, "how would you describe your intentions?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Promoting the flourishing of all sapient beings?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Little smile. "How? What's next?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, I don't want to go nuts and start resurrecting a thousand people a day, but we could stand to have a bigger sample size since you appear to be fine. It'll be more efficient to cut down on causes of death - material scarcity and diseases and so on. I already triggered the process that will lead to the extinction of the malarial mosquito, everything else is going to need some social engineering probably."

Permalink Mark Unread

"--The extinction of the malarial mosquito?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"They suck! Literally!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You just eradicated malaria!?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It takes a few mosquito generations and it's possible I undershot or missed a spot but yes."

Permalink Mark Unread

He opens his mouth. He closes his mouth. 

 

"Thank you." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're welcome!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you have anything else similarly momentous under your hat?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Tell him about vaccines," Lucy says gleefully. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"He knows about inoculation, he has surviving writing on the subject. Vaccines get very popular, safer, and more effective, and work great. - Smallpox in particular was eradicated from the face of the Earth. Formally declared in 1980, last case in 1977."

Permalink Mark Unread

"--Which would mean that smallpox has been eradicated from your Earth but not ours," Lucy says, noting the dates. "How did that happen?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Really aggressive global vaccination and quarantine campaign! It was before daeva were even common knowledge."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"So this is one of those things that requires--social engineering?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes. I can skip a lot of steps because I can travel anywhere in the world very fast and make arbitrary material objects, and it might be I can shortcut a lot of things if it turns out to be a good idea to teach everybody how to summon more daeva. But I can't just eradicate a carrier species for every ailment."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It seems to me that in testing your resurrection apparatus you have stumbled across a competent social engineer." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not sure how we do the part where we announce you're alive."

Permalink Mark Unread

"--How am I remembered?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Positively! It winds up being very important for that that you were an abolitionist who actually stopped owning slaves during your lifetime; that bites a lot of your contemporaries' legacies, especially Jefferson."

Permalink Mark Unread

He looks pleased at that. "Well, there are two obvious routes around that--one is to frontload further experiments in resurrection and strategy about how to unveil it, and then capitalize on my existing reputation; the other is to catch up on the modern--that is to say, present, rather than my time or yours--political landscape and attempt to perform social engineering from a new identity--which I suspect would still be my forte, but I could be mistaken." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"You are probably way better at politics than me even without the advantage of being Ben Franklin," acknowledges Cam. "I think since you don't have any weird resurrection-related symptoms these kids' mom is next," he gestures at the location of Lucy, and at Wilbur, "but after that I'm happy to perform more, and in between I can provide whatever research material would be handy - lemme find you a booklist about the history of the nineteenth century -" He rummages in his computer. "Do you want these paper copy or on a device like this?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"--Paper for until I figure out the device." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"You got it." Stack of books. "Let me know if you need help with all the dialect shifts over time or wanna follow up on a reference or anything."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Understood." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Shall I go ahead and get your mom now?" Cam asks the twins.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yesyesyeysyesyesplease." 

Permalink Mark Unread

Nod. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam starts setting up a second resurrection.

Permalink Mark Unread

Ben Franklin watches, fascinated. 

Permalink Mark Unread

As long as he doesn't look like he's gonna touch anything!

Here is the pre-mauling yet dead body of Mom Whatley. Here is a magic spell.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Her eyes blink open. 

She sits up. 

Her eyes light on Cam. 

"Who are you? Where am I?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hello! My name is Cam and your kids are over there."

Permalink Mark Unread

She twists around and looks. Her eyes light on Wilbur and then trace along the floor until they successfully alight on the place where Lucy is standing. 

"Wilbur? Lucy? What happened?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

Instead of answering, Lucy makes an inhuman-sounding noise and surges forward, and scoops her mother up into the air in a many-limbed hug. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Lots of things have happened," Wilbur says. "I'll fill you in on the details later, but--Cam is from another dimension, he has the power to conjure arbitrary material objects as long as they're well-specified enough--he managed better copies of Grandfather's books, cobbled together a resurrection ritual and tested it on Benjamin Franklin." 

Permalink Mark Unread

...Lavinia follows her son's gaze towards Ben Franklin, who she briefly gapes at. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I thought he wouldn't object," explains Cam.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I do not," Ben Franklin says, standing up and bowing. "Good day, dear lady, and may your return to the land of the living be as fortuitous as I have found my own." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"--Benjamin Franklin just called me dear lady," she says, burying her face in her daughter's side with a giggle. "And here I thought I had come to expect anything life could throw at me." 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam grins and wags his tail. "Can I get you anything, Ms. Whatley?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uh--well, I'll want food and a change of clothes at some point--where are we, this is not the house." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's a space station. I'm from an alternate universe in which it is the year 2159. Lemme know whenever you get hungry."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Will do. Why are we in space? Is that simply the done thing in 2159?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Cam didn't want to perform the initial resurrection experiments on an inhabited planet." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"--Wilbur John Whately--"

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's why Benjamin Franklin went first!" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"So what was the concerning failure mode?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ambiguously overriding desire for human flesh, plus anything the documentation he put it together from didn't warn about." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, I don't experience anything like that, thank God. Although I suppose it would have been merely inconvenient, given the ability to generate arbitrary material objects." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes. I would have still tried it if for whatever reason it were inconvenient to get into space but it wasn't at all."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Even with the ability to supply unlimited human flesh that had never been a person I've certainly met people I wouldn't want to allow wandering the Earth with an appetite for the stuff." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's also that, though you come with character witnesses."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm sure--God, have you two gotten bigger?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Wince.

"It's been almost two years." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Well, I suppose I'm glad it wasn't longer." 

Permalink Mark Unread

Permalink Mark Unread

"--Does the body have to be identical to the real corpse immediately after it died? My father--he helped raise the twins--he was very old--" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It does not have to be identical - I fixed Mr. Franklin's lungs and pulled your state from right before you were hurt - but I don't know the exact tolerances and in particular I'd worry that using a younger body would risk losing some memories of the later life, though there's nothing in the literature about it either way since the spell's authors didn't have my affordances."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...If it's informative, I do remember being--hurt."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That is informative. If you want, I can try for your father with a younger body."

Permalink Mark Unread

Nod. "He wouldn't mind being an experimental subject, he'd think it was marvelous." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I will get on that then."

He sets up.

Permalink Mark Unread

Mom Whately retreats somewhere private with Kids Whately to discuss features of how she died and the intervening two years that they would rather not immediately air in front of a Founding Father. 

Permalink Mark Unread

A Founding Father would like to know more about the process, if Cam's amenable. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure! Here's my procedural writeup, I cobbled it together from a chain of sources - some of it's Arabic and stuff -"

Permalink Mark Unread

If any of the stuff is French or Italian he can read that. Anything else he'll need translated. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam has not rendered anything into French or Italian that was not already that way. He can translate the Arabic.

Permalink Mark Unread

Ben Franklin is fascinated. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"This part I'm hoping can exponentiate," he says. "Even if more daeva can't be summoned, more people can be trained to do resurrections and then I just need to make bodies."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It would have to be treated very carefully--I wonder if your conjurations could specify between someone resurrected correctly and one who craves human flesh." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"That doesn't naively seem like a conjurable parameter. How'd - oh, there's probably footnotes about the historical forensics in some of your books."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Indeed. Honestly, everything about your world is incredibly interesting." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm glad you think so!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I find myself tempted to simply get lost in a sea of books! But that's best left at least until all the low-hanging fruit has been plucked on bringing this one up to par." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean, mine's a really useful case study. For instance, we have time to intervene before World War II!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Time to intervene before what?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"They rename the Great War to World War I and then there's a II and it's worse."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"I suppose I only got the summary of the American atrocities." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, the Japanese internment thing was a World War II thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Ah." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"But the big ticket items lifesaving-wise in that vicinity are mostly going on in Europe and Russia and China. I think it can be done, but there's enough I want to destabilize before then - were you all aware Communism's a bad idea? It requires real delicate conditions to work at all and nobody right now has them - that there's no way to be sure everything'll be where it's expected by then."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It didn't exist when I was alive the first time, and I hadn't read enough about it yet to have a firm opinion." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's a bad idea. So many people die. Best angle on it is probably ending material scarcity with daeva summoning and a tech jump."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That sounds much more straightforward than questionable political philosophy." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes. But testing whether it can be done without stranding daeva here will be delicate. I've written home for a volunteer but haven't gotten any replies yet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What kind of person would you expect to volunteer?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, history nerds? Altruists? Some demon who wants kids and would bet on being able to adopt some here?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Demons can't have children?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Daeva can't reproduce. Demons are the ones I can write to from here."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Daeva can't have children," he corrects himself agreeably, "why not?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The oversimplified answer is we don't have the necessary ingredients, but that's not the real problem, since demons at least could make them - daeva are indestructible. I could go fly into the sun, and while I would have a hard time getting out again without harming the sun I wouldn't be more than moderately uncomfortable in the process. The way this works has to do with our concept of the boundaries of our bodies: I can cut my hair if I want, but you can't cut my hair if I don't want. If you decide out of an impulse to mad science to graft an appendage onto a consenting daeva subject who then agrees to be knocked unconscious so you don't have to worry about them deciding that actually they like the new appendage and want to keep it, the appendage dies, because it's not incorporated into the thing that's holding us together. Demon women who've tried just sticking a zygote where it would naively belong have had one of two things happen - they incorporate the zygote into their self-concept and it stops growing, or they don't and it dies."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Bizarre...but in an oddly sensible way." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yup!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, if we can empty the orphanages in exchange for ushering in a utopia of unlimited material wealth, I can't think of anyone who wouldn't be better off." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I know, right?" Wag wag. "I should expressly CC some of those interest groups, actually, that might get me a quicker response and there are just orphans all over the place before folks really get the hang of contraception..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Contraception?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Assorted methods of preventing pregnancy."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We do have those. I take it the future gets better at it?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Much better. More set-and-forget, fewer side effects, more reliable."

Permalink Mark Unread

"How does that work?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Pills, implants, reversible surgeries that are a lot more hassle-free when there are angels around."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ahhhh." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have my medical quals if you want something along the lines."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Probably wise." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"All right, an implant in the arm's easy, it'll take effect in six hours, let me know if you have any side effects - pick an arm."

Permalink Mark Unread

He holds out his left arm. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam pokes around till he finds a good spot, then numbs it and adds an implant. "There you go."

Permalink Mark Unread

He looks at his arm and prods the spot. "Thank you." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Anaesthetic wears off in fifteen minutes, it shouldn't hurt after that but if it does and it's bugging you I can hit you with another dose no problem."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll keep that in mind." He lowers his arm and nods approvingly. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Snort. "Enjoy. I'm gonna resurrect another guy, then read more about early Communism and Naziism until I have an idea of what metaphorical butterflies to step on."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Naziism?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"German authoritarian party, very bad news."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Aha." Benjamin Franklin goes back to Cam's books. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam asks Ms. Whatley, "How young did you want him?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I want to say fifty, it would be odd if he was younger than I, but it seems unkind to do that just to flatter my sensibilities. Thirty?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thirty it is!" says Cam, and he gets underway. He times himself.

Permalink Mark Unread

And just over thirty-three minutes into the count, the ritual finishes and the body on the floor jerks and opens its eyes. 

He looks around wildly for a moment, then pushes himself into a sitting position and demands, "Lavinney, Wilbur, what is going on?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm here too," Lucy offers invisibly. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"--In front of people?" her grandfather says, taken somewhat aback, looking between Cam and Benjamin Franklin. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Wilbur accidentally summoned a demon," she gestures to Cam, "who agreed to feed Lucy in exchange for help navigating the eradication of malaria and, later, death as we know it. This is Benjamin Franklin, the first experimental resurrection subject. You're number three." 

Permalink Mark Unread

Old Whately does a double-take at Benjamin Franklin, before warily asking "...So who's number two." 

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Me. I died two years after you did." 

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Well now it is time to be standing up and hugging his daughter. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Hugs are good. But-- "Don't fret, it was an accident, not illness. Much quicker, and I'm fine now." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"If any of you does get sick I can most likely fix it unless you have something especially pernicious, although now that I think of it I should probably vaccinate you all against everything."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That does sound like a good idea--you could gloss the way Father died as 'sickness' or 'old age' or 'heart problems' but whichever way it wasn't pretty or painless." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can't vaccinate you against old age. Humans in my world still age and die. But it turns out resurrecting people in younger bodies works fine so there's that! Let me figure out the densest safe vaccine course for everything that's around now that has a modern-quality vaccine developed - some things I will not be able to manage vaccinations for just because they weren't going concerns by the time immunology was a major deal, or were handled in other ways -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Handled in other ways?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, like, I'm going to skip malaria because I've started the extinction process on the carrier mosquitoes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, that." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yup. Also, there are some things I know how to cure which have vaccines that are risky or contraindicated by other vaccines, and those I'm going to at least postpone because if you catch those things I can just fix it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Demons are great." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm so glad you think so."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I hope nothing inhuman has very nasty diseases since your dimension doesn't really have non-human mortals." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I too hope this. I mean, if you get something really baffling I can try really aggressive transplanting and transfusing everything that looks suspicious, but that's not gonna help if it gets you in the brain and that'll tend to stress your system pretty bad anyway."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Fish-people don't die of old age, at least." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, good for them!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sadly the Necronomicon has less to say about epidemiology." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"The scientific method will apply even if nothing I happen to already know does."

Permalink Mark Unread

"True enough. Although we don't know that they don't have that already." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, but they probably don't have, say, really good microscopes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Those might be harder to make underwater," he agrees. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Lots of things seem like they would be, I'm excited to learn about their state of tech."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can't you just check?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I could conjure their stuff but I would not exactly be able to read the instruction manuals."

Permalink Mark Unread

"True. And they're probably not very high on the priority list." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Even if they're about to have their own World War II, I don't know where to start looking for ways to avert it," Cam agrees.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Let's hope it doesn't come to that." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hear, hear."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Does 2159 still have wars?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"There are no ongoing wars as of my departure from 2159 and haven't been in decades."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Were there any wars after daeva?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes. Fortunately, daeva are people and don't start out super-interested in human partisanship."

Permalink Mark Unread

"There are billions, though, you said;" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, but the options when summoning are to go for an individual one you can identify or to offer a general summons and get the first taker. You can't try to summon specifically people who are really invested in exterminating your Buddhist minority or whatever."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh. That's good." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It can still get ugly, but a lot of the reasons people have wars are obviated when they don't have any material scarcity."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I thought wars were mostly about people hating each other." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"That features, but it's less likely to seem violently urgent if you're comfortable."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ooh, yeah, that makes sense." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"So daeva didn't instantly bring about world peace but it helped a lot."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It sounds like demons were a bigger impact than angels or fairies." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not as much as you'd think! For one thing, people are more reluctant to summon demons if they can make do without. We're harder to pay, because you can't pay us in any material objects, and people are often scared of us in ways that make negotiating even harder. It's still done, but not by everybody in their backyard. For another thing, by the early twenty-first century, when daeva became common knowledge, a lot of scarcity was driven by the cost of shipping, and fairies cut that down to almost nothing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why are people more scared of demons than angels or fairies?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Probably the name if nothing else, dearheart." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh. Right." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"The name and the being hard to pay. The fact that we're hard to pay plus the fact that summons are voluntary - exacerbated enormously by the fact that it's customary to summon demons without letting us talk for fear we'll convince somebody out of their soul - means that a disproportionate fraction of demons who show up to a random summons are there to have a laugh upsetting some human."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Wait, they don't let you talk?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not usually! Sometimes they do, but this is the first summon I've been on where I could talk."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's...dumb." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you think we could prevent it if we introduce summoning here?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I think so. It seemed pretty path-dependent. One jerk with a book deal."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ugh. What happened to him?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nothing? He sold a bunch of books and died of old age."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean what kind of daeva--he was a summoner, right--" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh! I don't remember if I've ever checked but probably a fairy, most people are."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is there a reason?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know for sure but I think it's sorted by personality suitability to the magic. And more people are the sort of person who moves stuff around than the sort of person who changes things or makes things."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh. I'd like to think of myself as a changer but I don't know if that's accurate." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know either, and this is only a guess about how it works anyway."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I almost hope I'm wrong. Demons have the best powers." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"We do! Being a fairy has its advantages - I hear floating midair is supremely comfortable - but I'd pick demon every time."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can just get all the books at any time!" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes I can. It's great."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The other stuff about being a demon is also extremely cool but the books." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"And all the other sorts of media, which get cooler in the future."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is there anything that doesn't get cooler in the future?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"You have to plan special trips to go stargazing because too much stuff is lit up at night."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Unless you're in space, I'm guessing." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, stuff in space is lit up too. I mean, you can still get a great look at the stars because there's no atmosphere but for a truly unencumbered look at 'em you need to get a fairy to take you and a bubble of air out a few thousand miles from anything."

Permalink Mark Unread

Bounce. "Somehow I'm not getting a 'not cool' vibe from that sentence." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean, sure! Fairy stargazing trips are very cool. But having to take one to get away from light pollution isn't. Oh, also a bunch of species have gone extinct, which demons can fix, and a bunch of languages have too, which we can't."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can't? ...I guess if the language didn't have a written form..." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Most languages in danger don't, or they just have a crappy attempt to transliterate into Latin orthography."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And if they don't have a written language, they're probably not summoning?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Right. It's not a priority next to all the public health and anti-war stuff that needs doing but it'll be nice if I can do a full summoning rollout and incidentally some Osage speakers summon somebody and some immortal daeva get their languages in the process."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And they wouldn't become immortal daeva themselves," she sighs. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, ideally they will, but weirdly enough languages acquired through summoning stick better than languages learned the long way."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They do? Really?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah. There seem to be a few things going on there - one is that a summon-acquired language is sort of a snapshot of a dialect in time. It can be used to participate in the language community as it develops, someone with summoning-acquired Portuguese is just as good at it as whoever summoned them in that regard as in anything else, but the summoner's Portuguese will adapt over time to the new vocabulary - they'll have all the new associations with words that change in meaning over their lifetime, they'll forget vocabulary that falls out of fashion, they'll feel awkward using sentence constructions that are no longer popular. The daeva can revert to Portuguese-as-spoken-at-time-of-summon any time. And there doesn't seem to be a limit to how many languages we can hold that way. I only know a handful of languages the long way but I've got dozens from summonses."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Being a daeva sounds so cool," she sighs. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's pretty great. I'll check my mail on the hour and see if anybody wants to be a test subject and you can summon 'em if you want."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yay!" 

Permalink Mark Unread

Further background reading ensues until Cam's reminder to check his mail goes off. "Got one! She's gonna want to go adopt a baby. Apparently she has recommendations from six different baby-related interest groups, wow."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Should we maybe have an adoptable baby sourced before we summon her?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you have one in mind? It didn't sound like she'd mind prowling orphanages on her own."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't have one in mind, I'm just...concerned what might happen if she stands out in the wrong way. Not anything specific, just a sort of nebulous sense of unease." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"The thing that's worrying me a little is that she's - well, she looks like a naturally occurring daeva, but in a dark-skinned way, so she'll probably get read as black."

Permalink Mark Unread

"--What do naturally occurring daeva look like?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uncorrelated mixes of ethnic features. Here's her picture on one of her recommendation letters." He displays it. "So at a glance she looks black but the hair looks more like what you'd find on an Asian person, same with the eyes except they're green, the nose looks European to me, if for some reason I were just looking at her skeleton I think I'd guess Polynesian build? All blended up like that, matching human patterns only by coincidence."

Permalink Mark Unread

"--Yes, she'd be read as colored. She does look oddly mixed, to me, but it's not like people with mixed ancestry get the benefit of the doubt." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes. Might make adopting a baby hard, at least in the United States. I guess I could suggest she bleach herself."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe--but given that she has no legal identity, it might be easier to find an under-the-table adoption if she presents as a wealthy colored woman looking for a colored baby than an odd-looking white woman looking for a white baby." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe. I don't know how much she's going to care about the exact details of the baby, some folks of this type build up weirdly specific fantasies about the babies they imagine they will one day have if demon/human relations ever improve, maybe she wants a Vietnamese one in particular or something... or, more likely, she wants one whose birth mother was eating decently and not under a lot of stress during the pregnancy, because that affects lots of things..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can't say as I know much about adoption, but she's not going to have much luck getting a baby in this country who isn't the same color people think she is." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe she's already frantically researching 1928 adoption practices in South America."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That is possible." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll let her know. I think probably a majority of the demons who want to adopt are going to be naturally occurring - even if the ex-humans are more likely to be interested in children, there are way fewer of them and they're likely to have already had a shot at it while human - but some naturally-occurrings could probably pass better than this one."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do naturally occurring angels and fairies look the same way?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes. The wings are different."

Permalink Mark Unread

"How do people deal with that in the future?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"With what, people being assorted colors? Way less of a going concern in general."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Oh. Good. Makes it harder to steal a solution--unless stealing the solution to race prejudice in general is possible--" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Unfortunately it was lots of slow attitude shifts punctuated by costly activism."

Permalink Mark Unread

Sigh. "I was afraid it would be something like that." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Very inconvenient," he agrees. "Probably material abundance will help."

Permalink Mark Unread

"One would hope." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Material abundance from, hopefully, a colorful bunch of demons. I'll write to Mrindeh."

Permalink Mark Unread

She nods and sits back thoughtfully. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam composes his letter but the response isn't instant so he goes back to reading.

Permalink Mark Unread

Lavinia chews her lip and pores over her son's copy of the Necronomicon. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Eventually Cam has a reply from Mrindeh. "She says she's prepared to go door to door in Alabama if that's what it takes, if she can get summoned here."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can't say I'm unsympathetic to that point of view," she says, reaching over to pat one of her daughter's tentacles. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll make most of the circle, give me a few to readjust a standard fairy adoption binding to cover demon magic."

Permalink Mark Unread

(Lucy processes the implications of that sentence and makes a face no one else can see.)

"'Kay." 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam adjusts a circle. He produces it on the floor on paper, with a marker. "Little gap right there."

Permalink Mark Unread

Squeaky squerk goes the marker. 

Permalink Mark Unread

And there appears Mrindeh! "So soon!" she says. "Not that I mind, I mean. Hello! It's nice to meet you all!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hi!" Lucy says, waving the marker, still invisible.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is the idea that you try to dismiss me, to make sure that works, and then if it does I come back and go looking for a baby and if it doesn't I also go looking for a baby?" confirms Mrindeh, looking uncertainly at the area behind the marker.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah--I'm invisible, sorry," she adds. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, as far as I know it's not rude to be invisible, don't worry about it," says Mrindeh. "I've just never met an invisible person before."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't think it can be rude for me to be invisible when I can't turn it off but I thought it might be confusing." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's all right," Mrindeh assures her. "Do you know how to dismiss me?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah," she says, and concentrates on wanting Mrindeh gone. 

Permalink Mark Unread

And a minute later, Mrindeh is gone.

Cam replaces the circle with a new one on top.

Permalink Mark Unread

Lavinia completes this one. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hello again!" says Mrindeh.

"Hi!" says Cam. "There's signage for the bathrooms if you want to take your wings off before you go dirtside. Can you fly a shuttle?"

"Some kinds."

"Well, feel free to make your own and let yourself out the docking bay. You have my mail label."

"Thanks!" says Mrindeh, beaming.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Good luck." 

Permalink Mark Unread

Out Mrindeh goes. Cam starts humming to himself as he picks up his reading again, tail a-wag.

Permalink Mark Unread

Mild floor seismics indicate that Lucy is bouncing. 

Permalink Mark Unread

...giggle.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

After a while: "Hey I just had a concerning thought." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We know fish-people don't lay eggs, and there's no reason to think gorilla-people wouldn't work like normal mammals, but we weren't expecting the gorilla-people and there might be more kinds of people we weren't expecting and I don't know how the Mi-Go reproduce and that doesn't even get started on the Elder Things and other things the books talk about or hint at."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, you guys exist, which isn't definitive but does suggest that perhaps not-eggs for whatever your dad is. I can check Mi-Go..." Mi-Go mini plasticized egg?

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't even know what's up with whatever our dad is." 

No egg. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"No egg. This doesn't guarantee they can't be made, though. Even human zygotes can be made and turn out fine, the thing is just that there isn't a suitable environment for them to grow in Hell. If they grow from single cells of adults like sponges can or something and they don't need anything complicated to live in while they're doing that, they can be made."

Permalink Mark Unread

"How long until someone finds out, do you think, if there's something to find out?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I really don't know. Most people wouldn't be inclined, but the people who would might be disproportionately interested in the kinds of news that'll pop up out of this dimension."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. Man, I hope this doesn't turn out to be a disaster." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think the upside potential is probably too important to pass up but I will keep an eye out for Mi-Go hatching enthusiasts or whatever back in Hell."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah." Unhappy sigh. "I don't even know if the Mi-Go think like humans do." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"What do you mean?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean the Necronomicon compares them to fungus and insects and they're from space and their brains could be totally different from humans in a way that makes them not baby satisfyingly." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, with Mrindeh able to just walk the streets and find an orphan to scoop up I don't think anybody's going to try to raise Mi-Go because they want a kid, not when we could easily find babies for a million like her, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't strike someone as interesting."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh. Yeah, that's a different problem." Sigh. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm going to have to carefully consider exact timing for the rollout if I'm hoping to run any significant amount of the infrastructure on demons adopting babies. Since there's also resurrection and orphans don't have to stay that way."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe some ex-summoner demon men will want to marry human women." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe! Plus I'm sure people can come up with other things to trade - art commissions in particular are a good option."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"I wonder if I'm any good at art. I can find out now." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why couldn't you before?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean I ever drew stuff when I was little but it's hard when you're not much smaller than the room you live in and much bigger than the door and the neighbors would probably kill you if they knew you existed. And we didn't really have the stuff for anything other than pencil sketches or a good way to get it." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, your computer's got art programs on it, let me know if you want some physical media."

Permalink Mark Unread

Bounce. "Are there--computers with bigger screens for drawing bigger things on?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"There are! How big you want?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Umm. Six feet by six feet?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Lemme look up a good model, I'm not a visual artist myself..." He rummages in his computer and then makes her a nice big square of drawing tablet against a wall.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Awesome," she says gleefully, and starts poking at it. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Permalink Mark Unread

Wag wag.

Reading and plotting.

Permalink Mark Unread

A while later, Wilbur says, "Is there a particular reason to stay off-planet now that the preliminary resurrection experiments have failed to end in disaster? Because I have ongoing correspondences with several other occultists, and that seems like a reasonable place to start if we want to test the waters on unveiling any of this, and if there's a way to send letters from space compatible with the current technology level I don't know it." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, sure, we can go down. Do you want to go back to your place?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'd rather not. I can include a change of address in my letters, and the old place has little to recommend it, particularly not the neighbors." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you have a preference?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Near enough to human habitation to send mail but remote enough that Lucy can move about relatively freely." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, I guess we can write Mrindeh and see where she's planning to settle." He does that.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Thank you. So much. For everything." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're welcome."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I haven't seen Lucy this happy in years." 

Permalink Mark Unread

- Cam refrains from punning.

Permalink Mark Unread

"--Oh, you know what I mean." 

Permalink Mark Unread

Giggle. "Yes, I do." Conjure. "Mrindeh's in New Orleans. Do you fancy Louisiana?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Louisiana sounds fine." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"To the shuttle. If you're invested in what you're working on on that drawing board we can wheel it in, Lucy."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If it'd be more convenient to make another one on the ground that's fine," Lucy says, abandoning it but scooping up the smaller tablet with her schoolwork on it. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"If would be, a bit." When everyone is aboard the ship he looks up a nice rural area accessible to Louisiana that is not currently developed or on record as owned.

Permalink Mark Unread

There are any of those. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Then there he will fly. "Welcome to Louisiana, everyone."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's warmer," Lucy observes, scurrying out of the ship. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, it gets hot here. I'll make us an air conditioning system when I'm designing the house."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't mind the heat," she says thoughtfully. "Or the cold. But that'll be convenient for people more human than me." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, you have weird tolerances?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Back when I was small enough to go outside I used to play in the snow in the winter even though I've never met a coat I could wear." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am glad your limited apparel options did not deprive you of playing in the snow."

Permalink Mark Unread

Smugly: "I'm the best at snowball fights." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I bet! It doesn't snow here but since summoning works normally you can get fairies to take you snowy places sometimes probably."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah. Admittedly I would probably not be the best in a snowball fight that included a fairy." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Depends on what rules you make the fairy follow. If they can assemble ammunition magically but still have to throw the balls with their hands you could probably beat a lot of them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It really doesn't seem fair to make someone having a snowball fight with me use only hands for anything." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Then yes. You'd be immediately buried in snow."

Permalink Mark Unread

Giggle. "My computer doesn't have a summoning curriculum, can I have one?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, with the caution that until you're really solid at it you don't want to summon strangers with a homemade circle. Even professionals usually start with preprint templates."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's fair. We got really lucky with you." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think a lot of people wouldn't have made awful trouble, but yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They wouldn't even have to make trouble for us to be really lucky we got you." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I rather agree."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What kinds of things do fairies take in trade?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The classic flippant answer is 'a batch of cookies' but anything that'd be harder for them to get or make in Fairyland than it is for them to do the job will typically do. Ideally it'd have resale value."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay, we can work with that." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Fairyland is no Hell but they do have high tech, so you'll want stuff that's still useful in that context - yes potted plants and food and even, like, authentic 1920s clothing, but not a telephone unless they're assessing it for its value as a... parallel dimension antique."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I was definitely thinking of stuff more like plants and food than telephones. I don't think we could make a telephone by hand so if we wanted to give a fairy one we'd have to ask you for it and if we're doing that why a telephone." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean if you go out and buy one."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"It's gonna take me a while to get used to living somewhere the neighbors don't know and hate us." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I suppose you'd still have some trouble making a shopping trip? But you could hire somebody to go shopping, probably."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Wilbur could go. Or Mother, or Grandfather, but Wilbur doesn't tire as easily, and it's enough of a walk that that might matter." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am confident the car has been invented by now."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Oh, yeah, those exist." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"They do! And won't even attract that much attention. Though I will have to teach you to drive."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, not me, I wouldn't fit, but yeah. I mean I guess you could make a car I could learn to drive but that would attract attention." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Quite. I suppose you would probably have mentioned by now if you had a set of wings in there somewhere."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wish." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Inconvenient. I know how to attach them to a regular frame but wouldn't know where to start with you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not even sure if normal visible wings would be compatible with the stuff I'm made of." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"No? You eat normal stuff."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, but I don't, like, have normal blood. Wings whose cells expected to be fueled by normal blood might find themselves disappointed." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh. What do you have instead?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know what to call it but it's yellow-green and more viscous than normal blood. And has a stronger smell." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh. Well, blood does come in different colors, horseshoe crabs have it blue, but maybe it's technically peculiar lymph or something, couldn't tell you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have no idea but I'm pretty sure it's a Yog-Sothoth thing and I expect Yog-Sothoth things to be weirder than crab things." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Seems likely."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Wilbur's way more human-shaped than me and he has the weird blood too." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Honestly it's bizarre that crossbreeds work at all."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think the answer to that one is probably magic." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, probably. Not a very explanatory answer."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well. No. But science has to start somewhere." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"This is true. Do you have some science you want to do?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think I want to learn more non-occult chemistry before I try doing chemistry to any of my own tissues but that's the first place I'd start." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, let me know if you run into a dead end on your computer."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I will. I'm glad I don't need to sleep much, putting this down to go to bed would be unbearable." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sleep is a frustrating need to have! How much do you need?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"A few hours a month." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's about as often as I sleep under normal circumstances."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why d'you sleep?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sometimes I'm reading a great book, forget to drink coffee during, and notice I'm tired and comfy and set up for a good shot at good dreams. That sort of thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh. Yeah, that sounds nice." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't expect that to happen for at least a year though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's so much stuff to do right now!" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah!" He wags. He checks his mail. "Mrindeh found a black orphanage."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Cool. I hope she and baby do well." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"She might want to settle near here, out of the way so nobody panics if she makes a replacement stuffed animal for one that goes missing or something."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If we do manage to overhaul everything a head start on being around strangeness might be an advantage for the kid." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm expecting things to change fast enough that it won't matter much whether a given person sees it first as an infant or as a toddler."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, fair." She considers this. "What do babies look like?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

He finds some pictures. "We can ask Mrindeh to bring hers by if you like."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think I'd like that. I've never been around a human baby before." 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam writes to this effect. "Mrindeh says she'd be happy to. Also she's adopted the local name Maria Williams."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What's the baby's name?" 

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"She has an orphanage, not a baby. Probably she's picking them all up to see which one metaphorically speaks to her or something."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Aww." 

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"It's a big decision! I'd expect it to take her a bit."

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"Yeah, it would be." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have a preliminary house design, but can I give you, like, a tape measure, to make sure the dimensions for the whole thing will accommodate you okay?"

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"Okay!" 

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Very long tape measure.

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Yeah this should work fine. 

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"All right, stand back, I'm gonna put in a house."

House!!!

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"You know, it's not that I didn't know it would take a lot of house to comfortably fit Lucy, but my goodness that is a lot of house." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Only most of it is designed to fit her, I didn't make everybody else's bedrooms accommodate her. But I did make a lot of bedrooms based on our current rate of accumulating people."

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"Entirely reasonable. I do wonder what we'll manage to stumble across next." 

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"I couldn't begin to guess!"

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"Maybe we'll meet a Deep One. But now that I'm expecting it, probably not." 

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"Are they expressly antipredictable that way?"

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"Them? No. Expressly? Also no." 

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"Hm?"

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"I was raised from the dead by an interdimensional formerly-human demon and then flirted with by Benjamin Franklin." 

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"He flirted with you? Should I be apologizing?"

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"No, no, it's fine. Nothing pushy. And I like imagining the looks on my old neighbors' faces if they ever found out." 

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Cam giggles. And leads the way into the house. Which is air conditioned.

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"Oh." 

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"Feel free to solicit decor, I left it pretty sparse to start out with."

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"I did not know it was possible to be this comfortable in the heat of summer." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Air conditioning is great. We can also control the humidity and if any of you are allergic to any local pollens they'll be filtered out on the way into the house."

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"None of us get hay fever. That can vary by region?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh yes. Different species of hay."

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"We'll let you know." 

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Wag wag wag. "Lucy, your room's the only one that has to be yours, I made everything with clearance for Wilbur since the floors worked out better that way -" He shows Lucy to her room. It is large and has her art board up.

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Awesome. 

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It also has her soft giant bed, though her food bathtub is absent, perhaps in the dining room instead. "Anything else you want in here?"

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"My blanket, please, I don't need it for the temperature but the texture is very good." 

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Blanket folded up at the foot of the giant bed.

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"Thanks!" she says, pulling the blanket over her and returning to her schoolwork. 

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"No problem!"

He goes and fields room decor requests from Wilbur, Lavinia, Lavinia's dad, and Benjamin Franklin.

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Ben Franklin and Lavinia's dad want books. Lavinia would like a map of their surroundings. Wilbur would like directions to somewhere he can post letters, and a vehicle if that's far enough away. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you know how to drive?"

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"...No. Is it hard?"

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"I mean, I can get you a car that drives itself but they're all trained on modern infrastructure and most of them rely heavily on global positioning satellites that there aren't any of here so you will need to do at least some of the work and yeah it's hard if you don't like crashing into things at forty miles an hour."

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"I would rather not empirically find out what kind of daeva I would be so soon, so yes, I'd say I like that." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"As I would have expected. I know how to drive. I'd suggest a bicycle but I'm not sure how those'd work with your knees."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I...expect I could manage...but I'm less sure I could manage without how my knees work becoming visible." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah. Car it is. I can get you an offroad model and a teaching program and it should be able to handle a 1928 road adequately and just don't go too fast if there's anything around. Ask me if you've got questions."

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"How fast is too fast?" 

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"I will get you a graph of survival data at various speeds of collision. Pick your own inflection point and mind that mind that we don't know if the turning into a daeva thing works for people here at all, let alone for your species varietal, and we don't know if the resurrection spell will work on you either."

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Grimace. "I don't intend to test any of the various hypotheses regarding my death, I promise." 

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Graph. Driving tutorial. Car with the guts of a self-piloting 2157 model and the body of an inoffensive Tin Lizzie.

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Great. What is a good speed to not die, he'll go with that. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam's graph shows a jump in fatality at twenty miles an hour, followed by a steady and concerning climb till it starts leveling off around fifty miles per hour. The curves for slight and moderate injury are angled more steeply and positioned a bit left.

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This "using cars" thing seems like maybe more trouble than it's cracked up to be. Under twenty miles an hour it is. 

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(The absolute risk in a car with modern safety features is pretty small, but the safety features were probably designed for people at least two feet shorter and slightly differently shaped than he is.)

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Yeah he's super going to err on the side of caution. He drives to the post office very slowly, posts his letters, and leaves. 

He's very aware of the gazes of the people around him--there's no avoiding that when you're nine feet tall. The people seem more curious than hostile, here, but it's still not something he feels able to handle gracefully at the moment, so he makes a minimum of conversation and, subsequently, his escape. 

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Meanwhile, Cam is reading up on Italian fascism. Exciting stuff.

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What little he's read about fascism has scared the bejeebers out of him and politics is not his comparative advantage so he's going to go study some books that are not about politics now. 

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And Lucy is likewise absorbed in her studies, but eventually she wants to take a break, and--

"Can I have a preprint fairy circle to go to Antarctica?" 

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"Sure. Do you want a fairy with good reviews off a list?"

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"Sure. What kinds of lists are there?" 

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"The big one is called Davidson's. They summon randoms and find out what they want and what they're good at and publish the results. If the first fairy you try is on summon at the moment, or busy, this takes longer than a random, but since you're new at summoning and a random could even well-bound try to trick or intimidate you, it's probably the better plan." He looks through Davidson's Fairy List.

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"Even though it's easy to pay fairies? Or easier, anyway." 

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"It's even easier to pay humans, wouldn't you say? Are those all nice?"

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"Well when you put it like that." 

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"Yup. Here's one with four point eight stars, no ones!" He produces the circle.

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"What do they want?" 

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"They're a reseller, I can make whatever they most want today for them."

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"Okay." 

She puts the circle down and finishes it. 

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There is a long delay. "Might be on summons, might be in the shower, who knows."

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"Do fairies need to take showers? Couldn't they just fling the dirt off?" 

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"It's harder for them to do stuff they can't see."

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"Huh." 

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"I'm sure some of them prefer telekinetic hygiene but I believe most of them have plumbing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wonder if it took fairies longer to invent plumbing since going to fetch water is easier for them." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Probably! I vaguely remember from some fairy history book I read that they routed early plumbing development through the desire for hot water."

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"That makes sense. Their earliest plumbing must have looked so different." 

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"Yeah," agrees Cam, and before either can say anything else, the fairy appears. He's got green and black butterfly wings, black eyes, brown skin, and red hair, and he's wearing a weirdly elaborate wrap in black and gold that goes between the wings.

"Hello, sum - wait, are you not a demon?" says the fairy.

"I'm a demon," says Cam.

"- okay, where's the summoner."

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"I'm the summoner. And invisible." 

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"...ha, ha. This is a paper circle..." says the fairy.

"No, she's actually invisible," says Cam. "She wants to go to Antarctica and be invisible there for a change. Do you need me to put a ribbon on her or something so you can see where she is, to pick her up?"

"Uh. Probably."

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"I'm also not human-shaped or human-sized, that's why this room is so big." 

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Cam produces some big ribbons. "I don't want to make them already tied, I don't know exactly where you are to get them the right amount of snug, you wanna tie those on?" he says.

"What is going on?" asks the fairy.

"New summons destination. Tell your friends."

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"This is another universe where it's 1928 and there's a bunch of kinds of people who aren't human." She ties some ribbons around various parts of herself, including one that goes all the way around to show how much floor she takes up and one that shows how high she goes. 

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"Is this reality TV?" asks the fairy.

"Nope," says Cam.

"Okay, but if it were you'd still say that..."

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"What's reality TV?" 

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"Do I need to start with the concept of television or just the genre?"

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"Just the genre." 

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"Placing people who are not actors, or are at least not explicitly playing characters, in irregular situations and then developing a narrative around their relatively unscripted responses."

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"I...see. Well, this isn't that, I'm self-conscious enough about being a barn-sized monstrosity as it is," she adds, a little unhappily. One of the tentacles with a ribbon wrapped around a few yards of its length curls around herself. 

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"I'll... see if I can pick you up," says the fairy dubiously. "Yell if I yank something wrong, I guess."

Being lifted in this way is not terribly comfortable, probably because he's mostly behaving like she's an ovoid defined by the circumference ribbons, but it doesn't hurt or anything.

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"You're not yanking anything wrong," she reports. 

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"Okay. Is your demon paying me?"

"Yeah, whaddaya want?" Cam asks.

The fairy has a list. Cam produces the stuff.

"Antarctica. Anywhere in particular?" the fairy asks Lucy.

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"Nah. Somewhere pretty, I guess." 

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"I'll see what I can do. You gotta confirm that we have a deal, trip for that stuff."

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"Trip for that stuff, deal," she agrees. 

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And the fairy scoops her up and Cam opens the door for them and out they go, south south south south here's Antarctica! He finds a spot with penguins.

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh wow penguins. 

The penguins don't like it if she comes too close but if she scoots far enough back she can watch them. After a little while she starts to get bored, moves farther off so as not to disturb the penguins, and starts rolling snow for the base of an enormous snowman. 

The wind over the mountains makes an odd, almost piping noise. 

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The fairy hangs around. Rights a toppled penguin. "How long you gonna stay? I could come back and pick you up if it's gonna be hours and hours."

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"It's probably gonna be hours and hours, I haven't gotten to play in the snow in a long time." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I could go have a look around, come back whenever you think you'll be done."

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"Let's say...five hours? Ish?" 

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"Sure, I'll set my timer. Don't go too far or take off the ribbons or I won't be able to find you, yeah?"

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"You might, I leave pretty obvious tracks. But I'll try not to go too far and I won't take off the ribbons." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"See you in five."

And he's off!

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She finishes the base of her snowman, then starts on the middle. There aren't any twigs or rocks or anything to embellish it, really, but she can pack the snow hard enough to make arms just out of snow, and she discovers to her delight that if she backs the base up against a cliff, she can scrabble up the cliff, her myriad tentacles easily latching to the tiniest imperfections in its surface, and place the middle piece atop easily. 

Only after the head is finished, crudely carved with a face and placed atop the pile of packed snow, does she seek to explore her environs further, and it is only after some significant wandering about that she chances upon the cavern. 

It's a deep hole, and dark, sheltered from the wind and the subsequent drifting of snow by some jagged rock formation that also initially hid it from view. As she leans in, curious to see if she can see anything in its umbral depths, she hears some noises which surprise her. The first is a faint piping similar to that produced by the wind, which after some consideration she concludes probably comes from some other opening to the underground cavern, one less sheltered from the elements. The other sound, which she could less readily explain, was what was unmistakably the squawking of what sounded to be an entire rookery of penguins, but yet not quite like the calls of the penguins she had politely observed from a distance earlier. 

She hesitates, torn between the desire to investigate and the desire to stay where the fairy can find her, before making up her mind in a compromise of sorts. She carefully piles up snow in the shape of a large arrow pointing towards the opening in the ground, then carefully climbs down into the dark. 

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The cavern is just as pitch-black as it looked from above. The penguins are clearly audible off in one direction, the piping noise in another. 

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She attempts to sneak up on the penguins. 

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The penguins, it transpires, can smell well enough to put up a fuss when she gets even a little bit close. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Aww. 

...Their voices seemed to come from weirdly high up. Like, about six feet off the ground. Tall penguins. 

She resolves to leave "Operation: Rescue Penguins?" for later, and instead pursues the piping noise. The piping noise leads her downwards, which is a little bit of a surprise, but she supposes there's probably another cliff around somewhere. 

The tunnel is very long and twisty. Eventually it starts to lighten, slightly--or is that just her eyes adjusting? 

And then the tunnel opens out into a glittering cavern, bioluminescent moss covering patches of it, and shining gelatinous creatures of every color moving around. 

The gelatinous creatures appear to be the source of the piping noise, as it increases when they seem to notice her, or at least the ribbons tied around her. The nearest ones surge towards her, and she hesitates, unsure whether to stay or go. 

The first one that reaches her slows and stops a few feet away, and probes at the ribbon wrapped around her tentacle, the nearest one to its position. She moves the tentacle to intercept, wrapping around the pseudopod that extended towards her. The creature makes a piping noise that sounds almost surprised, and she lets it go. It pokes at her again, and she pokes back with a tentacle not rendered de facto visible with ribbon. Another creature reaches her and pokes her, and she pokes back. The two creatures pipe at each other. 

Probably they're people?

"Hi," Lucy tries. 

The jelly-creatures pipe some more. 

Lucy considers this, and points at herself with the beribboned tentacle. "Lucy," she says, enunciating clearly. 

More piping. Then: "Lucy," the first jelly-creature says in an exact replica of her voice, pointing at itself. 

"No, Lucy," Lucy repeats, pointing at herself, then points at the jelly-creature and makes a passable imitation of their piping. 

"Lucy," the creature says, and points at her, then points at itself and makes a different piping noise. The second one points at itself and makes a third one.

"Are those your names?" Lucy wonders, then points at the first and makes the second's noise. 

"No," the creature says, and trills, then repeats the noise it made. 

This is so cool. Lucy is definitely bouncing now. 

Lucy and the jelly-creatures manage to exchange several more snippets of language like this, which Lucy soaks up like a sponge. The jelly-creatures attempt to invite her back with them, but Lucy, awkwardly conscious of the time, makes her excuses and crawls back up the extensive rock tunnel, past the penguins, and back out to where the fairy can find her before the five hours are up. 

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The fairy is there after five hours exactly. "Hi!" he says.

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"Hi! I'm ready to go back." 

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"You got it." And she is scooped up and whizzed across the water, over South America, over more water, and there's the place in Louisiana.

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"Cam! Cam! There are jelly people in Antarctica!" 

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"Jelly people?"

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"Yeah--or, I dunno what else to call them, but they're some kind of amorphous translucent solid and can change how they're shaped and they talk like--" and she repeats a snatch of their pretty piping language-- "and I found them in a cave underground." 

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"Huh. There's really a strangely high density of nonhumans around considering that you and I each casually stumbled across some, we know of more... and yet somehow they are not commonly known."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well it's no surprise that nobody knows about the ones in Antarctica." 

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"I mean, yes, but it is surprising that given the size of Antarctica you'd happen to meet them on a half-day trip. You should dismiss your fairy, looks like he's got all his stuff," Cam adds.

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She dismisses the fairy. "I don't know how much of Antarctica they live in." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, it's less surprising if they've got the lot of it colonized, although by this year..." He looks up some facts. "...humans had got as far as the South Pole..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, they were underground, maybe there's a lot of underground."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That could be it. The gorilla folks were known to some neighbors but perhaps not neighbors themselves very cosmopolitan."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe everything would have been out in the open by 2159 even if you hadn't shown up."

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"Maybe. It just seems awfully coincidental."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I dunno. Maybe there really are just that many hidden people." 

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"But the more there are, the better they have to tend to be hidden to not be widely known."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I dunno." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I guess we'll see if we run across forty more of them or not."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We haven't even met any fish-people yet." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah. I wonder if I should just try to inventory the lot of them before I do anything major - I've already decided the summoning rollout needs to happen differently, the literacy rate just isn't high enough..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is literacy rate important?"

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"Enormously. Preprints are good - better, even - but widespread use of preprints requires widespread availability of printers, or demons. In my world the distribution was accomplished by giving everybody a good look at a daeva, and a book on summoning to read."

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"You gave everyone a book?" 

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"Not literally one per person, but I got pretty good coverage, yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That is a lot of books. What did you pay the demons?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I had to shop around to find ones who wanted things I could get them, I was a high schooler, but some of them wanted things like to go to a mall and buy a coffee with money in real life."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Huh. Do you know why they wanted that?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Novelty. Demons don't use currency."

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"I guess that would be hard when everyone can just make whatever. --Is demonic counterfeiting a problem in 2159?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nah, there's ways around it. It does take some doing, and it'll be harder on a 1928 tech base."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What kinds of ways?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"So demons can make any physical thing, which means cash is right out. But for everyday transactions you can make someone scan their fingerprint or their retina - and you watch them do it so you're sure it's actually their fingerprint or retina, not a disembodied thumb or eyeball - or their voiceprint, sometimes, and match up that pattern with a centralized database that someone's gone to the trouble of positively identifying everyone in, and you can be sure they're actually trying to make a payment and their centralized bank can hand it over. That's not foolproof, but it's inconvenient for a demon to help someone route around, and there's more secure options yet for really big ticket stuff."

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"Why is fingerprint or retina more secure than a signature?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's harder to have a machine tell that two signatures are by the same person and not make mistakes in either direction."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If someone has to watch anyway why does there need to be a machine?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Because the person watching doesn't know what your signature looks like, they're going to be a total stranger who works at a store."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, okay. It would be convenient if brains could be made to work more like computers, if they didn't lose anything important in the process." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It would! Not a lot of progress on that front, I'm sorry to disappoint."

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"It probably wouldn't work for me anyway." 

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"You'd need some separate R&D."

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"And there's only one of me. Even Wilbur is put together differently from me." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean, if I were doing this I'd start testing stuff on mindless copies of you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I meant that figuring out how to do something like that for me was several billion times less important than figuring it out for normal humans." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, yeah, that's also true."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's a good thing I don't get sick as easily as humans, though, since human medicine would be moot for me." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Completely? I'd expect a lot of things to carry over - disinfectants, maybe antibiotics if they didn't have weird side effects on you that are worse than for humans - certainly anything surgical would be different but I'd expect the least discrepancy in infectious disease related medicine."

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"I mean I don't get sick so it's hard to say. But I work really weirdly." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll take your word for it and hope you do not come down with anything."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't think I will. I think if I were going to get sick at all I would have done so at some point when I was little and careening across the countryside eating everything in sight." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe you can get exotic otherworldly diseases."

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"That's possible. Those seem even less likely to respond to antibiotics," she winced. 

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"At least any I know about, yeah."

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"Well. No use borrowing trouble. Maybe I can't get space diseases either." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Let's hope!"

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"And even if the worst happens probably I'll be fine and the only real problem will be making a summoning circle big enough for me." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"We don't have confirmation on that for local humans, let alone you, but I wish you luck on that." Sigh. "I'm gonna go see how Benjamin Franklin is doing."

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Benjamin Franklin is going through a stack of newspapers for details of politics. He looks up when Cam comes in. "Hello! Is there anything I can help with?" 

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"Nope, just checking in! How are you doing?"

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"Excellent. I think I'm nearly fluent in modern politics." 

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"And what are your thoughts on modern politics?"

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Benjamin Franklin provides an insightful and witty analysis of 1928 politics that someone more familiar with 1928 politics and also the writings of Benjamin Franklin might have some hope of actually generating. 

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"Cool - let me get you something abridged from the future so you'll have a little more data on what trends can push how far how fast -" Cam comes up with a history book for this purpose. "It's obviously written from an even farther future perspective so you'll have some moralizing that will sound weird, but should be serviceable."

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Ben Franklin accepts it. "I suppose getting used to the morals of the future sooner rather than later will save some time." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"It will at that. You have a jump on avoiding farmed meat!"

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He wrinkles his nose. "Factory farming animals is a good thing to skip." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"The debate wasn't in full swing till I was already eating demonic meat all the time for sheer convenience, so I've never gotten worked up about it, but it's certainly something we might as well avoid when it's this easy."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'd much rather know the contents of my sandwich had never been marinating in its own manure." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Isn't fertilizer still largely manure-based? Anyway. Demonic meat, it's better than the real thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Despite how unnerving that sentence sounds." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I didn't name it. You get used to things being referred to casually as 'demonic' after a while though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I suppose one would! It's interesting how the kinds of daeva match so neatly to Earth mythologies--one could assume influence from the daeva side on your Earth, but not ours."

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"Yeah, I don't really know what to make of that either."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Perhaps it would make adoption of summoning smoother if names other than demon and angel and fairy were used."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're not wrong, but probably the terms will leak from daeva talking to people since the languages match."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's true. I suppose it will depend on what the rollout looks like, in this universe, whether it gives us any great advantage to not start out crying demon."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And I'm worried that it looks like a kind of - clumsy defensive coverup - if we say 'apsel' and then people find out that means 'demon'."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, precisely. That kind of thing can be affected after the fact, but first impressions do a lot."