"Well, you'd invented alcohol so they knew what it was in a general sense - I guess I didn't advertise what proof everything was -"

"I suspect those are stronger than what we make but that's possible to taste, it doesn't excuse them. I more meant, sometimes people drug prisoners, and they shouldn't."

"Of fucking course they do."

Slightly alarmed fairy.

"Sorry, just, hadn't occurred to me. Ugh."

"There's nothing to apologize for."

"You looked spooked!"

"Not because of any kind of reasoned assessment of the situation!"

"I still didn't mean to scare you."

"You're the best thing that has ever happened to the world and you could be a lot worse and it'd still be true and I am very very glad of you."

"You don't even know my main claim to, uh, anonymous future fame."

"Wow. Do tell."

"So you know how I've been referring to summoning becoming common at a certain point? It's in 2006, when that happens... I was nineteen."

"I don't know very much about human growth, that's an adult? The girl's age?"

"Thereabouts, yeah."

"Were you involved?"

"I found a summoning book in an abandoned house I was exploring, when I was seventeen, and I tried it, and then I spent a couple years doing research and edited the book and then anonymously had daeva distribute it worldwide."

" - wow! - why not sell it? - I don't know if I would have sold it, what with it being an entirely random advantage, but I would've been tempted -"

"Several reasons! It would have been logistically complicated especially since I wanted to be anonymous. Daeva being common knowledge predictably upended most of the extant forms of payment. And the thing I wanted out of the situation was the end of material scarcity."

"End all - how many humans are there by then, how did they live -"

"Six and a half billon and a range from 'tolerably well all things considered' to 'not much better than what they're dealing with now'."

"Did it work?"

"Yes."

"What's it like now?"

"Assuming by now you mean in the time I left? There's people living on Mars and the Moon and in space stations, electricity's too cheap to meter, people don't have to work if they'd rather be raising families or studying Proto-Indo-European, it's a very good time for the arts..."