"I promise I will work incredibly hard not to randomly die of some faery plague."

"I suppose if all faeries died I'd get unsummoned. Into who the fuck knows what kind of situation, I guess."

"Was Hell about the same back a thousand years ago?"

"Nah. I mean, similar, broadly, but the languages have changed and the tech level loosely tracks the human tech level."

"Huh. Our tech level has almost nothing to do with the human one."

"No?"

"There are courts that do really sophisticated things with magic, which humans don't have. A lot of human technology is weaponry, for the human sort of wars, which are not much like the faery sort of wars, and much of the rest is agricultural. Faeries could in principle plow fields but it's astonishingly unrewarding. Writing was invented independently."

"Architecture?" Cam asks. "I guess you can't smith things, but woodworking stuff? Do you do boats? Demons don't really need technology for the same reasons as humans, when I say it loosely tracks I mean things like 'humans got computers and demons copied them immediately', not 'the stirrup revolutionized Hell'."

"I've never heard of anyone doing boats. I think we got good at woodworking sooner than humans because we aren't in a hurry and don't mind as much if something will only last a couple of years."

"I suppose. Do you copy any stuff from them?"

"My father copied the Bible. Very diligently. He was trying to figure out what it meant. ...maybe we copied pottery?"

"Ooh, pottery! How do you fire stuff? Sneak it into humans' kilns small?"

"Yeah. Crystals don't get hot enough."

"I did notice that! I wonder why."

"My father has a book. I guess probably you shouldn't read it while he's slow and you can't settle. I can read it to you sometime if you'd like."

"That just cuts him out altogether, huh?"

"Yes."

"You realize that's weird."

"It'd be such a nightmare to discover knowledge if whenever someone you told shared it that created debt."

"Things being a nightmare does not preclude them being baked into the system. - metaphorically."

"This is true. But this particular problem doesn't come up."

"Well, fortunately this means I don't have to plan to plant gifts in the homes of every author and composer I want to refer to in the next million years when their lifetime rolls around."

"Seems like the kind of thing that might change the course of history. Or at least that I wouldn't want to take a chance on."

"They could be subtle gifts. I could hide air filters in their rafters!"

"I guess you could! Is there a problem with their air?"