"Good." Raafi squeezes her hand and breaks off to go get her a plate. "So, anything interesting going on?"

"Josue's birthday! We don't do a lot of birthday parties here but it would probably have weirded out his family for him to put away quite that much birthday cake so this is sort of an afterparty. Help yourself, of course, there's enough for everybody."

"Nice. We don't celebrate birthdays much at home but I rarely say no to cake. Any other birthday traditions I should know about?"

"Not for this party, but there's songs and silly hats and stuff for conventional ones."

"Sounds like fun. A little like a spring festival, maybe."

"What's your spring festival like?"

"In Greens, we decorate the main squares, and everyone dresses up - a lot of people make new clothes over the winter and it's a chance to show the fanciest of them off - and we wear flowers in our hair and on our clothes, and there's dancing, and games, and most years a feast with the last of our winter stores. It's the happiest time of year, everyone's tired of being cooped up for the winter and glad to see the daylight come back."

"Huh. I've never really experienced... seasons."

"Huh. It's the kind of thing you need to experience to really understand, I think. How long they last is a big part of it. Winter is always too long."

"A Martian year is longer than an Earth one by quite a bit but it doesn't really matter, we're all under domes, you see."

"The domes are pretty neat."

"Keep the air in. There's always proposals on the President's desk about terraforming but so far nothing doing."

"Huh. Daeva can't do it?"

"Oh, they could, it'd just be kind of an unpredictable expense, you'd need demons and they're tricky."

    "Ah. Well, less tricky soon, hopefully, that's one of the things Raafi has them looking into."

He comes back while she's talking, with two plates, one of which he offers to her; she takes a bite of an hors d'oeuvre and nods approval before taking the plate itself. "What have I been looking into?"

    "Demon gagging."

"Oh," he grins. "Yes, they're looking into that - I might have to come back to it and I'm sure the change will be slow, but I'm working on it."

"...looking into demon gagging helps how?" asks Herb.

"Well, if you can talk to them, you can find ones who are interested in your project for its own sake, or if you can't you can at least ask them what they want to be paid with instead of wasting your time and theirs until you find one who wants what you're offering."

"I thought it worked because demons all want the same handful of things."

"I'm pretty sure they're just as diverse as humans! I've only met a few, and those only because I went looking for them or they were looking for Pelor, but they all had their own projects and personalities. It seems to me that you've been meeting the ones who want the same handful of things because those are the only things they could get by coming here; if they wanted to build a planet or design a better brain chip or terraform Limbo taking summons wasn't going to help."

"Well, then how is anyone going to find the right ones by summoning?"

"Well, I don't know the details of how you do it with faeries and angels, but I imagine some of the same things will work with demons once you can talk to them. And they're the ones who can get letters across worlds, that seems promising - I don't know if they have an internet but it wouldn't surprise me, maybe they do and there's a way you can search it."

"Huh. I guess I never thought about that."

"Mmhmm. You learn very quickly as a cleric of Fharlanghn that a lot of what people think they know about other places isn't as true as it seems."

"Huh," repeats Herb. "Did you guys have a specific thing you were dropping by about, should I get Danica -?"

"Nothing very specific. Raafi won't be able to come by as often, though, we might want to take the opportunity to introduce them."