Eventually he reaches a good point to pause, and reclines on the grass and waits for the shellshocked admirers to say something.

Amriac applauds. "You're very popular in Hell, I dunno if you knew that!"

"I am delighted to hear it! We haven't done any summoning yet, Cam's the only person who knew how and he's been busy."

"I'm Amriac."

"Nice to meet you." He pats the grass next to him. "How did you end up dragged into this?"

Plop. "Cam knows me from a little instrumental group we're both in and recommended me when Timothy wanted an extra demon to test summoning and then spy on your brother with and now I'm mostly just hanging out."

"What do you play?"

"The flute family plus sphereflute," she says, "and hammered dulcimer and hang drum and the violin family and I'm passable at shamisen. And piano and chiptones but not specially, just in the background sort of."

"Ooooh, I was fairly obsessed with flute when I was your age, there're several hundred embarrassing little arrangements - I suppose Hell has everything already -"

"We do! My orchestra was picking it all over together, my favorite was the second symphony. Of course we had to machine translate the lyrics, I'm sure they're better if you know the language."

"If everyone wants to grab a summons for the Quenya, at least our machine translation really wouldn't do it justice, no. Most Elven music has lyrics because everyone sings it in the streets."

"Summonses for Quenya would be terribly popular," nods Amriac.

"And daeva'll be popular too, once we know how to grab you safely, Endorë is at least half rubble."

"I heard a little about the war, it sounds awful."

"Yeah. I'm working on a song. You can't go home, oh war hero, your children are afraid of you - it's not my most uplifting one."

"I don't think I saw that one, did you get a chiplocked computer or just start it the other day or what?"

"Chiplocked computer. Might want to trade some things, after all."

"I like having my chiplocked computer but everybody else has one too these days," pouts Amriac.

"Hell can only get 3000 years of my things for free, I'm sure they're really feeling deprived."

"We're a very greedy species!"

"I actually mostly got the computer for the interface, someone'll inevitably record the first performance of everything and that's perfectly fine. Withholding music from people seems terribly cruel. But I don't want people looking at work in progress, what if it's mediocre?"

"Oh, I like drafts because people recycle snatches of them in later things and I like watching it evolve over time - and some people never declare something finished, since chiplocks got popular there hasn't been anything new from this one harpist I used to like, it was only ever stolen drafts -"

"I finish things. At an Elf pace, admittedly, if demons are like humans you'll find us annoying that way."

"We're more like humans than Elves, I think, we might be immortal but as a rule we enjoy instant gratification."

"And you're mostly pretty young, sounds like."