"How... charming... what is it devils normally want?"

"Souls, children, holy things, power or land on the Material Plane, some of them have contracts that look straightforward but aren't..."

"And what does one summon those for?"

"Well, sometimes you want to sell your soul, right, or you want - riches, advice, a bodyguard, combat help..."

"...I've never especially wanted to sell my soul, why would one want that?"

"If you don't expect to make a particularly good showing in the general population when you die and go to Hell you might preemptively sell your soul to someone who you think can make good use of you. Or if people are questioning your loyalty, not a lot of questions about your loyalty once you've sold your soul..."

"Does, uh, everybody go to Hell?"

"Pretty much. If you're Chaotic you go to the Abyss instead but in Cheliax that's awfully rare, we have good Law here. And the cultists of other gods go to those gods' afterlives sometimes."

"And what is Hell like, for the dead people?"

"In Hell you are perfected and made a worthy tool of Asmodeus's project." By rote.

"...uh-huh. How's that work exactly."

"Hell has expertise in correcting the flaws in human minds and hearts and using as much of us as we make available in rebuilding us into devils."

"...by what methods."

"If you are squeamish about students getting eaten when they make mistakes you probably won't like it."

"Thanks, I appreciate the accommodation of my tender sensibilities. Uh, apsels, like me, are normally summoned - in the place where we are normally summoned - because we can make arbitrary material objects."

"Huh. With what duration?"

"Pardon?"

"How long does stuff last when you make it."

"Forever? It's a problem, back home the cities are all built on heaps of out of fashion crap."

"I need to figure out how I got - you - instead of the thing I was trying to get -"

"Yeah, I don't know, this doesn't look like a traditional apsel circle but it's still clearly working..."

"The question is whether we can reproduce it." She has pulled out a notebook and is copying it down. "If it grabs a random demon and grabs an apsel sometimes then that's going to be practically useless, because there are infinite demons, but maybe we can also summon apsels by name - do you know if things you make can be used as spell components -"

"I don't know. I can show you a traditional apsel circle -" He grabs his computer off his belt and looks one up. "- which includes the option to try for specific ones by name -"

Her expression has spent the last minute toggling between terrified and fascinated but the computer pulls it over towards fascinated. "What is that?"

"Chiplock computer! State of the art, apsel-proof..." He finds what he's looking for but then blanks the display rather than open it up. "Now, uh, I'd really like to get out of this circle, have a look around, explore the world."