"Demons have a bad reputation," sighs Cam.

"Bad enough that the first time he saw you the only explanation he could think of was that you were raping his sister?"

"Yeah, pretty much. It's not like we get a chance to contradict it most of the time. Most summoners call us up with bindings that don't let us talk. And there are demons like that, just, not all of us."

"Which I figured out, after I summoned him. And then he made me things and we dated."

"Awww."

"And then somebody shot her, all very legal, loose bindings on demons are a kill-on-sight offense because that's the quickest way to get rid of us, and I was just out of earshot of the conversation and didn't get something between Adana and the gun in time," sighs Cam, wings drooping. "...Magic deer kid, I should probably have mentioned this earlier, but in our afterlife system, which I don't think you have because some of you seem to have been dead in the past and you don't know what daeva are and I've never heard of a magic deer person before, anyway in our system the deal is you become a daeva after you die if you were a summoner before that."

Adana hugs Cam. "I'm okay, Cam, I didn't see it coming either, and I really should have."

"... I mean if my afterlife is now 'magic powers' and I can be retrieved by Bella or something... That's really not terrible! I'm okay with this. If it works, anyway, I kind of don't want to check, especially with the problems Cypress had with his resurrection."

"It also gives immortality. If that was a problem?"

"How good's the immortality?"

"Unproblematic," asserts Cam, prompting an "oooh" in near-unison from all his alts. "Non-daeva get the same immortality deal, they just don't have magic powers or show up in interesting places to be."

"Her species," Spring says, pointing at Ice, "is unaging, but not invulnerable or anything. She can cast a version of it on regular people, though. And resurrect, though that's sometimes glitchy."

"It was only glitchy when coupled with my magic's - whatever thing with the afterlife. It's not her fault," says Cypress, loyally.

"Whatever thing?"

"When mages die they leave ghosts. But the ghosts are also our magic, so when I first got resurrected I was brought back without it and there was still a ghost-me running around."

Snuggle snuggle. "That glitch is resolved, I hope?"

"Yes, but he had to die over again."

Cypress scoops his wife up into a hug, snuggling her. "I'm all right."

"... Has anyone else died? Besides the - obvious."

"Spring's introduction to all of this was being resurrected based off of commentary from a god."

"When you say 'god'..."

"A literal one." Pause. "We've gotten him to take a group photo of us."

"The world I live in - it's actually not my original, but there doesn't seem to be any way to deliberately replicate the mechanism by which I got there - has gods. Practical literal talkative gods. The ones most likely to be relevant to your life are mine, Perinixu, who is a healing goddess of the highland springs and has supplied me with relevant magic powers, and Raezenoth, Rae for short, god of the desert wind and freedom and so on, who is my best friend's god and is much more likely to hang around the vicinity of the portal hub and socialize. They can understand all languages via a mechanism which, as a side effect, allows them to identify alts in cases of uncertainty by hearing us talk."