"- Fuck, you'd really offer that?"

She folds her hands together. 

"I need to be technically on a task in order to stay summoned, if I'm going to be able to justify it at all to my bosses in Hell. And respectfully, I don't expect you to be able to keep me here for so long that I wouldn't face a reckoning from my boss eventually. 

But if you want to keep me summoned I'm all in favour of helping you come up with excuses."

I didn't offer it, I just asked if you'd like it. How do you like someone waggling your heart's desires in your face, little imp?

The words don't leave her skull, but her lips twitch. Perhaps there's no difference to a centuries-old cold reader.

" - Oh." 

She laughs. 

"I guess I deserve that." She crosses her arms.

The offer is genuine, Marianne Belor is just a bit of a dick.

Her lips recede into a line. "Is Liath monitoring you right now?"

She is guessing that divination is easy and fun but preventing it is not, from miscellaneous observations of Penelope and Alphazon.

"No. If we strike a serious deal that'll show up to identify, but that would require her to be here in person. She could message me telepathically, but I don't necessarily have to pick up. She also casts weekly auguries that'll turn up any serious damage to her cause, but me simply being away on a long mission isn't unusual."

"How do infernal deals work? Is there magic arbitration of it, is it just words—"

"Lily, please grab my laptop and try to doublecheck whatever she says."

Lily grabs the laptop and starts searching for Consortation resources.

"I'm bound to make all reasonable efforts to provide whatever is contracted and not to act outside those bounds. Hence why I am sitting here on the floor rather than doing anything. Right now there is no standing deal, so I'm bound to only do things that I can gloss as 'negotiation.' I am only bound to the letter of the deal and not to its spirit, but I would have been physically incapable of not answering your questions. Naturally with demons who are actually intelligent there's more leeway for alliances rather than just hammering everything into the contract so it's a compulsion; and of course I can turn down deals I don't like.

Lily, you could try searching for "standard longterm succubus escort service contract." I know some of those ones and would be willing to be bound by many of them."

Lily looks over at Marianne.

"Yeah, you can search for that."

"What all do you want, besides sex? If you were making a wishlist."

Lily opens a new tab and continues to read.

"Freedom. Some spending money. To make a good impression on my boss so I'm allowed to take more summons and spend less time in Hell. Being treated like a person. You know, the usual."

"So far what she's said about how contracts work checks out."

Oh, she's a human! Not in the literal sense, but she wants all the human things.

"What do I have to do to make an agreement binding, instead of just words? Or is there not — such a thing for you as just words?"

"Agree to terms including at least some sex as payment - it's fine if it's "on the job" - while you have me summoned. You could further enforce things with Covenant magic if you had any, though it's kind of redundant."

"Seems accurate. There's a warning that demons are all sadists and enjoy harming others, though. Standard contracts include an agreement not to harm anyone save as a direct effect of fulfilling the terms."

"Why does," she recalls the word, "Hell-law demand that you have sex as part of deals made?"

She wasn't planning on asking non-pressing questions until she got the demon under an honesty compulsion, whoops.

Cytherea looks over at Lily. "How many humans manage to harm no-one, hey? I'm a demon, I'm not pretending to be a saint. But I'll take that stiuplation if you insist."

She looks back at Marianne. "It's a holdover from how Hell used to be run - different demons for different kinds of sin, intention to corrupt so the gods don't prioritize the soul, blah blah. We care less about "sin" these days, and more about direct arrangements to deliver souls - my boss is more interested now in the information on the witching world I could offer from a summoning. But the old magic is still the same. I don't know why Hespatia hasn't changed it. Maybe She just doesn't care."

Are there many gods who won't pick you if you've had sex with a demon? Weird, maybe she's missing something.

"I will commit to being an honest and fair trading partner for this and all future arrangements with you and also make a good faith effort to have sex with you at some point if you will make an identical commitment about arrangements with me."

"If you fail to be honest and fair, what's the penalty for you? I'm bound by your arrangement, how is your honesty enforced?" 

"—I'm not sure we can arbitrate fairness on my end, since neither of us trust each other to interpret the term. But if you catch me telling you something I know is false, I will pay you 1000 US dollars."

"So the arrangement is that I trade fairly and honestly with you, and in exchange for each lie I catch you in I make a hundred Witch Kisses? That's only two days' wages for a low-rank witch. If you employ me as an escort I'll make far more than that for you. The basic idea is sound, though. How about... if I catch you in a deliberate lie, not including mere witholding of information, I get to keep ten percent more of my income for the next let's-say year, that's a good long period without being literally forever."

"Standard escort arrangement is that the summoner gets all the money the succubus earns through sex. It also has bindings against lying, deliberate harm, ceoncealing that the demon is a succubus, and so on. No self-defense exception."

"...I'm not going to employ you as a sex worker. It seems strikingly inappropriate to do that to an immigrant in exchange for letting them stay in a nicer country. You can do sex work if you want but I'm not going to garnish all your earnings."

"What I want from you is advice and assistance in dealing with the magical world and Hell. Ideally I wouldn't ask anything of you except that you don't put people's entrails up on coat hangers. But keeping you around involves indefinite non-negligible fatigue on my end, so in practice I would like you to make yourself useful."

She is not sure if you can sway demons by being very idealistic at them until they reflect some of it back, but it works on many humans and Cytherea seems very like a human.