He leaves from behind the counter and sits at the table with the others, gesturing toward an empty chair.

"It's a minor demon of the first choir. Darkness. In its case, retroactive deletion.

It's in an, ah, extremely abandoned factory. The binding is growing things around the walls and a lot of graffiti. Creation to oppose its destruction. None of that is permanent enough, so we add in more art and make sure it isn't decaying too much of what's there. The demon itself is either anywhere dark enough or everywhere dark enough. All we ever saw was limbs and mouths appearing out of shadow; can't say if it was creating them or hiding them or teleporting them or what. Its main bulk is in the basement, but we only went far enough to glance down.

When we tried going in, well, we don't remember any casualties. We wouldn't. There are just things that don't add up. How did we light the torches in the first place if we noticed a lack of matches later, why do we all think it deletes all memory of things it eats if none of us knows where we got that from, that kind of thing. So probably we lost at least one member, and it means we probably come out knowing less if we go in."

"...hooooooly shit. Okay, when you say it's anywhere dark enough, is demolishing the ceiling and letting sunlight through not a good idea? Or would it just escape in the evening?"

"Haven't ruled that out. The main downside is it'd probably demolish the walls too, and we're using those to keep it contained. Secondary one is we're not positive how much shadow it needs to hide in, so some piece of it might be able to get out if we're not real careful about taking care of debris."

"Yeah. And I suppose asking what you have tried would be impossible to answer. Do you know just how thorough the erasure is? Like, if I wrote something here then got caught would the writing disappear, too?"

"We must have had a lighter, and when it ate that our fires didn't go out. So it's not absolute."

Another diabolist objects, "But we wouldn't have gone in there with only firelight, and we don't have receipts for loads of halogen lamps or obvious gaps in anyone's bank account. I think it can do writing."

"Okay. We should probably favour remote strategies, anyway. How long has the demon been there? What do you know that has been tried?"

"It's vulnerable to light and heat. We disintegrated a lot of appendages and probably did at least scratch the main body."

"Spotlights?"

"We'll have everything we can get around the outside, but there are only so many windows and we need to get to the basement anyway. Spotlights might not be the most portable."

"Hmm. What if we surround the building with circular LEDs and walk in through the door with spotlights on wheels?"

"We get laughed at by any practitioners who see us doing it, but it could work. If they make lights that big. But it's already trapped in the building; it wouldn't need to cross the light to get us once we're in."

"No but that solves the window problem, and if we have good enough spotlights..."

"The word "enough" is doing a lot of the work there, but yes. A solution would probably involve enough light to flood the area."

"Would that actually kill the demon?"

"No. Unless we get really lucky. It'd just give us a chance to set up something tighter than the whole building."

"If we completely flooded the place with light, though, where would it go?"

"Our shadows, some alcove it hollowed out, maybe just wherever's the least bright... I don't actually know. We've never gotten a good view of it but that doesn't mean any situation where the whole thing's visible would kill it."

"And do we have anything that could seal it—for good?"

"Best shot is the same but better. It has weaknesses; we just need it locked down tight enough that it's defeated instead of trapped."

"What happens if we surround its current bindings with tighter ones?"

"It gets even more stuck in the same place. Wouldn't hurt, isn't a solution."

"Would it make it easier to take it on later, though? Or harder? And what did you mean by lock it down tight enough, if not binding it?"

"We narrow down where it is, and capture it in an object or something. Or at least a smaller area. We want it to think it's on the ropes enough to talk surrender."

She nods. "Alright, this is complicated. I'll need to take notes to think about it later, can probably not fix that right now."

"Sure. The factory has been there for years, and that was before we got involved."