But proposing to people you've never met is far more exciting! ....he doesn't think Cam feels that way, though, so he forwards that one.

I told the magazine I didn't think people who developed crushes on the subjects of magazine interviews were my type, but they cut it for length and on reflection my prospective dating life is irretrievably contaminated by fame now anyway. What's your availability?

I'm inclined to think you're a rather noncentral case of a magazine interview subject. And I have classes during the day but am free evenings or weekends.

What time zone and what's your travel capacity like?

I live in NYC, and I can summon a fairy.

So he provides her with a range of time options and the location of his Canadian gazebo.

Before I answer that, I should probably ask what your actual sexual orientation is.

You are the first human to ask me about it. Most daeva suitors specified. I'm bisexual. Kaede is a girls' name, isn't it?

Unisex, actually, and bisexual... rather fits. Because I'm genderfluid.

I have, like, the two-sentence summary of the concept nearly a decade out of date...

Sometimes I'm a boy, sometimes I'm a girl. That used to be merely a cause of intermittent dysphoria and differing presentation before angels became a thing in my life. I usually have, like, boy days and girl days, is why I was asking, today's a girl day but yesterday was a boy day so I'm likely to be a girl for another one or two days based on past experience.

Did you have trouble finding an angel competent to help you out with that for regularly affordable payments?

Some, but I eventually befriended one who agreed to come for a bunch of specifics if I summoned a demon every now and then to make her material goods or a fairy to take her cool places.

What're you paying demons?

Well, lots of them just wanted recs or trips, too... and I suppose this might be the kind of anecdote that would be a dealbreaker but better to find this out sooner than later, I was never terribly opposed to paying them with sex.

I mean, I'd consider that ruled out by monogamy if we were doing that but we are not at this time.

And if we were together, monogamously or otherwise, I would probably not actually need to summon arbitrary demons to pay my transition angel.

This is true.

It's also very good to know that in addition to having done the most good of anyone in the world and being incredibly hot Revelation is also bisexual and does not mind my history of only-technically-not-sex-work.

Not a dealbreaker. I hope you insisted on paying in advance and used a good circle though.

I did. And I actually learned about summoning before, ah, you Revealed. But I feel like this is perhaps a story to be told in person.

If you like. I'm curious.

Then how about we set that date for two days from now?

Sure. See you then.

And two days later: zoom come a fairy and—presumably that twentysomething human's Kaede. "Hello. This is Nita," he introduces the fairy as soon as they land.

"Yo! You're Revelation! That's wicked!"

"Hi, Kaede. Hi, Nita."

"So, I'm gonna scoot and find ya later?"

"Yeah. You could check back in, hmm, half an hour in case the date goes disastrously and otherwise I guess in a couple of hours?" he suggests, looking at Cam for input.

"Sounds reasonable."

"Toodles!" She takes off.

"So, welcome to my dating-people-who-read-my-interview gazebo."

"—wow do you do this thing with your eyebrow often because that's even hotter than the shirtlessness —anyway, you have a gazebo dedicated to dates with people who read your interview? What if I said my email was planned before the interview?"

"...what thing with my eyebrow? And yeah, I didn't want to try using Elvis's place, seemed rude. It was?"

"It was," he confirms. "Ever since you came out in that video and I verified your claim I'd been meaning to and the interview just sort of, you know, cinched it. I'd probably have eventually done it anyway. And the thing where you raise it like that, I don't know if I can mimic it—"

"Like this?"

"—not quite the same but that is also very hot, yep."

Giggle.

"Anyway, are you, like, crashing at Elvis' place or something?"

"Yeah, with him and his family. They have lots of room."

"I imagine living for a very long time on Earth while being incredibly pretty and having amazing senses would help with making a lot of money."

"Well, yes, but they live in the middle of nowhere in a building they constructed themselves; I'm not sure how much money has to to with them having room."

"—what, with their hands? Or—magically?"

"I think with their hands? Their magic was on the fritz at the time."

"...how much room are we talking, here?"

"It's a castle. Why?"

"Because unless we're talking about like two hundred Elves here that is a lot of time."

"They're stronger and faster than humans and had ever built castles before."

"It still sounds terribly boring and like money could have done it, but I guess I shouldn't be judging them from my human perspective."

"This was seven hundred years ago."

"...yeah okay fair."

"So I guess I shouldn't keep you curious any longer about my pre-Revelation summoning career."

"Yeah, do tell."

"It was a year before Revelation, I was in high school and during summer I was serving as counselor at a summer camp. I sneaked into an area that was still being built, on a dare, after the kids had gone to bed, and I saw an angel there. I was, ah, surprised."

"What were they doing there?"

"The construction company's owner had summoned her. He was, I believe, one of the people whose businesses you disrupted when you did the thing."

"I disrupted several small businesses, yes."

"Anyway, I asked her what the duck and she said she was an angel and explained the whole shebang and was very racist towards demons."

"...the duck?"

"—oh yeah I also don't really like swearing much? It started when I was a kid, my mother used to say that you should only swear when you really meant it and I'm pretty sure it was just to get me to not swear but then she died and I kept doing it sort of as remembrance."

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. So the angel explained everything and you - went home and summoned your own angel? Based on one conversation?"

"The angel didn't really know a lot about summoning but her circle was one for a random so I could copy it and then when I got home I looked up what the Latin on the bindings meant and then yeah I summoned my own angel."

"Well, I'm glad that didn't work out catastrophically."

"That binding was actually pretty decent, if not as good as the ones you published. I didn't really have a lot of—free time, when I could disappear and go somewhere to summon an angel, but whenever I did I summoned one to ask them questions and ask them if they knew more about bindings and summoning and stuff. And then Revelation and the whole thing was moot. So not much of a career after all."

"Did you capitalize on having been a summoner before?"

"Not really, I was seventeen when you Revealed and that whole year didn't get me nearly as much as the first class of Summoning 101 does. How did you come about it?"

"Found the book in an abandoned house."

"Wow that's lucky. Did it have all the same instructions and stuff?"

"Yeah, I abridged it and edited a little but it was a pretty good book to start out - lucky for my anonymity, I don't turn up as the author."

"Nor as the editor?"

"Editor is not a conjurable parameter."

"But author is? Why?"

"Unclear. I did check."

"Huh. Weird." Pause. "So what are the plans now?"

"Prevent disaster and colonize space."

"And do you have specific plans for doing those?"

"I'm keeping an eye out for opportunities but the biggest threat and obstacle is the Valar and being impatient with them is counterproductive."

"Right, those, what's up with them?"

"They are gods and bad at their jobs and even slower-moving than Elves by default."

"In what sense are they gods, exactly, what can they do? They're apparently not omnipotent, but couldn't they be—talked into being good at their jobs or something? Because if there's something that's better than the end of material scarcity it's competent gods."

"There's an omnipotent one who is even worse at his job. I would love competent gods, believe you me, but the Elves are mostly pretty nice and have had tens of thousands of years and haven't gotten much of anywhere with them. I'm not totally pessimistic about a strategy involving talking to the Valar one at a time, since there are fourteen, but that requires a way of talking to them at all which doesn't freak them out, and unauthorized interaction with Valinor does that."

"—and how do you get authorization?"

"You don't, mostly, but they're considering having a resident demon to do correspondence."

"...this is extremely frustrating."

"You're telling me."

"And to kill time you're going on dates with random strangers?"

"You're not random, Elvis sorted my mail."

"Ooh, what were the criteria?"

"People he thought I'd like."

"I shall take that as a compliment."

"You should!"

"What did you do, after Revelation?"

"Taught summoning at the University of Washington."

"Oh, right, that's where you, er—died—"

"Yep. Traumatized my students."

"Was the why just—really disrupting his business? That sounds so petty when the thing you disrupted was material scarcity—"

"That was his stated motive, I don't know for sure that was it."

Sigh. "Anyway, what's on the menu?"

"Whaddaya want?"

"I suppose I should have predicted this, shouldn't I," he says, grinning. "How about something fancy I have probably never ever eaten?"

"I have no idea how fancy your usual fare might be!"

"Something that could not be produced by mundane magicless cooking?"

"That I can do, but for all I know you had angels doing your breakfasts." Sauce-flaked salmon.

"No angels doing my breakfasts. Do you eat often? I met a demon who didn't really like eating or sleeping and just ignored the discomfort and drank lots of coffee."

"I eat but I don't usually sleep."

"Sleeping is a waste of time," he nods, and tastes some of the salmon.

It's delicious. "I sometimes like it as a sort of punctuation," he says. "Or if I'm really cozy I sometimes just stay put and doze off. But not nearly as often as humans or even Elves need it."

"Wow this is delicious," he says, taking another forkful. "And what did you do in Hell all this time?"

"Learned some violin and some of a demon language. Learned things I didn't already know about the daeva realms, and Limbo. Took summonses."

"Oh, if you took summonses—were you gagged very often?"

"Till an Elf got me and let me make a phone call, every time."

"Every time—that's absurd—I'm so sorry about that."

"I hope I have made a dent in that asshat's following."

"I've never gagged a demon, it sounds—absurd—I might have given it some consideration if it were just demons and angels, but it's demons and angels and fairies and that matches no theology at all so why would the soul thing match—"

"Oh, some demons get a kick out of trying to convince people to pay with their souls, it's just a stupid way to deal with that."

"Yes but that could have easily come from access to human theology instead of the other way around, and it just doesn't—fit, like, why would demons in particular have this specific skill while fairies and angels don't, the only thing that differs between fairies and angels is the one power and that's already different from demons and there's no reason for the souls thing and besides several demons did in fact say it was a practical joke and I ran tests—"

"You ran tests? What kinda tests?"

"Well, first of all as soon as I heard about the soul stealing thing I went—okay, so in the worst-case I need to have at least enough of a positive impact on Earth to be worth an eternity being tortured in Hell, so I was not completely ignorant of risk, here—and then I started interviewing demons about it and their answers didn't add up at all, and I found out some of them record videos of people selling their souls, and some people are there more than once. I got one demon to conjure me some of those, and then I had other demons try to classify which videos were of people pre—or post-soul sale, and the answers were inconsistent. And then I decided to sell my soul a few times to different demons for different things. And so far all my observations do match demons as a species being a superintelligent hivemind that collectively maximizes soul collection but."

"I do not know how to collect souls and am ninety eight percent sure it's just bullshit. Feel entirely free to not give me your soul."

"That's of course assuming you're not part of a superintelligent hivemind, otherwise I should just discount everything you say as trying to get more souls—unless being discounted is exactly what you want."

"I gotta say this is not entertaining as a potential running joke, so being really invested in it is not the makings of a second date."

"I did not in fact plan to make it a running joke but good to know. So what did you learn about the daeva realms that you did not know before?"

"Mostly just experiential stuff and conjuring models."