"How does that work?" wonders Maria, waving at the fairy to take them to the island.

"Every time I take a summons I'm a little scared they'll just keep me there, for the rest of their life, and I'd spend the next fifty years standing there gagged without enough room to lie down and my family'd be dead by the time I got out."

"Well, that's illegal. I think."

"Yeah. But still, people have a bad experience and then they stop taking summons. Michael's girlfriend Amriac stopped taking them because she hated gags and there's practically always a gag, and if the summoner messes up they could get murdered over me and that's really scary - I got summoned by a little girl once, she was ten, she had a hard time dismissing me because she didn't really want me to leave, I kept thinking what if someone else walks in and sees that she messed up the binding and murders this kid right in front of me -"

"- little kids aren't usually supposed to summon -"

"They're not. But she did. I told her that some people might hurt her if she did that and she said it was okay because she was getting me, not them - and it was okay, but if the wrong person had seen then it wouldn't have been - If everything goes the way it's supposed to taking summons is awesome. But there're a lot of ways things can not go the way they're supposed to."

Maria nods.

Island! He fixes it up for them. It's lots of fun.

And the staff fairy puts the dragons in it.

And he heads over to be nibbled on (can't make them treats, not in the deal). "They'll take really great care of you guys here, okay? And Theodore'll be by to help them out!"

"When are we expecting him?" asks Maria. She has some treats on her and tosses them to the fairy.

"This afternoon, probably, I'll pay a fairy for him when I get home."

"It must be so convenient to have you around to pay angels and fairies."

"Two of my brothers are dating demons so less useful for our family than for most families, I think. But yeah. Would've been hard to come up for something for the fairies that watch the dragons, otherwise."

"How did they even meet the demons to start dating them?" wonders Maria.

"Uh, Cam got summoned unbound by some kid and met Timothy and was like 'my real life ambition has always been to terraform Mars, but no one lets me talk so I can't tell them I'd do it for free' and Timothy liked him and Cam knew a lot about summoning and taught Timothy how and he started summoning people for humanitarian projects - still couldn't let Cam terraform Mars, because people'd freak out about him being unbound and maybe shoot Timothy even though Timothy's not his summoner - and one of the demons Timothy summoned while he was working on that was Amriac, and he thought she'd like Michael so he introduced them and they got along great."

"...wow."

"Which bit?"

"It's quite a story, I'm not really sure what to make of it. What kind of humanitarian projects?"

"Have you heard about the other worlds?"

"I don't think s- no, someone was asking me about the dragons, wanted to know if they were from another world, I said they were supposed to be genetically engineered?"

"They're also from another world. That's why I can't just make the eggs. Anyway, there's another world that's Earth only it's 1802, and there's another one with humans that's not Earth but it's also before, like, industry and stuff, and we wanted to teach people there summoning but if illiterate people try summoning they'll probably mess it up, so that's the kind of humanitarian project Timothy and Cam do. Amriac and Michael don't really do humanitarian projects they just hang out and compose music and play music and geek out about music."

"Did somebody from the dragons world summon somebody you know, so you could get the dragons?"

"Yeah. They have lots of them, they're considered a nuisance. So we imported some and I didn't want to keep them in Hell because in Hell people are pretty casual about destroying stuff, they won't think it's unreplaceable."

"Well, we'll be careful with them."