The stone floor is lined with thick squares of carpet. By the fireplace there is a gap: she pulls back two more to leave an empty square three paces across.
In charcoal she marks a rough circle on the bare stone. Around it she writes I summon a demon and then pauses, to consider—
Wearing clothes with words on them cuts the number of random summons down enough they're not annoying. When one floats by anyway—yeah, she's bored.
Now she's somewhere else.
"Greetings, summoner," says a humanoid woman with tightly curly red hair, dark red wings, and a baggy black t-shirt with the English letters ZAMPANIO IS A VERY GOOD GAME, YOU SHOULD PLAY IT written across the front.
"Why of course what I want is the good of all, and to those of my demesne is my care owed most particularly."
She has known this language for 0.5 minutes and is pretty sure she can identify sarcasm.
"Sparkly. Now if you can reify that desire into physical objects, we'll be getting somewhere."
...that is maybe the silent face of someone who does not want to be 'getting somewhere' with 'a demon'. Okay, she's dealt with this before—not, like, reliably well, but—
"Or, obviously, not, I could also just," haha what is that literally no binding? what? "wander off somewhere and entertain myself, I'm not imprisoned or anything."
"It's a complex question. Knowledge of the honest needs and what objects would successfully fulfil them is as difficult to come by on an ordinary day as the objects themselves."
Well, she could help with that if she applied a lot of cleverness. Does she want to? Ehhh not from a total blank slate. World's most... what is it, desperate? stupid? summoner can break her question down into smaller questions first.
What kind of summoner is she, really? She was still kneeling by the circle, like she thought she could add the binding after, but not after getting a reply, so -
"Strong paths are physical, yet hardly one object. Perhaps pure water, to wash their wounds, or a sack of seashells to lift their spirits"
Akʰa takes two entire seconds to double-check her impression that no real humans have ever wanted water to wash in more than to drink. Incredible. What are this human's real priorities, she desperately wants to know.
"I can make one... long stone, or many, in the shape of a road. Where would you want one most?"
Wow, that was practically rushed. And... phrased like she's trying to avoid agreeing to a bargain despite not having a binding to make that mean—well, almost anything. It would be nice to have the option to leave whenever.
"And how do you get to Assan from here?"
"We came down the coast and over the hills, but a straighter way would run through the Reinen mountains."
And for someone who has not heard of...this is a problem she can solve.
She creates in her hand a scaled model of the dry land surrounding them, all rendered into bark, the vertical dimension exaggerated, crawling outward over—oh, finally, there's a hill—as it outgrows her hand she hefts it up then floats it down to the ?bed? on a cushion of air. There's hills on two sides but the longer line has a coastal void past it, and steepens into proper mountains at one end; she continues past those until she starts building another ridge of hills.
(Yes, it's a bed! There's four low posts near the head so that blankets can be draped near your head without touching your face, because this is a rich person's bed room, and the cushions are meant to be rearrangable into a Soft Supported Sit position, but it's not that hard to recognise.)
She can, with difficulty, orientate to the monochrome relief map and backtrace the route from here to roughly where Assan should be. Somewhere along this bend of this river, unless it's the other one, which might have dried up or shifted more recently than the hills.
(...the sea might be a touch lower, but it's possible to recognise that they're in north-east Spain, and she wants a magic road through the Pyrenees.)
(It's not monochrome! The significance of 'bark' isn't 'all brown': it's flammable.) (Anyway,)
This is not the face of a demon who repeatedly memorises all the names humans repeatedly come up with for overlapping horizon-sized objects, but sure, she's pondered a lot of models in her time and can squizz it round her brain until she identifies it as probably the that-a-kinda-place.
That's... an amount of road. It's not really a larger amount than she first thought, but she was imagining sinking a smooth slab of stone into a bunch of old roads. Doing this and making it right would require... forethought. Planning.
Contrary to the plan 'get a completed summons so she can bail any time'. Aaand relatedly if she can bail any time there's no way she's getting through all that. Which—huh, does she want to? Maybe, actually. It has been a while since she finished something properly impressive. And while 'silent with controlled facial expressions' is not her favourite form of impressedness, the facial expressions are in fact failing to be controlled, which is very gratifying. And... okay no she can tell when she wants something and is making up excuses, she does not need to embarrass herself by pretending "what's the deal with the seashells?" is truly deeply fascinating.
"So. I will make for you this road, and I will make - ten cubic litres of purest water, for washing, and I will - give you this sack of seashells," she makes one, swinging from her hand, "and in return, I propose you give me..." oops she should have thought of something before starting this sentence,
"Yyyep, sure, electrum works fine, totally valid trade offer," she drags a hand through her hair, leaving a trail of fine gold and silver rings; "do note that tangibles need to be carryable on my person to actually go anywhere..."
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