Snort. "No kidding. And no explosions if I mess up."

"I like playing with pain magic but I acknowledge that it's not the most convenient imaginable system."

"No. Mine isn't either, but it's certainly more so."

"Yeah."

They pass by a dining hall, which has an enormous window with a lovely view of the lake. "—I suppose I shouldn't take for granted that you eat the same things we do—"

"I can check if something's going to be nutritious or if it's going to horrifically poison me. With ordinary substances, anyway, I don't naively think it'll handle all magical substances well."

"The food here isn't magical, strictly speaking, it's conjured but once it gets here it's perfectly ordinary - you sit down at a table where food belongs and it appears in front of you. Took me a while to build that one, but it's amazingly convenient, I love it."

"It sounds it. I wouldn't even know where to begin in order to do that with my magic. It's less for outright creation and more for augmentation, though light and heat are both easy enough to make. But I'm getting distracted, shall we see if I can eat the food now, while we're here?"

"Sure."

She turns a chair sideways so she can sit comfortably with her wings, then accordingly sits. She was promised food?

Food appears! And dishes and cutlery!

"None of my furniture is designed for people with wings," Serik says wryly.

"That makes sense. Fortunately, chairs are a solvable problem! But it might be a bit more of one with, say, a really small bed. I might knock things outside of the bed over while stretching, or something."

Hmmm. This food is unfamiliar, but after a quick magical survey, it looks edible. She nibbles on something. Yep, tastes edible too, if kind of foreign.

"Unless I spontaneously collapse in half an hour from shock or something, I think I can safely eat your food," she pronounces.

"If you spontaneously collapse I'll dump a bottle of healing water over your head," he promises. "I'm pretty sure there's a room with a big enough bed on the hall I'm thinking of, but if not there's hundreds more. And I can always conjure you a bigger bed."

"Thank you. Conjuration's so useful."

He grins.

She smiles back. Then she looks thoughtful.

"... How willing would you be to perhaps help with the demon problem?"

He shrugs. "Depends. If it's possible they could actually hurt me, I don't especially want to go near them, but on the other hand if it's possible they could find my lovely mountain and bother me here, leaving them alone until they eventually do that seems like a poor choice."

"I don't know if they could actually hurt you or not. I could make a, a demon demo and poke you with an unholy weapon or something, if you like. I'm one of the few celestials that knows how to make them. It's possible they could eventually bother you here, though if it's anytime soon, it'd be to follow me, which. Uh. Sorry about that. I expect some investigation, but they, ah. Just became rather busy. They might not find the time to disentangle the complicated mess that was my experimental planar shift, and it would take time. But they might decide that an angel managing to make it past their enchantments is worth making time for. I don't really know."

"Are unholy weapons the worst they can manage? You wouldn't get far trying to make my life difficult by messing with - this," he gestures at himself.

"No, but they'd need time to figure you out before they could do much more. It'd be unholy weapons and hellfire to start. At a naive guess, if they figured out your mountain explodes if you don't torture anyone, they'd try to prevent you from doing that. First by transporting you somewhere with no one to torture, in order to wait you out. After that, I think they'd start trying to meddle in the workings of your magic, see if they can upset the balance you have, but I have no idea if they could manage it or not. I know how some infernal magic is structured, but with large scale complicated stuff I'm less able to predict what they can do."

"Sounds like I should put some time into figuring out travel between worlds."

Nod. "That'd be smart, yeah. If your magic can do it."

He gazes at nothing in particular for a moment, and then says, "Looks like it can."

Smile.

"All right, then."

"One of the very convenient features of magic in this world - both kinds, actually - is that when you try to do something with it, you get hints, and if the thing you want to do is impossible the hint amounts to 'no'."

"I don't have that, it's more trial and error. I suppose your magic wins in convenience at one thing."