Cam is lounging in a hanging furniture object that's sort of a cross between a hammock and a chair and leaves plenty of room for the wings and tail, feet up, sipping hot cider, and watching a documentary about the history of the colonization of Luna because he does like to keep current. Ho hum.
"This is so weird, there are practically no prayers," he says. "Uh, short version: I can answer prayers. I can do just about any kind of magic you can think of, but I have to know what I'm doing first, so I'm not so good at things it's not safe to experiment with, like brains. But I can't do anything that's not answering a prayer. The body on the floor is me, but mostly in kind of an indirect metaphysical sense; I'm awake when he's asleep and vice versa, but we pretty much don't share memories. He's permanently asleep now because he figured out he's me and apparently that's what happens when he does that. This is Hell? No wonder the place is so dead. Is there anywhere around that's not Hell?"
"Uh, depends what you mean by around. Besides Hell you've got Heaven and Fairyland and the afterlife which goes by various names such as Limbo and then there's the mortal world. Fairyland and Limbo and the mortal world are probably better bets for you, how did you land here? Why Hell, why my living room?"
The voice trails off.
Half a beat later, it picks up again: "Okay, that's more like it. Fair warning, I might be a little distracted from now on, I found your other four worlds and some of them are a whole lot busier prayer-wise. But I can carry on a conversation pretty well between prayers; I've got practice."
"That sounds inconvenient," he remarks. "Yeah, don't know if I can move stuff between different worlds in your bundle, nobody's wanted to do it yet, but I can reach 'em all from here, they're just - a little farther away than normal. Ooh, I got to cure dementia already, that's a new record. Hey, and if I can move stuff between worlds, I might even be able to do fast resurrection, nice!"
A few seconds later: "Yep, no problem, you want your house to come with you or no? Actually, if you ask me again in a few minutes I might just be able to let you move between worlds yourself. But in the meantime, I can definitely move you to Limbo with all relevant magical properties intact."
"Faster to do it myself!" the god says brightly. "I am really really fast. What's your name, anyway? Wanna be friends? I like having friends, it's handy."
In the space between words, with hardly a noticeable pause, Cam is offered a silent and inherently comprehensible choice: does he want to be able to edit the things he creates with his demon abilities after he has created them?
"—doing you favours."
A neatly wrapped present, in paper with a curly-swirly rainbow pattern and a shimmering iridescent ribbon, appears hovering in midair in front of Cam in a burst of fast-fading rainbow sparkles.
If he unwraps it, he will discover a framed piece of paper that shows a long list of books by title and author, with little thumbnail images of front covers, and scrolls according to his whim. It is all of the books that currently exist but which he has not yet acquired.
"Limbo-ites can't make stuff, they're basically stuck with whatever they land with, and it's one 'thing' to a customer - sometimes a medium-sized or large thing, but they can't move them or tweak them or add to them. It's not terrible, but it's certainly not the casual excess of Hell or Heaven or as interesting as Fairyland."
On a whim, he appears for Cam a book containing all of the prayers he has answered here so far. There's a lot of blank space in the book currently, but it's got a solid chunk of pages filled in at the start. It has his name in Draconic on the front, even though no one in this world can read it, because why not?
"Draconic. It's magic, it's from the world I was just in; that symbol says 'Teah', which means 'miracle' roughly speaking, but written as a name and not just a word. The inside's all English, though. Funny, your world has a lot of the same languages as the one I'm from originally. Same Earth, too, just with some details different."
"A whole huge bunch of surface shit - none of the same exact people - a little older, too, looks like your Earth's got a few hundred years on mine. And of course until five minutes ago there wasn't any of my magic going around. I wonder when people are gonna start sweating about how to announce me?"
"Do you wanna just be able to talk anyway," he says, "seems like it would be convenient but maybe it'd just freak people out? Still working on giving you free travel between worlds, by the way. They move around, it's tricky. I can do one-time moves no problem; making a magic power for it is a whole different jar of candy."
A few seconds of silence, then,
"Now seems as good a time as any to mention - my body doesn't really need maintenance, I figured out how to make it self-sufficient like it is, but I might want to kill it eventually because if I do that I reincarnate in a local body and then I get to stay here pretty much permanently. But if you don't wanna be involved with that I can probably find another prayer to sneak it into. I don't wanna do it right away, though, because I'll be back to only getting out while the new body sleeps, and I wanna have some time to settle in first without being offline most of the day."
"Debatably permanent. Technically if my extremely immortal dragon buddy back in Elcenia dies or decides to break the send for some reason, I pop back there right away and can't get here again on my own. In practice he's not gonna do either, but I still like to settle in properly. And I get kind of antsy if I go too long without some downtime. It's a problem."
"Oh, he still has one of me with him! I'm a copy. I figured out how to do that. That's why the random sending. Teahs, Teahs everywhere! It's hard to coordinate two of me in the same world for longer than a few minutes, though. One of me's going to try it eventually somewhere, but probably somewhere a little quieter than here."
"Means I'm probably not what you'd expect from a bad god, but I might not be what you'd expect from a good one, either. Read the book if you wanna get a sense. Read this one, too, even - " and a burst of rainbow sparkles and a copy of the prayer record for his first couple of weeks in Elcenia, with 'Teah' and 'Elcenia' on the cover in Draconic. It's pretty thick, even though he's condensed a lot of the less memorable prayers into 'X hundred children given nice safe candy or toys' or 'conversation with Kaylo about Y, Z'. Part of the extra is all the notes explaining (somewhat tersely, but comprehensibly) things like what a hearer is and the problem with shrens.
"Like you might have an idea of what a super awesome god would be like if you could make one to spec, and I might not be exactly like that. So if you're doubting how awesome I am, I'd rather show you what you're getting and let you decide for yourself than just say I'm really great and invite all those expectations about what that means."
"Nope! I can do a lot for somebody who's talking to me that I can't do for somebody who, say, wants a life-size diamond sculpture of themselves. Especially now that I'm used to it, I can fit in the kinds of little things I've been doing under the definition of 'hanging out with you'. And you keep making me laugh so I keep wanting to give you presents."
"Do people tend to do things that falls into the category of 'worshiping' you?" wonders Cam. There's nothing significant he wants to do to his person beyond the wings and the tail or he would have gotten around to it already, but he tests the ability by adjusting the length of his fingernails and grins.
"Just like I can be randomly sent, people can be randomly summoned too. Somebody did a random summoning just to show off, and they caught my body while it was asleep, and suddenly I was in this whole new world with all kinds of weird magic problems. This place has way fewer weird magic problems! I mean, the thing with the five different worlds that have such a hard time interacting with each other is weird and inconvenient, but it's not, like, dragons."
While Cam is looking at that, another Optional Superpower arrives! This one is the promised interworld transit, in the form of a teleportation ability that comes with large-scale previewing - if he wants to visit the mortal world, he can scout around it first looking for a good spot to show up, although it won't zoom in any closer than the point where people are small undetailed blobs. That's still plenty of detail for the purposes of detecting large landmarks.
"Are people actually gonna start shooting at you? What would be the point?" Somewhere in between those two sentences, an invisibility power arrives. It's very tidy - he can see himself while invisible, but as though he is a lightly painted soap bubble, translucent and faintly shimmering and all surface with no interior; he can choose whether or not to invisible clothing and carried objects along with him, including things he puts on or picks up while invisible, but if he puts something down, its invisibility will fade after a few seconds; he will pass through mist or smoke or fog or assorted floating particulates as though he isn't there at all, and he won't leave footprints or fingerprints unless he deliberately intends to.
"I'm indestructible, not un-scratchable. They could make it sort of inconvenient to be in a particular area without slaughtering them, basically, which is stupid if the target's dangerous and rude if the target is not, but someone might do it anyway. This is a very nice power."
"It doesn't seem to work that way. I mean, maybe if I just spontaneously made it so everybody in every part of the world has all the daeva powers and then I vanished, if I came back in a hundred years there wouldn't be that many prayers. But people know I exist, in my original world and in Elcenia, and they want things, and the things they want aren't usually 'tons of superpowers'. So they ask for 'em."
"If you let enough people teleport - especially if you let them bring stuff - I guess we get massive amounts of colonization outside the solar system and probably the population explodes and you will be able to fill time making magic puppies for a wide variety of children." He turns invisible and goes to hang out on Earth, above somewhere in Russia, and glides.
"I'm thinking of maybe doors between worlds, actually. I could do doors between planets just as easily - easier, even. I could make planets, for that matter. Actually, that might be really fun. Do you think if I made a little galaxy somewhere, people would wanna live there?"
"Probably! Seems kind of superfluous because there's lots of planets people haven't touched yet, but I may just be overreacting to having lived in Hell for a century and a half where somebody's idea of obviously necessary decoration was a gigantic tacky plane of solid gold."
"Most of the planets people haven't touched yet would take some work to make habitable, is the thing. I can just make an entire galaxy of people-friendly planets. And just for you, one of 'em is going to have a gold core," he giggles. "I mean, if you let me. This is one of those things that's kind of dependent on having somebody willing to wish for it."
"Awesome." And now Cam is on a different planet. Gravity is roughly Earth normal, but the planet is smaller - the horizon is noticeably lower. And the area Cam is flying over is covered in absolutely stunning rock formations - spires of branching translucent crystal in blue and pink and green and orange and red and white and purple, varying in size from towering to tiny. Very pretty, but not exactly habitable per se. The crystal forest has edges, though, and beyond those are some grassy areas striped with rivers and spotted with gentle hills.
"Most of the pretty stuff like this is different per planet, but not always a lot different. And the people-friendly parts are mostly just copies of nice Earth climates with the exact geography changed. And all the plants are Earth species, and somebody's gonna have to go through and build up the rest of the ecosystems, because if I'd had to come up with any complicated biology on the fly it would've taken ages."
"People have prayed for some little stuff, but I dunno. I'd feel weird just barging in and covering places in trees and hills and pretty rocks when there are people there already. Maybe I'll do it to some places that are near people but not under 'em and see how they like it. There, I did one."
"There you go. It's just always sounded unbearably drab. The understood theory is that you show up there and you get exactly the one thing that you think an afterlife would be most incomplete without, but you don't get a chance to think that through, so people show up and they maybe get their favorite dead dog or a pond or an ice skating rink and it winds up being a pretty bizarre mishmash."
A large, graceful-looking stone archway appears on top of a nearby hill. It's big enough to drive a car through, and made of one solid piece of dark polished granite, and it has the two square symbols of Teah's name carved into an oval at the top.
Through the archway, with only the faintest rainbow shimmer at the edges to announce that something magical is going on, a different section of empty landscape is visible. This one is a flat steppe rather than hills and rivers, and has some very colourful mountains in the distance.
"What do you think?" says Teah.
"Okay, eventually you're going to want these near population centers, but for an initial proof of concept I'd think something maybe fifty miles away from the nearest good-size town - a town with, like, hotels in it as opposed to two bed-and-breakfasts, but make the whole thing remote enough that people don't swarm it and trample each other."
Et voila: a door! It's on the next hill over, and it's made of a paler, redder granite and is twice as wide and half again as tall, but is otherwise built to the same plan as the original. On the other side, a road is visible in the distance, past a considerable amount of anonymous vegetation.
"Cool. Uh, the non-mortal worlds could also really use standardized communication protocols of, like, any kind, I think Fairyland may have something worked out but Limbo doesn't have the materials and Heaven and Hell don't have the coordination to agree on how to use radio frequencies and encode signals and so on. If you one-time issued every dead person and daeva some kind of magic widget that would communicate with other widgets of the same kind and attach to any sort of computer, and threw in the computers too for the Limboites and maybe the fairies, that would be swell. Especially if they worked world to world."
Cam now has a device. Helpfully, it is as invisible as he is, but clear enough in his invisi-vision to be usable. It looks more or less like a large smartphone or a small tablet computer. The material of the screen is impervious to dust, fingerprints, and other obstructions; the case is a dark blue that matches his wings and tail, with a swirled texture reminiscent of the paper Teah used to wrap his present. It has Teah's name on the back.
Instead of having anything like a traditional help menu or manual, it is self-explanatory in a way similar to Teah's choices: if he wonders things about it, the answers arrive, clear and correct and complete.
Essentially it is a magic computer connected to a magic extranet. It can send and receive information to and from any other such device, as long as the other device is identified and hasn't blocked him; he can block other devices from requesting or providing information to his. It has infinite storage capacity and instantaneous data transfer. It can take pictures and record sound and video. It can manifest a keyboard attachment, or display a virtual one on the screen, or take dictation perfectly. It can read data from any computing device he asks it to, and convert between its own purely magical formats and any others he cares to name. It can read entire computers and simulate them for him so he can run programs written for their environments. (It does not have any magical programming languages or runtime environments of its very own. He will just have to bear that lack.) Although it can display images using pixels, its native formats have no such simplifying abstractions.
It belongs to Cam. Very firmly. No one else can use it. If he leaves it behind or forgets it somewhere and wishes he hadn't, it will appear. He can change the colour and glossiness of the case at whim, although Teah's name and the swirl pattern will stay.
"Whatcha think?"
And the person with the remote control wants a demon to show up and make her a few things and take its payment out of the summoner as long as this neither maims nor kills him.
And, because after all of this Teah still finds he has strong feelings on the matter, the former remote control and the person holding it are now enclosed in a large and magically unpoppable soap bubble with the word NO swirling across its inner surface in a repeated pattern of shimmering black ink. (But because he still doesn't mean to be entirely cruel, the bubble also magically frees its occupant from the need to eat or drink or use the bathroom while she is thusly enclosed. And its air supply is self-renewing. She's not going to die in there unless she really, really wants to.)
Last of all, he has a quick look into the recently threatened summoner's history and puts together a magical package of goodies fitting his personal definition of ultimate coziness, as best Teah can guess at it - comfort foods, pillows, whatever he might prefer. The package comes in the form of a small gift box wrapped in rainbow-swirl paper with an iridescent ribbon on top, and has a little tag that says, Contains nice magic. Open at home.
The snake is magical and undeterred by shooting. It goes on hissing and trying to bite her - but as soon as it succeeds, it vanishes, leaving behind a mark that's more of a bruise than a bite.
What's Cam up to? Still on the gadget with his dad?
Cam is just finishing up on the gadget with his dad. "Yeah, Dad, I will totally come by and make you a decent fishing lake soon. Sure, but just the once. ...Yeah, probably. All right. I'll be by in a while."
Cam fills the lake with water and pondweed and makes a set of fishing gear, and would like Teah to supply the fish.
Starting next to Cam and rippling outward at astonishing speeds, fish appear in the lake. Many are Earth species, but most are decidedly not. There are little ones and big ones and ones of various medium sizes. There are ones with huge gorgeous shimmering fins that trail artistically in the water; there are ones with gleaming jewel-toned scales that change colour in smooth gradients from head to tail; there are long white eely things spiral-striped with a single bright colour each, like wiggly candy canes.