This result is not even slightly in the book. "Hi -"

He yelps in startlement and drops his paintbrush. The ink smears under Cam's feet, and the paintbrush contributes a final splatter.

There is... something like an explosion. The plate warps and shatters; a mass of twisted wreckage fountains out of it, shredded spirals of stone intersecting with loops and whorls of coloured glass and splintered lumps of wood, all at highly uncomfortable speeds in semirandom directions. When the shrapnel hits Cam's summoner, he shatters into a fine spray of brilliantly gleaming crystalline shards, which are then blown outward in a wide arc by the force of the blast, shredding the book and scattering the ink-spheres across the ground.

It's over in moments. The fountain of debris stutters to a halt. Cam, somehow, is still here. The person who presumably summoned him is in a thousand glassy pieces spread out over the fifty-foot blast radius, glittering beautifully in the sunlight.

...and... Cam's still here?

The fuck?

Where even is he?

He is in a flat and lifeless wasteland, under a glaring yellow sun. There is a hill visible in the distance, and a glimmer next to it that might be water; besides that, it's pretty much flat dry ground as far as the eye can see.

A few of the shards of Cam's summoner are moving. They pull together into a single piece, and that piece starts to grow, in a manner somewhere between a crystal and a plant. It forms the shape of a face, which is crying in pain. As the growth moves on to form a neck and a pair of shoulders, the head slowly transmutes from shining white crystal back into flesh and bone and skin and hair.

Cam has no fucking clue what just happened and the instinct to supply painkillers should be firmly ignored in case of eldritch crystalline horror with unknown biology or nonbiology. He waits.

While he waits, he might take the time to notice that the eldritch crystalline horror is bilingual in two languages he's never heard of and which share no discernible roots with any language he speaks!

It takes about a minute from the first signs of movement until enough of his torso regrows that he has lungs and can breathe. He gasps in an agonized breath, whimpers, tries to speak, fails, whimpers some more, tries again.

"What," gasp, "the fuck," wheeze, "are you?"

"Uh. I'm a demon. I'd offer to help but I have no clue what you're doing there sorry. What are you?"

'Demon' comes through as 'maker'; there isn't a word for it in either of the two new languages.

"I'm a human," says the eldritch crystalline horror. "And I'm—" A spurt of new growth from his elbow jars his whole body, and the movement presses his face against the mass of shards underneath him. They're sharp. His cheek and jaw are shredded right down to the bone. He stifles a whimper; the deep gashes barely have time to bleed before the edges turn glassy and knit themselves back together. "Fuck. What was I saying?"

"You were claiming to be a human. I gotta say this is a novel form of humanity for me."

"An athra did it," he explains. "But maybe you - ow - have as little idea what I mean by 'athra' as I do what you mean by 'maker'."

"Not unless you're claiming to have been enchanted by an eggplant. That's presumably just a homophone."

He giggles. This proves to be unwise. Now he has to regrow half his face again. "Augh!"

"Sorry."

"I'll be fine in a couple minutes," he says. "Just not much fun in the meantime. I hate exploding, it's the worst."

"Never had the displeasure myself."

"Good, I hope it stays that way! How'd you end up in the middle of my diagram?"

"Seems to have managed to constitute a valid demon summoning circle. Briefly."

"Demons are summoned by circles?"

"Yes we are."

"That sounds - ow - inconvenient."

(His regeneration has progressed far enough that it may at any moment become relevant that the explosion destroyed all his clothes.)

"It's voluntary on the demon's part and usually intentional on the summoner's. Will you be harmed if I replace your outfit?"

"...Probably not! Replace it how?"

"Demons aren't usually summoned for decorative purposes. We make stuff." He replaces the outfit.

His legs are starting to regrow. He scrunches his eyes shut and stops talking. The new growth shoves him across the shard-dusted ground, shredding part of his new outfit and most of his back, but there's enough of the clothes left to preserve modesty and his back only has half a second to bleed before it glazes over and heals. And now there's enough of him intact for him to sit up.

"Making stuff," he says. "Huh. Seems handy, I guess."

"It is," Cam says. "So, uh, what's an athra."

"They have a lot of magic, and sometimes someone convinces one to do them a favour, but they really don't like killing people. So somebody won a favour from an athra and tried to come up with the most inevitably fatal curse they possibly could that didn't directly mention death, hoping the athra wouldn't figure out that cursing me to shatter into little pieces whenever something hits me hard enough was effectively murder, and the athra cursed me exactly as specified but then also made me immortal."

"That's, uh, weird. Convenient in a horrible sort of way?"

"Athrai are weird! Their minds really don't work like human minds. They can take any form they choose, and some of them try to pretend to be human sometimes, and I can always tell."

"Okay. Next question is where are we?"

"Weird barren wasteland with weird magic. I've been trapped here alone for months with no idea how I got here or how to get home and I'm pretty sure I'm the only person on the planet and I'm kinda going insane a little."

"Oh. Well, I'm not a hallucination, if my saying that helps, which it probably shouldn't. No idea at all?"

"I went to sleep at home and woke up here."

"Well that sounds distressing. Are you just sufficiently immortal to handle being in a barren wasteland?"

"The weird magic makes it less barren. I, uh, can't starve or die of thirst, but I do actually have food and water; I hauled the big plate way out here because I wanted to test that diagram without risking blowing up the hill I'm living under. And look how right I was!"

"So right!" Cam agrees. "I didn't get a good look at any of it before it exploded."

"As far as I can tell, that diagram was supposed to build a house."

"If it weren't for the part where it's probably not supposed to explode, you could declare it an indirect success?"

"Are you offering to build me a house?"

"Make you a house," Cam says. "Demon, remember, we're useful."

"Well, I won't say no," he says.

"What sort of house do you want?"

"...You know, I'm really not sure. But I probably want it closer to my hill. Unless you can make me a mountain range, in which case I want it farther from my hill."

"I can make you a mountain range! Why the preference for unlevel terrain?"

"The hill is where I found all the supplies I'm using to do local magic and books I'm learning local magic out of, I'm not attached to its hilliness in particular. The mountain range is because I grew up in one."

"I can probably just copy the one you are from, if that would not be weird for you."

"Wait, really? And no that would be really weird and not in a good way."

"I have pretty good copying-stuff powers," Cam says. "I can also just give you, like, the Catskills or something, or design a mountain range which has not previously mountain ranged somewhere else."

"If I have all these options I think custom mountain range is my favourite, but I've never heard of the Catskills so in fairness I wouldn't really be able to tell the difference," he says.

"Do you want to design one yourself? I can go off blueprints. Or, like, a topology map."

"I've never designed a mountain range before, I have no idea of the operative engineering considerations! ...But yes I totally do!"

"How steep it can be depends on the angle of repose of the material in question!"

"Cool," he says. "...I should probably clean up all this - me - before trying to learn how to engineer mountains, though."

"Yeah, it looks kind of like a tripping hazard - do you have anywhere to put it -?" Cam materializes some brooms and offers his summoner one.

"I usually pile it up and burn it. It'll melt if it gets hot enough, and then the sharp edges aren't a problem."

"Okay cool." Sweep sweep.

Sweep sweep!

"Be careful," he adds, "this stuff's way worse than broken glass, it's really sharp and really hard."

"I'm indestructible, wouldn't do more than scratch me," Cam says, "but thanks for the warning."

"How's that work?"

"My favorite analogy is 'imagine attacking a watermelon with a plastic fork' but I'm not sure how that translates for you. Basically I can get a little bit hurt - for that matter, I can get tired and hungry and thirsty and whatnot - but only to a point, and from there it just doesn't get any worse. And I heal really fast, if injured. Without your inconvenient crystal theme."

"Sounds handy."

"I like it!"

Sweeeeeep sweep sweep.

Sweep sweep sweep. Pile pile.

It's a really pretty pile. The shards are transparent and colourless, but they catch the light really aggressively, like they're auditioning for a part in a chandelier.

"Your dangerous shards look like they belong in, like, the crown jewels," Cam comments.

"Yeah, they're really pretty."

And presently it's all together and Cam torches it.

"Wow, you're really useful."

"I'm so useful!" Cam agrees, wagging his tail. "And I am in a really good mood because this place looks like it needs terraforming and I have always wanted to terraform a planet, I was hoping for Mars but that realistically wasn't gonna happen."

"'Terraform'?"

"Make it pleasant and habitable. This one already has air and gravity, which, good on it, those are important, but it could use plants! And water features! And animals, although I can't make anything smarter than a snail so at first it will be mostly like bugs and I will have to have careful breeding programs of demonic fauna otherwise."

"Local magic can do plants, and it did a plant that grows bacon, it might actually be able to do animals too."

"...I actually don't think I can do a plant that grows bacon, on account of, what."

"If you come back to my hill I can show you my bacon plant! It's that way," he says, pointing hillward.

"Sure." Follow follow.

And... yep, that's a hill. It's covered in rich brown dirt and thriving plants, and the haphazard garden spills out around it for a considerable distance, including all the way down to the shore of the nearby lake.

"Nice!" Cam remarks. "And you even have a water feature."

"Yeah, I guess so," he says. "Anyway. Bacon plant."

It's a tangly little shrub. Rolled-up strips of raw bacon sprout from its coiling branches.

"That's really weird."

"I mean, yes, it is, but what specifically is really weird about it?"

"There's lots of magic where I'm from but none of it can create persistently magical effects unless you count the indestructibility; everything has to work by the laws of physics once it gets there. This plant could conceivably be managing to do that somehow but it implies some combination of a magic system that can handle the design of a thing that does that somehow, on its own, or an inventing civilization that could invent it and thought this was the best use of their incredible biological knowledge. Or, this magic system works very differently from the ones I'm used to, but is based on similar enough underlying principles that it has 'bacon' as a concept."

"Basically all the magic I ever saw before I got here came from an athra creating a persistently magical effect," says the still-unnamed eldritch crystalline horror. "So there's that."

"Any of this seem like the sort of thing an athra would do?"

"Nnnno, not remotely. From everything I can tell, there used to be humans on this planet and now there aren't anymore, and it's hard to imagine an athra fucking up that badly at the whole 'not killing anyone' thing. And even besides that it's just... not their style."

"I will have to take your word for that. - what's your name, anyway, I'm Cam."

"Tiro! Tiro se Fara."

"Oh, if we're doing full names it's Campbell Mark Swan."

"Nice to meet you! You're a big improvement over being trapped alone on a dead planet forever!"

"Delighted to be of assistance!"

Tiro giggles.

"How are you going about learning the local magic?"

"I have books! I can't read the language but I've made some progress on interpreting them anyway."

"I can probably speed that up - I'd only get the language for free if someone who knew it summoned me, but I can do computer analysis if you've got enough text."

"I dunno if I have enough text. I can show you my books, though, c'mon in."

There is a door in the side of the hill. Inside there are a bunch of boxy packs hanging on pegs on the wall, and some storage cabinets, and a big table with a small pile of books on it.

"What're those?" Cam asks, pointing at the hanging things.

"Emergency magic kits. They have plates for painting magic diagrams on, and paintbrushes for painting them with, and recipe books for copying diagrams out of, and balls of magic ink."

"This was just all here when you showed up?"

"Yeah. And a bunch of broken furniture and human skeletons. I cleared all that out."

"...naturally. If they had enough stuff to grow a bacon plant I wonder what killed them. If this is in fact a remnant of an entire civilization, though, I should be able to get more text than what you happen to have here."

"With your copying-stuff powers?"

"Yeah, exactly. If this is some weird athra prank or whatever, there will be no result beyond what you've got on the shelves if I try to conjure up 'the complete works ever produced in this language' for a translation program to chew on, but if there was a whole civilization, they presumably wrote more than that."

"Try it and see, then, I guess!"

"Should do it outside in case they wrote a lot more."

"...yeah, good plan."

So Cam goes outside and attempts to produce in searchable electronic format Everything In That Language.

"...it's so small," says Tiro.

There's a fair amount of it, but the language was spoken by a subplanetary civilization with no electronic records. It all fits on a handful of chips.

"It's very compressed," Cam says, setting it up for crunching. "It'd be bigger on paper by a lot."

"How do you compress it that small?"

"...this requires a long explanation indeed! How curious are you?"

"Very! Very curious!"

"Okay. You have lightning where you're from?"

"Yep!"

"So, you can learn to generate small amounts of the same stuff, and it can do many interesting things, including flow in a manner loosely analogous to water through paths in special materials. The paths can store information and the flow can move the information around. And it can be very very small. I will proceed to elaborate on all of that." He produces a version of his computer and starts explaining electrons.

Tiro is fascinated.

They can just have an entire Electrical And Software Engineering From First Principles lesson here if Tiro wants, while the translation software nibbles on the corpus.

Yes! Tiro wants! Tiro is really fucking excited about Electrical And Software Engineering From First Principles!

What fun! After he has gotten as far as the concept of the logic gate, Cam pauses - "I'm hungry, you hungry?"

"Yeah kinda!"

"Whaddaya want?"

"I dunno. Some kind of food you like."

So now they have linguine in clam sauce and a side of broccoli with hollandaise! And dishes.

Whoa. Food.

Tiro is tentatively enthusiastic about the food.

Yay! "Have you been eating bacon and nothing but? ...Do you even have a way to cook the bacon?"

"Yeah, I can cook the bacon. And I have fruit trees and vegetables and stuff."

"Okay, so you're probably not desperately malnourished. Have a multivitamin anyway." Cam hands him a multivitamin.

...He blinks at the multivitamin.

"You swallow it - or chew it, if you prefer, but it is not delicious - and it contains various nutrition so you don't come down with some deficiency of something? Or don't, maybe you're immortal enough that you could survive on bacon alone, I don't know."

He shrugs. He swallows the multivitamin.

"I mean, I did mention that I can't starve. It's really uncomfortable but it doesn't seem to impair me much."

"Well, I wouldn't want you to be really uncomfortable with the symptoms of magnesium deficiency!"

"Thanks!"

"You're welcome!"

And resume lecture.

Learning is fun!!!

"Do you also not need sleep?" Cam eventually wonders.

"Iiii do still need sleep. Unfortunately."

"How often? It's been a while."

"Once a day is supposed to be the ideal! I should go do that, huh."

"I could make you a house first, but a whole mountain range, if that is where you want your house, will take a while."

"I mean, I have, like, a bed. Several beds. They're downstairs."

"Okay. Would you like to wake up to a mountain range, I don't usually sleep."

"...I'm torn between 'yes I would love to wake up to a mountain range' and 'but I wanted to learn how to design mountains first!'"

Cam laughs. "How about you wake up to, like, three mountains, and I can show you what I'm doing as I design the rest of the range?"

"You know what else I want that I don't care much about having design input into? Weather. What can you do about weather?"

"I can make clouds! And air of various temperatures! I am not a weather expert so I'd like to be a little conservative about that until I can survey the whole planet and run simulations but I could make it rain locally and not have to worry about it much."

"I would be really happy to wake up to some rain!"

"I can do that!"

"Thanks!"

And he goes downstairs and goes to bed.

When he wakes up it is drizzling. Cam's sitting inside, fiddling with stuff on his computer.

Rain!!!!!

He goes outside and twirls around gleefully in the drizzle.

"I can't say rain is the sort of thing I miss when it's not around," Cam remarks.

"I have been missing rain a lot!"

"How come?"

"Well, for one thing, I have to haul water out of the lake for all my plants."

"I could see how that would get annoying. ...The bacon plant. Needs to be watered. That's incongruous."

"Why's that incongruous?"

"It's a bacon plant! It should be able to sustain itself in a vacuum, it's a freaking shrub that grows strips of bacon!"

"Why does that matter to how it should be able to sustain itself?"

"Because if you can make a bacon plant at all why should it have any of the other limitations that plants have like needing water?"

"We don't know anything about how the bacon plant was made!"

"I know, I know, I'm sure it makes sense somehow, but it's just silly."

"The bacon plant is kind of silly. But very tasty."

"I am glad that you have had it to keep you company in this lonesome time."

Tiro starts giggling helplessly.

Wag wag.

Heeeeeeeeeeee.

"So I did a survey of the area overnight and it is very dried up and rather flat," Cam says. "I can put in a mountain range! I have been designing a lovely mountain range, want to see?"

"Yes! Please teach me all about designing mountain ranges!"

So Cam walks him through the process - he has all kinds of fun demonic software for designing mountain ranges and such - and here is how it can be shaped and here is what it will look like if he puts a different composition of rocks in it and then they slide and here is how tall it will have to be to have snow caps once there's more general moisture around and here are plants that could go on the mountains!

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Tiro is so excited about his mountains. He has mountain-related aesthetic opinions! Trees are good! Snow is good! Attractive rocks are good!

"I mean, do you want it to look naturalistic or do you want me to get fancy..."

"How about... mostly naturalistic, with occasional departures into fancy?"

"Scattered around, or, like, Mount Fancy in the middle of the Naturalistic Mountains?"

"Well, what does your mountain simulator think about those options?"

"Oh, let's see -"

Cam dabs flourishes scattered around in the range - high caldera lake with unreasonably pretty waterfalls, vein of bright quartz, copse of excessively shapely trees, salt terraces, basalt columns - displays the result and pans around - and then shuffles things around until it's all crowded onto one mountain.

"...As much as I love Mount Fancy, I think I like them better scattered," says Tiro. If he had a tail he would be wagging it. "This is going to be such a great mountain range."

"I think so too!" Cam reverts to the scattered version. Adds in some more things. Cave system! Wildflowers! Cliffy parts!

Tiro admires the design and maybe makes quiet 'eeeeeeeeee' sounds.

"Are you going to want a house on here? Easier to know going in if I am going to want to put a house foundation."

"Yeah! Like—" He tracks down his favourite section of mountain, a nice little forested valley in a particularly naturalistic section. "There?"

"All right, let's design you a house!"

He's got a "plain" default house design for nondemon residents stored somewhere. It has things like indoor plumbing and electric lights.

"Fancy amenities," comments Tiro.

"Pretty bare-bones for my world's tech level," Cam says. "Feel free to suggest tweaks!"

"Yeah, the design is a little... bland. And I'm used to way different architectural styles. I'm not that good an artist or I'd just draw you a picture... actually I guess you could just make, like, a tiny model of my childhood home if you felt like it, right?"

"Yeah, sure -" Now he is holding one that is just slightly outsize for the palm of his hand, he hands it over for Tiro to point things out.

It was a pretty big childhood home and they are going to have to squint to get some of the details, but Tiro is happy to talk about the difference in architectural styles. He's not actually an architect but he can point out things like the customary shapes of windows and the way the roofs have that particular profile and the open awnings with the decorated columns that go over all the main doors... Haelahar architecture is overall very pretty.

"Oh, the palace, too, that has some really good stuff," he thinks to suggest. "But you might need to make it bigger for us to, like, see the windows."

"How big?"

"Let's see..." He moves some things from one side of his table to the other. "That should be enough space. There's two sets of walls, see, and the really old stuff is mostly inside the inner walls and the newer stuff is mostly between inner and outer, and I'm a fan of both."

"Gotcha." Scale model!

The palace of Haela is huge and gorgeous. The inner fortifications are blockier, the construction techniques less refined, but their entire surface is decorated with beautifully intricate carvings, mostly abstract curves and lines, a little weathered but still clear. Between the inner and outer walls, the interconnected buildings are a little more elegant and modern in style, looking more like Tiro's childhood home and less like an ancient and forbidding castle. There is an enormous beautiful garden surrounded by charming colonnades. Tiro smiles wistfully at it.

"Pretty," Cam remarks. "What do you want to copy from here?"

"How hard would it be to copy, like, the style of the stonework on the inner castle without actually copying the exact designs? And there's a huge window somewhere around here that I really like," he hunts down the huge window and points it out, "yeah, this, that one." It's latticed diagonally in the Haelahar style, small individual panes of glass held securely in a wrought-iron frame, but unlike previous examples the frame has been crafted to look like a huge climbing vine instead of being a simple crosshatch of straight bars. "Isn't it great? I used to climb it as a kid until my mom caught me. Literally, I fell off and she caught me."

"I might have something that can procedurally generate more in the same style if I give it enough to go on," Cam says. He shoos his simulations, looks through his application library, finds something promising, starts scanning the model.

"Computers are so cool," says Tiro.

"They're great!" Cam agrees. "Okay - you're gonna want to prune what the program spits out, it can do silly things sometimes regardless of how great it is that it can do the things at all -" The program produces an example of a "more of that" based on the stone carving.

Tiro examines it. "That doesn't look so bad, except this corner is kind of messed up... it's weird the kind of mistakes it makes," he says. "Like, if this was calligraphy I'd say it had great handwriting but really iffy spelling, d'you see what I mean? Almost reminds me of athrai."

"Maybe athrai are artificial intelligences," suggests Cam, registering this feedback with the computer.

"I don't think so. Maybe! But it's just sort of conceptually similar, the way they make mistakes that aren't the same ones a human would make in the same situation. I think an athra would actually have a pretty easy time copying the style of the palace stonework."

"The thing with the computer generation is that it 'knows' when certain elements are combined but has no idea why, and it's not equipped to speculate," Cam says, "nor to tell by feel when something 'looks right' if it fits all the rules it derived from looking at its sample." He generates another instance. "How's this one?"

"Huh," says Tiro. "Yeah, I like that one!"

"All right, I will extrapolate enough square footage and export it to the house sim -"

And now the simmed house has pretty stonework all over it.

"It's so nice!" says Tiro.

"Yup! Anything else? Easier to change it now than later."

"Can you do the same thing with the window I like, or is there not enough of it?"

"Not really enough of it. I mean, I could try but you'd have to do a lot of pruning. I can copy it outright?"

"Hmm... nah," he decides. "Having exact copies of my favourite features of the places where I grew up would be too weird."

"I suppose turning it upside down or something wouldn't cut it?"

He giggles. "No."

"All right. It almost reminds me of these windows in this one demon's house -" He rummages around, pulls up a photo. "Ignore the rest of it, demon architecture is tacky, do you like the windows?"

"Wow," he remarks. "But yeah, I like those windows!"

"This is not the worst demon house ever," Cam says, snipping out the window design and adding it to the house sim. "They get real bad. We can make stuff but have no special ability to get rid of it. You get way too many things made of solid gold that way."

"There's a similar problem with the magic around here, I had to dig a bunch of new rooms to hold all the junk from my diagrams testing, but I think there's got to be some way to get rid of stuff or the entire planet would be one huge junk heap."

"There is, at least, some really thorough way to get rid of stuff," Cam says.

"Maybe they were trying to get rid of their junk and screwed it up and accidentally got rid of their everything," he speculates.

"Cautionary tale," nods Cam.

"I'm pretty sure they screwed something up. Like, it took me a while to notice, but this whole hill-house thing looks kind of like it was dug in a hurry, you know? And it's full of - I mean I don't know for sure that they're emergency supplies, but they sure look like emergency supplies. That seems more like 'suddenly everybody needed to hide underground' than like 'they died off gradually of starvation or plague'."

"And it didn't work," Cam says, "hence the skeletons and remaining supplies..."

"Yeah."

"How far away from the hill did you appear?"

"A ways. I wandered around for a while before I found the lake, and then I went around the lake until I found the hill with a door in it."

"This is a weird place," Cam opines. "...Anything else for the house? Wallpaper? Parquet? Swimming pool? This is like the painfully generic 'I got a demon to make me a house but I had no opinions on anything' baseline design here."

"I don't know! I wasn't expecting to get a demon to make me a house! Wait, what do you mean 'swimming pool'?"

"If you like to go swimming but do not wish to do so in a lake for whatever reason some people have pools of water in or near their homes in which they swim."

"Huh," he says. "Okay. Well, what do you think I'm missing?"

"This wouldn't be my standard house design for all my uncreative summoners' demonic housing needs if I thought it had glaring flaws, it's just plain and uncustomized."

"It's not that I'm uncreative, it's that I've never designed a house before and all my house-related experience is from a totally different world," he says. "So I can think of things like 'needs more gorgeous stonework', but, like... okay, I can ask for a computer with a copy of every book ever published in Haelahar or Sanash on it, right, but I only even know I can do that because I saw you do it for the language from my books, so how many other things like that are there that I don't know are options because I haven't heard of them yet? That's what's tripping me up here."

"Do you want me to translate you some intro-to-demons?"

"Sure."

So Cam finds an intro-to-demons article and reads it aloud, translating manually for Tiro since he hasn't had his computer chewing on Tiro's languages yet.

And from this Tiro learns things such as the existence of hot tubs (he doesn't want one) and the thing about never writing something down in plaintext if you want to keep it secret from demons (which sounds potentially if not immediately useful), and then he asks for examples of especially interesting or striking interior design choices Cam has heard of.

Cam can produce hellish architecture photo books! Hell architecture is tacky but contains many redeemable individual elements.

Tiro turns out to have a real gift for picking out the best bits and synthesizing them into something delightful. He also enjoys this pastime immensely.

Yay! The house simulation becomes more interesting over time.

It's going to be so pretty! And he gives in to the temptation to ask for physical copies of all the books in the royal libraries and his family's personal collection, and designs an extension to the house to hold them all. It is bigger than the rest of the house. This is acceptable to Tiro.

"...I could just give you a computer."

"No, no, I want the computer too, the giant library in addition to the computer is pure personal indulgence, but I figure if I'm giving myself an entire mountain range for personal indulgence, adding a library isn't really a big deal."

"Sure." On goes the library addition. "I don't know whether to suggest you get the kind of computer I have, it requires a chip in your brain and I am slightly concerned you might explode again if I tried to give you one."

"A chip in your brain? What's it do?"

"It lets me direct the computer by thought! Other computers have to have stuff that you poke or talk to or whatever."

"That sounds really useful," he says. "...I mean at worst it would probably just be my head that exploded, right?"

"Are you expecting me to know how your explosion thing works?"

"No, I mean - if you didn't put anything anywhere other than my head, then it would only be my head that broke, and that's honestly the best kind of injury to have."

"Is it? Yeah, the chip is localized only to the head, doesn't need supplements anywhere else."

"Shattering hurts, regrowing hurts, and if I blow up it's always my head that comes back first, but if it's just my head then I'm unconscious for most of the growing-back part."

"Ah. Well, up to you if you want to risk it."

"...Maybe not right away."

"Sure."

"Thanks. So I think I might be done designing my house!"

"All right -" Cam drops the simulated house into the chosen spot in the simulated mountain range. "Here? Do you care where I put my house?"

"I dunno! Where do you want to put your house?"

"I was thinking up here -" Plop goes the architecture of Cam's house, non-black-hole-planetoid version - "by the crystal vein, but that's accessible for me, not as much for you since you don't have wings and that's another thing I don't know if you could have without exploding."

"...You know, even though it would probably be horrifyingly painful if it didn't work, I'm kind of really tempted to try wings!"

"I also don't know if you can have painkillers without exploding, the exploding thing is really kind of a problem!"

"I mean, my whole body won't shatter if part of me gets injured. Exploding only happens when there's, like, an explosion, and I am near it, and it explodes me."

"Okay, that's less nerve-wracking. The painkillers I am acquainted with might not work while you are being a crystalline horror but they do not themselves explode."

"Crystalline horror," he giggles.

"I did not detect signs of, like, a vascular system in there."

"I'm made of normal flesh and blood most of the time!"

"Normal flesh and blood that crystallizes at odd provocations!"

"Well, yes."

"On noncrystallizing humans I could do the chip and the wings just about risk free - although you'd have to commit to the wing design and be very sure about it compared to a demon let alone an angel adding extremities - and I am also a fully qualified medical demon."

"What wing designs are there?"

"Well, assuming you want them to work, you've basically got bird kinda wings and bat kinda wings -" Cam pulls up the catalog he selected his own wings out of.

"Oooh, I am so tempted by wings," says Tiro. "I shouldn't be this tempted, I just exploded like yesterday, normally that puts me off risky things for a while, but wings!"

"Will it slow you down if I mention it takes a while to learn to fly and you may in the interim crash?"

"It should, but it doesn't appear to be."

"Should I be enforcing some sort of waiting period?"

"Maybe. But until we know whether I can have wings, we don't know what the accessibility considerations are for where you put your house!"

"This is true!"

"It would probably be sensible to just put your house somewhere reachable without flying and then wait until I'm used to the idea before I decide whether I want to try getting wings..."

"Yeah, probably." Nudge. Now the house is a short flight of attractively tiled stairs away from Tiro's.

"Nice stairs!"

"Thank you I stole them from a park."

He cracks up.

Wag wag.

Giggle.

"Any more things to change about this mountain range before I go place it?"

"No, I think it's perfect. Where are you going to put it?"

Cam pulls up a picture he took from the air of the area. "Along here, I think."

"That looks like a reasonable place to put a mountain range."

"All right, here goes!"

And Cam goes and takes off and gets plenty of altitude

and mountains grow below him.

It's amazing to watch.

Swoop! Soar! Glide! Mountain range!

Eeeeeeeee.

It takes a little under an hour and then Cam lands in front of Tiro and takes a bow.

Tiro applauds.

Wag wag wag. "You will have a bit of a hike up to your house but it's walkable. I can put in more stairs if you want."

"I can walk up a mountain."

"Have fun with that." Cam flies up the mountain instead.

Tiro walks. Tiro grew up on a mountain and is good at navigating them. Also he just helped design this one.

And: house! What a house. He is so happy about his house. He is... actually sitting down abruptly on his front step and bursting into tears.

Cam pokes his head out of his own house and swoops down. "You okay?"

He rubs his face with both hands. "Yeah? I - I guess? I just," sniffle, "I'm," sniffle, half-stifled sob, "I was gonna be alone forever and now I'm not and," sniffle, "I guess I'm - getting emotional. About that."

"Do... you... want a hug?"

He wraps his arms around his knees and nods shakily.

Cam plops down beside him and hugs him, both arms and the nearest wing.

Tiro leans into him, all small and sniffly.

Poor small sniffly crystalline horror. Hug.

Hug. Sniffle. Gradual decrease in sniffle magnitude.

"Thanks."

"No problem." Squeeze.

Leeeeeean.

"Hell is really boring and I have no objection to living here at least until I have to my satisfaction learned the entire local magic system and even if I want to leave at that point I can teach you to summon other daeva!"

"Thanks," says Tiro. Hug. "You're pretty great."

"Thank you."

Hug!

Hug!

Such hug.

"Okay," says Tiro, "I think I'm done having feelings for now. How's the 'translate the magic books' project coming along?"

Cam checks. "Not bad, although we will have to help it as we come up with guesses about what mistakes it may have made, it was short on helpful illustrations for some of the content."

"I have guesses about some of the words - can you find one of the ink-colour indexes from the back of one of the recipe books?"

"Maybe -" Cam sorts through the library. "No, not trivially without a title or something, the electronic corpus is a lot of books and 'one of the recipe books' is not searchable."

"Well, maybe it's already figured out as much as I know - the list should have '3. Light' and then I don't know what four is and then '5. Air, 6. Water, 7. Earth, 8. Fire', and I guess if it already knows all those then I can't help it much."

Cam calls up the vocabulary for the numbers and those words - "These?"

He peers at the symbols. "That looks right. I only know the numerals, though, not the words for the numbers, it could've gotten those wrong and I wouldn't be able to tell."

Cam searches for the string "3. Light".

"Yeah, that's an ink colour index," says Tiro of the first search result. "Does it already know all the words I guessed?"

It does. Also it describes itself as a List of Known Essences. The first one is "0. Void", then "1. Chaos", "2. Order", "3. Light", "4. Matter", and Tiro's four other guesses, all of which the computer agrees with.

"Congratulations, how'd you figure the words out?"

"They're the ones with the most straightforward and popular recipes! Earth makes dirt and stone, fire makes hot things, water makes water, light makes glowing things - air was harder to figure out but it makes things that have a lot of air in them or are light, that sort of thing."

"Nicely done. What-all recipes do you have besides 'bacon plant'?"

"Well - a bunch of kinds of dirt and stone, water, glowing rocks, cloth, a bunch of kinds of plants..."

"Glowing rocks. What is their glowing mechanism?"

"Pretty sure it's magic."

"Delightful! So there's the whole recipe thing and then there's whatever the products run on. Wait, lemme check -" Cam attempts to make one of the glowing rocks of the sort Tiro has made.

No rock appears, glowing or otherwise.

"Does that mean I was right?" says Tiro, observing this rocklessness.

"Yep. If the rock glowed because it was smart or because the alchemizing process did some nonbypassable encryption which somehow produced glowing, I couldn't make a glowing rock, but I would have gotten a nonglowing rock."

"...How would you encrypt a glow?"

"I don't know, but I could probably invent a magic system where that was how it worked if I wanted to write a book with a pointlessly complicated magic system."

He giggles.

Cam flips through the recipe book to see what else is in here now that it's translated. "Did you just try stuff at random, see what it got you?"

"Pretty much! And then I figured out what some of the colours tended to do and used that to guess which other recipes might be useful to try. And so on."

There are so many recipes. Most of them for some kind of raw material, but there's intermediate products like cloth and knife blades in there, too, and a few entire tools.

"Weird," Cam remarks. "It's like - I have to assume this system either has the recipes installed or that the system itself is intelligent, how else is it supposed to get a concept like 'weaving' out of atomic concepts -"

"I'm not sure what you mean by 'installed', or 'intelligent' for that matter?"

"Like, all the fancy software that my computer has to design houses and mountains and stuff, that's installed, it was written by people out of teeny parts to allow computers to do those things, computers can't innately do that. There's not enough teeny parts in these recipes for me to buy that they add up to 'weaving' or 'garden implements' on their own, so I am imagining that one of two things is going on - someone wanted a cloth spell and came up with the recipe and 'taught' the system that this recipe means 'cloth', or, the system itself is personlike enough that the recipe conveys to it just the gist and it can fill in the blanks."

"Huh. I have no idea which of those it is," he says. "Maybe there's theory books."

"I am pretty sure that if this planet is genuinely empty and you tried things without knowing what they did it and they worked, it can't be using caster knowledge," Cam adds. "Must be baked into the magic itself somehow."

"I guess! But I do, like, know what cloth is, so it could've been drawing on me a little..."

"Possible. Did you get anything you really didn't know what it was?"

"Yeah, but mostly in the category of 'what kind of rock is that'... the bacon plants seem like they would've needed complex ideas like that, but they also kind of look like someone took a 'pig' recipe and a 'plant' recipe and mashed them together, so it still seems possible that the whole thing runs automatically on basic concepts and the weird part is which basic concepts it's able to draw on."

"If you naively mashed 'pig' and 'plant' you could just as well get a pig made of wood or a pig-shaped topiary or a shrub that grew unappetizing pig parts, the bacon plant continues to be suspicious!"

"For all I know they got all those things before they figured out a bacon plant that grew edible bacon! I do actually know you can fuck up a recipe and get something weird - like, if I draw a random extra line on a diagram, what usually happens is the result is shaped wrong or appears in the wrong place, but if it's a diagram for something complicated like cloth, it does weirder things. I managed to get cloth that was missing all the threads in one direction so it was just a big pile of loose threads, once."

"Ooh, huh. Okay, maybe it is naively mashing concepts and it's just doing it in a particularly refined way."

"I think that seems plausible! Are there theory books? There's got to be theory books, right?"

"Probably! Unfortunately I have this library organized in no particularly useful way so it might take a while to find them." Hunt hunt.

"Does that mean 'organized in a useless way' or 'not organized at all'?"

"Oh, I had to make it organized some way, but some way is in this case pure chronological order."

"Could be worse, I guess, but yeah, not that great for finding theory books about alchemy."

"Yeah. If we are lucky there is a book titled 'theory of magic' or something like that."

They are unfortunately not quite that lucky.

"I'm excited about theory books, if we ever find them!"

"Me too!"

Tiro beams at him.

Wag.

Tiro grins and looks for a second like he might be about to cry again and then recovers and settles for saying, "You're really great and I'm so glad you're here."

"I am glad I could help. And glad the summoning circle didn't count as having bindings in it, that would have made me much worse company."

"Bindings?"

"It's customary to summon daeva of any kind with restrictions on our behavior so we don't go on magical rampages, as magical rampages are terribly inconvenient and a lot of summonings are of random willing daeva rather than specific ones. Demons in particular are often also summoned gagged, which means we can't talk or in fact do anything communicative at all except for agree to or reject proposed trades. Except, like, make facial expressions and stuff. Part of the reason I got the tail is that unless someone does something dumb like 'tail left for yes, right for no', I can be fairly expressive with it even under a gag. Also it's fun but I didn't know how fun it would be in advance."

"The tail is really cute," says Tiro.

"Thanks!"

"Why don't people want you to be able to talk?"

"They are afraid demons will talk them out of their souls."

"How's that work?"

"Doesn't. Or rather, doesn't actually. Demons are kind of hard to trade with for the obvious reasons. So the sort of demons who show up to summons are sometimes nice people who just want to help out but sometimes are looking for intangibles, and one intangible that got popular to go for was some human thinking you had their soul because of, I don't know, the looks on their faces."

"...Weird."

"Yeah. But I'm not sure I'd let on it was fake if I had the chance because this is really desperate humans who make those trades and if it were common knowledge that the commodity in question didn't exist..."

"...they might just get convinced to do other stuff that put funny looks on their faces?"

"The other traditional intangibles if you leave the realm of, like, book recommendations, are unpleasant, yes."

"Yeah, wow."

"Most demons are perfectly nice but the perfectly nice demons usually don't let random humans interrupt their lives with miscellaneous requests trying to trade them things they can get in Hell."

"That makes sense."

"It's a good thing you got me if I do say so myself."