He feels an open summons and lets it grab him -
Aaaaand he's totally loose, but the angel will probably be spooked if she notices that, to say nothing of the sloppy summoner. He rocks back on his heels, looks around, doesn't say anything just yet.
Then she spots the demon and she flinches. She has encountered a demon. Once. "Summoner?" she says, looking at the demon in absolutely genuine terror. "Summoner please tell me the demon is bound better than I am."
The summoner does not respond.
Apart from some moving coloured lights that vanished almost as soon as the daeva appeared, the room is poorly illuminated - only one in five of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling are lit. The result is spooky, but it's enough to tell that the two daeva are the only people present. It's a very large room; the far wall is only dimly visible from where the daeva stand, in an empty space on the bare concrete floor, between some haphazardly arranged tables laden with assorted electronic components and some cars lined up near the only clearly visible exit. There are no windows. It's pretty clearly a garage/basement of some kind.
Well, he's not gonna attack the angel. Far as he's concerned she doesn't need to know he's loose at all if it would upset her.
He sits on the ground.
The angel looks at the demon suspiciously. He's not obviously doing anything harmful, and it seems like he's actually bound, but - still. Where is his circle? Adana's was made out of light, and it's gone now, is his the same?
"Summoner, please answer me, this is important! If there is a rogue demon on the loose I need to know, I am the closest daeva nearby to stop him if he starts trying to kill people," says Adana, concerned and a tinge of fear leaking into her voice. "I won't be angry, just - please. I am worried about the safety of those around me!"
If the summoner even cares, what kind of terrible summoner summons two daeva and then abandons them in a creepy dark basement with vintage cars?
"Lights up, c'mon," he yawns. "What am I looking at here." The rest of the ceiling lights come alive, illuminating the room - yep, definitely a combination basement/underground garage. He peers at Adana and Cam. He stops.
"...Does somebody wanna tell me why there's winged people in my basement? I didn't ask for winged people in my basement," he says.
"... Winged people in your basement. We are daeva? I'm an angel, he's a demon, there are also fairies but we seem to be missing one of those in our basement menagerie. There are others and we all do different types of magic?" She sounds like he should know this and that she's confused that he doesn't.
For a few seconds, Adana stares. "Okay," she says. "Um. Where I come from there are normal humans and then there are daeva. Three types - fairies, angels, and demons. Any human, ever, can summon one of those three, and when they summon them they can also bind them so they don't - go on a rampage or steal souls or -" She cuts herself off, abruptly, and scrunches up her eyes. "- other terrible things. Angels are reasonably nice. Fairies are occasionally jerks but you can pay them off easy and it's not like they can do large-scale cataclysms or anything. But I have met a demon before and he was very much not nice. Therefore, I am extremely concerned. Why, what's it like here?"
"Steal souls?" the pajama'd boy repeats. "That's, like, worrying. I'm worried. - Okay so around here 'demon' is not a subcategory of any kind of a thing, it's a catchall for, like, anybody who's not human, there's something like three thousand species of demon and a bunch of them are pretty nasty but some of them are fine. And I guess some kinds of demon can be summoned, but it's pretty different depending on the kind, and not everybody can do all of 'em, I don't even know what-all you need for some of that shit because I'm not a freaking demonologist." He rubs his face and yawns again. "Also it's three in the morning, have I mentioned it's three in the morning? It's three in the morning."
Pause. "I'm sorry it's three in the morning, will you help me find the summoner so we can get an explanation for why we are in your basement at three in the morning?"
"A summoner can summon things, and upon summoning give - constraints to the summonee. But they can't change them after they're set, it has to be when the daeva's summoned. Bindings can be broken after but never replaced or changed. Summoners also get some very minor personal magic, but it's so slow, small scale, and difficult that in just about any situation it's not worth it. Summoning works by drawing out circles to fit certain categories with what you're summoning written around it. Mine was made in light, light works but it's not really common in comparison to like - markers. Or even crayons, actually. Someone summoned me in crayons once, that was a strange day."
She glances at Cam. "Demons make things. Anything in the world."
Even bound and gagged Cam would be able to make things that didn't affect anything outside his circle. He makes a sugar-glass that he'll be able to eat later, full of apple juice. Lifts it, makes the facial expression associated with saying "cheers" even though he doesn't actually say the word, sips.
"They need to think about sending us back for about a minute. But honestly if there's stuff I can do while here, I don't need to go back right now, I don't mind. I don't even have any concordances I need to wait for. So I guess I can just stick around fixing things that need fixing until the summoner dies or figures out how to put me back. The demon might not be so lucky, but it's not like we can ask him now."
"Because he's acting like he's gagged and bound, and if that's the case we can't remove the gag without unbinding him. Which I highly recommend against. Because then he would be free to do whatever he wanted and when you can make black holes that is extremely alarming."
"Black holes are pretty alarming," says Tony, "but like, just because you can do something doesn't mean you will, I can build nuclear bombs but I don't. Also didn't you say you can turn things into other things? Are there serious safety limits on that power that you didn't mention?"
"That's nice of you," says Tony. "I'm sorry I can't really, like... point you at random problems that can be solved with transmutation, magic isn't publicly known around here and a lady with wings and a halo showing up at a hospital is proooooobably gonna cause a stir. Although I guess if you have good transmutation you can maybe ditch the wings and halo and be a sneaky angel? But I still dunno where to send you to do your sneaky angeling."
She plucks her halo out of the air, swats it, and it dims to being a simple white and fluffy-looking circlet. She's going to leave it intact aside from being off because it was a pain to make, and she would rather avoid spending the time it takes to do it again.
"Any reason for me to keep the wings? Downside to ditching them is the time it takes to remake them. So if they go they're going to be gone unless I get several hours to myself to remake them."
Then, quite casually, she converts both of her wings into the cloud-like substance she's accustomed to working with. It's not instant, but it passes over both wings like a wave, changing them from white and feathery to white and... fluffy. She then reaches back, removes the - now large amount of fluffy cloud-like stuff no longer attached to her back, balls it up, and politely puts it down in a corner that seems appropriate.
"There. Angel in disguise."
"It's... I don't actually know what it's called. I'm kind of new to angeling it up. But it shows up naturally in Heaven, and it's pretty much the perfect thing to transmute from when I'm making things. It's also pretty easy to turn things into it. You can mess with it and study it if you like, but if you lose or destroy any amount I'll need to replace it if I want wings again."
'This' is a large empty mug with a company logo - Stark Industries - on the side. He zeroes in, grabs it, and holds it out to her. There is a tiny bit of dried-up coffee inside.
She looks at Cam. "... Sorry. If you are actually nice. If you're like the demon I met, kindly go fuck yourself."
Cam's not actually bound, so when he doesn't remember off the top of his head whether a particular gesture is permitted by a gag order and he's trying to pretend to have one he has to guess.
Well, it doesn't sound like she would be terribly likely to know either.
He places his hand over his heart, face wounded.
"Like I said. Sorry."
She sighs. "If I were a summoner I could just check to see if he's bound and what the conditions are, but I'm not. If I could see the circle itself, I'd be able to tell then, but I don't know where it is or if it's even here anymore. If it was like mine then it's probably gone now."
"Okay, but let's hypothetically say this circle was a, like... random arrangement of words and geometric shapes," he says. "I'm thinking the odds of accidentally including a binding are even lower than the odds of accidentally summoning something in the first place."
Pause. She frowns. "But that doesn't make sense, either, I don't even know if that would work. As far as I know it's got to be a person that makes the circle."
"The two things are not necessarily mutually exclusive," says a dry voice out of thin air. "And Tony has correctly identified the source of the circles as semirandom arrangements of standard visual elements. I would show you, but I don't think the situation would be improved by adding two more daeva to the mix."
"Uh - you can display them on a wall, vertically? They need to be horizontal to actually summon anything, on the floor or even a table or something. So I can inspect the circles."
A pair of holographic circles appear in midair, oriented vertically and facing the two daeva, decorated with semirandom arrangements of words, lines, and polygons in a variety of colours. They are minimally different - enough for one to summon an angel and the other a demon, but apart from that, functionally identical.
"...Like, I really don't think there's cause for alarm here," he says. "I mean," he gestures at Cam, "you've been sitting there for ten minutes drinking apple juice and laughing at my fluffy adventures, I just don't get a sense of imminent danger."
She still does not look comfortable around Cam and is maybe scooting away from him a little. Arms still wrapped around herself. She is uncomfortable being this close to a demon who is obviously unbound, even if logically she knows that if he wanted to cause harm he would have already.
"Okay. I'll spare you about the cars. It's 2007." He turns to Adana. "Do you, like, want to take your giant fluffball and go find a guest room to stay in while you're here? It's the least we can do what with the accidental summoning and all. Jarvis can show you around. God knows we've got room."
"So, while I am here, where's a good place to get an internet connection to get my bearings and see if this place is similar enough that you want me to save the bees, drop a hundred fifty years of medical advances on you, tile the Sahara in solar panels, and then fly off and terraform Mars nice and pretty for later settlers?"
"Well, what I'd really like is to use my normal computer setup from home. I can duplicate it but I bet it can't talk to your internet. I can make intermediate steps as far as each device's backwards compatibility extends, though. Erm, can't help but ask, are you planning to spy on my web browsing activities?"
"Okay, back up, 'choose not to observe' is not a phrase I like to associate with whether my computer use is in a position to be monitored, let alone when it is literally going through a person. I'd tentatively bet on my futuristic encryption, but I probably cannot communicate with 2007 websites in my futuristic encryption schema, so however safe my personal files are this doesn't give me, like, proper end-user control. I will look up Colony Collapse Disorder on Wikipedia with people looking or able-to-look if you'd take it very much amiss did I seek a public library instead, I put up with worse crap from summoners all the time, but you see why this might not be the best thing to say, 'I want to check out how things are before I hand over a century and a half of tech', 'how about you check Wikipedia through My Friend The Artificial Intelligence Of Unspecified Wikipedia Editing Speed'."
"You're gonna have trouble finding a public library to use the internet from because it is three in the morning," says Tony, waving his ball of cloud-fluff around expressively. "Maybe more like three-thirty by now. Your options are gimme a cup of coffee and some format specs and I'll have your future computer hooked up to the Internet just fine in like a couple hours, or take a guest room and hit Sunnydale Public Library in the morning, and their machines are ancient even by my standards. I mean, or just ask Jarvis to look things up for you. I'm not gonna tell you which one to pick, but if I was the one picking it'd be kind of obvious, and it's slightly too three in the morning for me to go over everything I say and make sure it doesn't sound weird if you assume I'm secretly evil? Jarvis is like my best friend and the most convenient looking things up on the internet buddy ever, and if he snooped on all the Internet traffic in this house I would watch way less porn, let me tell you."
Adana giggles, a little. "That last part was maybe more than we needed to know. But uh - I would like to go with the public library rather than bothering both of you at three in the morning. Er." She glances at Cam. "If you go public library route, do you want help with your wings?"
"To be clear, does this coffee mean you want option one? Because if you're just gonna get it all from Jarvis or use the library, I'm going back to bed," he says. "But I will totally take the coffee and bury myself in circuit diagrams if you want future computers hooked up to the not at all future internet."
To Adana: "There's not minding and then there's trying really hard not to mind and I get vibes of the second thing. If I ever need to leave the house under better cover than a coat and faster than a hacksaw will manage the trick maybe I will take you up on that, but."
"Okay, my question about grossness is answered," says Tony. "Ew. No but going back to the computers, are you seriously going to backchain the whole hundred and fifty years of different standards talking to each other? Because like, speaking of deep revulsion, wow. And what if it doesn't hook up on this end because our worlds are a tiny bit different? Like, the reason I'm offering is because I think it would be fun and I've done something like it once already. If you desperately want to drape a century and a half of technology across my basement floor, I guess I won't stop you, but man. It just sounds so ugly."
"Well, when one is a hundred and seventy-two one gets used to thoughtful upgrades, I think I could do it in five or six steps, and it also doesn't require me to unencrypt anything but the last input step for not sure about giving you lots of futuristic tech reasons - although the fact that you have AI and we don't may mean I shouldn't worry about that in the software department specifically..."
"I am already ahead of most of my world in both software and hardware by, like, a lot," he says. "Like a lot. I don't want your futuristic tech for weird nefarious reasons I can't even actually think of right now, I want it because I bet it'll be fun to take apart and if it's ahead of me anywhere I can make even cooler stuff once I figure out how it all works."
"I don't really do things with it. Most of my stuff right now isn't even technically my stuff, anyway, it's the company's stuff," he gestures with his fluffball, "Stark Industries, weapons manufacturing. But that's just the family business, it's not what I personally aspire to do with my life, I don't know what I personally aspire to do with my life, I'm seventeen. I wanna get an engineering degree at MIT and then spend the rest of my life making cool shit into cooler shit, I wanna get cold fusion off the ground as a viable energy source, I wanna take all my dad's old plans for flying cars and God knows what and build all the shit he never got to finish."
"Well, I am definitely supportive of cold fusion and new sources for viable energy. It's just I can see why he is concerned about handing over huge technological advances. They are potential world-changers and need to be used carefully." Pause. "Also, do you want a hug?"
"It's complicated," Tony mumbles, somewhat muffled by Hug. Hug is Important. "Like I'm not gonna hand out anything that went into Jarvis, because it'd kill me if something happened to him, and I don't have that much else that'd do anybody any good, like when the company's doing nice helpful stuff on the side I'm right there but I don't run the place. Yet."
"I'm pretty sure someone with AI in the basement cannot overmuch misuse consumer-grade computing hardware from 2159 that includes no such wonders, so yes, for the sake of being able to view the internet on a familiar and well-behaved device," he produces this device - heavily partitioned with his own files behind enough layers of security to choke an elephant - "let's do it."
"So how exactly are you planning to let my computer talk to - damn, what was the leading browser in 2007? Do you have Starbird yet, I liked that, it annoyed me when they stopped supporting it. Or, no, that was definitely after 2009, couldn't tell you without looking it up how much after..."
"There's, like, two and a half problems to solve here," he says. "Can I have some more of that amazing coffee? Problem number one is hardware, I probably don't have anything that hooks up to what you've got. But give me specifications and I can fix that. You can even save me the manufacturing step. Problem number two is data transfer protocols, also something I can solve. Problem number three is file formats, which Jarvis can fix for you no problem, he'll just write you a browser that runs on your machine but talks to our internet. I mean, it won't be the prettiest thing in the whole wide world, but it'll work, and it won't take that long if you give us good specs. You have all that stuff, right? The hardware stuff and the network stuff and the system library info and all? Because the more of that we have to reverse-engineer, the longer this is gonna take."
The coffee mug refills. "This model is very, very wireless - I'm actually going to have to make it a charging station in about six weeks when the battery runs down but that's wireless too - and I can make the router it would normally communicate with, or the satellite alternative for that matter, but I don't see how you're planning to talk to those objects any better than you could talk directly to this thing. I think you may also be operating on an... incomplete set of assumptions about how much I have to know about a thing before I can make one. I can produce futuristic comp sci textbooks, but it's a hundred fifty years from here to there, and I haven't read them all."
"I don't need you to personally know the specs, I just need you to be able to produce the specs in a format I can read. Ideally on, like, a 2007-compatible hard drive, because Jarvis is more convenient than a huge stack of books, but I'm flexible. And then when I know how your computer is expecting to get data from its environment, I just build something that sends it data that way, or design the something and get you to appear it for me if that's a thing you can do. It's more complicated than that but not hugely more complicated than that unless your computer systems are, like, way way stranger than I've been imagining." He drinks the refilled coffee.
He steps into the middle of the swarm and starts dragging things from place to place and drawing in the air, talking a mile a minute and very admiringly about the details of the technology and what he plans to design in response. It may or may not be comprehensible to anyone but Jarvis.
Tony is very smart. This is going to be a fun summon.
The internal partition hasn't started becoming alarmed or deleting itself in a panic, so either Jarvis hasn't gotten past the first layer or isn't trying.
Cam starts by looking up bees.
"Hey, Tony?" she asks, absently. "Does Stark Industries have lots of - trash or waste that you can quietly send my way so I can make it into useful things? If I'm here for a while I might see about starting or usurping a trash company."
"Huh. I mean, we have some, but - oh, hey, how are you with radioactive stuff? Because there's not a lot of volume there, even worldwide, but disposal is kind of a huge problem, if you could just turn it into fluff you'd be doing the world a huge favour. I guess it'd be hard to get it aboveboard, but - I dunno, it just came to me. Not that Stark Industries personally produces that much radioactive waste. Barely any. I guess I just totally failed to answer your actual question."
She goes to look up spots where radioactive waste is dumped.
"It's pretty confusing to start existing all of a sudden, I'm told. But they'll fly around and land on things and leave the cure on those things and then less fake bees will also land on the things. It should get everywhere, but just to be safe I might want to do another batch from another point on the continent in, oh, six months."
Pause. "And if I run out of those I might just colonize the moon. I miss it."
Now Cam is looking up the public employees of Phoenix, Arizona.
"I can handle the rest," says Adana. "But I was hoping to coordinate so we don't mess each other up, and there are some things each of us can do faster than the other." She looks at Tony. "I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure he's a genius, so I'm fine with him getting in on this plan, I like geniuses. Besides, I don't know anything about cars, I drove a shuttle. It would help to have someone who knew what was going on besides 'spinny wheels make the box of metal go.'"
"I am a genius," says Tony. "And I have a legal identity and lots and lots of money. And a company waiting for me as soon as I get my undergraduate degree. And I'm an engineer. If you want somebody to, say, design you a factory to build your amazing future cars on infrastructure this world actually has and then buy the land to put the factory on - well, there you go. I mean, unless you were planning on personally building all of these amazing future cars, but I didn't think that was where you were going with it."
"Mm-hm. I was born in 1987. I think all ex-summoners get to be daeva, actually, although beats me how that will affect Jarvis if it ever comes up. But no sign of either of my parents where I expect them to be -" He looks up himself. "And nobody familiar under my name either."
She glances in a... Jarvisy direction. "Jarvis, I vote we work very hard to never ever figure out what happens to you if you die. You are potentially immortal, I am definitely immortal, I will work very hard to make sure you don't die, okay?" Pause. "Actually if the summoner to daeva thing is true - Tony if you want functional immortality, summon a fairy and give them cookies. Then if you die we have Jarvis bring you back and we all work excessively hard to keep him safe and sound."
"I don't know that it will, in fact, work for people from this world at all. I've never heard of any daeva getting summoned to an alternate universe and/or time period, or any who had previous lives in other universes or asynchronous time periods. So if it started happening that would be strange, and not all parts of that eventuality are necessarily attached. I'm actually sort of worried Jarvis will not be able to send us home."
"Try to be precise, but don't worry too much if you're off a bit. If it's circle shaped and has all components it will work. Start with -" She points at the proper part of the circle. "That part first. If you do the main parts required to summon something but still need to add the binding to it, it won't matter and the fairy will be summoned without it. Which could be bad, considering this is for a random fairy. The binding's just to keep the fairy from killing you, or anyone else, don't worry, it's not something really intrusive like gagging."
"Hullo, summoner," he says with a bow. "What can I do for you?" He eyes Cam with suspicion, but doesn't comment; Adana, with wings off, doesn't register as interesting.
"It's complete nonsense. But even if summoners did tend to let me talk I probably wouldn't tell them, because - it comes up exactly and only when you've got a combination of a demon who's nasty and thinks that's a funny joke, and a really desperate summoner. And that combination doesn't get better if it's common knowledge that the souls thing is nonsense."
"So I mentioned we have tons and tons of kinds of demons, right? One of those is vampires. Vampires can turn people into more vampires, in this kinda gruesome way where the person dies partway through, and then they come back a little while later as a vampire with no soul and the difference is kind of really obvious. Like they have all the same memories and everything but suddenly they're a way bigger asshole than they were before and really into eating people."
"Carry around one or two of those, and if somebody grows fangs and tries to bite you—" he mimes pointing with a laser pointer. "I'd mass-produce these if vampires were public knowledge but they're not, the majority of human society doesn't know magic exists, and Iiiii am not well placed to change that."
"Well, yeah, but production isn't even the problem, it's that people don't know vampires are a thing. And a lot of the time they are really weirdly resistant to figuring it out, like to the point where I'm worried that if you demonstrated magic actually existing on national television a lot of people might still not get it, and I - don't have the kind of public credibility it takes to get past something like that."
She closes her eyes. "... He took his payment, then I dismissed him." She doesn't expand on what the payment was. She tries very hard not to think about it. Very, very hard.
"Then later, I was on my shuttle to get a - stupid summoning license thing and I - told my name to a ship that seemed like it was in distress to see if there was any way I could help. But it was - not... That. The pirate came after my shuttle, and it's not like I had any weapons, or time to summon something. So she got me, tried to make me summon another demon." Pause. "And I didn't. So I died."
"Natively an infinite plane like Fairyland, but without any of Fairyland's stuff. The only stuff it has are the people in it, and one thing per person - 'thing' can be anything from their favorite dead dog to their house to a popcorn machine, the going theory is it's whatever tops the list of non-person things that they think an afterlife would be incomplete without. The things go on working even if they shouldn't - you don't need dog food or to pay your water bill or to refill the popcorn machine - but that's all they get."
"Little pocket of overlap between any two of Hell, Heaven, Limbo, and Fairyland. People from either side can go in, or leave into their own side, but you still can't properly visit. Heaven/Hell concordances are small wars by really obnoxiously patriotic demons and angels, but the others are impromptu post offices, which is probably the best thing - there's enough people who want to send mail that there would be way less space in there if the concordance was full of people trying to talk to each other in person instead."
"I couldn't begin to tell you how to expect the systems to overlap, except that apparently at least as of recently you can summon and unsummon from here. Oh, and when I was gone my clock didn't think I'd been away for too much or too little time, so the worlds are also proceeding in sync, as far as that goes."
"Convenient for calculcating dates," says Tony. "Actually, are our year lengths even the same? I mean, they probably are... Cam, can you make something with date and time calculation specs that Jarvis can look at? Or one of you send him something from your computer, or something?"
"It's a difficult situation and I'm honestly not sure how to proceed," says Jarvis. "But it's possible that this information might be relevant to your safety, so... While Sherlock was in New York, he discovered that Tony's parents - previously assumed to have died in an ordinary vehicular accident - were assassinated by a family friend. Tony is not taking it well."
Cam has less trouble feeding himself. He finishes his sugar glass, then says, "Hey, Jarvis? In the interest of not getting crumbs or unnecessary plates all over the place if I make myself anything more substantial to nibble on, can you direct me to someplace that has dishes already?"
"Yes. To complicate matters further, the man who had Tony's parents killed is currently running Tony's company for him pending Tony's eventual completion of an engineering degree. I've no doubt he's going to try the obvious follow-up if he can't get Tony to give up the company any other way."
"One AI and one clone, to my knowledge," he corrects. "Both byproducts of Tony's intensely lonely childhood. He cooked me up when he was twelve, I caught up to his development when he was fourteen, and in between he had very little idea of what to do with me and consequently ignored me as much as possible. So I grew up on literature and Jarvis and acquired a name from the former since the latter was at a loss on the subject."
"And now here you are. Okay then. Do you have a use for demonic help with the assassin? Tony already summoned a fairy, so you can maybe retrieve him with added snazzy magic powers if all else fails if it works like that, but this being a brave new world that has such people in't I'm not sure I can vouch very confidently."
"Hmm. I could offer decent advice if you were going to be wandering on the ground - take a laser pointer, is the main thing - but I lack the relevant experience in the air," he says thoughtfully as he works. "Perhaps you'd be fine. Perhaps you'd attract hostile attention of some kind. Can't be sure until you try it."
"Is you do what you like and I go introduce myself to the other one," says Sherlock. "Tony neglected to mention me because he didn't feel up to the task of explaining, but much in the same way that you can factor him in whenever you need something bought or invented, you can factor me in whenever you need something analyzed or found out. I believe you have an inkling of what I mean."
"Informed name-picking, huh? Well, I checked the internet for versions of my parents, both of whom were public employees in the United States when they were alive where I'm from, but no such luck - you have Martin Luther King Jr. and George Washington and Queen Elizabeth the Second but you don't seem to match up on minutiae - but if there is a me I would very much like to locate him."
"And I would have all sorts of plans regarding how to coordinate the five of us in enacting widespread improvements to the world, but alas - timing. I'd better go upstairs and check on Tony. You're likely to see more of me than him in the next few days, and not much of either."
"It's possible he will take you up on your offer of hugs at some point. And I'm sure he will appreciate your concern. As for the more practical level..." He shrugs. "There's not much to be done except await the inevitable assassination attempt. Tony being the only remaining obstacle between the man who killed Tony's parents and full ownership of Stark Industries."