Ari nods, having clearly dispelled any lingering confusion over what he is doing. He's so good at explaining things!
"I am totally speaking English! I could also be speaking French or German, but I'm not doing that because you seem like a decent sort of person and it'd be very cruel. You are in Vancouver, in Canada, in North America, on Earth, etcetera etcetera Lanikea galactic supercluster, known universe, etcetera. We have wizards! And demons and faeries and vampires and other variously awful or non-awful monsterfolks."
"Oh yeah. Fun Wizard Fact: we're not great with technology. As in, 'stuff starts exploding when we're upset or actively doing magic unless it's behind leaded glass or preposterously sturdy', bad. You don't have, like, a chip in your brain or something, right? That'd suck."
"Cosmetics and magic powers. More the latter; you could find demons and angels with each other's wing types. Less so with fairies, their magic doesn't lend itself to that. Demons make things, angels change things, fairies move things. I could maybe dig somebody up, but we don't know if I can go home, and I don't think anybody wants to be permanently stranded in a mortal realm."
"Same for mine with math, though that's more because I specialize in earth and long-term earth effects are super complicated. Lucky bastards who picked up fire don't have to worry about that, though I get the last laugh since I'm actually useful for things other than destroying things."
"I can avoid circles with words around in the future, yeah. There's other configurations that can sub in. It's kind of weird that nobody else has summoned something nasty that way, given how frequently that kind of diagram crops up in magic...Might have to ask the loa about that too. She's going to be getting half a cup of my blood at this point, isn't she."
"I mean, by default it would be materially identical to someone's, I'd have to go somewhat out of my way to make it a total nonmatch for everybody. But are you sure it's a good idea to make it known to this individual - if she doesn't already know - that it's possible to summon daeva?"
"Holy shit, you can totally make arbitrary people's blood. That is- a different cool thing, that could totally- we'll talk. But the spirit I have in mind is really, really neutral, she wouldn't do anything dangerous. Might tell somebody else about it, but they'd have to have a super specific question to get her to tell - 'is there a way to make arbitrary matter' or something. Which nobody would ask because that is, of course, impossible."
"We already have the Library of Alexandria and you could do a temporal scry on it anyway, anybody who wants to un-nuke Three Mile Island is welcome to a choir of angels to do it with, and launching spaceships without much fuel is totally feasible for a wizard without getting daeva involved. As are most things. And the thing is, she's got discretion. She doesn't live on Earth, but her customers do, so she's got a vested interest in it not turning into a black hole; anybody she'd actually, willingly give the secret to is somebody who wouldn't fuck it up."
"No, anyone who wants to un-nuke things is not fucking welcome to a choir of angels to do it with, an angel who is not handled correctly might have a hard time destroying the earth but they can sure as they sprout feathers go on a massive killing spree or worse if they feel like it. If daeva are going to be common knowledge it's got to be carefully handled. I did it once but I would want to know about the local differences before doing it again."
"Yes, because she'd obviously tell them how to summon an unbound angel, or tell someone who has no idea what the hell he's doing, because she has no idea how to keep people from using dangerous knowledge to destroy the world, what with all those other apocalyptic secrets she's let slip over the past several thousand years and allowed to shred the world to pieces. This is not her first rodeo."
"Look," says Cam. "I consider telling anybody about daeva - who doesn't already know a dangerous amount because he got one while trying to sculpt genitals in a park - to be my personal responsibility. I carried it off without disaster once before and I did that by being fucking careful and I still got murdered in the process. I have known you for about fifteen minutes. I have never met your friend. My, personal responsibility cannot be discharged by going 'oh it's probably fine, I have hearsay that this person has both competence and reasonably well-aligned goals'."
"Because in the first place, she's the best and most trustworthy person I've ever known; in the second place, I've sworn an oath never to lie to her, and I don't care to split hairs about deliberately leaving out relevant information; and in the third place, you don't 'let' me do anything."
Ari hisses through his teeth. "The idea of Sally doing anything that could endanger the world... is absurd. She has worked harder than anyone I know to prevent our reality from crumbling to pieces around us like it desperately wants to do. I trust her infinitely more than I trust myself. And she's had the resources and information necessary to intentionally or accidentally destroy this world since she was twenty-three, and astonishingly, she hasn't done it, because she is a reasonable and extremely cautious person."
"I have some trouble gauging your standards of judgment. For instance, you apparently think I'm unqualified to decide that my best friend, who I've known for ten years, has an IQ above room temperature and doesn't want to end the world, despite the fact that she's personally saved the world multiple times."
"It's not that I think you're unqualified, it's that from where I'm standing you are a random dude saying words. If what you are saying is true, she sounds great, let's give her Introduction to Circles and tell her to go nuts while I have way more fun than this conversation with terraforming Mars, yay. If what you are saying has any of the things wrong with it that may go wrong with Utterances A La Random Dude, then maybe I get as far as putting atmo in and then I get balcony seats to oh look the Earth is being sucked into a singularity or I come back to find oh an angel has turned most of the population of the eastern seaboard into spicy garlic eggplant."
"Great. You severely underestimate our world's ability to take care of apocalypse, but fine. I'll introduce you to Sally. And while I'm sure that my threats if you decide she needs a three-year-long nap are already implicit, I'd like to make it clear that they are not empty, no matter how invulnerable you are."
"Let" sounds like a dirty word coming out of his mouth.
"You're scared? One day I'm comfortably immortal and my biggest problem is that I never get the cool public works project summons, the next I'm in an alternate universe with magic I know nothing about which may or may not be able to dent me or kill me or for example explode the chip in my brain without you even trying, I'm wondering if it would stick if I got murdered a second time and you were the one pulling the trigger, wondering how literal a mind-reader you are vis a vis that most recent comment - you're scared? You have big guns to call in. My big guns have to worry about this being an inhabited locale to the point where I may as well have none. I'm fucking terrified and if I didn't know approximately the population of early twentieth century Earth I would let you do whatever you damn well pleased with the fact that you nearly got somebody, anybody, less friendly and more inclined to running rampant than me."
There is, somehow, an even more uncomfortable silence than before.
"I don't read minds," ventures Ari. "Except this thing wizards do where the first time you look into their eyes you both get this trippy vision-quest thing about who the other person really is. And it's really vague and tells you practically nothing. It's just I've got forty years' experience telling when someone's thinking about killing me, and you're just- so obviously the kind of person who'd go for a coma instead given your resources, but it's the same face."
"There's any number of things that'll hypnotize you with their eyes so they can eat you alive. The Black Court of vampires uses eye contact to enthrall victims and destroy minds, turn you into a living zombie. And I've heard of things that can eat your soul out through your eyes, though there's a fair chance that's a myth."
"Mostly it's just... there's a lot of supernatural things that prey on humans, and some that would like us to die out entirely. And practically nothing is on our side. So, a human could be eaten by vampires or sacrificed to demons or massacred by zombies at any moment. You specifically are probably safe from most random threats because you're invulnerable-ish, and if you stay anonymous and stick to subtle tweaks then you're mostly safe from magical threats too. But it's never totally safe."
"I might well like some enchanted shoes. But yeah, nothing about being a demon improves grace. I can make lifesize elephant sculptures out of multicolored corundum if ever I suffer a sudden defect in taste but I cannot ice skate even when I'm not hiding my extra appendages."
"Ah. Makes sense, brains are complicated. Anyway, enchanted shoes are easier than brain-chips, the ones I'm thinking of just sort of shift your probability so you don't step in such a way as to trip yourself up. Wouldn't help with skating, but you could walk and run and such without any real trouble."
"I don't remember the entity's name. Ari accidentally summoned a random demon - or, let's call me an apsel, you reportedly have different demons here - he accidentally summoned a random apsel. I had the quickest reaction time on this occasion but he could have gotten anybody who felt like going for a jaunt about the mortal realm, however mistaken they would have proven about the identity of said mortal realm, and they would have been delightedly surprised to land ungagged and unbound. If a summoner dies their summoned daeva get sent back, so an apsel who wanted to have some fun would have merely rendered Ari unconscious, and then gone and done whatever. I'm a nice friendly apsel. I am only slightly out of the ordinary for apsels in general but I am a huge outlier as apsels who take summonses go."
"...So, potential horror avoided. Thank you for not being unpleasant. I doubt he was going to tell me, or anyone, to summon random unbound apsels. Again, he doesn't really like comas and mayhem. And I'm guessing that he assumed that was implicit, but you don't know him from Adam, so it wasn't. But allow me to clarify that summoning sprees weren't on the menu. Ari is not malicious or an idiot. All appearances to the contrary."
"You are badly misunderstanding the nature of my roommate. He thinks that everything is 'cool'. That does not mean that he doesn't realize that it is incredibly dangerous. He chooses to be blasé about dangers passed, but believe me when I say that he is fully aware of them. At the very least, he would never do something stupid without consulting me first."
"Maybe. Once I am reasonably sure that the key information is not going to be carelessly deployed by this vector I might also fuck off and terraform Mars and visit the NIH and - are your bees in trouble? This year in the other mortal world I know the bees were in trouble."
"Well, it may still be a disease here. But the root cause stems from the Lady. Anyway, I may have mentioned that we're not idiots or inclined to tell idiots how to summon apsels, so you can soulgaze Ari and be on your way if you like. I offer our place mostly because if you stayed here you'd be protected from a lot of supernatural threats that might otherwise trouble you, and our world is tricky for outsiders."
"The abridged version of that crash course is that fully avoiding hazards without being, or being accompanied by, a wizard, verges on impossible. I can make you a number of tacky accessories to shield your mind et cetera, at reasonable rates, but you'd need to stay here for a time waiting for me to finish them anyway. Until such a time as you're covered in sparkly things to keep you from getting your soul ripped out, you'd likely be best off if you only went out while accompanied by Ari or I. Or Peter, I suppose, if he shows up any time soon."
"Oh, they don't have to be tacky anyway. I'll make them perfectly tasteful if you like. I just tend towards the gaudy myself, as you may have noticed." She indicates the truly ridiculous volume of gemstones dangling from her person and set into her face, and the equal number decorating the room.