"I was more hoping for planet and calendar year. And I have a very good idea, but this situation is as far as I know unprecedented and it might not work, plus I'm not sure I want to go home yet."

"Planet? Why would the planet have a name? Year - 6893 or 1201 depending on who you ask. Telra tried to reset the yearcount, but it didn't catch on in most of the rest of the world."

"I see." Pause. "So, I'm a demon. Demons make things. Do any things need making around here?"

"...We could use a lot of things made in a lot of places. Preferably spread wide enough that no one person or small group controls them, because that would be likely to result in unpleasant political and social consequences. In the short term, I would like you to make proof."

Cam has part of a grilled cheese sandwich left. He holds up his other hand and makes a paper cup of tomato soup. Dip. Bite.

"That is sufficient proof. Do you have access to the bluestream? If you don't, roads and buildings and water pumps and elevators are still physical things, we can just go straight to installing magic instead of needing to build them."

"I don't know what the bluestream is. Perhaps you could tell me."

"Demons can casually add almost anything we want to our bodies. Subtracting's a little harder. None of this bluestream stuff sounds remotely familiar; my magic's costless."

"You're a demon? Either my mythology's wrong or you're awfully benign for one or you're running some sort of con. Any which way you'd terrify Durant, he's a scheming, monopolizing hawk taking advantage of tariffs and market scarcity. Oh, shapers can be made. At least from humans. You sit in one of the stone circles and if you're lucky, you get sensory deprivation and then magic. If you're unlucky, you get intense pain."

"Your mythology is wrong - well, I'm assuming, since you didn't realize I was one or know we could be summoned or that we make things - and I'm pretty benign for a summoned demon."

"My mythology says that demons are empathy-less creatures capable of disguising themselves as anything, who eat magic, enjoy watching suffering, and cannot be killed. And I appreciate it. What kinds of things can you make?"

"I may or may not be able to make anything that is inherently magical - I can't normally do it but it might be that I could if I were copying something. I need surprisingly little but still some information about what I'm trying to make. It can't appear more than about five or six times as far away from me as the sun, can't appear in motion, and must be matter, not energy or antimatter."

"...The Senate likes to ban books. Useful books, even. Can I have a copy of Yero Green's The Art of Healing and Transmuted Medicines?"

"I could conjure it from that description, but I don't know what's in it, so I would have no way to know if you just asked me for a misleadingly titled book on how to make high-yield explosives or something unless I hung onto it and read it first," Cam points out.

"It's a medical treatise by a renowned doctor who supposedly made more progess actually understanding the body's microscopic workings than anyone else. It was banned - well, the ostensible reason was that it's dangerous hogwash, but my friend Link claims it's not, that the Senate doesn't want improved medical care because it might threaten the power structure. I'd treat it with appropriate skepticism and not stick people with strange medicines before testing them on rats and monkeys... And I know how to make explosives already, though I get the sense you wouldn't appreciate a demonstration."

"...It seems, not guaranteed but extremely likely, that I know more about medicine than Yero Green. Also, I am immune to conventional forms of harm and don't actually mind that much if you demonstrate an explosive here with nobody around, presuming you know how to avoid getting yourself killed. What the hell kind of power structure is even plausibly threatened by improved medical care, what, do you do your agriculture with zombies?"

"...No, those are fictional. The kind of power structure where the oligarchs have relatively advanced medical care all to themselves and want to keep it that way, is the idea. Not that I give it much credit. But for the off chance the book is actually useful and actually has some decent medical advances in it, I'm willing to spend a lot of time researching and verifying and testing things on mice. And being very careful and conservative when applying the things that worked on mice to humans, I'm not stupid. Though if you have better medical knowledge than him that is entirely welcome."

"What are some relatively recent medical advances that you know about?"

"Morphine, which we make with magic but is not magic all by itself. Less invasive heart surgeries. A way to repair ruptured blood vessels by careful incremental transmutation, though it doesn't work on capillaries. I don't know how to do these things, I'm not a doctor, but I know of them."

"Okay, so not dismal, but I'm way ahead of you. ...Of course, none of my medical textbooks are in a local language."

"Presumably there exist language textbooks, yes?"

"The languages you speak are completely unrelated to any languages I've encountered before. I got your languages when you summoned me, so I can translate, I could probably even come up with a curriculum, but there are no textbooks aimed at local speakers."