"I haven't done the hat experiment, either, so maybe I'm wrong."

"As long as there's not no hope, there is some hope. And that's good enough for me."

"Okay. Thank you very much, I will see about your wishlist." Dismissalllllll.

"Bye!"

And then he's gone.

"This is so cool."

"It is. This has the potential change the situation here significantly. What do you plan to do?"

"Not sure. If it weren't for the fact that the nasty biteys might be able to summon help too I'd probably try to see to it that everyone knew. End scarcity. Since the nasty biteys may be able to summon help I will have to be more conservative."

"Summon demons in secret, trade for 23rd century technology? Or maybe just textbooks."

"This is a promising avenue. What do you pay demons?"

"Media recommendations. We should see if there are any significant differences due to the divergent magical history, those would be valuable."

"Yeah, otherwise I feel like being from the past will handicap me terribly."

"It could. But you seem like a problem-solver to me."

"We should compare history, find points of divergence... I might have to just repeatedly summon demons until I find one who's bored, bootstrap from there, if you don't have reliable history memory off the top of your head..."

"Broad strokes, yes. I will likely not be able to tell whether a given artist or author has a counterpart there. Repeated summonings could be a viable tactic, if we leave off the standard gag."

"Standard gag?"

"Demons have a reputation for talking people into trading their souls for whatever task, the gag is a binding developed to prevent that. With it, the daeva can only communicate in pre-specified phrases, typically 'yes, summoner' and 'no, summoner'."

"...are they really persuasive...?"

"I think it's more a case of desperate people willing to make any sort of deal and demons finding the prospect that they actually could claim a soul amusing."

"Oh, they can't do it? Some demons here can. And turning into a vampire evicts one's soul, that's why they're such sociopaths."

"I see. Souls have never satisfactorily been proven to exist in my world."

"They're not particularly obtrusive except by their absence."

"Are all sociopaths soulless? Can people who are born with the condition become vampires?"

"Enh, vampirism isn't exactly the same thing as sociopathy, it's just a shorthand? I think human sociopaths still have souls and can become vampires. My sources on this are handwritten old books by people who can't spell and actual vampires, so, grain of salt, but that's my impression."

"The vampire I met wasn't terribly inclined towards talking."

"They often aren't. Every now and then I get a chatty one."