"Gotcha.  Well, thanks again!"

And off to see Cam.  "Hello again.  Um, Alassëo thought that maybe I'd find summoning another demon convincing about stuff but also that maybe you had reasons other than not having thought of it for not suggesting it earlier?"

"...well," he says, "if you do it wrong, you destroy the planet."

"Yep, uh, want to avoid that one for sure."  She glances out the window.  "Is this place even relevantly a planet?  - Not that I, um.  Just . . ."

"I think here would be fine, Nechar can probably handle it, but if you knew how to do it and went home and did it there..."

She nods.

"On my original world summoning has been used to excellent and largely nondestructive effect for over a century but I don't know if your world is prepared to absorb it, let alone with such a specific vector of introduction."

"How largely?"

"The mortality rate fell dramatically when magic went public, mostly due to the use of summoning to handle infrastructure and shipping and medicine and suchlike, but there are small-scale summoning mishaps. No serious attempt to destroy the planet."

"Well.  I was trying really hard to prevent the spread of a much less dangerous threat than that to my world, but I'd probably think less of you if you decided to teach me anyway based only off the information you have now."

"Behold how I'm not teaching you."

"Right, yes, I wouldn't have said that if I thought you were going to; I just would have quietly thought less of you."

"Uh-huh. If you think summoning a demon would allow us to come to some workable agreement on our differences I guess I can have Alassëo test if it works here and then if it does I can help you summon somebody without letting you know how it's done, with of course the caveat that you might imagine whatever you like about whether this lets me introduce distorting influence."

"I don't even know that it would; he just brought it up as a potentially-faster alternative to me doing lots and lots of reading.  Though I would be a lot more confident in my ability to tell if there exists an Earth as described a certain way and springboard off of that than trying to evaluate an entirely alien culture, if springboarding is - how that would work.  I don't have a very clear picture."

"Unfortunately a lot of the information I could provide to explain how a demon would help with that would also be germane to how summoning works. Uh, Alassëo can bindingly give his word? You could check that with Bar, if you don't want to take my word for it though since my word on that came as part of my explanation for how I holed a planet you might choose to, and then he could tell you whatever."

She sighs.

"This is very - sticky.  I would probably take Alassëo's word if I could be convinced it was bindingly given but I'm not going to take anyone's word that it can be and am not immediately thinking of any remotely ethical ways of proving it - is there any hope of proving myself to be trustworthy with summoning or did I just completely burn that - can I try and verify anything about your Earth or is it too entrenched - "

"Hmm... If you think Bar is secretly me appearing things on the countertop I guess that will not work for you very well. I guess you know that when you showed up I was wearing jeans and sneakers? They wear those on my Earth. I doubt that gets you very far. I just - you didn't - make any attempt to find out more about what information I was working with, Ancora-wise, and -"

Her face is rather flushed, now.  "Yeah, I - yeah.  I could try and explain but it would probably just sound like excuses, I don't know."

"I am not in much position to disparage the concept of excuses but..."

"Just - I'm not a good actor at all and I was pretty sure that if you caught wind of literally anything then I'd lose the chance permanently, and - there's no being the right amount of careful here, right?  Not exactly; there's far too many ways things could be for me to spin the wheel and have it land on the appropriate level of caution, or of suspicion or willingness to take drastic action.  It could be that everything's fine and I'm massively massively overreacting and doing a lot of pointless harm all the while, or it could be that it's worse than the worst thing I could possibly think of and I would never be capable of preparing for it or preventing it, or, it could be absolutely anywhere in between those.

"And so wherever I draw the line, it's going to be above some of those possibilities and below others, and every action I take cuts off more options - and obviously attempting to murder someone is burning lots of options, but as far as I could tell so was not doing that, or at least one really important big one.  I - wish someone more competent was here instead of me?  But I'm not sure anyone is actually competent enough to deal with this sort of thing, just maybe more or less lucky in whatever level they pick matching reality's.

" - I don't know enough about summoning to have any clue whether that makes me more or less qualified for it, but.  That's where I'm at, I guess."

"Do you have, like - friends or allies or anybody you'd want double checking you here who merely are not present, or are you just flying solo?"

"Just me, really."

"...How old are you?" he wonders.

"Seventeen."

"When I was seventeen I worked alone too. It worked out okay for me but it could have - not.

I don't think either of us is in a hurry. Maybe if we wait around long enough more people will come in and they can - mediate or convince me to teach them summoning or something."

"Yeah.  Okay."