"You know, a table's just as bad as a floor if it's got clearance and isn't wobbled more than a certain number of degrees to one side."

It takes a full second for the person with freakily big eyes to abruptly fall out of his chair, the strange tattoos on his face pulsing wildly.

"Relax, I'm not gonna hurt you. What exactly were you trying to do here?"

"We're having a reading group."  (There's no one else in the room.)  "...Do you want to join?"

"...bringing the population of the group up to, uh, two?"

"Nine.  At least."  He glances around at the room's walls, clearly expecting Cam to be able to deduce something about them.  Nothing obviously stands out; the interior design is spacious and tastefully opulent; the wallscreen is shifting through generic naturescapes.

"I, uh, don't have augmented reality contact lenses or anything on the optimistic assumption that's what you mean." He jumps off the table with a big wing-flare to steady his landing.

"That's not what I mean."  He's staring.  "...Bubbly surge."

"...no thanks I don't drink?"

"...Your costume surge.  It's really bubbly."  He carefully starts to get up off the floor.

"In principle summoning me should give me your dialect but it does not give me your precise vocabulary."

This guy is going to stare at him some more.

He sits back down in his hoverchair, kicks it over to where he dropped his stylus, and writes annoyingly slowly and with very bad handwriting, 'we are being listened to'.  Then he fiddles conspicuously with his silver chain necklace.

Blink blink. Sign languages are a... no, guy doesn't understand any and even if he could he couldn't produce them understandably right now. ...Cam will hand him a tablet with a gaze-tracking keyboard and a back display. Then produce his own computer. Look at letters to type them, and it'll display on the reverse side for me.

This gets a bunch of spam letter inputs while he assesses the layout, and then deletes.  We also have to keep talking.  (Complete with competent spaces and capitalization.)  He picks up his book, a falling-apart copy of the Communist Manifesto, and reads another paragraph from it.

"That's an interesting choice of book." What exactly are they listening for?

"History's pretty bubbly."  Too much to summarize.  Do I keep losing consciousness??

"Are you doing some kind of study on communism?" Not that I've seen?

"Not specifically."  Why are you - he deletes that.  How did you come to be here?

"The manifesto wants a lot of context, if you ask me." You summoned me with the thing you drew on the table.

"Doesn't everything?"  How?  It pinged you?

"Well, everything wants it, but this one had an unusual concentration of surprising-to-contemporaries geopolitical fallout." No, it magically pulled me here from the universe in which I normally live.

"Huh."

I'm brain-damaged, not gullible.

"I could come up with more book recommendations if you want." I can fuck off and go do something else if you didn't want a demon here and don't feel like being my native guide to whatever this-all is.

He considers this, rocking his hoverchair back and forth.

"I mean, it seems totally fascinating.  It'd be bubbly to get to know more context."

"Yes, just absolutely hella bubbly. I too could always use more context about the world." Do you want to stop having your necklace by any chance.