"I suppose I should have predicted this, shouldn't I," he says, grinning. "How about something fancy I have probably never ever eaten?"

"I have no idea how fancy your usual fare might be!"

"Something that could not be produced by mundane magicless cooking?"

"That I can do, but for all I know you had angels doing your breakfasts." Sauce-flaked salmon.

"No angels doing my breakfasts. Do you eat often? I met a demon who didn't really like eating or sleeping and just ignored the discomfort and drank lots of coffee."

"I eat but I don't usually sleep."

"Sleeping is a waste of time," he nods, and tastes some of the salmon.

It's delicious. "I sometimes like it as a sort of punctuation," he says. "Or if I'm really cozy I sometimes just stay put and doze off. But not nearly as often as humans or even Elves need it."

"Wow this is delicious," he says, taking another forkful. "And what did you do in Hell all this time?"

"Learned some violin and some of a demon language. Learned things I didn't already know about the daeva realms, and Limbo. Took summonses."

"Oh, if you took summonses—were you gagged very often?"

"Till an Elf got me and let me make a phone call, every time."

"Every time—that's absurd—I'm so sorry about that."

"I hope I have made a dent in that asshat's following."

"I've never gagged a demon, it sounds—absurd—I might have given it some consideration if it were just demons and angels, but it's demons and angels and fairies and that matches no theology at all so why would the soul thing match—"

"Oh, some demons get a kick out of trying to convince people to pay with their souls, it's just a stupid way to deal with that."

"Yes but that could have easily come from access to human theology instead of the other way around, and it just doesn't—fit, like, why would demons in particular have this specific skill while fairies and angels don't, the only thing that differs between fairies and angels is the one power and that's already different from demons and there's no reason for the souls thing and besides several demons did in fact say it was a practical joke and I ran tests—"

"You ran tests? What kinda tests?"

"Well, first of all as soon as I heard about the soul stealing thing I went—okay, so in the worst-case I need to have at least enough of a positive impact on Earth to be worth an eternity being tortured in Hell, so I was not completely ignorant of risk, here—and then I started interviewing demons about it and their answers didn't add up at all, and I found out some of them record videos of people selling their souls, and some people are there more than once. I got one demon to conjure me some of those, and then I had other demons try to classify which videos were of people pre—or post-soul sale, and the answers were inconsistent. And then I decided to sell my soul a few times to different demons for different things. And so far all my observations do match demons as a species being a superintelligent hivemind that collectively maximizes soul collection but."

"I do not know how to collect souls and am ninety eight percent sure it's just bullshit. Feel entirely free to not give me your soul."

"That's of course assuming you're not part of a superintelligent hivemind, otherwise I should just discount everything you say as trying to get more souls—unless being discounted is exactly what you want."

"I gotta say this is not entertaining as a potential running joke, so being really invested in it is not the makings of a second date."

"I did not in fact plan to make it a running joke but good to know. So what did you learn about the daeva realms that you did not know before?"

"Mostly just experiential stuff and conjuring models."