call me maybe

[from_scratch]

Cam is out flying. There's a decent cloud of atmosphere around the gold plane, now, millenia of demons making air around themselves for comfort and not sealing it up because why would you bother. There's a small forest, here - the effect is kind of ruined by the lamps it has to grow under, but it's still pretty.

He feels an open summons and lets it grab him -

with the Joker (kappa)

with Ripper (kappa)

with Darren (Aestrix)

with Minus (kappa)

with Emma (Marri)

with Facility 3141592 (armokGoB)

with the admin (kappa)

with Jarvis (kappa, Aestrix)

with Miles (kappa)

with Hank (Nemo)

Comments

[manofmyword]

Somewhere very, very far away, someone is decorating the interior of an empty warehouse. The people he plans on inviting here should feel right at home, when he's done. In the meantime, there's a pile of Halloween decorations against one wall awaiting repurposing, and he has a box of black and red permanent markers and is drawing a spooky circle on the floor, with mirror-written fake Latin about demons scrawled sinuously inside it. (No one's going to be looking too closely, or reading too well in the lighting he plans to provide. It doesn't have to be perfect.)

He has just finished the last scribbled curve to close the circle.

Won't he be surprised.

[from_scratch]

Cam is pretty surprised, although not that surprised.

"You're letting me talk, that's - that's the worst circle I have ever seen, wow, you are terrible at this," he says.

[manofmyword]

"Nnnno," he says, standing up and capping his marker and regarding his summoned demon with an unavoidably crooked smile. "I'd say I'm unexpectedly good at it."

[from_scratch]

"This circle is appalling. You're ludicrously lucky you got me instead of somebody else, you know that?"

[manofmyword]

"Tell you the truth," he says, "I wasn't expecting anybody to show up at all."

[from_scratch]

"...What, really?"

[manofmyword]

"Really really!"

[from_scratch]

"...Do you live under a rock?"

[manofmyword]

"Nope," he says serenely.

[from_scratch]

"Aaaaand," says Cam, "what year is this?"

[manofmyword]

"Two thousand annnd twelve."

[from_scratch]

Cam stares at him.

"Congratulations," he says. "Your shit circle has either accomplished time travel or summoned me to an alternate universe."

[manofmyword]

"What fun!" he says brightly.

[from_scratch]

"Well, maybe, or maybe I can't get home. Which wouldn't be an unqualified disaster or anything, but I would've liked to know this sort of thing ahead of time."

[manofmyword]

"Mm, sorry 'bout that," he says. "If I'd known I was gonna get a real live demon I would've made better arrangements." He cocks his head and adds, "Maybe including not drawing a circle at all, but maybe - not. What's a real live demon good for?"

[from_scratch]

"Making stuff. Your circle is terrible so I don't have to do a thing you say, and if I were a very bad person you'd spend the rest of your life comatose while I ran around being a very bad person, but I am not a bad person so I might as well hear you out."

[manofmyword]

"Making stuff..." he muses. "What kinds of stuff?"

[from_scratch]

"...Stuff stuff. The stuff is just stuff, it still has to run on physics, but I can cheat on some details, especially if there's an extant version of the thing, and if it's two thousand and twelve I know a lot of science fiction gadgets relative to what you probably have."

[manofmyword]

"All right," he says. "So how about I tell you my problem and you decide if you feel like helping. The deal is, last week this clod calling himself Bane caved in a football field in the middle of a game and announced on live TV that he's taking over Gotham, on the authority of this big menacing round thing next to him." He gestures to approximate the size of the thing in question. It's pretty big. "Walks a guy onto the field with him, guy says he's a physicist, guy says the big menacing round thing's a nuclear bomb, guy says he's the only person in the world who knows how to disarm it, Bane kills the guy. And the next day he broke a buncha people out of prison and gave them all guns, but that I can handle, it's the nuke that's a little out of my league."

[from_scratch]

"...Okay, this is hard, and you really would have been better off with an angel, but I can probably do something. You know where it is? Is it on a hair trigger or a timer that would not allow me to throw it into the sun if I picked it up and made a little space shuttle and zoomed into the sky?"

[manofmyword]

"It's somewhere in the city, can't say beyond that. No idea what-all he's rigged it up with, besides that somebody somewhere's got a little button they can press to set it off anytime they feel like, and he's not saying who."

[from_scratch]

"Okay. I could try to muffle it in something, if it's too dangerous to try making off with it, but I'd still have to know where it is. And I'd need to re-read some of my physics notes to have a good guess as to what you wrap up a nuke in, but fortunately," he conjures up a little stick of a computer that projects a large screen of information for him, "I can do that."

[manofmyword]

"...Very nice," says the person in the weird makeup.

[from_scratch]

"Mm-hm." Read read. "This thing giving off any sort of radiation now or don't you know?"

[manofmyword]

"Couldn't tell ya, I'm afraid."