trade my soul for a wish

[from_scratch]

This is a successor to "call me maybe", which is getting crowded.

Cam is dipping a grilled cheese sandwich into a bowl of tomato soup when he feels the summons. He goes ahead and grabs it. Doesn't even drop the sandwich.


with Mark (kappa)

with Adanya (Aestrix)

with Sable (kappa)

with Ari (andaisq)

with Metella (kappa)

with Miles (kappa)

with Isabella (Eva)

with Steel (Rockeye)

with Daphne (Maggie)

with Edie (Maggie)

Comments

[from_scratch]

Cam has part of a grilled cheese sandwich left. He holds up his other hand and makes a paper cup of tomato soup. Dip. Bite.

[sturdycoldsteel]

"That is sufficient proof. Do you have access to the bluestream? If you don't, roads and buildings and water pumps and elevators are still physical things, we can just go straight to installing magic instead of needing to build them."

[from_scratch]

"I don't know what the bluestream is. Perhaps you could tell me."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"It's... The framework of magic. If you are a shaper, which I assumed you are because usually only shapers can safely withstand any significant body modification, you can see the layer of magic over the world, and change it from useless fog into structures of sorts, and then use those structures to do magic. Magic powers most of the economy. People fly heavy loads on roads, artificial light and heat grows our crops, and so on."

"Oh, magic costs. Making structures weakens your strength and coordination temporarily, on the order of a couple of hours only. Viewing - or listening to - the stream takes away your physical senses for a proportionate time. Actually using magic dampens the emotions, or hurts if you do too much. Does any of that sound familiar?"

[from_scratch]

"Demons can casually add almost anything we want to our bodies. Subtracting's a little harder. None of this bluestream stuff sounds remotely familiar; my magic's costless."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"You're a demon? Either my mythology's wrong or you're awfully benign for one or you're running some sort of con. Any which way you'd terrify Durant, he's a scheming, monopolizing hawk taking advantage of tariffs and market scarcity. Oh, shapers can be made. At least from humans. You sit in one of the stone circles and if you're lucky, you get sensory deprivation and then magic. If you're unlucky, you get intense pain."

[from_scratch]

"Your mythology is wrong - well, I'm assuming, since you didn't realize I was one or know we could be summoned or that we make things - and I'm pretty benign for a summoned demon."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"My mythology says that demons are empathy-less creatures capable of disguising themselves as anything, who eat magic, enjoy watching suffering, and cannot be killed. And I appreciate it. What kinds of things can you make?"

[from_scratch]

"I may or may not be able to make anything that is inherently magical - I can't normally do it but it might be that I could if I were copying something. I need surprisingly little but still some information about what I'm trying to make. It can't appear more than about five or six times as far away from me as the sun, can't appear in motion, and must be matter, not energy or antimatter."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"...The Senate likes to ban books. Useful books, even. Can I have a copy of Yero Green's The Art of Healing and Transmuted Medicines?"

[from_scratch]

"I could conjure it from that description, but I don't know what's in it, so I would have no way to know if you just asked me for a misleadingly titled book on how to make high-yield explosives or something unless I hung onto it and read it first," Cam points out.

[sturdycoldsteel]

"It's a medical treatise by a renowned doctor who supposedly made more progess actually understanding the body's microscopic workings than anyone else. It was banned - well, the ostensible reason was that it's dangerous hogwash, but my friend Link claims it's not, that the Senate doesn't want improved medical care because it might threaten the power structure. I'd treat it with appropriate skepticism and not stick people with strange medicines before testing them on rats and monkeys... And I know how to make explosives already, though I get the sense you wouldn't appreciate a demonstration."

[from_scratch]

"...It seems, not guaranteed but extremely likely, that I know more about medicine than Yero Green. Also, I am immune to conventional forms of harm and don't actually mind that much if you demonstrate an explosive here with nobody around, presuming you know how to avoid getting yourself killed. What the hell kind of power structure is even plausibly threatened by improved medical care, what, do you do your agriculture with zombies?"

[sturdycoldsteel]

"...No, those are fictional. The kind of power structure where the oligarchs have relatively advanced medical care all to themselves and want to keep it that way, is the idea. Not that I give it much credit. But for the off chance the book is actually useful and actually has some decent medical advances in it, I'm willing to spend a lot of time researching and verifying and testing things on mice. And being very careful and conservative when applying the things that worked on mice to humans, I'm not stupid. Though if you have better medical knowledge than him that is entirely welcome."

[from_scratch]

"What are some relatively recent medical advances that you know about?"

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Morphine, which we make with magic but is not magic all by itself. Less invasive heart surgeries. A way to repair ruptured blood vessels by careful incremental transmutation, though it doesn't work on capillaries. I don't know how to do these things, I'm not a doctor, but I know of them."

[from_scratch]

"Okay, so not dismal, but I'm way ahead of you. ...Of course, none of my medical textbooks are in a local language."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Presumably there exist language textbooks, yes?"

[from_scratch]

"The languages you speak are completely unrelated to any languages I've encountered before. I got your languages when you summoned me, so I can translate, I could probably even come up with a curriculum, but there are no textbooks aimed at local speakers."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Where did you come from, anyway, with different medical advances and different magic and so on? And would you mind stepping out of the circle so I can get to work on my sun-eater spell? Oh, it won't eat the sun. It's supposed to let me survive for a long while on nothing but sun and water by turning carbon dioxide and water directly into sugar."

[from_scratch]

Cam gets out of her way. "This circle should be all used up as far as summoning demons is concerned, but do they usually look like this? I live in a place called Hell, but there are other places, most notably Heaven, Fairyland, and the mortal world."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Spells are usually more efficient in terms of cost to build their structure if they're circles. Actually marking out the circle is for convenience only, I can do it completely invisibly for magic I have more practice with. Let me know if or when you want to go home. If you can. Because if Kell annoys me enough that I finally snap and run off to the northern fringe or the stone teeth, er, the mountains in the west, you might not be able to find me."

[from_scratch]

"I don't actually anticipate wanting to go home and stay there in your lifetime unless it's to test whether summoning and dismissal work as normal here before collecting other daeva for some large project."

[sturdycoldsteel]

She starts pacing slowly around the perimeter of the circle, alternating between intent and blank stares at its contents. She also seems a little - droopy and tired.

"If you say so. I'd say I'd object if you started doing evil things, but you could have appeared a boulder over my head and run off cackling hundreds of times by now."

[from_scratch]

"Actually, if you die - assuming things are working normally - I go straight back to Hell. If I were inclined to run off cackling you'd be unconscious, not squished."