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

[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."

[sturdycoldsteel]

Assuming he's not lying, of course.

"Say, can you make me wings? I assume you know enough to tell whether my body can take it. I won't even look too terribly out of place, they're uncommon but not unheard of. Just expensive and prone to complications, done our way."

[from_scratch]

"I can make you wings. They'll even work. If you ever want to take them off again, though, you will have more trouble with that than I would if I wanted rid of mine."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Morphine is a thing. Magical cutting and cauterizing is a thing. I'd need a doctor, but not a quest across the ocean to the Ancient Shrine of Power or anything."

[from_scratch]

"Oh, no, that's not the problem, I can make them without nerves in the joints and you can slice them right off without feeling a thing, you'd have to worry about blood loss but it sounds like you have that under control, I was just talking about the scarring and the muscles in non-wing locations you need added on to work them. I can define what is and is not part of my body at any given time and anything that isn't doesn't tend to stick around to wear out its welcome, be it scar tissue or extra layers of pectoral, but you don't have that advantage. If it doesn't bother you I can totally make you wings and the substrate for them, what kind of design do you want?"

[sturdycoldsteel]

"We can do scar tissue. We can remove muscles, if we do it carefully, but not put them back. Thanks for the caution."

She takes a piece of paper and four multicolored bottles of ink and telekinetically sketches. It's startlingly detailed for how little time it's taking, though perhaps the magic helps with that.

The end result looks a lot like a cross between a fairy's wings and an angel's. With longer than average, relatively unfluffy angel wings as a base, the feathers are colored vibrantly in a symmetrical rainbow pattern. She has the joints and feather types for each section correct, mostly.

"It'll be great to fly without needing magic to stay up, I suspect. Magic dampens your emotions."

[from_scratch]

"That doesn't sound like any fun," Cam says. "Okay, I can do these - I might have to deviate from your design on the internals here and there to make sure they'll get you in the air, but they'll look like this and handle about how you're expecting. ...Your shirt has a back."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"It can be useful, too. If I'm about to do something I'd regret, I sometimes remember to hover or slightly warm up a cubic mile of rock or something instead. Ah. Yes, it does, and so do my flying leathers. This may have to wait until I find a tailor unless you want to appear clothes for me on top of wings."