home sweet home

[from_scratch]

Cam is lounging in a hanging furniture object that's sort of a cross between a hammock and a chair and leaves plenty of room for the wings and tail, feet up, sipping hot cider, and watching a documentary about the history of the colonization of Luna because he does like to keep current. Ho hum.

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[aeskhyne]

A sleeping human, wearing blue pajamas with a pattern of fluffy white sheeps, appears without fanfare on the floor between Cam and his - television-like apparatus.

[from_scratch]

Well.

Cam didn't make that.

He pauses the documentary, removes his feet from the footrest, and nudges the person. New demons could theoretically appear inside a residence, and they don't all start with wings.

[aeskhyne]

The person remains asleep. Firmly and unwakeably asleep.

[from_scratch]

Now Cam is confused. New demons might appear in his house but should not appear asleep - for that matter, the pajamas are also a surprise - and certainly shouldn't be comatose. He'd really like to know what's going on.

[aeskhyne]

"Finally," says a voice out of thin air, age and timbre roughly matching the body on the floor. "Hi! I'm Teah! I'm a god! Do you need one around here? It kind of looks like you don't, which is surprising. Keep wanting to talk to me or I can't keep talking, that's how I work."

[from_scratch]

"...This is Hell, it's an unusual place to find a god, how do you work?"

[aeskhyne]

"This is so weird, there are practically no prayers," he says. "Uh, short version: I can answer prayers. I can do just about any kind of magic you can think of, but I have to know what I'm doing first, so I'm not so good at things it's not safe to experiment with, like brains. But I can't do anything that's not answering a prayer. The body on the floor is me, but mostly in kind of an indirect metaphysical sense; I'm awake when he's asleep and vice versa, but we pretty much don't share memories. He's permanently asleep now because he figured out he's me and apparently that's what happens when he does that. This is Hell? No wonder the place is so dead. Is there anywhere around that's not Hell?"

[from_scratch]

"Uh, depends what you mean by around. Besides Hell you've got Heaven and Fairyland and the afterlife which goes by various names such as Limbo and then there's the mortal world. Fairyland and Limbo and the mortal world are probably better bets for you, how did you land here? Why Hell, why my living room?"

[aeskhyne]

"Random!" he says cheerfully. "Wow, I just answered the only prayer in all of Hell, some guy was stuck in a black hole. Now let's see if I can't..."

The voice trails off.

Half a beat later, it picks up again: "Okay, that's more like it. Fair warning, I might be a little distracted from now on, I found your other four worlds and some of them are a whole lot busier prayer-wise. But I can carry on a conversation pretty well between prayers; I've got practice."

[from_scratch]

"Uh, okay. You can interact with all the others from here? We can't do that, we have to wait for infrequent conjunctions to meet anybody from Fairyland or Heaven or Limbo and we can only get to mortality via summoning."

[aeskhyne]

"That sounds inconvenient," he remarks. "Yeah, don't know if I can move stuff between different worlds in your bundle, nobody's wanted to do it yet, but I can reach 'em all from here, they're just - a little farther away than normal. Ooh, I got to cure dementia already, that's a new record. Hey, and if I can move stuff between worlds, I might even be able to do fast resurrection, nice!"

[from_scratch]

"...I would like to relocate to Limbo, actually, if I can continue being a demon with demon abilities; most of what I like about Hell is the part where I am a demon with demon abilities. Including summonability."

[aeskhyne]

"I'll take a look," says Teah.

A few seconds later: "Yep, no problem, you want your house to come with you or no? Actually, if you ask me again in a few minutes I might just be able to let you move between worlds yourself. But in the meantime, I can definitely move you to Limbo with all relevant magical properties intact."

[from_scratch]

"I would love to move worlds myself, I can reconstruct the house and its worthwhile contents in like ten minutes but if you care to spare me them I won't complain, just put me above New Pacific and I'll be fine."

[aeskhyne]

It's done before he's quite finished uttering the word 'fine', with a brief faint rainbow shimmer in the air to mark the passage, although the change in lighting conditions would have been a clue by itself.

"Faster to do it myself!" the god says brightly. "I am really really fast. What's your name, anyway? Wanna be friends? I like having friends, it's handy."

[from_scratch]

"My suspicion is that I would very much like to be friends!"

[aeskhyne]

"Cool!" says Teah. "Mostly your half of being friends is making sure to want to talk to me every so often so I can tell you if there's something I wanna do that nobody's praying for. And chatting. I like chatting. And my half is—"

In the space between words, with hardly a noticeable pause, Cam is offered a silent and inherently comprehensible choice: does he want to be able to edit the things he creates with his demon abilities after he has created them?

"—doing you favours."

[from_scratch]

"Fuck yes that," says Cam, "I will be the very first angelic demon, yes, I can stop abusing my pet black hole."

[aeskhyne]

The choice grants his request as soon as he makes the decision, without requiring him to confirm it out loud.

"Pet black hole," giggles Teah. "You're cute, I like you."

[from_scratch]

"I feed it, it's obviously a pet. A pet that in a few millenia would have gotten too big and I'd have had to toss it the entire house and make a new one from a safer distance. Now I can just - can I - yes, I can shrink my pet black hole. You are my favorite god."

[aeskhyne]

"Yay!" says Teah, happily.

A neatly wrapped present, in paper with a curly-swirly rainbow pattern and a shimmering iridescent ribbon, appears hovering in midair in front of Cam in a burst of fast-fading rainbow sparkles.

If he unwraps it, he will discover a framed piece of paper that shows a long list of books by title and author, with little thumbnail images of front covers, and scrolls according to his whim. It is all of the books that currently exist but which he has not yet acquired.

[from_scratch]

Cam does unwrap it.

"You are fantastic, the entire multiverse just got absurdly lucky, and I'm not going to be nearly as busy here in Limbo as I thought, am I?"

[aeskhyne]

"Why, what were you planning to be busy with?"

[from_scratch]

"Limbo-ites can't make stuff, they're basically stuck with whatever they land with, and it's one 'thing' to a customer - sometimes a medium-sized or large thing, but they can't move them or tweak them or add to them. It's not terrible, but it's certainly not the casual excess of Hell or Heaven or as interesting as Fairyland."

[aeskhyne]

"You have a pretty cool bunch of worlds here."

On a whim, he appears for Cam a book containing all of the prayers he has answered here so far. There's a lot of blank space in the book currently, but it's got a solid chunk of pages filled in at the start. It has his name in Draconic on the front, even though no one in this world can read it, because why not?