it's a piece of chalk, actually

[unblinkered]

Parking on the street at Brenda's is full. It's what he gets for showing up for the 7:30 rush, instead of his usual 6AM. He takes the Volvo around to the back parking lot- the one that's not connected to the road, where you have to drive over the curb. It's... probably a parking lot. It's paved, after all. It's on the coffee shop's property. There's no "employee only" signs, anyway. There is, within reason, room to park a car. Maxwell Wax is sure the management will understand, if they even leave their room long enough to notice.

Hm? Who's this? Some kid in a hoodie, smoking a cigarette behind the building. He's standing right in the way of... what looks more or less like a parking spot, off to the side of some graffiti on the ground. He honks at the kid, who panics and drops his cigarette. Wasn't even lit. Did him a favor, in Max's opinion. He knows firsthand how bad those things can mess you up. He watches the kid round a corner, and pulls into the probably-parking-space. 

He hears a snapping sound as he pulls in. Must've run over the cigarette... do cigarettes go "snap"?

In his rearview mirror, he sees nobody standing on top of the graffiti, and then abruptly sees somebody standing on top of the graffiti. There is no transition between these two states.

Comments

[unblinkered]

"Right. Okay, that sounds... I can work with that, I think. ...Assuming these instructions are on the level- I can't think of why demons would generally have an incentive to spread misinformation, besides being under binding by summoners."

Max pages through his notepad.

"You said you were going to fly to your mother's house, right? How do you plan to do that without being spotted?"

[from_scratch]

"Earth still does that thing where sometimes it's dark, right?"

[unblinkered]

"...Well, yes, but there are... a lot of lights, and a lot of cameras. You'd need to plot a route that avoids population centers, and even then there's the risk of showing up on satellite imaging. And there's the matter of getting out of the city- you'd be-"

He pauses.

"...and your entire thing is letting the secret get out, right."

[from_scratch]

"I mean, even if it weren't, I don't think a couple of photographs on somebody's conspiracy theory website are going to make or break it. I can go up high. I'll look like a somewhat lower-altitude bat or a kite."

[unblinkered]

"And... until it gets dark, do you have any way of... hiding those? How do daeva usually go around doing things for summoners, if they have to keep it secret?"

He points at the demon's wings.

[from_scratch]

"I could put them under a coat?" shrugs the demon. "When I summoned daeva I did it without any witnesses while I was first setting up. I could also cut them off but that'd be messy and I'd just have to remake them to fly."

[unblinkered]

Max exhales. His brain has stopped producing obvious sorts of questions. It is time to take a moment to deliberately produce non-obvious questions.

What is the major consequence of this new information? Parallel worlds, okay. He has a semantic explanation of summoning- provided Cam is successful in neutralizing the dangers of open investigation, it shouldn't be too much trouble to find a lab with instruments for measuring the underlying mechanics. That goes on the back burner... or...

"Er- you said you got shot- do you know who did it, and how they found out you were summoning daeva? If it's just a matter of not being too overt, that's one thing, but I want to know what kind of safety measures I ought to be using if I'm doing my own investigation."

[from_scratch]

"I have a few suspects. I think one of the daeva told someone - there are so many fairies and angels who take summons that with this few summoners operative you aren't likely to get one that sees regular use by somebody else when you're taking randoms, but I summoned demons too and fewer demons take summons, so it was probably a demon. I haven't run into anybody I met while alive in Hell, though, so I can't confirm."

[unblinkered]

"So, I don't want to go around telling everyone I summon about plans to publicize summoning. But... you don't know, specifically- can you be sure that there isn't some way you could have been spied on regardless of whether you told anyone? The types of magic... there's parlor tricks, summoning, and the native magic of daeva, but none of those seem like natural kinds. Are there... any other types of magic to worry about, or is it well-established that those are the only tools available?"

[from_scratch]

"I am not aware of any other kinds. It's not impossible I could be missing something, but I've gotten a lot of reading done in the last five years."

[unblinkered]

Right. Hm.

The demon could fly the coop at any minute- with the summoning notes, that's not an enormous setback, since Max could just summon another daeva- but this one is, by his own account, unusually forthcoming, and his price has already been paid. What information could he get from him that he's unlikely to get from the next summoned daeva?

...most of them were never human, is the most obvious. Becoming a daeva is an attractive option, but Max would like to avoid getting stuck in Limbo with no powers at all.

"So- you don't know how the sorting works, humans becoming daeva when they die? Do you have any theories, or... do you know, say, how often people end up in Hell versus Limbo or whatever?"

[from_scratch]

"I don't have great numbers on that. It's pretty hard to get accurate census data. One thing I do notice is that daeva don't look quite like humans - they don't cluster ethnically the same way. You get blue eyes and brown skin and red hair on the same daeva just about as often as you get a trifecta of brown, where in humans you need exciting ancestry for that. So, if I assume that a representative population of daeva live in the city where I live and that this phenomenon is real and not a matter of deliberate cosmetic choices, I think I may well have never seen another ex-human in Hell in person, not enough to be sure that they weren't just normal-looking by happenstance - that there's thousands of natural daeva for every one that died. And the post office folks say if you want to talk to someone who's probably dead you just send their mail to Limbo, so if there's much like me going on it's not enough to affect the postal system."

[unblinkered]

That they're human-looking at all... probably the same thing that's responsible for the bat thing. But...

"Hm... so, a random distribution of physical traits... makes me suspect that the existence of daeva is intentional on someone's behalf. Genes aren't discretely packaged and identified such that a simple magic effect could pick from a List of Random Human Appearance Parts. It'd have to have been done on purpose... and..."

He snaps his fingers.

"Experiment. I've got a prediction, here- would you say that daeva- or demons, at least- generally look... aesthetically pleasing? Pretty? Or, at least, about as attractive as the mean in human populations? Or are they usually, for lack of a better word, ugly, or uncanny in some way?"

[from_scratch]

"Well, some of them make alterations that I don't find that appealing. The ones who as far as I can tell just plain look that way - no fangs or spines or tattoos or pointed ears or anything you'd get kicked out of a piercing shop for asking about - they look fine on average, I guess? I don't stand out except for being part of an ethnic cluster, and that happens often enough by chance and I don't think demons automatically notice it anyway. We don't get acne or need braces or anything, which probably helps."

[unblinkered]

"Hmmmm. Right. That matches my prediction- if you really built a human face by... randomly selecting traits independent of one another, from across the entire gene pool... most of the time, it'd come out looking wrong, an uncanny valley effect. Unless... I mean, unless the way you process those things changed when you became a demon... on average, human brains recognize pretty faces by how close they approximate the average features of their population. If all traits seem uncorrelated, and they still look 'fine' in general, that implies there's a more complicated selection going on behind the scenes. Whatever it is that makes daeva faces wants them to look okay, on top of looking human."

Max's grin indicates that he believes himself to have stumbled onto an important conspiracy.

[from_scratch]

"I mean, if they don't like how they look, they can fill their systems with morphine and reconstruct the hell out of their faces, we do not have the same limitations as humans on cosmetic changes and I have never seen a brand new daeva appear. I didn't want to change anything except adding the wings, although I might decide to get a tail one day, but if somebody appeared and was weirdly asymmetrical or something they could just fix it."

[unblinkered]

Max frowns. The feeling of a complicated chain of logic coming undone thanks to a single inconvenient fact... was never his favorite feeling.

"...Oh."

[from_scratch]

"Sorry about your creationism theory."

[unblinkered]

"Well, I'm not done with creationism quite yet. Not ten minutes ago I was informed of the existence of Hell, so... the possibility space has widened considerably."

[from_scratch]

"There are demons but no sign of a Lucifer, angels but nowhere to leave a message for God, and fairies but no evidence of a Titania - well, that's not technically true, fairies form political units and some of those probably have queens and I can't guarantee you that Titania wasn't named after one, but anyway."

[unblinkered]

"Sure, not as such, but... demons? Fairies? Angels? All with their own special magic powers, in their own special worlds, without... without any plausible evolutionary mechanism to account for them? It's all so... storybook. And all I've got to explain storybooks, for now, is storytellers. If there are demon natural historians with other explanations, I'd love to meet them."

[from_scratch]

"The ones I've heard of don't take summons. And they tend to come off more like philosophers than anything, and they're damn shaky on mortal science in most cases... I remind you that there is significantly a sense in which demons are just what we are called."

[unblinkered]

"You are immortal people with bat wings and magic powers that you summon with magic circles. You mentioned angels literally live on fluffy clouds. I'm going to call that close enough to raise suspicion."

[from_scratch]

"They live in the fluffy clouds. In sort of caves in the clouds. Since the fluff goes on forever in all directions. Are you familiar with how long humans have had written language? And the ability to draw circles? It's been longer than the lifespan of any religions with which you are familiar."

[unblinkered]

"Oh, no, did you think- I didn't mean... lord, not at all, I didn't mean God, that'd be- that'd be- I'm not- I meant, it seems likely that these things exist as a product of... some sort of deliberate engineering or manipulation by someone, at some point in history, not... did it sound like I was implying that the whole time?"