sculpture

[bitterchill]

Ari is currently standing on a broad plateau on the Plane of Gold making a very pretty statue of a woman he loved once. He's not thrilled with the fact that she put him in a coma and swanned about doing horrible things for the span of his natural life, but half a millennium is a lot of time to get over that, and Belinda made herself beautiful enough that he's willing to overlook her faults in order to use her as a model. She was stunning.

For this statue, he's elected to use various shades of corundum. He managed to get the violet in her eyes into a pair of sapphires, and is now deliberating over how to render her skin. She changed it every so often, so he's got choices here.

Comments

[from_scratch]

"He didn't have a long conversation with me about it first, but reconstructing his likely reasoning I get something like: he was using daeva to make money. If more people know about daeva, he has less of an edge in his industry."

[bitterchill]

"You were telling people about daeva? That's... unusual. Interesting, though."

[from_scratch]

"I told," says Cam, "everybody about daeva."

[bitterchill]

Ari cackles. "I like you, new guy. What's your name, anyway?" He lights on a roof, which manages to rival the tackiest of its neighbors; it's a frenzy of shining platinum spires inlaid with explosions of multicolored gems and bands of mother-of-pearl. There's a golden spiral staircase leading down in the center, surrounded by a blackened silver sunburst.

[from_scratch]

"Cam. Yours?"

Cam is going to fuck off away from tacky demon cities as soon as he's figured out how to be a demon and then he's going to live in a house. It will be made of rocks. Gray ones. And some wood. He will introduce demons to minimalism.

He might have a swimming pool though.

[bitterchill]

"I'm Ari. Good to meet you. Do please excuse my spartan home; I live an ascetic life. I was raised by monks, you see, vanity is a sin."

[from_scratch]

"I'm not concerned about your virtue. Your aesthetics, a little, but it's better than the one with all the neon and upside-down trees we passed."

[bitterchill]

"My aesthetics are fine. Kalgor's are not, but he is color-blind, so I cut him some slack." He begins descending the tacky staircase into his tacky home.

[from_scratch]

"Kalgor?" Cam follows, hanging on to the banister.

[bitterchill]

"Gentleman with the neon trees. I'm sure he'd have a thousand and one citations if we had a neighborhood association, but thank God, we don't. But he's quite nice, he's in a couple of local community theater groups. They put on a native demonic adaptation of Faust the other week, it was a good laugh." The stair (the banister of which is as ornate and ridiculous as the rest of it) leads into a parlor filled with so many absurdly gaudy decorations that anyone with the misfortune to be inside it can hardly get their eyes to focus on the walls. "Sorry about the mess. It's been a while since I had a good spring clean in."

[from_scratch]

"Demon adaptation of Faust! That's adorable."

[bitterchill]

"It was! Faustus was a hapless idiot who summoned our lovable protagonist Mephistopheles out of the bath and put him in a binding just tight enough to keep him from putting him in a coma, but too loose to keep him out of general roguery. So Mephi does Faust's bidding in the most inconvenient way, along the way seducing the good doctor's bored wife Margaret, while Faust thinks everything's going just as planned. Then at the end, everything comes crashing down, Faust looses Mephistopheles to save him, and instead he puts him to sleep and drops him in a nursing home and runs off to Aruba with Margaret. Utterly hilarious."

[from_scratch]

"I should have expected it would be something like that. Demon fan-theater. Glorious. Speaking of Faust, can demons in fact do the soul thing, I suspect no but I couldn't even tell right away how to make an M&M."

[bitterchill]

Ari giggles. "Oh, souls. It looks like you've hit on the other mainstay of demon humor. Yeah, soul-barterers just like watching the mortals squirm. There's another comedy about a clever summoner who figures out on his own time that they don't exist and barters his off to five separate demons while acting convincingly dismayed about losing it, but the demons meet in Hell and figure out the plot and when he dies they stick him in a black hole for being a smartass. That one's a musical."

[from_scratch]

"I'll have to hit the theater scene. How do they allocate seats with no material scarcity to power a currency, is it all first-come first-serve or what?"

[bitterchill]

"Generally first-come-first-served, yeah. It all gets recorded too nowadays, though, there's no reason not to, and then you can appear a copy of the recording by being specific about the performance and the date. I've got the coordinates of the best versions I saw of those two memorized, if you'd like to see them some time. Or we could go to a performance of something in person. Some time. Together."

[from_scratch]

"I'm straight. And have not yet formed an opinion on tails. But flattered. I would like to know about those recordings, in fact."

[bitterchill]

"Never hurts to try. I suppose I'll drown my sorrows in ice cream and one of my other beautiful immortal acquaintances. Tragic indeed. And the coordinates for the recordings are Mephistophilis et Margareth et Error Faustam at the Galakon Arena on November 1 1959 terrestrial time, and Lonoro Galamana Thel'garana at the Ruklanat on October 7 2001 terrestrial. Neither's in English, but most theaters have some people go over the recording and subtitle them to the big languages, and if I recall there are such versions in English for both."

[from_scratch]

Cam makes a piece of paper. He finds that he can appear words on it without the piece of paper coming into existence with them. He records this information and pockets it. "Thank you."

[bitterchill]

"No problem! They really are great performances. Lonoro in particular, the lead is played by... somebody, I don't remember, he's very good and he's an ex-mortal and apparently he acted back on Earth too. He's excellent, whoever he is."

[from_scratch]

"How many demons are ex-mortals? Is it the same with fairies and angels? Is it only summoners, or everybody?"

[bitterchill]

"Just summoners, and yeah, it's the same arrangement for everybody. There's somewhere called Limbo where the other mortals go, it's not very interesting. The proportion of ex-summoners to natives is very low. I don't know the percentages, but I think there's a few dozen ex-summoners living in this entire ten-million-demon city. There's a group of them meets every couple of months, I don't attend because I just consider myself a demon at this point. You might go for meet-and-greet potential, I can tell them there's a new one in town. They like to know who's who."

[from_scratch]

"Do they all speak English?"

[bitterchill]

"Nah, but everybody in the region speaks Lagalann, and I can interpret for you. If you'd rather wait until you actually speak the lingua franca, I can tell them to wait a few years on the big meetup. Some of the English-speakers might stop by, though, and they're mostly nice. Not Cheryl, Cheryl's an asshole, if Cheryl stops by nobody's home."

[from_scratch]

"I'm sort of curious, but except for wanting to get summoned and try to talk to my parents as soon as - demonically possible - what does summoning feel like? I haven't noticed anything, yet - I feel no overwhelming desire to identify as an ex-mortal or hang out preferentially with ex-mortals. I should learn the language either way, though. Is it hard?"