Alicornutopia

But could a daeva feel a summons, wait a while, and then tale it? I think the answer is yes (assuming nobody else grabs it); I think we’ve even seen that happen, but what you said about it being instantaneous makes me less certain. Presumably if the answer is yes, a demon couldn’t feel a summons, put on a T-shirt with words, and then take it.

A quick Fermi estimate says there are, within a few orders of magnitude, 5 trillion daeva total spread out among Heaven, Hell, and Fairyland (1% are dead summoners, assuming negligible summoners were before Revelation, about half the world summoned at least once after, average world population of 10 billion, and about 10 generations between then and now). About how many daeva regularly respond to general summons?

Yes, you can wait on a summons, assuming nobody else grabs it or it's for only you in the first place. We have seen this happen in sandboxes where Miles summons a daeva by filling in chalk drawings in a park and then wandering off. You can't tell whether it's been taken already (unless it's for only you) except by trying to answer it. You cannot feel a gag-ordered summons, don a text-bearing shirt, and then take the summons successfully.

Fewer than half of people summon daeva, but you're using very Fermi-ish numbers so maybe that doesn't matter. It depends on what you mean by "regularly".

Yes, I figured that and the number of generations were overestimates, but the population was an underestimate.

I guess I’m more asking, if I keep summoning random demons, how long until I get Cam (who tries to answer every summons he can)? Although I was more wondering about fairies than demons (and I’m not asking from a metacausal perspective, because then obviously I’d probably get Cam as my first random summon), but I expect that’s a minor issue.

EDIT: I hit subnit before I intended to. I was also curious what different definitions of regularly you were ccnsidering.

If Cam is not already summoned, this depends significantly on how many other people currently have demons summoned, how many tries it takes to get you Cam. There's a fair amount of variance in that number and it's within the realm of possibility for most of the routine summons-taking demons to be all tied up elsewhere if somebody has a big job and doesn't want to try to come up with something of sufficient interest to get one demon to do it all. Many more angels and many many more fairies take summons, so it would take longer to get a specific one at random even though they are also more commonly employed by summoners.

Sometimes a daeva takes summons until they have something specific they wanted. Sometimes they take summons when they aren't already in the middle of something and spend a lot of time in the middle of something. Sometimes they try to take summons all the time but have bad reaction time and miss them. Sometimes they take summons for a while and then have a bad experience or get comfier at home and then stop. Sometimes they want to take a long trip to Earth and keep taking summons until they get a few-weeks job and then they're done until the next time they care to take a working vacation. Sometimes they're looking for routine work, and they take summons and try to find a good working relationship with a summoner, and then stop taking random summons and only go back to that one summoner. Sometimes they want to contact living relatives and only take summons until they get ahold of comm access and then stop, except for being summoned by those relatives. What counts as "regularly"?

In my case it meant “tries to answer all available summonses”.

Also, about how many summoners were there at any given time pre-Revelation? Obviously you can’t be very precise, but I don’t know if “very few” would mean around one in a million people know about it, or around 10% of people know about it. The upper end seems a bit unlikely (the secret would get out much sooner in that case), but beyond that I’m not sure.

There were like a literal handful of people who knew about summoning, certainly fewer than a hundred at most times. The books Cam found were basically somebody's personal notes/journal.

There's trying to answer all available summons and then there's really trying - not sleeping in the way that daeva may, turning up even if you just got into the shower, etc. Not even Cam does the latter.

I find it interesting that Cam can create matter with thermal energy (I assume that's what's meant by "on fire") but not kinetic energy. I think I get what you've said about torque - a simple example would be instantiating a spring that has a rest length of 1cm but is stretched to 2cm; it will tend towards its default state immediately upon beginning to exist if it can - but at a small enough scale, thermal energy *is* kinetic energy. You could, for example, instantiate a steel rod which is mostly at room temperature except for a millimeter-thick layer on one end that is at the temperature where steel vaporizes, could you not? The expanding vapor would cause the object to immediately be in motion, even if the instantaneous velocity at t0 is 0 m/s. Another related example (though this produces a less-homogenous object) would be a loaded gun cartridge where the powder is "on fire"; the bullet would immediately be expelled by the expanding gas (though unless you have a backstop for the cartridge, a lot of the momentum will transfer to it instead of the bullet). No need to pull a trigger if you need a bullet shooting at that person/thing Right Now.

Cam can also create a gun with the trigger already depressed and it will fire immediately. But yeah, the distinction is mostly not grounded in physics.

"You have some vocabulary confusion, summoner," says Cam, "I'm a demon. That is clearly a snake."

How does this line mesh with daeva getting languages? Does it mean that the push to change the word to “maker” (to the point where daeva would stop identifying themselves to summoners as demons) would be doomed if the two sandboxes ran on the same rules?

Cam already has English, and vocabulary doesn't copy exactly even when a language is brand new. A summoner who spoke Old English, which their daeva didn't have before, and firmly knew all the daeva species by their revised names, would probably not get daeva identifying themselves as demons.