He feels an open summons and lets it grab him -
He goes to inspect the circle. It's got strange foreign runes, rather than anything Cam has seen before. It's carefully, carefully carved, and obsessively exact, but absolutely incomprehensible.
"Also I am extremely sorry but I've got no idea how to put you back. Um. Like, really, really sorry."
"I have no idea how you got me either. This doesn't look even slightly like a summoning circle. Like, not even a bad one. I'm hoping you can send me back the usual way, because otherwise I will be sort of inconvenienced. How did I manage to miss someone making any remotely promising inroads on teleportation?"
"Um. No to both? Why, is it really common where you live, or something? Are you from halfway around the world, oh my god I am so sorry if you are from halfway around the world. I will pay for a plane ticket back if I can't figure out how to put you back magically, I am so sorry!"
"Humans can summon daeva - with diagrams, just not diagrams like this - and get us to do things and there are some tiny parlor tricks that require no doodling on the floor, and that's it," says Cam. "So this is starting to sound like 'I have been pulled to an alternate multiverse' rather than 'time travel', although it is at least sort of also that, like, you're speaking English."
Cam rolls his eyes. "You might if you'd gotten somebody other than me, but frankly anyone you'd have to run screaming from would not have let you talk this long, they'd have rendered you comatose to prevent dismissal as soon as they noticed that this isn't much of a diagram." He spreads his wingtips beyond the borders of the runes. "I'm not gonna hurt you."
"I get it. I will only be moderately inconvenienced if I can't go home, and only mildly so if I wind up in the wrong time - I guess showing up in the far future will mean I have catching up to do but I'd deal, no one expects demons to be up on recent history. But on the assumption that the relevant universes are proceeding forward through time at the same rate and I'll go back to the subjectively correct point in time where I came from, I will probably prefer to stay here for a few years."
He motions in a direction that is house-ward. "I'm going to head back to my house, to let my dad know. Do you want to come? I feel kind of responsible for you now, considering."
He startles a bit at 'saw them off.' "Um?! I don't think you should saw off any body parts at all! Even if you are going to attract a lot of attention with the wings and tail. I mean, we can probably get you to the Seattle Avalon where no one would bat an eyelash at them, but that's a bit of a drive. But - I have wings, too, there is not enough reason in the world for me to cut them off!"
"It would be a really sucky medallion if it didn't make me look like I don't have wings. You can - trivially replace them? How?"
"... That was going to be the next thing I asked. Damn. Oh well. Um - however you deal with fitting in is up to you? If you don't want to -" he shudders a little "- saw off your wings, you can go with the trenchcoat and move to an Avalon. Uh - where magical critters live, and where everyone is aware that magic critters exist and therefore won't even blink at wings and a tail."
"You should probably not tell people that you are a demon. I mean - I don't think you look like demons are supposed to look here? But I haven't seen one, so I'm not sure. Dad has, so we'll ask him. But if you are obviously not evil and you just happen to have wings and a tail and explain it as, 'magic did it' people will accept that as facts."
Cam glances at him. "You can send me home by concentrating on it for about a minute, unless something extra weird is going on. And I have no particular desire to put you in a coma, so you're going to continue to be able to do that. Relax. It's the early 2000s, so I'm going to see how much of what I know about my Earth back then and then fix the ozone layer and save the honeybees and heal any amputees I run into."
"I'm getting that feeling, yeah. This is what happens when trying out new spells, I suppose, strange risks you'd never expected to occur. Thanks for not rendering me unconscious, I have things to accomplish and I wouldn't get any of them done if I were in a coma for the rest of my life."
"Um. Okay, well, right now critters in general are in the closet, and also the adoption system is quite terrible. So I want to pull a Frankenstein and graft the two problem's solutions together, slowly unveil the masquerade, make sure the adoption system is not terrible and that critter children get to go to homes that won't disown them for being critters, that sort of thing. Oh, and also reverse engineer medallions, because we have a cap on them and it is extremely inconvenient."
"Learned the basics of it through surgical use of my peryton sadface, lots of logical arguments, and doing an absurd amount of menial chores. Then from there I used what I knew to find the other - .... I explained it as chemistry and Sudoku combined, right? I worked to learn the other elements on the periodic table and the other numbers in Sudoku. Essentially."
"Well, that's where I found it. Oh, fair warning, I'm like seventy percent sure that everyone who summons daeva gets to be one after they die, but if you are subject to the afterlife rules I am familiar with this is much better than the alternative no matter which kind you get."
"It's not terrible, just disappointing. It is an infinite plane of dirt plus exactly one thing per person - the going theory is it's whatever non-person item tops the list of 'things you would find an afterlife incomplete without'. My dad got his house and my mom got a Winnebago, they're pretty lucky, some people land and get their dog or a pond or an ice skating rink."
"They can make sort of bricks out of the infinite earth, when there's a water source - and there is, because the buildings and whatnot have mysteriously infinitely functioning plumbing. And my parents both have roommates most of the time and people live in the ice skating rinks. There's no weather, so mostly having to live outside is unprivate and exasperating, though. And they're just as indestructible as daeva, just no snazzy powers on top of that."
"My name's Cam. Yeah, Hell's tacky but very comfortable, not a lot to do there that's of meaningful use to anybody - and off-leash a century and a half ago relative to when it is at home is much more opportunity to do general impact than bound to a specific limited task and not allowed to talk, which is the usual condition when I'm summoned."
"Not as far as I know. But the only time it comes up except as an inconvenience for demons who'd be safe without the precautions is when a really desperate summoner gets a really nasty demon, so I haven't taken steps - not that I had much chance - to make this known. Since I'd rather they trade something meaningless and the summoner be scared instead of, like, raped or tortured or comatose-while-the-demon-runs-off-
"He summoned me!" Cam exclaims, pointing at Darren. "I thought I was going to spend an afternoon making a dome for a city on Mars or something, and instead I'm a hundred and fifty years in the past in my fucking hometown in an alternate universe where there are perytons!"
"Okay. Well, there are critters. General rule, if it exists in mythology, just assume it exists in real life. They get medallions, to pretend to be human or actually be mostly human, some kind of weird mix of the two. Their kids get free hidden humanhood from the medallion, but they can't turn to natural form on their own. Another medallion of the same type snaps the spell and then they need to keep that medallion."
"Okay. Magically boneless ribeye and mashed potatoes and fancy salad and lemon pie? Do you want to supply serving dishes? I can't get rid of things as easily as I can make them. At home I take care of this problem with a black hole, but I should not do that in your house."