There is a book held open with a rock and a wooden stake; and next to it a messenger bag; and beside these a teenage girl, painting goat blood onto the floor of a crypt.
This book does not resemble anything remotely like a summoning textbook as Ellie is familiar with.
"...I begin to suspect we are talking past each other somewhat. Demons as I understand them create things, you wouldn't describe that as 'empowerment'. That'd be closer to what an angel could do. What do you need a better crossbow for, and why not just use a gun?"
"Vampires...? Okay. So. In the world I am familiar with and usually summoned into, there are three classes of supernatural entities collectively called daeva. Demons make things, angels change things, and fairies move things. I am a fairy. Daeva can be summoned by means of a summoning circle, and the summoner makes a deal with the daeva to trade them something in exchange for them using their power for a given task. I have been asked to perform tasks ranging from moving a couch across a room to transporting supplies to a lunar settlement. Demons and angels, being more generally powerful and slightly harder to pay, are usually asked to perform tasks at the higher end of that scale. If this book is a typical example of its kind, your system is entirely different."
"Where I am from humans can't natively perform magic besides summoning apart from a class of thing called 'parlor tricks', which have effects on the order of flicking a light switch from across the room. But it is often easier to simply stand up and walk over to the switch yourself."
"Demons create arbitrary matter. This includes things like books and music recordings, if you can specify them to a certain degree. Thus, one of the primary means of paying demons is with lists of original media they have not heard of before. Concordances are when two of Hell, Heaven, Fairyland, or Limbo overlap. Items can be transferred between the two overlapping planes during that period."
"I've asked that myself. My dad was born here and he's a very rooted sort of person, I'm not going to move at this point because of the vampire hunting thing, but I can't explain why my next door neighbors are still around. People are good at ignoring things, I guess."
"It's actually kind of hard unless they're chomping on somebody right then. I've applied unobtrusive cross markings all over town and watch for people who flinch when they go by them, or I stalk anybody who looks a little too happy to be wandering Sunnydale at night and see if their faces go all wrinkly and fangy and they try to bite somebody."
"It seems likely that this circle working was a fluke. Every summons I've ever taken, and every summons I've ever heard of being taken, has been to the same world, the one I was born in. Parallel realities were a thing of fiction. I expect that if this circle could consistently be used to summon fairies, the author of the book would have known, and described the capabilities of the summoned entity differently. I suppose I could teach you what a proper summoning circle looks like and you could try drawing it."
Ellie takes them, and sketches a small demonstration circle that will target an angel of her acquaintance. She points out the various standard bindings and explains their purpose and the importance of getting them right and that you always finish the circle as the last step.
Ellie clamps her jaw shut.
"Let's start with the left, then. If at any point over the next period of time you wish to become cooperative, simply indicate this by nodding your head frantically."
She stretches out the vampire's left arm towards her, hand open and fingers spread. Then she begins applying precisely directed telekinetics to each of the bones in the hand, starting with the distal phalanges and working inwards towards the wrist, shattering them into pieces.
If there were any places that were obviously signposted, Ellie expects her summoner would already have wallpapered the place in crosses.
She'll try Willy's first, on the theory that secret demons are more likely to congregate at a place less public than the local brewery.
And no one shows any hints of demonaicality, at least so far as she can discern in a brief observation. She doesn't spend much time in each bar, as she has no local currency which to spend.
After the last one closes, Ellie returns to the hillside where she dusted the vampire to await the morning.
"Enh, vampirism isn't exactly the same thing as sociopathy, it's just a shorthand? I think human sociopaths still have souls and can become vampires. My sources on this are handwritten old books by people who can't spell and actual vampires, so, grain of salt, but that's my impression."
"I don't really know. I mean, there's me, but there's only one of me and nothing actually stopping people from trying to start apocalypses in Tibet and nothing that would let me know about them in advance, and my power set is really stupid even when they're courteously local."
"No, I woke up one day and realized I could descend stairs without fearing for my life, and then later a god sort of thing appeared in my bedroom in the middle of the night and told me I had a mystic destiny, had I not been getting my prophetic dreams, I was supposed to get prophetic dreams? but no, I had not. Glitchy prophetic dreams. I also can't identify vampires with a spooky sixth sense. Everything else I'm supposed to have is in working order, though, it's not like the mystic destiny is under other circumstances well-crafted."
"I'm 'the Slayer', I am supposed to kill evil shit, there is one of me, my predecessor was presumably killed by a nasty bitey and I will have a successor when one gets me - it was the middle of the night, I was in bed, I did write things down afterwards but I didn't have a chance to get exact words."
"Go over the elements of a circle in more detail, explain what makes up a binding, explore more of the standard bindings and how they fit those criteria, and how to construct a binding yourself. Different ways to target the summons, how to summon a random daeva, how you can specify a specific one. What sort of agreements you should make once you do summon someone, common errors to avoid, more sophisticated errors to avoid."
"With this diagram." Ellie flips to the appropriate page in the notebook and passes it over. "It's a simplified version of the one you used this morning, so you can familiarize yourself with the layout of each component."
And lo, much exposition on the topic of summoning circles was laid forth.
Political figures match. Musicians and artists all sound familiar or are obscure enough that it wouldn't be weird for her never to have heard of their counterparts. Geography is alike, science seems to be following a similar trajectory, all the wars are in the right places.
"Moving snow and earth, yes. I have not personally been called to clear out any trash. Also lifting satellites or habitats into orbit or beyond. For fairies, the reasons for summoning can be very frivolous. We are easy to pay and the bindings are less complex than for an angel or demon. Whenever something needs to be moved somehow and it would be more convenient to draw a circle on the floor."
"Specialization is mostly for things like angels with medical training, daeva are largely interchangeable otherwise. Around the time period I was learning, there were lists of medical angels available on the Internet, and you could target one of those specifically if you had the need. Daeva can and do negotiate for what they'd like to receive, and can refuse to make a deal if they want to perform the task. If something was going to keep me away for years such that I'd miss concordances, I wouldn't do it, but for shorter time scales there's not much I'd be missing out on in Fairyland."
"No problem. So, since summoning does reliably work here is it a good idea for you to go home and come back with history books for me to look through...? I'd have the advantage that as long as you got anything from the right time period it's more recent for me than you."
"The basics of summoning itself are relatively simple. Most formal courses include digressions about the history of the practice and background information about the daeva planes and cultures. And the essentials are repeated over a longer span of time to ensure all students have a firm grasp on them."