"You want to what?" Mr. Geiller stared at Jonathan like he'd grown a second head.

"Look, I know it sounds a little crazy, but I really think making a contract with a demon to become a housekeeper will be safe."

"How many times—" Mr. Geiller massaged his forehead. "Look, boy, demons are never safe! No matter how many rules you make in their contracts, they will always find ways around them. Summoning anything other than you is a huge risk to those kids and myself, and even you are a ticking time bomb with that demon lurking under the surface!"

"No, just, hear me out, alright?"

Mr. Geiller looked exasperated, but waved him on.

Jonathan took a deep breath and plowed ahead. "After I heard what happened when Ebola took control of my body from Abigail, I figured out a way to make a rudimentary connection to the demon. I can't communicate with it, but I can get a sense of what it's feeling. And the thing is, it feels a strong urge to kill stuff basically all the time, as far as I can tell."

"That's what I'm telling you, boy—"

"No, listen! The strength of that desire fluctuates a bit, but the core desire never wavers! That got me thinking about how this demon that has an overwhelming urge to kill every living thing around it held itself back and warned Abigail not to let it near the other kids, whose contracts with me didn't actually allow them to banish me if I threatened their physical well-being. I asked myself why it would do that, and I think it's because the demon knew that it wouldn't be able to help itself in the short-term and believed that protecting those kids and allowing me to take control again after creating a contract with Abigail would allow it to kill even more things in the long term."

"You're not exactly convincing me that summoning a demon is a good idea."

"The important thing is that I theorized that the demon had a single over-arching desire driving it, but it could make logical choices that would allow it to achieve that desire in greater numbers long-term. It even was willing to use the contracts it had made to provide boundaries around its behavior in order to ensure that it would have greater opportunities for killing down the road."

"Again—"

Jonathan interrupted Mr. Geiller before he could get started. "So, I had Abigail set up a ritual that would allow me to summon demons and ask them three questions, with the stipulation that if they lied they would be immediately banished. We figured they would probably tell the truth for the first two questions and lie for the third, which was mostly true."

"Mostly?"

"Well, one of them prevaricated on the first question by using an idiom that could be misunderstood literally, but that's not the point. The point is that the first question I asked all of them was what their greatest desire was in the mortal realm, and while all of them were pretty murderous their specific desires varied. Several of them really wanted to kill me, but the one I'm interested in said she wanted to 'kill throngs'. And when I heard that, I thought: well, what if she were killing germs?"

"She?"

"The demon looked like a human female, mostly. Look, that's not—"

Mr. Geiller apparently couldn't take it anymore. "Just because it looks like a nubile young female doesn't mean it's not still a demon, you idiot! That's called a succubus, boy, and they're some of the worst of the lot! Think with your brain not with your—"

"No, I summoned a succubus on accident, and Cholera—the demon I'm talking about—was definitely not a succubus."

Mr. Geiller looked disgusted. "Fine, I'll accept for argument's sake that this demon of yours wasn't a succubus. But how by all that is holy could you think that contracting with something that wants to slay throngs of people would be remotely safe?"

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Jonathan leaned forward with excitement. "See, that's the thing! She didn't say she wanted to kill throngs of people just that she wanted to kill throngs of living things! Now, I know, it's possible she was lying by omission like the other one, but when I resummoned her and told her about germs she got super excited and basically demanded I make a contract with her."

Mr. Geiller narrowed his eyes. "What are these 'germ' things you keep mentioning?"

Jonathan leaned back. "Oh, right. I had to explain that to Cholera, too. Germs are viruses and bacteria—basically, really tiny living things that can cause sickness and infection if they get inside a human." Jonathan frowned to himself. "Well, I know bacteria are living things. I actually don't know much about viruses, except that they're a lot smaller than bacteria. Anyway, the important thing is that we're surrounded by countless numbers of them. Like, millions or maybe billions, are on surfaces in this orphanage alone, on our skin, in the air, all over the place. Most of them aren't harmful—actually a lot of them live inside our stomachs and intestines and are extremely helpful—but when I told Cholera about them, she was actually able to modify her eyesight or—something—to be able to detect them somehow. I'm guessing she'd never been aware they were even there and was content to just kill lots of people or animals or something, but there's some several orders of magnitude more bacteria on Earth than humans."

Mr. Geiller frowned, but this time it was a thoughtful frown rather than a condemning one. "So you're thinking that you can give her free reign against these 'bacteria' which would simultaneously help keep the orphanage clean and fulfill her desire to kill swathes of living things?"

"Exactly!"

"Hm." Mr. Geiller crossed his arms and drummed the fingers of one hand on his opposite forearm. "That…might work. I still think you're taking an awful risk, though. I want to review this summoning circle and your proposed contract before you go doing anything irrevocable, if you don't mind."

"That would be helpful. Thanks."

----------------------------------------

A day and a half later, the summoning circle was complete, Mr. Geiller had grudgingly signed off on its use, and Jonathan was fighting a serious bout of nerves as he second-guessed himself at the last minute. He thought he had a pretty solid understanding of what drove demons, but surely after who-knew-how-many-years of interacting with them the Quintarchal Church would be aware of demons' driving needs and know how to exploit them, too. And yet Mr. Geiller was adamant that summoning demons was more dangerous than it was worth.

Then again…Mr. Geiller had admitted in the past that he had little experience with demon summoning beyond its rituals, and he'd expressed unhappiness with the Church. It was entirely possible he was biased for whatever reason and didn't have a good understanding of the actual risks involved.

Jonathan took a deep breath, enlivened his magic, and channeled it into the ritual. He needed help with running the orphanage if he was ever going to be able to deal with the broader problems in front of him, and thanks to the damned Petty Baron he didn't have a lot of choice where he found that help. He, Abigail, the other kids, and Mr. Geiller had all gone over the contract he planned to propose with Cholera. He could do this.

Space twisted in the middle of the circle, and Cholera popped into being. A smile immediately split her face when she saw Jonathan, which caused her eyes to bulge in a weird way. Boy, he might need a contract clause to avoid scaring him in the dark, because rounding the corner and running into that face could straight kill him from shock.

"What is your command?" asked Cholera.

"Cholera, I require you to make a contract with me and until the contract is complete harm no one and nothing and use no magic."

The demon wasted no time. "Agreed. What are your terms?"

"You will harm no humans through direct or indirect means. If you knowingly cause harm to befall a human, I will have the right to banish you back to the Infernal Abyss without a ritual. You will agree to help me clean and otherwise maintain the orphanage for at least six hours every day. In return, you will be allowed to kill as many micro-organisms as you wish, as long as they are not in or on a human or other living thing."

The demon cocked her head. "Why do you require that final term?"

"There's a lot of bacteria and things that we need to live inside our bodies. If you destroy them, you would be causing us harm."

"That is acceptable, but if I know a micro-organism that is on a living thing will cause harm, may I kill it?"

Jonathan fell silent to think about that. On the one hand, the stipulation made sense. But on the other, they'd decided on such a broad stipulation precisely because it wasn't something he could police. Relying on the demon's understanding of what would cause harm was problematic. "We can revisit that term in the future. For now, if you wish to kill a micro-organism on or in a living being, you must confer with me before doing so."

Cholera was silent for a moment before nodding once. "Acceptable."

"My final term is that you must treat the people I am contracted to with respect. You do not need to do everything they tell you, but you must try to keep them happy or seek me out to mediate. If you do not and persist in behaviors that make them scared or uncomfortable after I discuss the problem with you, I will have the right to banish you to the Infernal Abyss without a ritual."

"You are contracted to other demons?"

"No, I'm the demon as far as our contracts are concerned."

"…What?"