One bit of information the imp left out: the phase walker not only shifted the shape of itself, but also applied its art as a glamour on the rider. The summoner didnt realize this, as his hands appeared paw like, while holding onto the reigns of this creature. He wasn't proud of his reaction... there was cursing involved, then falling, and nearly dying.
When he saw his hands return to normal, he felt an odd sense of dejected sadness, over the link, from the demon. Upon realizing the effect reversed itself, he got up, and rushed over to the phase walker's head, giving it reassuring strokes behind what he thought it meant to be an ear at the time.
Today's form: demented bird things. Despite needing to get used to the sudden beak in his field of vision, Egil was at least thankful that their current form was likely to terrify bandits, and leave him unrecognizable.
The smoke permeated the trees. They were down wind of the fires. It created a sort of unpleasant fog within the forrest, with the occasional ash falling down. How bad was the fire at this point? He could only speculate. One thing was clear though: its been burning for almost 48 hours now. Was it spreading?
Could the summoners guild still blame him? He thought about the makeup of the clockworks. They had entropic power cores, but those were surprisingly pretty safe, since they mostly acted like 'semi-permanent taps' into the entropic layer. Break them, and the taps disappear.
Come to think of it, those cores could revolutionize power. He wondered why the engineers guild hadn't adopted them. Probably because they're demonic in origin. Maybe because the engineers don't know they exist. Maybe because the engineers are too focused on firearms development, which was dragging.
Following the demon war, firearms started becoming more common. The primary producer of gun powder is a country that calls itself "The Middle Kingdom" in the far east. The european businesses have struggled to produce the powder locally, with the dangers outside the cities.
Anyways...
The next goal of this adventure, sadly, was to search for bones. These were needed to acquire a summoner demon, who could, in-turn, summon other demons. These would be instrumental to the cause, because honestly, if Egil is to have his own force, he needs a more reliable way to build it. This requirement was too costly, and time consuming to do on his own.
These demons, like most of their kind, came with their own requirement for change, thats not satisfied by the act of summoning other demons. Since 'summoning' *is* their usual service, they do not consider the act to be a form of entropy. In his previous encounters which such demons, he tried various ways to 'coax' their continued cooperation, but they proved to be quite strict.
In this case, they only extend their services, willingly, to a client, for the length of one cycle of the moon. At the end of that cycle, they go rabid. First, this shift expresses itself as theft, if they dont just violently turn on the summoner. They can be placated with old fashioned valuables, but their service was never quite... 'permanent.'
Other summoners got their permanent cooperation through imprint-lobotomy. Egil had done that himself to a few demons. They were a far cry from the friendliness of the imp and phase walker.
The problem with the lobotomy approach, is it left Egil disgusted with himself, and demon biology tends to be fairly mutation heavy, which meant performing the exact same extreme imprint on two different demons could yield two different results. Some just died. Others noticeably suffered from diminished performance. The best outcomes achieved the desired effect without immediate drawbacks, but the demon would wither with time.
In lieu of this, cooperation was best achieved with what amounted to 'business negotiations.' Supply the summoner demon what they want, but get the price down.
