Self-Summon [Demon Summoning/Evolution litRPG] Chapter 80: [2.06] Bureaucracy is Inescapable (Part 4)

Read chapter 80 of Self-Summon [Demon Summoning/Evolution litRPG] by Drim on NovelPedia.

With his number called, Gawk hopped off the chair and began to inch forward to the front, headed in the direction of the flickering candle guiding him. But his progress was slow, so very slow, to the point that the Demon waiting for him at the booth, who was actually quite humanoid, began clacking their long nails against the counter impatiently. Angelica wanted to pick him up and carry him the rest of the distance, but he hadn’t asked for help, so she didn’t want to intrude and overreach. “Now assisting #530.” She felt a little bad that she’d be jumping ahead of him, but hopefully the little guy wouldn’t take too much offense. Though Angelica did slightly hesitate a bit as she approached her own designated booth. Her assigned helper Demon was the most… unique… of the bunch. The creature sort of looked like a relatively small obelisk, maybe six or seven feet tall. Its pillar shape was covered in what she could only describe as a fleshy, drippy muck. There were no eyes to look at, nor most other facial features. Well, except for lips. Its whole body was covered in pairs of thin, flappy lips. “What do you need?” One of the lip sets warbled as Gelic approached, with each word exaggerated by a wet, vibrating trill. “Erm…” She wanted to use Scrying Eye so that she could address the one kind enough to assist her properly, but fortunately, she didn’t have to do so, since the tower-like Demon actually had a nametag embedded in their… skin? “Smook, I am an Imp looking to get registered so that I can Evolve.” “Ichor, please.” Smook spat, wasting no time. Though that threw Angelica off a bit, both by the request and the attached politeness. Demons saying please felt wrong, but maybe customer service workers had to put on the same friendly courtesy masks in any reality. “How do I go about giving you that?” “I will take it.” With that warning, hardly a warning at all, one of the unspeaking lips shot out, stretching toward the human, apparently attached to a tendril-like appendage that had been hiding. The lips smacked against Angelica’s cheek, and an instant later, she felt a toothy prod. Before she could even try to complain or think about smacking it away, the invasive mouth was gone, reeled back into the attendant’s body. “Very good. What do you want your Alias to be?” Oh damn, jumping right to the moment of truth. Hopefully hers was available, or she’d probably struggle to come up with another on the spot. Despite authoring a webcomic that had a whole bunch of characters, she’d always had trouble coming up with names. “Gelic.” “This spelling?” A lipped tendril once more shot out at her, but stopped a few inches short, then a translucent screen, similar to the Demon Growth System, hovered in front of the appendage. “Yeah, that’s right.” Angelica honestly wondered how it would look in the Demon language, and considered asking if she could briefly turn off Tongues, but she didn’t want to hold up the process. “Very good, now let us take a look at your profile.” Several more of Smook’s lips jutted out and began tapping away at screens that appeared briefly only when touched. Whatever information they were accessing, they were doing so with haste. “I see you are currently Bound, and have been since… since the second after you were born?!” Gelic didn’t know if she should be panicking by the attendant’s realization, but strangely, it almost sounded like genuine concern. “What sort of sick Summoner…? Tell me, Gelic. Is your current master mistreating you? While not something we normally do, I can report this to the higher ups, and we can see if assistance can be provided. This is definitely an abnormal situation, so perhaps the rules can be bent a bit.” Wow, she was genuinely not expecting that level of care. “Umm, I’m alright. I am quite content with my master.” Really, she just didn’t want to draw any excess attention to the strangeness of her Self-Summon situation. Still, it was nice to know that there could be an avenue for assistance in tr