“You… don’t have any dolls?” The succubus sat in the center of the summoning circle, an incredulous look on its face.

“Well, you know,” the witch stammered. “I just never got around to making any. Never saw the point.”

“And so your pact with me is to… pretend?”

“Pretend to be my doll, yeah. Just for a bit. To get the coven off my back.”

“And when it comes up again?”

“Then I’ll, idunno, summon you again. Why do you care? Isn’t that more chances to strike a bargain for you?”

“Strike a bargain with a dumbass, maybe.”

“Hey, do you want to make a deal or not?”

“I could be seducing an emperor right now. I have better things to do with my time than play arm candy for a half-rate witch.”

“I’ve got a lot of things to offer, though!”

“I’m a succubus, what do you think I want?”

“Well, I mean, yeah, I can offer that too.”

“It doesn’t look like you can.”

“I-I can! I know a lot of spells that could help, you know. You shouldn’t judge off of appearances.”

“I usually don’t, but this is the exception that proves the rule.”

The witch gave a defeated sigh, slumping back into a chair and looking utterly dejected. “I just… want to fit in at a meeting, you know? The rest of the witches, they were animating dolls when they were kids. I just… never got it.”

“That sounds like something to bring up to a tutor, or a doctor, or a therapist, or all of the above.” The succubus raised an eyebrow. “I do have other places to be, just so you know. So if you could drop this circle and let me get on my way…”

The witch blinked, a thought crossing his face as he stood up. “You feed off of human decadence and lust, yeah?”

“Slightly more complicated than that but yes, that’s the introductory explanation.”

“And you can only be one place, feeding one at a time, yeah?”

“…Yes?”

He laughed, grabbing a textbook off a nearby shelf and flipping to a worn page. “I tried so many different things to make a doll before, and none of them worked for me. None, except one time, when the coven Matron was teaching me about familiars, I accidentally cloned a cat.”

“That sounds like something horrifying to do by accident.”

“Well, yeah, the cat’s soul wasn’t strong enough for it.” He looked at the succubus, eyes lit up. “But yours is. My spell for it is impeccable, I’ve used it countless times since. That’s my offer to you.”

“Making copies of me? That’s just more competition against the real me.”

“Copies of you that are you.” He turned the book around, pointing at his notes. “You control them all, because they’re all you. One soul, spread across multiple bodies. You can feed exponentially faster.”

The succubus squinted at the notes, looking at them and then at the witch. “…You’d unleash a wave of succubi on this world, led by one mind, so that you can win brownie points at a coven meeting?”

“Well, if I did this for you, I’d expect it to be more than one meeting.”

The succubus smirked, stretching out a hand to the witch and flicking its tongue at the newfound ambition it could taste in the air. “Let’s make a deal, ‘Miss’.”