"I am actually," Paxton replied, an almost cheery tone to his voice as he finished outlining the circle with salt. With the borders done Paxton took a piece of chalk in hand and stepped inside the circle, crouching down and scraping lines across the floor in a slow and precise manor. Each little change in course of the thick white lines he lay out was second guessed by a moment of pause before being continued in a few more hesitant but fluid motions.

"I'm ah," Paxton started again, pausing to guide the chalk a little farther before sharply turning it in a new direction, "I'm summoning someone whom I owe a favor of sorts. Every few years we make a point of seeing each other- it in part has to do with a contract I got roped into but I like to consider him a friend." Paxton finished his short story with an incoherent swear, followed by him spitting on the ground and working to wipe away an error he'd made in his etchings. He was back to work soon enough though, and had begun working on a few complex looking symbols to dot the areas between the larger lines he'd drawn. The main design of the circle was similar to a pentagram, but was sloping to one side in a way that made the curve of it's points look like a crescent moon. The space that the pentagram didn't occupy held a large spiral, the center of it twisting into a figure-8 with two dots put in it's middles.

From her corner of the room, Madi let out an irritated hiss and dropped the bloody, half eaten palm she'd been gnawing on. The hiss was directed at Paxton, more directly the symbols underneath him, and in protest the imp's glamour peeled away to reveal the creature beneath. Mostly a blob of shadow, Madi was crouched low on her perch with dull, silver eyes glaring towards the chalk on the ground. As if gravity had suddenly shifted, her body flew sideways and splattered against the wall, flattening out and melting down to the ground until she was on the floor.

"Madi." Paxton huffed sternly, watching as the pool of shadow tried to cross the room towards him. This was met with another loud hiss, and the shadow on the ground sprung upwards in a burst of ashes. The parrot that emerged from the dust cloud fluttered off to the bedroom, the door slamming behind her despite the bird not having physically touched it. 

Paxton barred his teeth towards the shut door, letting out a small grunt before returning to the symbols he was working on. He'd finished the first which rested inside the center of the pentagram, it looking like some sort of complex Chinese character contained inside a lopsided oval. All along it's edges there were smears and smudges; the ghosts of the various errors made while trying to perfect the symbol he needed. The beginnings of such marks already existed in the space where he was working on the second symbol, it being composed so far of mostly zig-zagging lines.