Lore: Demon World (Part 2) (Patreon)

There's something that is very liberating about the realization that the word “No” is a positive thing. When you become an adult, being able to say no to someone is the closest we will get to having super powers without also having to suffer chemical burns and melted skin from rolling around in radioactive goo.

Saying “no,” is also quite useful for making world building easier, and in some cases, way better.

In the last post, I talked about how demons are based around the idea of a species and society without love. I think I did a pretty good job of making that, but there's still one big, glaring issue.

How they gonna do the baby making if they can't stand they babydaddy/ babymomma/ babybaby.

That's the thing, they don't.

I ain't gotta make the made up people get pregnant. They don't exist.

Demons are not born, they are manifested. They come into existence when negative human emotions (anger, fear, sadness, and any related feeling) sink into their world and amasses into a demon.

By the way, that's where the demon world is. Below ours. They know this because bad vibes sink like cold air. Obviously.

Because genetics don't factor into birth, demons have no set form or structure, and can mature into any form. They can have any number of limbs at birth and grow or lose any number of parts when they get older. They can grow out in any direction, or even metamorphosize into a completely different form later in life.

There is very little consistency when it comes to the physiology and biology of demons, but there are a few “rules,”

For one, all demons have a heart. A literal one, they're all still dicks. A demon's heart is the most important organ, the only one that is required to live. Every other organ could shut down, fail, or get damaged, and the demon would still be alive. They wouldn't even suffer for too long after losing those organs, since all demons are able to repair their own bodies. The heart is the only organ that leads to death if it stops working, making hearth failure the overwhelmingly major cause of death for them. The other two causes are absolute annihilation of the body, since there's nothing to grow back from, and being killed by having their heart severed from their body, and then damaged. Both are so tedious and complicated, most would-be murderers don't bother, and settle for a savage beating with a lead pipe.

Second, all demons have some sort of human feature. The uncertainty of their shapes are reigned in by this stipulation. This is why most demons are bipedal or resemble humans with extra features, or oblongish proportions. Others have human body parts as part of, or in addition to the rest of their body. An amorphous blob demon might have a semi-solid humanoid face floating in it. A giant mantis-like demon could have human skin in addition to, or instead of a carapace.

Third, all demons have horns. Although, “horn” is more of a catch all term for the functionless protrusions on a demon's body. They are not always mounted on their heads, and they could have one or thousands. They could be hard, squishy, smooth, rigid, pointy, nubby, gaseous, made of incorporeal light, there really are no limits as to what a “horn” could be, besides a protrusion of some sort. Nobody knows why they're there, or what they're for. A common theory believes they used to be used for intimidation back from when the scariest thing anyone could think of was a larger version of themselves.

Because no demon is going to willingly going to want to afflict themselves with a child, or a spouse to help them raise that child, families are hardly ever formed on citizens' own accords. Families are formed by the city government in what is called “The Domestic Draft.”

When an adult demon reaches a certain level of financial stability, their names are entered into a pool of eligible suckers their government can dump a baby, or two... or eight onto. Two to four demon adults are called into city hall to meet their future spouses and negotiate the terms of their engagement; how property is to be divided, who keeps working, who stops working to take care of the baby, who starts working to support their new family members, who has to move into who's home, what days they're allowed to get away from one another, what habits and possessions they have to give up. The sort of things that will make for a functioning, agonizing home for everyone.

Once the terms are settled, a court date is appointed for the suturing of the parents and children to each other for eternity. It's a grace period to give the parents-to-be time to accept their lives are getting shit on, or scrounge up enough money to pay the exemption fee. After the negotiations are settled (you have to sit through that, even if you know you can pay the fee, fuck you) a drafted adult can pay an outrageous fee to the state to opt out of the draft, leaving the other parent(s) to raise the kid(s) without them.

All parents who haven't paid their way out are then forcefully wed in court, and the judge decides the number of children they'll have to care for. Children are randomly appointed, you don't get to choose whether you want the baby made of sentient needles, or the one that already has a full set of adult teeth, you get what you get and you raise it. The domestication is made official by branding each member with a special sigil that keeps them from being able to harm each other, so nobody can murder their way out of a family. There are few demon murderers, but you'd be surprised how many adolescents are committed enough to go through with a full evisceration to get out of another family vacation.

Devorce is not an option, but you can file for an exchange of relative if an unforeseen complication caused by your spouses, child, or parents keeps you from being able to function in society, or threatens your health or wellbeing. If the court can't bullshit a way to keep you alive and stuck with your appointed schmoe, you can get a mulligan or transfer to another family. Don't expect it to be any less awful though.

The domestic draft was made to both get someone to raise these damn kids, and to regulate and moderate misery and hatred in a community. Having a family of jerkasses who hate each other is miserable for sure, but its a misery that needs strategic and careful planning to work correctly. Families must raise children to have a booty-ass childhood, but those kids also have to become a somewhat functioning cog in society later in life, so parents can't be allowed to be abusive monsters that ruin their kids lives. Likewise, kids can't be allowed to run wild and grind their parents down too fast, since we still need someone to pump gas and work the graveyard shift at the liquor store. Making a system that gets that right while still crushing everyone's hopes is hard. So there's two elected officials put in charge of that.

The Grand Matriarch and Patriarch, are the two demons in charge of child rearing marital affairs. The names of the titles are merely ceremonial, there can be two matriarchs, two patriarchs, or nonbinary officials referred to as “Grand Brooders.” Whoever they are, there are two of them, and they oversee the ways each territory handles domestic law. They make sure laws fall in between the realm of “too lenient” and “someone's 'bout to bash their husband in the face with their teenage daughter if this keeps going.”

Mandatory family vacations need to be appealing enough that dads will fight tooth and nail to take their kids on despite not having any real interest in the destination in the first place. Moms have to have their passive aggressive judgments of their kids regulated to develop a safe amount of self-loathing. Children have to have access to a reasonable amount of laws they can safely break to engage in shenanigans and misdemeanors, without erring into small scale domestic terrorism. Someone has to make sure laws will influence families to be this correct level of ass to each other, and it is up to the Grand Parents to do so.

The other job of the Grand Parents is to be parents, but like, to everyone. They are every demon's parents. They are the Grand Parents. Demons don't regard their guardians as parents like humans do, a standard parent is seen as a shitheel stranger they got stuck with because someone had to raise them. The Grand Parents take the role of everyone's parental figure and role model, as a way of tricking them into thinking they can become something if they keep playing the game of life. To aid in the illusion, the job of Grand Parent is exceptionally rewarding and lush, to the point that they have a whole week of Father's/ Mother's/ Brooder's days. That's where they travel from capital to capital, and herd everyone in the city into a stadium so they can yell at them and force them to give them gifts. It's also mandatory. You can be fined, arrested, and put on blast if you don't come to the assembly and have a gift.

If this glimpse of demonic bureaucracy and biology seems tedious and complicated, the demonic government did a good job. If this made any sense, I did a good job. Its a challenging, but fun process making systems that by all means should not work, kinda work if you don't drill too far. Its something I've realized is the way you have to make fictional systems, since you're only theorizing and there's no way to test if they'd actually work. Plus you have fantastical elements to add to its implementation and fill in any logical gaps. If you stress about every layer of it, you'll never come up with a satisfactory result.

The best you can do is make one that serves its purpose in the story, and doesn't interrupt narrative lines or character motivations. It only has to work for the story, not for an actual people. If some dork on YouTube makes a video essay on your thing, you want them to be nitpicking, not pointing out how it fails to serve the story or characters.