Lore: Demon World (Part 3) (Patreon)

One of the things I wanted for demons was the ability to do cool magic stuff, and/or have special abilities that made each of them unique on more than a physical and personal level. Because I'm a big, nerd who likes a dumb fighty shonen anime with a cast of obscurely powered characters, this was a must, but there's two problems with that; one, this isn't a fighty shonen anime, it's a slice-of-life observational comedy about fun things people like to do, and two, I remembered I'm trying to build a somewhat functioning society and having every member of that society have godlike powers to reshape reality would jam a crowbar up in its gears.

That's an even bigger problem when everyone in that society hates each other. Having tremendous shonen-level powers would make domestic terrorism and assault super common. So I once again, just said “no” to the idea, not the entire idea, just everything that would cause problems about it. Demons would all have unique abilities, they just wouldn't be god-like, reshape reality, or even be all that good even. Demon magic is more like a convenient tool or an extra arm you can use in the right situations if you're born lucky enough.

I considered the way the Avatar series handles its superhumans, specifically in the way they relate to average-humans in the second series. While benders are capable of wielding the elements to do their bidding, they're still evenly matched by gun ownership. There are only a few benders that can't be handled by a couple of jobbers with stun guns, and those are extremely gifted, or well trained main characters. One could say, for a bender of average skill, wielding the elements is no different than having a gun. And being an MC bender is no different than being a main character with a fancy gun. That's the direction I wanted to go with for magic.

All demons have a personal style of magic, as well as a set of influential magic. (curses, hexes, and possession) Some can also be born with a physical ability like superhuman strength, or the ability to hover, scale walls, or teleport short distances. The demon's skill and aptitude with each of these varies, but usually, if one is pretty strong, the others are much weaker, as if life built them on a point-buy system.

In that same vein of nerd-talk, the strength of the best demon magic is on the level of a mid-tier, second-level D&D spell, and at worse, they're dookie-teir cantrips. There are also rare cases where one might have high-teir magic they have no control over, but that usually comes at a detriment. The average demon would kill to have the ability to make small animals yell swears at someone, or apply a Gaussian blur to their bodies, but most of the time, their personal magics end up being the ability to create floating orbs or plant small rocks in your pocket.

Selena's personal magic is Pyromancy. She can create fire, not like a lot, but enough to incinerate vegetables or cover herself in flames. She's never going to be able to explode into a Hades temper-tantrum, but she can cover herself in fire while she writhes around on the floor, kicking and screaming like a child. It was actually kind of hard to remember that looking back at earlier drafts of the story, because there where multiple times when she was exploding in anger and shooting huge infernos from her hands. I have to constantly remind myself that trhere will never be a tournament arc in this book, and she can't have enough power to burn a city to the ground. If she did, lord knows she'da already done it.

The influential magics are universally the same, they're the ways a demon can put their will and fragments of their psyche into something to manipulate it. Curses are where a demon takes control of an object or area with a kind of psychokinesis. A cursed object can't do anything outside of its normal functions, or the demon's personal magic. You've seen Selena curse Nick's television and game consoles when they fought the first boss of the game, and again when she went looking for tomato sauce and cursed an entire apartrment.

Hexes are put on living things with consciousnesses or wills of their own, something they can't take psychic control over. Instead of directly manipulating them, they put an affliction that activates under certain triggers. For example, a demon could curse someone to have a bird shit on them every time they walk under a tree, or have them become lactose intolerant whenever they eat at a specific restaurant. It can't be something dramatic, or immediately life-threatening, but it can impede comfortable living and add up over time. Hexes are more of a “death by a thousand cuts” form of magic.

Possession can only be performed on a willing being, or someone who is missing a soul. It involves literally jumping into a body and puppeteering it around until they leave or are forced out. It's an outdated technique and there aren't many times you would actually make use of it. There are few demons that have enough practice with possession to do so convincingly, and  there are better ways of skulking about humankind. In Selena's case, not caring and just walking around as-is works pretty well.

Of course, she also has her physical magic of shape shifting to blend in but nobody has ever made enough of a stink about her walking around red-skinned and pointy tail'd for her to do that.

Physical magic is an ability to do inhuman things with your body that varies from demon to demon, but include only so many options. High physical strength is the most common, but there's also, growth, invisibility, stretching, and being able to move one part of your body really really fast to name a few.

Canonically, it's thought that demons were given the ability to do magic this way as a way of compensating for their lack of comradery. A way of compensating for the lack of help they'd have when working together wasn't absolutely necessary. Thematically, having an entire race of people with different powers that aren't specifically used for fighting, and can be mixed and matched with those other magics makes for a wide array of story possibilities. There are so many ways a person with an ability to be slightly annoying can change up a day spent mini-golfing.

That's about all for demon world lore for the moment. As more things are revealed I'll go into explaining them, but for the now-future, I'll probably be going over character-oriented stuff. Some things have come along that might make developments in that field happen sometime soon, so I need to organize my look guides and design ideas anyway.