Top 5 Things You Will Experience During Demonic Possession:

The smell of burning flesh. Your burning flesh. If you like barbecues, this is a great perk. Vegans, you may want to second guess your decision to form a contract with a demon. Your boiling blood searing a black insignia onto your skin from underneath. This is how the demon marks it’s property. If you have an appreciation for tattoos, you will have no qualms with this feature. The more conservative crowd may want to steer clear of demonic contracts. An unbridled infiltration of cursed knowledge flooding through your brain. By all accounts, this is not a desirable consequence because nobody wants to know how they were conceived. Nobody. You will then promptly lose this knowledge. Thank God. After the agony of a foreign entity invades your soul, mangingling your bones and reverting them into a perversion of their original form, you will be truly and wholly alive. Or maybe not.

Victor’s Basics of Practitioning

Practitioner: A professional in the field of magic (enerium) or black magic (anti-enerium) manipulation. They utilize one or more of seven crystal-like substances called crystallics to produce their magic.

See Also: Wizards, Witches, Eneric Humanoids, Warlocks.

“What are you doing here?” Victor Santos asked.

“I need help.”

Rohan Lad was caked in blood and shame. It dripped from his dark hair like a pulsating faucet, streaking across his cheek under his round glasses marked by a spider web crack. While he leaned heavily against the door frame, his footing was stable -- much like the footing of a horse shot in the leg was not.

Victor laughed. “And you came to me for help? You must truly be desperate.”

“I am.”

Victor took a step forward, examining Rohan with a meticulous obsession. “Is this an ambush?” He glanced over Rohan’s shoulder, letting his gaze melt into black sky. “Are you trying to trick me?”

“You were the only person I could think of going to. I thought you would understand.”

“You do realize the predicament you’re in now, don’t you?” Victor said. “I have every right to kill you now. You have to know that.”

Maintaining some semblance of dignity, Rohan mustered the energy to reply: “You don’t have the right to kill anyone, you idiot. That’s the difference between us, remember? That’s why we’re enemies.”

“I think I have the right to kill you. You willingly walking into enemy territory counts as a death wish.”

“Unfortunately, you’re the only one I can trust to help me now,” Rohan said. “If I had the option to, I would have come to literally anyone else. But you’re the only one.”

“Well, you’ve come to the wrong place then.”

“That’s your decision to make.” Rohan’s voice was weak, drifting in and out of silence.

Before Victor could reply, Rohan floated to the floor like a cinder block drifts through the surface of a pool.

Victor stared at Rohan’s mangled form, examining the rips snaking through the gray poncho-like cloth obscuring the top half of his body. The dark brown hair drifting across his dark skin, cheeks bespeckled with dark freckles, had fallen to the ground in a mangled heap. Victor remembered his hair as shoulder-length and fluffy. In its full glory, it splayed away from his neck in downy clumps. Now, it was a sad perversion of what it once was.

“What are you going to do about this?” Taro Suzuki said.

“What does it matter to you?” Victor snapped. “Go back to hell.”

Taro appeared before Victor, his form translucent, edges of his body undefined. His long, sleek dark hair was fixed in a bun, red eyes donning rectangular spectacles. Two long, red horns protruded from his head, sleek and ridged. He appeared before Victor and Victor alone -- for he existed in Victor’s mind. In Victor’s body.

“I enjoy watching you make amusing and ill-conceived decisions,” Taro responded. “Do you want me to help you decide what to do with him? I could hold your hand through this troubling process if you’d like.”

“You’re not my real dad,” Victor snapped.

Taro stared at him, eyebrows raised. “I never claimed to be. In human years, I am not much older than you.”

“But you’re over two hundred years old in actuality,” Victor snapped. “Remove yourself from my presence! I need you not.”

“I suppose I don’t have a choice, then.” Lip pulled back in a slight snarl, revealing sharp teeth, Taro did as he was told, dissipating from the air.

Victor stared at Rohan once again, face crinkled with disgust. “What have you poor creature got yourself into?” He turned toward the entrance to the abandoned church and called out, “Madeline the Cruel! I require your assistance right now!”

Rohan awoke to a feeble darkness, eyes facing the inside of an angled roof held aloft by rotting planks. Spiderwebs and dust danced in the moonlight sifting through the smashed window. The musty odor of oak infiltrated the church.

“I saw him move!” Madeline Cohen said, a radiant smile creasing the array of freckles splattered across her pale skin. Her cheery sunny sky eyes were framed by locks of thick blonde hair twisted into four huge braids dangling down her spine.

Victor leapt from the floor, tossing aside a thick book bound in dark leather.

“I’m not going to strip you,” Victor said, glaring at Rohan. “If you have any injuries on your body, then that has nothing to do with me.”

“I wouldn’t want you to strip me anyway,” Rohan said.

Victor knelt down before Rohan and touched his matted nest of hair. Blood was still infused with each strand, but the skin was no longer bleeding. “You must fix this up. This looks absolutely repulsive. How dare you come before me in this state?”

“Come on, Vic, give him a break,” Madeline said. “He went through a rough patch here! But he’s all fixed up now so he can work on looking less like a dirty slob.”

Rohan stared at Madeline as if seeing her for the first time. “What are you doing with this cretin?”

Madeline cocked her head to the side in thought. “What do you mean?”

“Like, why are you here and not working? You don’t have a job? Or anything better to do with your time?” Rohan shakily lifted himself into a seated position. His eyes glazed over for a moment, but he regained his focus quickly.

“Oh, he asked me to do some evil deeds with him so I decided to help him out,” she said.

“Are you really playing into his ridiculous ‘supervillain’ charade?” Rohan snapped. “You’re better than that.”

“Oh, I am absolutely not. But go on.”

“It makes no sense, as I’m sure you knew. Which is why I’m surprised to see you with him in the first place. Why would you want to be a villain for the sake of being a villain? This is so stupid. Both of you are out of your goddamn minds.”

Victor whacked Rohan in the shoulder. “You came to the aid of supervillains. You are not one to judge. We just saved your life and you are trying to get yourself killed?”

“But it’s just so painfully stu - wait, what are you doing?”

“Well, we do need to take those bloody clothes off of you,” Madeline said as Victor began pulling at the frayed poncho fitted over Rohan’s body.

“Didn’t you just say you weren’t going to bother with that?” Rohan exclaimed, scooting away from Victor’s hands. “I don’t need you to do that.”

Victor glared at him. “Shut up. I am not trying to help you at all. I would just like to see your pathetic worm of a body in its full glory.”

“What the hell? That’s not any better! Keep away from me.”

Madeline laughed. “He’s just being silly. He really does want to help you. We do have a change of clothes for you.”

“I’ll do it myself,” Rohan said, rising to his feet on tremulous legs. “God, you two are lunatics.”

Rohan was crumpled in Victor’s arms within a second.

“Are you done pretending like you have any control of what’s happening here?” Victor said as Rohan squirmed to get away from him.

“Let go of me! What are you doing?” Rohan demanded, his face a mask of mortification. “Get off of me!”

Victor strengthened his grip on Rohan’s shoulders. “You’re the one who fell into me. If you didn’t want me to catch you, you shouldn’t have made the foolish decision to rise on unsteady feet!”

“Shut up. Shut the hell up before I crush your brain,” Rohan spat, though his wandering eyes and weak voice were as intimidating as a unicorn who speaks human language, which doesn’t exist, so the narrator guesses it would be fairly intimidating it were to occur, but the narrator digresses.

In one swift motion, Victor lifted the poncho from over Rohan’s shoulders, revealing a long, black shirt beneath. “There we go. Madeline the Cruel, could you be so kind as to wash this for -”

Shame providing Rohan an adrenaline-fueled burst of energy, he slammed his wounded body into Victor, careering them both into the floorboards, which protested with loud groans.

“What do you think you -- !” Victor shouted as Rohan’s smaller body writhed on top of him, grabbing at his clothes.

“You want to strip me so badly?” Rohan snapped, face blossoming with redness as he grabbed the end of Victor’s blue crop-top shirt and pushed it up toward his neck. “Huh? Do you like that? Do you like that, Victor?”

“Enough already, you creature of the night!”

“Stop talking like that! You sound so idiotic!”

Rohan managed to push Victor’s shirt up against his chin and once Victor’s chest was bare, Rohan froze, pink eyes widening with what Victor could only identify as horror.

“What is it? Don’t you like my sick tat?”

“What is this?” Rohan said, retracting his hands as if he had been electrocuted. He forced himself into an upright position as he sat on top of Victor’s midriff. “What...what did you do?”

Upon Victor’s chest was a large, black insignia - a perfect circle staining his skin with a vertical infinity sign, the top loop broken. Three black holes lined the top loop and the sides outside the loop, black curls emanating from the outer circle.

For the first time since Rohan visited, Victor’s stoic, proud expression cracked into a smile - one laced with uncertainty.

“Do you like it? It’s my new tattoo. It is a tattoo of impressive design, isn’t it?”

“You… contracted with a demon?” Rohan said, the agony of his injury forgotten in the revelation.

“Oh wow,” Madeline said, sprinting over to Victor and staring at exposed chest he made no move to cover. “I didn’t even realize that was a demonic seal. I saw it when we were having sex, but not from this angle. I guess because it’s always been dark in the church attic…”

Rohan’s eyes snapped to Madeline. “You did what?”

Victor finally tugged his crop top down over his chest. “You know I would never burden my sculpted body with some ridiculous shirt unless it was necessary. I think this tattoo is cool, but since it’s still illegal to make demonic contracts I have no choice.”

“It’s not a tattoo!” Rohan exclaimed helpfully.

“I can’t believe you did this. Your boiling blood burned that into your skin. Do you have no idea what you’ve done? Don’t you know what happens to people who form a contract with a demon?”

“Of course I do! I’m a Practitioner of Hell! We learn about demon related principles in the first year of college. You know that. You wanted to study daemonics once before.”

“I wanted to study daemonics when I was a little dumbass kid! It just sounded cool, like it does to everyone else! But real daemonics just causes destruction. You know that much.”

“It works for my purposes. I want to cause as much pain and destruction as I possibly can. That is my goal as a supervillain.”

“I can’t believe you took it this far.” Rohan stumbled off of Victor and sat cross-legged on the ground. Victor rose from the floor into a seated upright position, legs crossed before him.

“Wait, I’m not too familiar with demon stuff,” Madeline said. “What happens when you form a contract with a demon?”

Rohan stared at Victor’s chest. “That was the mark of a hell demon, right?”

“Looks like you paid attention to Professor Lan’s class,” Victor said. “Good job.”

“You’re the one that failed Intro to Demon Identification,” Rohan snapped, narrowing his eyes. “Now look where we ended up.”

“Look where we ended up indeed,” Victor said.

Silence passed between them, thick and cumbersome.

Rohan turned to Madeline. “If he’s contracted to a demon, there are only two options left for him. After the completion of the contract, he will either be killed by the hell demon or become his feeding slave.”

“Feeding slave…?”

“Hell demons feed from pain and suffering, physical and mental,” Rohan said, narrowing his eyes. “The demon tortures its feeding slaves so that it can gain energy. The feeding slave cannot escape and can be mind controlled by the demon to its whim.”

Madeline stared at Victor, her expression as blank as a procrastinated essay. “Wow, you’re into some weird stuff, Vic.”

Rohan pressed a hand over his face, just in time to suppress the cacophony of laughter escaping his lips.

Madeline smiled at Rohan’s reaction, but said nothing. After Rohan managed to regain his composure, he dropped his hand, face sagging in fatigue.

“Which one of you healed me…?” Rohan glanced at Madeline. “Well, if Victor is contracted to a demon, I doubt he can use ethreallic magic.”

Ethreallic magic. Healing magic.

“Yeah, he can’t,” Madeline said, folding her hands in front of her exposed midriff, bespeckled with freckles. “I healed you! I did good, right?”

“Not to be rude, but you did a terrible job,” Rohan said, pressing a hand against his skull. “You completely skipped the contortion phase.”

Madeline pouted. “Well, next time you can do it yourself! I did well enough. The painkiller magic stuff I gave you will be wearing off soon and will turn into a sedation charm.”

“Oh!” Victor exclaimed, impressed. “Abram’s Sleep Away Charm? That is a very high level spell. How clever to create a painkilling spell that puts you to sleep when it can no longer function as one…”

“Right, that makes sense. I am about to pass out.” Rohan suddenly reached out, grabbing Victor’s arm, determination flashing in his eyes. “You need to know something.”

Victor stared down at Rohan. “What? What do I need to know?”

“The reason why I’m here, dumbass. You never even asked why I came here.”

“I don’t care,” Victor said, though his eyes betrayed his curiosity.

“I...we need your help. We…”

Conveniently, Rohan crumpled to the floor, outstretched hand plummeting onto the floorboards like a slab of concrete dropped by a bird onto an unsuspecting shell.