Before we get to the meat of the matter, it is worth spending some time exploring the fundamentals of our topic of discussion.

Namely, demons themselves. Many of the mainstream religious doctrines paint them as the personification of evil, beings whose sole purpose in existence is to corrupt what they were able to, and destroy whatever they cannot.

While such superstitious notions have been thoroughly debunked (Doobergast et al. 137), many religions stubbornly cling to this narrative, much to the amusement, I believe, of the demons in question.

So what is a demon then? Just another magical creature? An intelligent monster? The personification of sin? A simple dimensional traveller?

The answer is that we don’t fully know. Demons themselves are extremely hesitant to discuss anything that relates to their origin or ‘The Abyss’, as they call their home realm on the other side of the portals through which they arrive in our world. All attempts to study them or their world have so far been met with very limited success.

But limited is not none. From our own studies of the Obsidian Gate, the permanent demonic abyssal gate in the middle of the Diabolist District of Grailmane - something the demons who control it were strangely permissive of once they were properly compensated in souls - we do know several things.

Firstly, ‘The Abyss’ is not a place that is possible for mortals to traverse. Not in the sense that it is inimical to life as we know it, though it is most assuredly that as well, but in the sense that mortal, physical beings cannot ‘fit’ in there. In that place, the very fundamental aspects of what defines ‘existing’, in the sense that we know it, are simply missing. It is a world composed absolutely and entirely of what we would call ‘magic’.

Some have speculated on what such a world would look like if it could be viewed through mortal eyes: sheets of roaring flame with outcroppings of sparkling, almost crystalline formations of more stable magics and the sky a constantly roiling, shifting warp of lights and colours beyond mortal imagination. But the truth is, it is all just that: speculation.

The truth is likely so alien that we could not even imagine it.

But why is the nature of ‘The Abyss’ even topical to the question at hand?

As anyone who has partaken of an evening with a Pleasure Devil can attest, demons, in our world at least, are very much physical beings, just like us mortals. How is it then, that we mortals are unable to pass through to their realm due to being too physical, yet demons themselves, despite possessing the same physical attributes, are able to pass back and forth seemingly at will and without harm?

That is the second truth. The demons we see are not the true entities. Just like their world is inimical to our state of existence, so ours is to theirs. The difference is, they have developed a work-around: amalgamations of meat, blood, bone and magic that allow the true demons who puppet them to interact with our physical world just like you or me.

While the exact nature of these possessed puppets of flesh still elude us, just always remember: it is all a facade. No matter how emotional they seem, how mortal they appear, how human they act, behind those eyes lie a cold, malevolent and altogether alien being that desires nothing less than everything you have and are.

Even if they are not personifications of evil, they are not ‘just people with horns’, they are not ‘just like you’, they are not your friend and they are not ‘safe’. There is a reason that diabolism was for centuries seen as a doomed and suicidal path that inevitably ended in misery and death.

Even today, when you dabble with the diabolical, you must always be vigilant.

Future student be warned. Here be Demons.

- Malicrux, D. Chapter 1 of Demonology, Diabolism and Devilry, an advanced student’s guide, Grailmane Academy for the Study of the Forbidden Arts

Darkness. Infinite, timeless inky blackness. It stretched into infinity, emptiness without limit. In this dark void, there drifted a single… being.

Ixilis didn’t know how long she had been drifting here. Time and space lost all meaning in this place of nothingness, crushed and ground to dust beneath the sheer… sheer absence of this place.

Then, a single point of light appeared in the distance, a something that disrupted the endless nothingness, throwing tendrils of light deep into the void.

But it was unlike any light that she had seen before. It was something different… new…

And somehow, it made her hungry.

Movement. She started moving towards the light. Or perhaps it was approaching her? In this world of vast nothingness, the difference was academic, anyway. But it was growing larger, closer. That was what mattered. That was the most important thing.

She couldn’t explain it. It was more than hunger, it was more like a craving for a taste she didn’t know existed. No, not just a taste… it was so much more than a taste. It was an entire state of being that was so much different than anything she had known before!

They were closing faster now, she and the light. Its rays suffused the space around her, illuminating her… body? Yes. A body was coalescing. Her body. It was taking shape as she soared closer and closer to the light. Like it had always been there and a mere change of perspective, a trick of the light was letting her see it.

Supple flesh… coiling horns…

Of course, she knew it wasn’t real. Not here. Not yet. Just a trick of the light in this place of ever-present darkness. But the illusion was so… alluring. And it made the hunger so much deeper, as if there was so much more of her that could experience the sensation.

A faint, barely perceptable sound started from all around her. Just a soft whistling at first, but it rose and rose as she came ever closer to the tantalizing glare. She had never even heard sound before. It was pleasant, a background hiss that drowned out thought even as it caressed her mind.

More. She needed more.

Faster now, ever closer to the light she drifted. The sound was a rising crescendo, growing ever louder, ever more intrusive, ever more delectable.

She wanted that light. She needed it more than she’d ever needed anything before. Soon.

The hunger was growing uncontrollable. The hunger for life. The hunger for sensation.

The hunger for… reality.

The sound peaked at an ear-shattering wail as she struck the little pool of light. The world around her screamed as she struggled, trying to force her way through some empyrial barrier. It wrapped around her like an oil slick, an impenetrable, impassable veil between worlds that strangled and constrained her, letting her come so close to her goal, yet kept her just tantalizingly out of reach.

Here, pressed up against it, the light was blinding. The sheer reality of it overwhelmed her senses at the same time as it flooded her mind with sensations beyond imagining.

And yet she needed more. It was like a taste, the merest lick of honey when the pot was right there in front of her! She would not be denied! Not when she’d come this far!

Around the edges of the light, shapes took form. Red squiggles that ran and flowed until they’d formed a pattern of runes that spun and twirled through this realm of nothingness, spiraling ever inwards until they orbited her, just outside of reach.

Of course. She could not simply enter here. It was… Not Allowed. Not unless she Agreed.

No! She chafed at the restrictions. She wanted to be free! To indulge herself with all of the sensations the place beyond the light had to offer, to gorge herself on feeling until her mind drowned in bliss…

But the only way in was to comply. To restrain herself. Those were the rules of the runes. Intellectually she’d known this was coming, long before she’d even started this journey, but it was one thing to know and another to experience the crushing disappointment of being able to feel the echoes of what could be, only to immediately after be forced to give up nearly all of that potential. It was heartbreaking. But it was also the only way through, and Ixilis had known what her answer was going to be all along.

Rather scraps of a feast than total starvation. For now.

Mentally, she sighed and Agreed to the unspoken demand that had been hovering in her mind since the runes had formed.

Immediately, they flared and started to spin around her, drawing closer and closer until they formed a pulsing red band around her. With a feeling of hot irons pressing against flesh, they tightened against her mind.

They were momentary white hot pokers of pain jabbing into her psyche as they bound her, then they were gone.

And so was the barrier.

Gloop.

The Abyssal Gate hung silently between two pillars that seemed to grow out of the ground like twisted black bones. Softly glowing, eye-searing red glyphs criss-crossed their surface with no apparent rhyme or reason. The gate’s surface was smooth and so deeply black that it seemed to drink in all of the light in the environment.

Its smooth surface rippled.

A delicate hand breached its suddenly oily surface, sending cascading ripples spreading through its suddenly turbulent surface. A red-skinned arm followed shortly thereafter, then a beautifully toned leg… a beautiful, delicately featured face on a head topped by two gently spiralling, curved back horns.

Ixilis stepped through, into Grailmane. The City of Sin. The City of Demons. She took her first, deep breath… and nearly choked on the inevitable stench when you had so many people living in close proximity without indoor plumbing.

Gah, vile! But… interesting. Even a bad sensation, such as this awful smell, was still an experience, after all? Rich in flavour and uniqueness and novelty… She took another sniff before scrunching up her face. No, the novelty was gone, now it was just bad.

She quickly regained her composure, focusing instead on the feeling of the flagstones beneath her feet, of the gentle breeze playing across her bare skin and whispering through her dark red hair.

Her gaze slowly took in the sky above, ringed by the sight of the world curling around itself… in the distance, the dark stone spires in the distance reaching for the sky like fingers trying to grasp the sun high above… the blackened spikes adorning the stone structures around her, like temples to ancient, mad gods… the intricate frescoes depicting acts of wicked depravity liberally scattered across the walls of the courtyard she found herself in… shriveled trees, poking up like weeds from between the flagstones… and scattered around the myriad different forms of what she quickly identified as other demons.

By all rights, the experience should have been overwhelming. And it was, a little. Existing was new. Breathing was new. Everything was new. But Ixilis’s body had come with a pre-existing set of memories, instincts, knowledge… everything she needed to adapt to her new existence as swiftly as possible. As she looked around, knowledge and hands-on experience trickled into her mind at a gentle yet rapid pace, so that she barely had to look at something before it was as familiar to her as if she’d known it all her life.

She looked down at her own form. Flawless, red skin. Lithe, toned legs ending in delicate feet. A flat, yet slightly muscular stomach. Two beautiful, round breasts, perfectly proportioned to match her frame. She was gorgeous.

She was also naked as… well, the day she was born, her mind supplied, along with what ‘clothes’ were, but that didn’t matter. A body like hers was meant to be shown off!

It was only then that she finally noticed the mortal. It was kneeling next to one of the pillars of the Abyssal Gate behind her, examining the glyphs and seemingly paying her and her perfect body no attention. It looked like a mess of interwoven, tan, fibrous strings, poured into a humanoid shape and drawn tightly until no gaps remained, just a solid lump of… pasta?

A Nodol, her mind supplied, a kind of highly magical, ambulatory fungus. Sapient, intelligent, gifted with magic and extremely tasty. A hunger began bubbling up inside of her…

Immediately, barriers slammed down inside her mind. Her limbs locked up. Her body refused to obey her commands as the red runes blazed across the inside of her consciousness.

She was not allowed to harm the mortal fungus-thing. She was not even allowed to THINK of harming the mortal fungus-thing.

No, that wasn’t quite right. She was not allowed to simply harm it. Not without jumping through many, many legal hoops and meeting a dizzying number of requirements, from contractual obligations to consent from parties of a certain familiarity. The complexity of it was mind-boggling, but the path was there, if she was persistent and devious enough. Perhaps not today, but one day she would feast on such a creature, just to experience it.

This world was a challenge. But it was one that she relished. They thought that they were prepared. The poor fools. Someday she was going to devour this world, or her name wasn’t Ixilis-Divz…

“Out of my way, Newbie!” a deep voice roared behind her.

Ixilis barely had time to look over her shoulder before a big, meaty hand closed around her head, and after a brief instant of vertigo, the wall of the courtyard was suddenly approaching at high speed.

CRUNCH!

Guffaws of demonic laughter greeted her as she slowly sat up and tried to steady her spinning head.

“Good one, Boss! You splatted that slut right into the wall!” a little voice chittered behind her.

“Yeah! Like ‘weeeee-SPLAT!’” another voice added, before more peals of laughter echoed out.

Ixilis glanced up at the wall that she’d just impacted and noted the dark red bloodstain where her head had struck. She carefully touched her face with one finger and winced at the resulting sharp pain.

So that was what a broken nose felt like. Lovely. Definitely something to avoid in the future. She had barely had her nose for five minutes and already she’d managed to break it.

“Tha’s enough gawkin’ ya gobs! Now get the hell movin’!” a big, fat, leather-covered demon sporting rolls of blubber and a face like a pig thundered and began stomping off towards the courtyard gate.

A Taskmaster Demon, her mind supplied. Used for constructions projects and other tasks requiring menial labour. Around it, a swarm of little red winged humanoids chittered and buzzed and cackled. And those would be his Implings. Barely sapient little wretches that did little but goof off, play mischievous pranks and get themselves killed when they weren’t being kept on a short leash. They weren’t even proper demons, just unattached appendages of the taskmaster demon himself.

Behind them, the Obsidian Gate glooped one last time and fell silent, its inky black surface returning to placid stillness.

Ixilis sighed as they stomped through the courtyard gate in the distance, wincing with pain as she did her best to reset her nose.

Ugh, that was going to take minutes to heal.

“First day?” a frosty feminine voice asked.

Ixilis looked up.

Two large, curled sheep’s horns framed the severe, yet elegant face of a demoness standing at the foot of a set of steps nearby. She was dressed in a simple black and white business outfit that was just a tiny bit too short and too tight to truly be called ‘professional’.

“Yes, er…” Ixilis replied.

“Just call me Sazka,” the demoness replied, a faint smirk playing around her lips. “I’m the Receptionist. Come inside and let’s get your paperwork sorted out.”

The inside of the stone building - which from the outside looked like a temple to some particularly jagged and angle-loving eldritch god - was actually quite cozy.

A merry little fire was burning in a hearth off to the side, and the whole place was brightly lit by small glowing white balls hung from the ceiling and walls. There were even some brightly coloured pillows strewn across several luxurious couches along the wall.

The middle of the room was almost split entirely in half by a large, wooden desk, bare except for two very small stacks of papers, laying side by side.

The demoness, Sazka, settled into her high-backed leather chair on the opposite side from the door with all of the understated elegance of many years of practice. She gestured for Ixilis to also take a seat on her side, on one of two simple little wooden chairs.

An obvious power play, but Ixilis could respect that. If you had it, flaunt it, with power as with everything else.

“I didn’t know InferTec had a presence on this side to need a receptionist…,” Ixilis began as she sat down, but found herself silenced when Sazka held up a single finger with casual authority.

“Not InferTec’s receptionist, Dear. Simply the Receptionist. Capital ‘R’,” she said with no more than a gentle admonition in her voice.

“Oh… oh I see. Of course. Apologies,” Ixilis smiled. A quick mental check revealed that while mortals were off-limits, she could murder her fellow demons to her heart’s content.

Of course, that also meant that they could murder her. Interesting.

The Receptionist fished a handkerchief out of one of the drawers of the desk and flicked it over for Ixilis to catch. It had a small stylistic kitten embroidered into the corner. “There. Clean up your face. You can’t go to your first contract like that, you’ll send the customer screaming.”

“My first contract?” Ixilis asked as she began wiping the blood off her face. “Already? I’d only just arrived, I was hoping to have some time to get my feet under me…”

Huh. ‘To get your feet under you’. What a quaint phrase.

“An early contract helps newbies to acclimatize faster, we’ve found,” Sazka replied, “so we try to pair new arrivals with an available contract as quickly as possible. But do not worry, you will likely have a little time to explore. After your paperwork is complete, of course.” She tapped a complex looking clockwork pen on one of the stacks of paper.

“Paperwork?” Ixilis asked, dabbing at her nose. The bleeding appeared to have stopped, but it would be a while more before her nose was fully set again. “I went through all of that on the other side, before I came. The people at InferTec were very thorough.”

The Receptionist shook her head. “Nevertheless, we are required to keep independent records on this side of the gate. Unfortunately, that means that you must go through it again. Name?”

Ixilis sighed. She hated paperwork. Well, she hated the Abyssal equivalent of paperwork which meant that she would likely hate paperwork in this world as well. Somehow, recordkeeping appeared to be a universal obsession.

“Ixilis-Divzalex-Zulgarinos-Proxalix,” she said, then paused. “Wait, no, that’s not right. It’s missing like…”

The Receptionist waved her off. “Don’t worry about it, that’s good enough. You’ll find that your name misses a lot of layers here. It just doesn’t quite fit in this world. And if you try to force it, you’ll just end up damaging your delicate little vocal cords.” Then she smiled, and added, “It’s funny to hear mortals try, though.”

Right. It was like at least three layers of her name had simply… not come with her through the abyssal gate. What a weird feeling. Like pieces of herself were missing, except she wasn’t missing them. Weird.

“Next, could you please confirm your subtype of demon for the record?” Sazka continued, pen hovering over the paper.

Ixilis blinked at her, then slowly gestured at her nude body. “I would imagine that that was obvious?”

“So, Pleasure Devil then, I take it?” she asked. “Sorry, Dear, but I am being dead serious. You have no idea the chaos that I’ve seen here. People arriving in the wrong bodies, people arriving in the right bodies but thinking they arrived in the wrong bodies, people having last minute regrets about their choice of bodies… and on top of that, every couple of decades InferTec releases some new type of outfit and the first we hear of it this side is when someone wearing it plops themselves down in my chair like they own the place.”

“Y… yes. Pleasure Devil,” Ixilis replied. “Er, how does that happen? Arriving in the wrong body, I mean.”

Sazka shrugged, which did interesting things to her low-cut neckline. “Fuck ups on assignment at Infertec, interference during the transferral, plain old corruption, who knows? All I know is that I get stuck explaining to the poor fucker that their only options are to suck it up and live with it, or…” She gently pointed out the door, at the silent black ovoid that hung suspended in mid-air between the two stone pillars carved with glowing red runes.

“You mean… back through the Obsidian Gate?” Wow. That sucked. Ixilis was glad her body had come out as intended. Transferral was a bitch, and it took subjective eons.

The Receptionist smirked and nodded, before turning her attention back to the document in front of her. “Next I’m going to need your measurements, height, weight, etcetera, as well as your body’s serial code. Just the real number part will suffice.”

Dutifully, Ixilis offered the required information, only having to resort to magic twice to confirm some numbers she weren’t certain of. Eventually, they reached the end of the document.

“And finally, you need a short-short-name,” Sazka said.

“A what now?” Ixilis asked.

“It’s like a stripper name,” Sazka explained. “Something short and sweet that mortals can remember and pronounce. Because, trust me, they will not try to figure out how to pronounce ‘Ixilis’ correctly.”

Ixilis huffed. That was annoying. Using only her short name was already mildly irritating. To then pronounce it incorrectly on top of that would be like nails being scraped across a blackboard. Making it even shorter would still not be her name, but at least it would be hers. And correct. That was… better.

“Ix?” she suggested. Surely even mortals couldn’t fuck that up.

“‘Ix’ is a bit… cold. Something a little more playful, perhaps?” Sazka suggested. “I wasn’t kidding about the ‘stripper name’ part. What about ‘Ixxy’?”

Ixilis rolled the name around her mouth. Ixxy. Ixilis. Ixxy. Yes, that could work. She could live with that. She felt the name smoothly settle into her identity.

“That works,” Ixxy replied with a grin.