Some accuse me of double standards. They say, “Albricht, you constantly tell us how we should stay away from demons and not make contracts, and then in the very next sentence you brag about how many Pleasure Devils you’ve slept with. Doesn’t that seem a trifle hypocritical to you?”

To which I reply, “No. No it does not.” And the reason for this is simple.

People are idiots, and I am not.

You see, I have spent my entire life learning how to deal with these things. How to become just as duplicitous, manipulative and conniving as they are. I have screwed up and I took my lumps when I did. I studied like a maniac, graduated from Forbidden A with a post-graduate degree in Contracts, taught myself Diabolism, mastered the art of the fine print, perfected politicking, backstabbed my share of rivals and I did it all just to show that I could.

That a man could stand up to monsters and deal with them as equals.

And let me tell you, the journey was not worth it. Looking back, I believe that it has permanently altered the way I see the world, not as a place filled with people to be cherished, but as an itemized list of assets and resources to get me what I want.

I see the world as they do, to some extent, and it leaves me empty inside.

Also, the number is thirty-seven. The number of Pleasure Devils I’ve slept with. And those are unique girls, I might add, I didn’t count repeat business. It would have been more, but the sneaky little bitches started unionizing and raising the price on me.

Of course, I also know that none of you nitwits are going to listen to me when I say not to follow in my footsteps and make the same mistakes I made. Each of you is going to think that you are just a bit cleverer than old Albricht and you’re going to be different.

Lucky for you, young idiot, you will have the Grand Contract watching your back and preventing you from doing anything too stupid.

“Ugh”, I can hear you say, “but the GC just holds me back! It prevents me from putting in the terms that I want! It makes anything five times as complicated as it needs to be!”

Shut your mouth, you ungrateful turd. The Grand Contract is over three thousand pages of genius, written in such a way that it is a ‘living contract’, able to be changed and adapted, within certain fundamental boundaries, to changing circumstances and language.

It was set up by likely the greatest Contract Mage in history, Denver Malicrux, to govern the very act of Contracting. That’s right. The guy who literally wrote the book on Diabolism and started the Institute of Diabolism’s growth from some back-alley cult to the grand edifice that it is today, rivaling even the Academy of the Forbidden Arts in power.

So what is the big deal? What has the old ‘GC’ ever done for you? Well, let me just lay out three of the many, many things it does for you on a regular basis, freed from their legalese so that even the man on the street can understand it.

Firstly, it controls what demons are and are not allowed to do. It specifies which of these instructions can be bypassed by their contract and which cannot. It does little things, like forcing them to actually obey the law and preventing them from killing, robbing or torturing random people because they feel like it. The things you take for granted every time you perform a summoning!

Secondly, it prevents anyone from going below two-thirds of their total soul essence and nullifies any contract that requires or results in it, no matter what. That means, the next time you blithering morons miss that a demon had shifted the comma by one spot, you don’t immediately get your entire soul yanked. This also protects long-term, habitual users by gradually lowering what they can pay rather than letting the demons take a progressively larger and larger part of their soul as their total capacity diminishes from over-use.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly for you, when eventually you screw up so completely that you have no other option, it provides you with an escape route. Your own golden ticket out of whatever mess that you’ve gotten yourself into: the Safe Word.

- From the memoirs of Albricht Poppelheim, 8th High Master of the Institute of Diabolism, Grailmane

“Wait!”

Nope, Ixxy was done waiting. She’d waited for over forty minutes already. Time was ticking and she was going to be damned if she wasn’t going to get at least a little action in the time they had left.

“Stop! This isn’t…”

Timothy’s robe landed in a pile on his desk.

“I don’t even know your name!”

Didn’t matter. Sex now. Names later. Or never. Either way, sex now.

“Demon, stop! I command you to leave my shirt!”

Hold on… nope. There was nothing about commands in the contract. Good thing, too, or she would have had to obey them. Which would have meant less sex.

“Stop trying to take off my pants! I’m warning you…!”

Can’t have sex with pants on. Well, no, that wasn’t true, you could, but it made things unnecessarily complicated, and she was in a hurry. So off they had to come.

Oh hey, a foot. Maybe Timothy had a fet…?

And then suddenly Ixxy was flying.

CRASH!

And then she was lying on her back, on something cold, hard and metalic. Her summoning ritual plate. She slowly lifted her head. Timothy had managed to wiggle his leg in between them as she was, ahem, ‘efficiently disrobing’ him and had kicked her off the bed.

“What the hell?” she exclaimed as she scrambled to shaky feet.

“I told you to stop! This isn’t what I had in mind!” Timothy whined as he struggled to retie the laces of his pants. “I wanted something… different!”

Ugh, why was he doing that? Did he not know how to make a proper bow knot? She was going to have to untie them again and she did not have time to be picking apart a double-knot.

“Such as what?” she demanded, crossing her arms under her chest and tapping her foot impatiently.

“I… look… actually… it’s just a little bit too much too fast, okay?” he stammered out. “Just give me a minute to figure out how to explain this.”

Ixxy rolled her eyes. She didn’t have a minute; she had sixteen. That was barely enough time for a quickie and he wanted to waste one thinking. What he really should have done was figure out what it was he wanted before he summoned her and put it in his contract, that way everyone would have been on the same page without all of this…

Suddenly, Ixxy’s eyes flew open as she was struck by a realization. Obviously he couldn’t put the details into the contract, he was going to have to hand it in to his professor!

And then all the pieces slotted into place. His discomfort with her, his lack of interest, his resistance to her charms and the ‘something different’… She must have been blind not to see it.

“I get it! Don’t worry Timothy, I got you,” she said, giving him a great big wink.

“Wait, what are you…”

Ixxy closed her eyes and focused on her body. This wasn’t something that she’d done before, but it was something she could do, according to the InferTec user manuals. Which she’d barely skimmed. But how hard could be? After all, it was just shapeshifting, right? She could do that. She just had to… keep going.

Ripples spread across the surface of her body as it changed, flesh moving under her skin, shifting away from her breasts and… elsewhere as she reconfigured herself into a form more pleasing to her client.

It was so obvious, really. Timothy was gay. So deep in the closet that none of his fellow students or teachers knew. Well, as a professional, she could understand that not everyone could be comfortable with their sexuality. Maybe she could even help him? Give him a chance to really be himself with someone who would not only not judge him for his orientation, but actively support him in his chosen lifetyle!

“Well? What do you think?” she said in a suddenly much deeper and more masculine voice, slowly swaying her hips from side to side.

Rippling pectoral muscles, a jaw you could cut glass on, fantastic hair and a toned physique that a Greek god would be jealous of. Oh yeah. She had it all, now. Not to mention, between her legs, something brand new and ready for action.

She opened her eyes, and in a husky voice said: “So, you prefer to be pitcher or catch…”

Her voice died in her throat at the sight of the look of absolute horror on Timothy’s face. He looked up at her face, glanced down between her legs at the new… addition, then back up to her face. Then he made a sound like a dying narwhal.

Huh. They did mention in the manual that shifting in front of clients could be upsetting to some. Oops.

“Erm… sorry about that… guess I should have warned you to look away for a moment…”

“THAT’S NOT WHAT I MEANT AT ALL!” he screeched.

Oh. Oh dear. Perhaps she had made a teensy little mistake.

“So… you’re not gay?” she tried in her still very manly voice.

“NO!”

“Not… attracted to men at all?”

“NO!”

Ah. Yes. She had definitely made an oopsie. Awkward.

“I see. Oh dear. That was my fault I’m afraid, bit of a miscommunication there,” she said, her voice quickly reverting back to its feminine self as the rest of her body rapidly flowed into its original shape and form. “See? Good as new.”

“NO! CONTRACT’S OFF! GET OUT!” he screeched.

Well, shit. She may have traumatized him a little bit there.

“Calm down, calm down. You just saw a bit of penis. Nothing to freak out about. Nothing you haven’t seen before, right? Come on, it wasn’t even real. This is the real me. Okay?” Technically true. This was her body’s default configuration.

“STAY AWAY FROM ME!”

Ixxy sighed. “Look, all you need is a bit of stimulation and you’ll forget all about it, you’ll see,” she said as she slowly stalked closer, hips swaying seductively.

“I SAID STAY AWAY FROM ME!”

“Come on, let me make it up to you…” she purred, slowly crawling across the bed towards the cowering young man huddled in the corner.

“I’M NOT JOKING! DEZELGEBEB…”

Ixxy leapt away like she’d been bitten by a snake, nearly tripping over Timothy’s desk in the process, before finally perching on the corner like a lady who’d seen a rat.

“WAIT! Okay! I get it! You’re serious! I’ll back off! There’s no need to… no need to invoke the Safe Word, okay? Just calm down! Be rational about this!”

“Why shouldn’t I!?” Timothy snapped. “This is a complete and utter disaster! You’ve completely ruined it!”

“Because if you do it’ll ruin both of us!” she snapped back without thinking.

Sazka had warned her about the Safe Word. ‘Dezelgebeborox’. The last resort of the diabolist in over his head, and the clause of the Grand Contract that single-handedly tipped all contract dealings in favour of mortal-kind. Invoking it immediately and irrevocably nullified all outstanding contracts, as if they had never been signed, no questions asked.

Its potential for abuse was incredible, which was why…

“Anyone who resorts to using the safe word is immediately blacklisted for all contracts,” Ixxy explained. “You’re studying Diabolism, right? Good luck with that when every demon knows you Safe Word out on signed contracts for the rest of eternity. You’d be lucky if you could get an Impling to answer a summons.”

They held each other’s gaze for a few moments longer, before Ixxy broke eye contact, sagging against the wall and resting her head in her hands.

“This is so not how I envisioned this turning out,” she muttered. Somehow she’d gone from guaranteed sex, contract locked down, payment in the bag, with a horny client in the prime of his life to him freaking out at the sight of her, all in the space of five minutes. And all because she’d been too aggressive and impatient.

She let out a deep, shuddering sigh of disappointment. It was time to accept sex was not going to happen.

“Hey… what did you mean it would ruin both of us?” Timothy asked carefully from where he was still huddled in a ball in the corner of his bed.

Ixxy looked up. “Hmm?”

“I mean, I get how it would ruin me, but what about you? Don’t you just… go on to the next contract?” he asked.

“Are you kidding me?” she replied. “Fresh-faced, newbie demoness gets Safe-worded on her first contract? I’d get kicked back through the Gate so fast it’ll make my horns spin. No, wait, that’s not quite right, they’d definitely take the time to laugh at me first. ‘Stupid newbie was so unfuckable, she fucked up the un-fuck-up-able.’ ‘She couldn’t even do the job on her back.’ ‘Literally all she had to do was spread her legs and she couldn’t even get that right.’ Ugh. I’d never hear the end of it. My reputation would be in the absolute gutter.”

Not to mention all of the shit that she was already in. If Sazka found out she’d fucked up this badly, she might very well make good on her threat to toss her mangled corpse through the gate until she stopped coming back.

“So… this is really your first contract?” Timothy asked.

“Yes. Yaay, congratulations, you popped my contract cherry, woo!” Ixxy said sarcastically, waving her hands in the air in mock celebration.

“Is that, like, a special event to… you know… demons? I mean, I’m sorry if it was, sorry that you just got… me for your first time.”

“Hey,” Ixxy said, smiling, as she scooted a little closer and rested her hand on the bed next to Timothy. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. I’m the one who got overexcited and pushed you a little hard.”

“No, I shouldn’t have freaked out. It’s just… it’s my first time too,” Timothy admitted. “Or it would have been, I mean. If I hadn’t freaked out. I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. It happens, I suppose. Tell me, do your studies seriously require you to summon and fuck a Pleasure Devil? Not that I’m complaining, but that seems a bit…”

“Oh, no, not at all. We just have to summon something and complete a contract. But all of the guys said that they were going to summon a Pleasure Devil so I kinda felt like I should too. Otherwise, you know, they might call me a coward or something,” Timothy explained.

“Besides,” he added, “I had secretly hoped it might help make me more comfortable talking to girls.”

Ixxy giggled. That was so silly it was adorable.

“Well, you talked fine to me, so maybe there’s hope for you yet,” she said. “Unfortunately, we’re about to run out of time. Tell me, before I collect my pay and get out of your hair, what was it that you wanted, exactly?”

Timothy shrugged uncomfortably. “It’s kinda embarassing…”

“Timothy, I just turned into a guy right in front of you because I jumped to the wrong conclusion. Believe me when I tell you, no matter how kinky your fetish, it’s not going to shock me.”

He blushed bright red. “Its not that… I just… I just wanted to cuddle. Someone to hold and make out a bit… you know just be close to someone for a while. I’m not even sure I wanted sex, necessarily.” He looked up to see Ixxy looking at him, a suppressed laugh on her face. “Yeah, I get it. It’s pathetic. Laugh away.”

“No, no, I’m not laughing at you, honest. It’s sweet, actually. I’m laughing at myself,” she said as her brain filled her in with the details. “I just wish you’d said something. The ‘Girlfriend Experience’. What a name.” She shook her head. “I totally should have seen that coming, though. Lonely, innocent guy like you, companionship would have been much better for you than some hussy sucking on your knob.”

“You mean… it’s got a name?” Timothy asked, incredulous.

“Oh yeah. It’s veeery common. You’d be surprised. Shit, and I totally could have done that for you too, you dipstick! It’s such an easy one!” she giggled again.

“You mean…?”

“Yeah, we could have spent this entire time cuddling, you numb-skull.”

For the first time since she’d arrived, Timothy laughed. An embarrassed, self-deprecating laugh, but a laugh nonetheless.

“Ok, time’s just about up,” Ixxy said, smiling and getting to her feet, “I should collect my pay so I don’t have to track you down later. I think both of us would rather put this whole mess behind us and never speak of it again.”

Timothy nodded. “Sure. So how do we do this? Do you need to stick your hand under under my shirt again?”

“Hah, no. You blew your chance, Loverboy,” she said, grinning. “All I need is your hand.”

Ixxy held out her hands expectantly and Timothy obediently offered his arm.

“Although…” she continued as she she took his hand in hers and gently caressed his fingers. Huh. He actually had nice hands. Soft, but with strong fingers. “Maybe you won’t miss your chance after all. Our contract will still technically be open, thanks to that ‘satisfaction clause’ I put in. And since you’ve already paid for it, if you were to ever summon me again…”

She left the rest of the thought hanging, but she could see the gears begin turning in his wonderfully predictable head.

“Or, you know, if you just want to practice talking to girls,” she added before she’d even realized it. Why did she add that? “You know how to summon by name, right?” she quickly went on.

“Of course I do! I’m studying Diabolism, for goodness sakes.”

“Good! In that case… I’ll see you when I see you… Emelia.”

With a grin and a wink, Timothy suddenly felt like he’d been kicked in the chest by a mule.

She was gone. Nothing but a faint whiff of sulfur indicated that she had ever been there.

For a few seconds, he just sat there, wincing as he waited for the shock of it to wear off. So that was what losing twenty-eight-point-one-one percent of your soul felt like. Ow. Definitely not a nice feeling. He’d remember that if he ever felt like making a habit of this kind of thing.

Well, maybe he’d do it just once more. After all, he’d already paid, right? And she seemed nice. A grin crept across this face… only to be replaced by a sudden look of horror as he scrambled to the contract still lying on his desk, paging to where she had signed in her illegible chickenscratch.

Shit. He couldn’t make out her name!

There was a flash of light and the smell of brimstone, and suddenly Ixxy was standing on the summoning sigil back in the demon compound, exactly as she’d left it.

The only trace that she’d ever been gone was a brand new bit of soul essence wriggling inside of her and a vague sense that she’d forgotten something.

Ah, well, couldn’t have been important.

“So? How did it go?” Sazka asked.

Ixxy looked over to where the woman was standing off to the side, leaning against the wall outside her alcove.

“Did you wait for me the entire time?” Ixxy asked, stepping out of the ritual circle.

The Receptionist snorted delicately. “Do not flatter yourself. I knew exactly when your summoning would end, remember? I’m just here to make sure that you don’t get any funny ideas about skipping out on paying your fine.”

Ixxy scowled at her. She’d agreed, hadn’t she? Of course she would pay it.

“So, did you get paid or not?” Sazka asked again, one eyebrow raised quizzically. “And before you think about lying to me…”

“What do you take me for?” Ixxy replied, still scowling. You didn’t lie to other demons or try to cheat them. They were real people, for goodness sakes. Doing that was just… wrong. She raised one hand and with a flick of her wrist, like a stage magician’s trick, something invisible was pinched between thumb and forefinger.

“A simple yes would have sufficed,” the Receptionist remarked coldly, making a note on the clipboard that she was carrying. “Now put that away before you drop it, or it’s going to evaporate. Come along.”

Ixxy flicked her wrist again, making the little piece of soul-stuff disappear back inside her body. It felt weird, to have it inside of her. Ticklish. Still a bit warm, too. Freshly harvested from a mortal.

It was at the same time incredibly robust and incredibly fragile. As long as it stayed inside her, it would remain forever, never degrading or shrinking. Yet, the moment she was no longer in contact with it, it would evaporate in an instant. Blown away by the magical flows streaming from Aer’s sun. That was why souls had to be harvested fresh.

“So I assume the contract went well then?” Sazka asked as they set off, back towards the Receptionist’s office. “I’m going to need a copy of it for my records.”

Ixxy pondered the question as they walked. On the one hand, she’d nearly managed to screw up so badly that she got Safeworded and hadn’t gotten laid. On the other… she had her first regular. Maybe. Even if she did still owe him. All in all…

“Eh,” Ixxy replied, wiggling her hand in a so-so motion. “Passable. The client insisted on providing his own contract, but I figured it out.”

“Oh? Anything interesting?”

She shrugged. “Nothing much, except the client wasted too much time on negotiations for us to really get into it. Contract’s still open.” No way she was going to tell anyone about the little misunderstanding that occurred. They’d never let her live it down.

“But you got paid anyway?” Sazka asked, eyebrow cocked.

Ixxy grinned at her. “Negotiations went rather well.”

Sazka gave a refined laugh. “Very respectable, Ixilis. Most newbies botch their first custom contract completely. Glad to hear you made it through, somehow. Now come on, let’s go do the paperwork.”

Ugh. More paperwork.

“Hey,” Ixxy said as they walked through the halls of Triorbus Square. “I’ve got a question.”

“Ask.”

“Does it hurt mortals when we take a piece of their soul?” For some reason, she’d never thought about it before.

“Only if you yank it too quickly,” the demoness replied.

“Oh.” Oops.