Cyan Ericson
Hello and welcome to my little autobiography. First, please do take a look the obvious tasteless picture. I am a demoness and I can change form into whatever I might want to look like. So, you might ask "Why do I choose a form and outfit that's in such obvious poor taste?"
It's certainly a legitimate question. My answer is that I do not wish to deceive people. I want people to know up front that I'm a demoness in no uncertain terms. I find using a form and clothing that conveys the obvious impression that I am neither trustworthy or innocent is one of the quickest ways to convey the effect I want.
As you can probably guess by now, I'm not happy about being a demoness. In fact, I rather hate it. I see very few benefits in being one and I'd rather not continue being one. I was born a normal, everyday human and if I hadn't been too proud I'd likely still be living as a happy enough human lady.
I was born a very normal human child on the very normal Earth. It was a nice place to grow up: safe, secure, and with no particular problems. I was always too smart for my own good. In school I excelled without much effort and lorded that over my fellow students. Most of my classmates loathed me, but I didn't particularly care about that. I was "better than they were", and I knew it.
At the tender age of 14, I gave up on my classmates and went directly to college. I was smart enough to do well in college, but arrogant enough to do poorly my first few terms. But, eventually I was successful. In fact, I was more than just successful. I was the best in my class by quite a fair margin. This success made me even more arrogant. I decided I would work to make myself rich so I could become rich before I was 25. I also decided I should be the youngest to earn a doctorate in whatever field I chose, and that I simply must choose a major that was impressively difficult to show my superiority over others.
I hit on an astonishingly simple plan. I decided that people who control the most powerful weapons would be the ones with the most power, so therefore I figured out if I could master the science of designing weapons I could easily become wealthy. Not only that, I would surely gain a reputation and much respect as an engineer of weapons of mass destruction. So, using this rather pathetic logic, I settled on majoring in nuclear engineering with a special eye toward weapons design. In retrospect it was a rather foolish choice, but I was 16 and bent on demonstrating my superiority at the time.
At 19, I graduated and became one of the youngest nuclear engineers ever. Of course, I'd graduated at the top of my class by a fair margin and made absolutely sure to make every other student more than aware I was far better than they. I made very few friends in college, nor did I care to. When I told one of them I planned to design the most destructive weapon I could possibly think of as my thesis in graduate school he told me I was "wasting my great mind doing evil". I laughed aloud at him. Then I promptly went to the best possible graduate school so I might learn the best points of weapon design. To keep this part of the story manageable, I completed my thesis on designing an exceptionally powerful new sort of weapon. Funding was cut at the time because it was "not in keeping with current strategic theory" and my work passed into relative obscurity gaining me little but an excellent job opportunity.
During graduate school I had no real friends so I had lots of free time to develop my skills. I did make a hobby of "exposing the stupidity of others" by revealing things like "faith healers" and "seances" to be the fakes they were. I did it in an obnoxious, superior way that tended to make me even less popular than I was already. It also made me a target of opportunity for the scorn of many quasi-religious groups. This I did not mind in the slightest. When I was about to leave graduate school an offer from what I took to be a mad group who believed in ancient Aztec rituals. They offered me a free trip to a lovely tropical resort in exchange for me participating in their rituals. They assured me their rituals were "real magic" and I would be convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt of their power. I thought it would be a wonderful vacation and happily agreed to "take part in your rituals".
When I arrived at their encampment about an ancient step pyramid, they informed me that the purpose of the ritual was to transform me into an immortal demoness. The price, they told me, for becoming a demoness would be that I would be bound to serve Tlazoteotl, the Aztec goddess of vice, for six years. Then they asked if I consented. I laughed at them and told them their religion was false, demons did not exist and to "face facts: there is no God, there is no afterlife and certainly there is no half-insane Aztec goddess of vice. Of course I consent. Let's see me be transformed into a demoness!" After I said that, someone clubbed me from behind with a rather large blunt instrument.
As I awoke in a haze of pain I found myself tied spread eagle fashion to an altar atop the step pyramid and clad in an extremely indecent ocelot fur outfit with Aztec motif jade jewelry adorning my body. I could see a group of some thirteen obviously drugged local women being led up near the altar by grown men dressed in Aztec style hummingbird costumes. In spite of being tied down and having quite a headache after being clubbed like a baby seal, the costumes seemed silly enough for me to laugh at. When they brutally slaughtered the first of the drugged girls with a fairly blunt obsidian dagger, I stopped laughing and started screaming for help. Then I started struggling to escape. My screams seem to amuse the men there, and my struggling didn't do much. One by one they killed the girls in a horrible ritual manner that was obviously painful. After the last girl was dead, the madmen advanced on me. It was quite obvious I was going to die. I couldn't think of anything to do but scream louder and struggle for dear life. I didn't escape and they drove two obsidian blades into me. At first the pain blocked out all other thought. Then I went into shock and felt little pain. I couldn't believe they'd just murdered me and I had all of about two minutes before lack of oxygen killed my brain. I thought it was a pointless way to meet oblivion, but I was firmly convinced death was, indeed, the ultimate end. That was about my last thought.
When I woke up again, I was utterly, totally shocked. I could not believe I was waking up. I'd been so sure death was the end and that there was no afterlife and now it was blatantly obvious I was wrong. Then I began to think about what they'd said before the ritual. I would become a demoness and be enslaved for six years to Tlazoteotl. That really, really unnerved me. I was right to be unnerved. The six years of slavery were horrific enough I won't go into detail about them. Suffice it to say that I was forced to corrupt my family and destroy quite a few innocent lives in a horrifyingly personal way. At the end of the six years, I was a free demoness. I was also a much humbled demoness. I no longer harbored any real belief that I was superior to anyone or anything. Much to the contrary, my belief was that my own foolish pride led me to trap myself into hurting others.
My freedom let me cease doing loathsome deeds, but it also left me with a fair number of difficulties. The most major was that I was not a powerful demoness. Apparently, my official rank among demons is a pathetic one: "lesser succubus, 2nd rate". This left me very open to rituals of summoning and binding. My life became a constant succession of summonings where I was forced to do pretty much whatever the spellcaster wanted me to. It was not a very pleasant existence and I could see only two ends to it. The first possible end was if I chose to seek power and advance myself as a demoness. To advance I could either defeat a mightier demon or go back to Tlazoteotl's service and earn power by evil deeds. I decided neither of those options was palatable. The second end was to remain pathetic and simply wait until a summoner became annoyed at me and bound me for eternity to some horrible fate. I chose the second as a more palatable option. I'd learned the bitter way to be humble and I realized full well that trying to be nice would likely lead me to an truly awful fate.
Since I did have quite a bit of spare time in my immediate future I tried to devote myself to helping people and to learning all the skills I'd missed in my ill advised pursuit of weapons engineering. After a few years of doing reasonably nice deeds throughout quite a few realms and answering hundreds of summoning spells, I found myself in one of the more difficult situations I'd faced. It began when I came across a horribly tortured girl who was fleeing in terror from a torture chamber. As usual I helped her flee. Since she had nowhere to go I managed to get a small home for her and thought that the end of the matter. It was not. Other girls fleeing from the same torture chamber sought me out. Soon I found myself running a family of young ladies. Then the mad lady Valteria, mistress of the torture chamber, decided to send people to reclaim her lost girls and we were forced to flee. As we fled yet more girls joined us.
So it was I became the head of a small orphanage of young ladies who were constantly hunted. I began to look desperately into finding a magical realm that could protect the young ladies and keep them safe. This led me to the twin cities of Moonblade and Taglios, where I found I could be safe and set up an orphanage in peace. For once, doing a good deed for others provided me a benefit. Dwelling in the twin cities would keep me relatively safe from being summoned and bound. For the first time in years, things in my life were finally looking up.
And that brings me to where I am today: running a small orphanage and happily looking forward to better times ahead for the first time in almost a decade.
