Demon Queened Ch. 02

"...I can't believe it," Abigail whispered. True to her words, my maid's eyes were filled with disbelief as she stared at me. Her mouth opened again, and then closed as if she couldn't quite figure out what to say. Her hand reached out toward me, and I thought for a moment that she would prod me to see if I were real, but then she seemed to think better of it . "I really can't believe it," she repeated, shaking her head back and forth.

"...Don't you think you're being a touch rude?" I demanded, exasperated. "I do not see the need to stare at me with such shock just because I got up a bit early."

"You never get up without being woken, first, your highness," Abigail pointed out, narrowing her eyes at me. "And you certainly never dress yourself. Where did you even find those clothes?"

"Do you not like them?" I peered down at myself, not entirely sure what the complaint was. My blouse was solid black, with long sleeves and a stiff collar. My skirt was red, and ended just past my knees. I was wearing a pair of white knee high stockings as well, meaning that the vast majority of my skin was covered. Not exactly my normal M.O., but that was rather the point. I was a brand new person, thanks to regaining memories of my past life, and I saw today as my official debut.

Abigail didn't seem to be impressed, though.

"It's not like I hate them, or anything," she told me. "But outside your coronation, I've literally never seen you show this little skin. Are you really comfortable wearing all that?"

"I am, yes," I informed Abigail, cheeks tinged red. It was true that I had, in the past, always insisted on showing off as much skin as possible. The majority of my closet reflected this, meaning it had actually taken quite a bit of searching to put together an outfit so modest. I didn't intend to make a repeat effort any time soon, either. While Jacob might have been the sort to hide his body, Devilla had always enjoyed being on display, and it seemed my current self was closer to the latter. I alsoI didn't see much point in hiding my assets when everyone in the tower had gotten a good look at them already. None of that translated to me being actively uncomfortable being covered in clothing, though.

"I happen to have a reason for not wanting to wear anything too flashy on this occasion."

"...And what would that be, my queen?" Abigail asked. Her face was pinched with worry, and her tone was cautious. At least her words were polite.

"It is quite simple," I said, my lips pulling ever so slightly up at the corners. "Today I will be paying you a home visit."

Again, Abigail opened and closed her mouth. She lifted both hands, this time, not to reach out to me but to cradle her head.

"A... Home visit, my queen?" Abigail choked out, hardly able to believe the words she was speaking. "You want to visit my home?"

"Since it is just the two of us, I will permit you to speak freely on this matter," I declared, magnanimously. "Your first comments of the day prove that you are capable of it."

"A home visit?" Abigail repeated, before groaning softly. "Why do you even want to go home with me? Do you want to have more sex? Is that it? We can do that here, you know! You don't need to go slumming it!"

"...It would seem you have no problems with speaking your mind, once given permission," I muttered, crossing arms in front of my chest. "Shall I take that as a sign you're adjusting well to your new position?"

"Adjusting, huh?" Abigail sighed. "I mean, I've been your personal maid for less than twelve hours... and I spent most of it doing paperwork with your chief of staff, too. I don't think I can say I'm really used to it, or anything. It's more like I'm too damn tired to keep my shock in check, at this point. I mean, what's the deal with you? You haven't yelled, or threatened to whip me, or... And what's the deal with wanting to pay me a home visit?"

"Perhaps I should have led with that," I admitted, referring of course to the home visit. I was doing my best to ignore the other comments Abigail had made, since it wasn't as if I could tell her about my past life memories. Ignoring Abigail's suspicions didn't seem like the best solution, but it was the only one at my disposal.

"I'm waiting," Abigail replied, lifting an eyebrow. It was hard to believe that this was the same woman who'd demurely tried to beg off from being my personal maid just the night before. Had she reached the end of her patience with me so quickly? Or was it that she'd become emboldened in the absence of punishment? It was also possible that this was her true nature, and that she'd simply grown tired of hiding it. Regardless, all I could offer her was the truth of today's goal.

"I wish to learn how to cook."

Abigail just stood there, for a long moment, staring at me. I felt as if her eyes were boring holes into my soul, and I found myself shifting my weight nervously from foot to foot. I did not back down, however. I could not back down. This was essential to my future.

"You want to learn how to cook?" Abigail repeated, after a moment.

"It's an essential life skill," I pointed out. "I would also like to learn how to clean and sew. But I thought cooking might be a good place to start."

Abigail lifted a hand to her forehead, kneading the fingers against her scalp as if trying to massage away a sudden headache.

"And why," she asked me, "do you need to come to my house for these lessons? You have a massive kitchen dedicated to serving you. And cooks! Professional cooks who could teach you how to cook!"

"I would only get in the way in the royal kitchen. The chefs there are quite busy preparing meals for me and the generals." That was probably true, but mostly just an excuse. The real reason I didn't want to go to the royal kitchen is because I wanted to learn how to cook as a commoner. If I got used to using the amenities and spices available only to royal households, I'd be in trouble after I fled the tower and started life among humans.

"I won't be able to cook anything fit for a royal palette," Abigail warned me.

"That is fine," I promised. "A queen should know how her people are eating." Quite frankly, I wasn't sure that the royal food fit my palette, either. I hadn't had any since recovering memories of my past life, and while I remembered the royal food tasting quite good I wasn't sure how it would actually stack against what I'd eaten as Jacob. I was already missing fries, for example. Still, whether it was royal cuisine or commoner food a demon queen needed to eat.

"In fact," I added, I would appreciate it if we could go cook up a few commoner delicacies immediately. I am quite hungry."

"Don't you have royal duties to do?" Abigail protested. She sounded a little frantic, for some reason. "Paperwork to sign? Things to... I don't know, survey?"

"My generals can handle all that," I told her, rolling my eyes. "In fact, I am quite certain that they will be happier without me butting in." Besides which, my long term plans involved the generals betraying me for the sake of our people. Building a relationship with them, in the meantime, would only make things more difficult. "Is there a reason you do not wish me to enter your home? I am starting to become perturbed by having my personal maid so set against me."

"N-No..." Abigail said. She wasn't quite meeting my eye - but then, I'd never actually given her permission to start looking directly at me, so perhaps that was why.

"You may look me in the eye from now on, by the way," I told her. "Now gaze upon my features and say that again."

"I..." Her black eyes met mine for a moment, and then broke contact. "I'll go talk to your head of personnel, and get us some guards."

"Guards will be unnecessary today," I insisted, quickly. "Have you forgotten that I am dressed to avoid attention? Guards would only defeat the purpose. ...And I'm stronger than them, anyway." That's right. You wouldn't know it to look at my slender frame, but I was the demon queen. There were few who could rival my physical strength, and pretty much no one who could match my magic capacity. Even the heroine would need to gain power from my generals if she wanted to face me on equal terms.

For some reason, though, Abigail was giving me a funny look.

"Is something the matter?" I asked. "I should be quite strong by my reckoning, yes?"

"Well, yeah, that's not the problem," Abigail said, rubbing at the back of her head. "It's just... Changing your clothes isn't going to make you inconspicuous, you know? You're the demon queen. Everyone in the tower knows what you look like."

"Such a triviality," I said, letting out a smug laugh. "I have already thought of that. A simple illusion should suffice."

My voice was confident, but inside I was actually trembling with a heady mix of fear and excitement. While I had cast magic as Devilla many times before, the entire thing now had a far more romantic feel to it. I was excited to do it - and a little worried about messing it up.

Unlike the Rite of Insight, which was actually holy magic, most spells didn't involve an incantation. To use arcane magic, you simply had to imagine what you wanted and supply the magic energy to make it happen. It worked better if you had a solid grasp of the process, too.

Creating an illusion, in this case, basically involved projecting an image over my own face. I couldn't change my eyes, since covering them with light magic would remove my ability to see, but I made my cheeks a little rounder, my nose a little bigger, and my lips a touch thinner. I also made my hair black, for good measure, and added tiny little red horns to my forehead so that I would not be mistaken for a human.

The actual casting felt like... Like warmth, in my soul. Heat flowed through my body and out through my skin. Since keping an illusion up required a constant supply of magic energy, the feeling didn't go away, either. It was strange, even more so because part of my brain accepted it as natural while another part had never dealt with it before. It also felt pretty damn good, though.

"So?" I asked Abigail, grinning widely. "Does it suit me?"

"I'm not even sure how to respond to that, my queen..." Abigail lamented, shaking her head softly back and forth. "For one thing, your lips aren't moving. Which is strange. How did you even manage to cast an illusion spell that doesn't move with the user?"

That was a fair question. The image I used when casting the spell was that of a projector, plastering a solid image across the expanse of my face. It was no wonder that wouldn't move, now that I thought about it. Fortunately, it seemed that the people of this world used a different mental image; one that would work better. Unfortunately, I'd always deferred magic lessons, saying I would receive all the knowledge I'd ever need from the Rite of Insight. I had no idea what the proper way to cast the spell was.

"I don't suppose you would happen to know anything about how to cast illusions?" I asked Abigail, hoping against hope.

"Of course!" she replied, surprising me. "I'm a succubus, you know. We're pretty much masters of showing people what they want to see. You just need to think of it like a paint job - like someone took your face and drew an entirely new one over it. That way the illusion will move with you."

"I see," I murmured, giving a small nod. I released my spell, causing the warmth that was flowing out of me to draw back inside again, then called upon that same energy to cast another spell. "Is this better?" I asked.

"Much better, my queen," Abigail promised. She looked a little relieved. I could only imagine it had been somewhat creepy having my voice emanate from a motionless mask.

"You shouldn't call me 'my queen' while I'm like this," I warned her. "It would ruin my cover, if people heard you. You should call me..." I hesitated, unsure of what a good name would be. Jacob wasn't quite a good fit, and I'd die all over again before using "Jacoba." After a few minutes of thought, I settled on "Eena Divington," which I thought was a normal enough name, at least by the standards of my new world.

"Eena," Abigail parroted back to me. "Are you sure my - Eena?"

"It is fine," I promised. "In fact, if you would like to call me Devilla when we are alone, I would not object. Being called 'my queen' all the time is honestly somewhat stifling."

Abigail stared at me for a long moment, before slowly nodding her head, and holding out her hand. "I don't know what's gotten into you, Devilla, but I really hope it stays there. Now come on - let's get going."

It was my turn to stare. I had been acting differently of late, obviously, and it was no surprise that she'd realized it... But I really hadn't expected it to make a difference. After a lifetime of acting like a brat, there was only so much one could do to make up for it. That's why I had pretty much given up, from the start, on making friends. Yet now a hand was being offered to me, if not in friendship than at least with the intent of walking together toward a shared destination. It was such a small thing, and yet it struck me harder than I ever would have thought possible.

Trying hard not to cry, I reached out and took Abigail's hand in my own.

***

Walking through the tower was an entirely new experience for me. Normally I would simply fly, utilizing the large windows that dotted the tower. In an emergency I could even use a teleportation circle to go directly to any one of my generals. Utilizing either method would make it impossible for me to pretend I was just an ordinary demon, though. The teleportation circles were only for high ranking officials, and no one in the tower would fail to recognize my void-like wings. So we walked.

Walking, as it turned out, was quite fascinating. There were many sights I had never seen when flitting about the tower by wing. For example, I had never realized just how big the tower was. The ceiling on the hundredth floor went maybe twenty feet above my head, but the ceiling of the lower floors stretched far further than that. It stretched so far above that, if not for the lack of stars, one could be mistaken for thinking they were looking up at the night sky.

It was also incredibly dark in the tower. Away from the windows, there was only the occasional lantern or conjured light to brighten the various shops, houses, and apartment buildings. Despite that, I could still see. Small details, vibrant colors - I could see it all so clearly that you'd think I was standing beneath the midday sun. Looking at the demons around me, I could tell that they were the same way. I imagined that it might be different in pure darkness, just judging by the small amount of light provided, but I honestly thought there was a good chance that even then I'd be able to see.

We had to travel through six floors to reach Abigail's home. Other than my own floor, and that of General Sylvanna right below it, each floor we went through seemed to contain the equivalent of a large town, or perhaps even a small city. It made sense, really. The entirety of demonkind had been forced to live in this tower, after all. It was just that there were a lot more of them than I'd thought. More than there had been in the game, for sure.

"It would seem that I have a larger force at my disposal than I thought," I muttered to myself. I still thought that the best route forward for my people was to join forces with the heroine and make peace with humans. No matter how many of us there were, there were undoubtedly a hundred times more of them. Still, seeing such a large fighting force gave me hope that the demons would be able to hold their own at the peace talks, without capitulating to demands from fear.

Abigail quickly shot that hope down, however.

"I hope you aren't expecting anyone here to fight," she said, glaring at me. "Most of these women have never even held a pitchfork, yet alone a sword."

Indeed, while I saw many women were sharp teeth and claws, none of them seemed like hardened warriors to me. They were shopkeepers, business women. The most any of them would be able to tell you about a weapon was how to price it. It seemed that I did not have much of an army here, after all. Just ninety or so towns full of women who needed my help.

Sobered considerably by that thought, I took another look at the townsfolk around me. They came in all shapes and sizes. I saw a lady who looked to be part frog, for example, talking to a woman who looked mostly human except for some spikes. I saw another woman with wolf ears and a tail, kissing a girl covered in wool. There was even a bee girl, running a flowerstand. She seemed to be trying to sell roses to a lady who looked to be part goat.

It's seriously all women, though... Not that I was surprised by that, per se. I knew full well that demons, or monster girls as they could properly be called, were all women. In fact, as Devilla, I had never once seen a man in my life. It wasn't as if I had some longing to see one, either. It was only that I had been a man in my last life, and it was a little odd having that gender simply removed from the equation.

"Oof!" A loud noise, and a light impact, broke through my reverie. There was, for some reason, a redheaded woman, with long rabbit ears, sprawled out on the floor, laying on her back.

"...I apologize," I murmured, realizing I must have bumped into her, in my distraction.

"Not your fault," she laughed, to my surprise. "I'm the one who bumped into you, lass, not the other way around. Guess I was in too much of a rush."

"Really?" I asked, looking to Abigail for confirmation. She gave a small, reluctant nod. She looked quite concerned. Did she think I would get mad, or some such? I had more compassion for mistakes than that... These days. "It's fine," I told the bunny girl. "I'm sure I'm as much at fault as you are, for not paying attention."

"Well, that's mighty kind of you to say!" The rabbit girl hopped back onto her feet with a single smooth motion, dusting herself off and smiling brightly at me. "Well. Hate to bump and run, but it's almost time for work! I'll be seeing you around, maybe."

"Of course," I said, smiling faintly back. "May the Fallen One's grace be upon you." My memories as Devilla told me that was a perfectly normal farewell. Perhaps it was only common among the upper ranks, though, because the woman opened her mouth in surprise, before letting out another laugh.

"Feeling pretty formal, there, ain'tcha?" she asked me, giving me a thump on the back. It didn't seem to have much force behind it, but the intention was obvious enough so I gave a smile in return.

"Guess we can use whatever blessings we can manage around here, though, the way things are going under Queen Devilla's rule," the rabbit girl added. "Bet ol' Luci would be twisted up something fierce inside to know she ended up with a descendent like that."

"Th-That's enough!" Abigail protested. She was still holding my hand tightly in hers. So tightly in fact that her knuckles were turning white; it was almost starting to hurt. "You should know better than to speak bad about our queen."

"Or what?" the rabbit girl demanded, rolling her eyes. "She'll throw me in the dungeon for a few days? How's she gonna even find out? If everything everyone said was reported to that woman, the whole damn population would be in the dungeon, Probably forever!"

"Th-That's not true," Abigail insisted. Her eyes flicked to me, then back to the rabbit. "You don't know what you're talking about." Her voice was firm, and her words were sweet to hear. It would have been nice to think she meant them, but it was fairly obvious she was simply frightened of how I'd respond.

"It's fine, Abigail," I declared. "The woman is simply speaking the truth. The queen has been less than ideal, so far as rulers go." I couldn't keep the bitterness from my voice as I spoke. I worried the rabbit girl would notice, but she was too busy glaring at Abigail. "Did you not have to go to work?"