Chapter 277: Mornings Made To Order

on January 26, 2015 in Volume 2 Book 8: Elven Holiday, Volume 2: Sophomore Effort

In Which Mackenzie Realizes Glory’s True Motives

Our first morning on the ship really hammered home how much being on a flying cruise line really was just like being in a super fancy inn with slightly smaller rooms than you would expect.

Waking up in bed next to Glory was the only really novel part of the whole experience, and that could have happened anywhere. There wasn’t anything in the bedroom that really screamed “airship”, and there was absolutely no movement or sound to convey the fact that we were sailing through the open skies.

Maybe that was why the first thing we both did was go to the bubble window in the living room and look out… or down, in Glory’s case. I found it dizzying enough to see the wispy clouds stretching out to the horizon. I wasn’t sure if I could actually see the curve of it all or if my mind was just playing tricks on me, but it was something to see.

“There’s a lot of cloud cover today,” Glory said. “I was hoping that we’d be far enough south for clear skies.”

“As long as it stays clear up here, I’m okay,” I said.

“I’d like to have a bit of a view,” she said. “Clouds can be pretty, but they don’t look that different from the top compared to the bottom. If we can’t get more than a glimpse of the land underneath, we might as well be sailing on the ocean.”

“You wouldn’t have got me to come on an ocean trip,” I said.

“Considering that I barely got you in the air to begin with, that’s saying something,” Glory said. “I just find I dislike the idea of essentially being stuck in a fancy resort with nothing to show for the extra money I spent for said resort to be levitating. If we were on the ground, we could at least go out sightseeing.”

“Well, as far as I’m concerned, the less distinguishable the shipboard environment is from a ground-based inn, the better,” I said. “If it ever becomes really obvious that we are flying through the air, it’s probably because something has gone wrong and the direction we’re flying is down… or all the directions, very quickly.”

“So you’re saying you wouldn’t enjoy a nice, open view?”

“…I think I could learn to appreciate it?” I said. “Even if the clouds don’t clear up, though, we’re bound to descend below it at some point. I mean, there are port calls, right?”

“None today… the itinerary calls for steady travel until we get to warmer and more interesting climes… but yes,” Glory said. “Honestly, I think we’re only flying so high because of the clouds… I’m sure it’s warm enough on deck regardless of what the weather looks like, but people expect sunshine. I imagine when we get well away from the weather, we’ll probably descend a bit anyway, though of course it will matter less.”

“Probably,” I said.

“I’m going to check around and see if any of the salons aren’t booked up,” she said.

“Do you really think that’s necessary?”

“I told you, if you don’t want to do something with your hair, you don’t have to, but I want to try a different look.”

“No, I meant, do you think you’ll really need an appointment or reservation or whatever?” I said. “I mean, I think most people who want a holiday haircut or whatever would do it before they left home.”

“Well, there are people who basically live on these things,” Glory said. “And I imagine managing the demand for things like personal grooming services is something of an art… I doubt there’s a ton of excess capacity built in. Though this is simply a guess… I don’t know if it’s necessary to have a reservation, which is why it’s necessary to find out.”

“Okay. Do you want me to do it?” I asked, since this was the kind of thing I normally did handle for her.

“You’re on vacation.”

“So are you.”

“Which means I’m not a queen right now,” Glory said. “Let me enjoy doing this for myself.”

She invoked the mirror, which brought up a directory of shipboard services.

“Walk-ins welcome… walk-ins welcome… walk-ins welcome… please reflect for availability,” Glory read. “Hmm. Of course, I immediately want the one that doesn’t take walk-ins, but I suppose it’s more of an adventure to walk in?”

“You realize that there might still be a wait,” I said.

“I don’t have anywhere to be.”

“Why do you want to change your hair, anyway?”

“Well, you know… the identical sister thing made for an interesting novelty, but the novelty has been wearing off,” Glory said. “Keeping Grace in her place was essential for her protection in Treehome, but now that we’ve made the break, I think it’s time we started disentangling ourselves from each other. Until last night I had been thinking I would probably suggest that she changes her look when we get back, but I think that might just reinforce our respective positions.”

“That makes sense,” I said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she does change her own look once she realizes she’s been cut loose,” Glory said. “Actually… I will probably have to have a conversation with her so she knows that I’m not expecting her to follow suit.”

“What exactly were you planning on doing, anyway?”

“I’d rather not say just now,” Glory said. “I have a general idea, but I’m not sure how far I want to take it, and I’m afraid if I say it out loud, I’ll either scare myself off of it or wind up committing one hundred percent.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to sound neutral, if not actually supportive. Not that I didn’t support her, in a general sort of way… I just didn’t know what it was that I was supporting.

Glory had the long, straight, wispy hair of elven femmes, so the only thing I could think of was that she was thinking of cutting it shorter, like the women who were trying to land men did. Her talk about what extreme to take it to just made me picture her with a buzz cut, or going completely bald. Neither of those things would have been my pick for her, but it was her hair. As she had pointed out recently, she hadn’t dragged me to a salon to get my hair fixed to her satisfaction. I wasn’t about to complain about how she wanted to wear it, however that was.

Anyway, if she took off too much and didn’t like it, she could certainly afford to have it put back instead of having to wait it out.

“Hmm… I guess while I’m in front of the mirror, I should check in with home,” Glory said. “Oberrad House, Magisterius University, Prax.”

The mirror went into swirly fog while the spell located the destination and found a connected mirror and waited for someone to answer it. It wasn’t swirling for long before the mist coalesced into an image of Amaranth.

“Hey, baby! Hello, Glory,” she said. “How’s everything going there?”

“That was going to be my question for you,” Glory said.

“Well, I’d say it’s been all quiet here, but actually, things have been a little… rambunctious?” she said. “But nothing bad, and no outside threats.”

“…it’s not just one big party, is it?” Glory asked.

“No!” Amaranth said. “Not even several small ones. But Pala has been a little… excitable?”

“Do you mean she’s getting upset, or she’s getting excited in the modern sense of the word?”

“Excited,” Amaranth said. “It’s kind of adorable. She’s having a great time. You know, even if nothing happens… and I really think that might be the case… I think you guys have done a good deed by opening your doors to her.”

“Well, just as long as somebody’s keeping their eyes and ears open, I guess,” Glory said.

“I don’t think anyone could say Pala is neglecting her duties,” Amaranth said. “She is very conscientious about things like watch duty. But to be fair, even if she was doing nothing but standing guard and no one else here was doing that, you still wouldn’t expect her to be the one to detect a group of elven intruders, would you?”

“No, I suppose I wouldn’t,” Glory said. “I don’t begrudge her… or any of you… having a good time, honestly. Or rather, I’m trying not to. I just… I can’t do anything from where I am.”

“I know the feeling,” Amaranth said. “How are you doing, Mack?”

“Really good,” I said. “The whole thing is… well… it’s kind of surreal, but everything’s fantastic.”

“I’m glad,” Amaranth said. “I’ll want full details when you get back, but right now any time you spend telling me about your experiences is time that you’re not having them. Get out there and have some fun… or stay in and have fun. Have fun!”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Goodbye, Amaranth,” Glory said. “Thank you for your help.”

“It’s my pleasure,” Amaranth said, and Glory waved her away.

“Well, I have some good news,” Glory said once the image had faded.

“What’s that?”

“We slept through our breakfast reservation.”

“How is that good news?” I asked.

“It means, dear one, that you get to begin the day by receiving your fondest wish.”

The first class breakfast buffet was everything that description promised. That is, it was definitely a breakfast buffet, and it was definitely first class.

The thing about breakfast buffets is that they’re so easy to do right that it’s hard to imagine a bad one. Yeah, some are better than others, but as long as it’s not just dry pastries and stale cereal, you’ve got a warm, satisfying, filling meal to start the day. So right off the bat, what Glory called my “fondest wish” was really more a matter of knowing that I’d be satisfied. Where she was interested in trying new things and hoping for amazing, I was more inclined to aim for a more reliable decent.

That said… it was pretty amazing. The pastries were far from stale. In fact, we could see them being made in an open prep area behind the case where they were. It was like a bakery counter where everything happened to be free. It wasn’t just doughnuts and bagels, either… they had things I’d never heard of, though fortunately I knew enough Merovian to realize that “pain au chocolat” was less kinky than it sounded or I might have missed out on something incredible.

Even Glory’s skepticism for the whole enterprise diminished somewhat when she realized how much fresh, made-to-order food was actually on offer.

There was a griddle station where pancakes, hash browns, sausage patties, and bacon were all being cooked and plated quickly enough that nothing sat for very long. There was an omelet bar and a waffle station that not only had more toppings than most sundae bars, it had a bunch of different things to mix into the waffles, too.

“You see why I was excited about this, right?” I said once we had our first plates and found a table.

“You were excited because you knew you would be able to get as much bacon and scrambled eggs as you could put down your throat before you got bored of eating,” Glory said.

“Was I wrong about that?” I said. “Meanwhile, you were afraid you wouldn’t be able to eat anything that hadn’t been baking under a sun stone while a parade of snot-ridden children stuck their hands directly into it.”

“Just because I’m on vacation from the monarchy doesn’t mean I appreciate being spoken to like that,” Glory said.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m just saying, though… one of us was right, and one of us was wrong.”

“Well, I’d be lying if I said I’m not actually enjoying this,” Glory said. “Though I’d also be lying if I didn’t say that a large part of that is seeing how much you’re enjoying it.”

“You know, if we ate here every morning, we could sleep in as long as we want every day of the trip.”

“You eat breakfast at the same place every day when school is in session,” Glory said. “Do you really want to do that on your vacation?”

“It’s a different same place,” I said. “It’s a much, much better one.”

“The hardest thing in planning this trip was figuring out which restaurants to book us, knowing that there were only so many meals and far more restaurants available,” Glory said. “That I wasn’t simply picking which restaurants to go to, I was picking which ones to skip… some of them were never in the running, of course. I mean, I’m not going to eat at a chain when it means passing up the opportunity to go to a place I might not ever see again. I made peace with the fact that I can’t do everything I want on this trip… but the idea of eating at the same restaurant even twice when I could have had something different? That’s just too much.”

“I understand that,” I said. “But… I don’t know. Early morning is not the best time for me to be trying something new every day. I like a little predictability… I like to be able to walk in to a situation and know what to expect. I like to have something I can hold onto.”

“You make a good point,” Glory said. “Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, we can have breakfast here every day,” she said.

“Are you serious?”

“Were you kidding about wanting to?”

“…I wasn’t seriously expecting you to give in, and I wouldn’t seriously mind not doing it,” I said.

“But it is seriously something that would make the vacation better for you,” Glory said. “And you’re not wrong about it giving us more flexibility in how we start our days, which gives us more flexibility in how we start our nights.”

“What about your reservations?”

“I’ll see if anybody else in the group wants to take them over,” she said.

“You’re serious?”

“Completely,” Glory said. “I mean, I suppose… well, this place is a bit like a food court. I already made choices about what to get and what not to get, which means that tomorrow I could come back here and make different choices. And even without knowing how much they vary the menu from day to day, I suppose I could eat here every we’re here and still not have everything that I want… so, really, it’s just a case of another set of opportunities.”

“Or you could just go back and get another plate today,” I said. “There’s a reason it’s called all-you-can-eat.”

“Mackenzie… I am very fond of you, but sometimes I don’t think you understand what it’s like to have a stomach that goes somewhere,” Glory said.

“It’s not like I can’t get full,” I said.

“You had three times as much food on your plate as I did,” Glory said. “And if I ate as much eggs and cheese in one day as you have already, we would both be in for an uncomfortable time later, though me more so than you… elf or not, there are limits to the whole ethereal beauty and grace thing.”

“…well, now I’d feel weird about getting more.”

“Oh, don’t,” Glory said. “Like I said, part of the fun for me is watching you enjoy yourself.”

“…oh,” I said, as things kind of fell into place for me.

“Oh, what?”

“Oh, I suddenly understand the point of this trip a lot more,” I said.

“…you didn’t understand why I would want my girlfriend to be within a more convenient sex-having radius than a thousand miles or so during winter break?” Glory asked.

“Not why I’m here, but why… why you’ve been doing things the way you did,” I said. “Like the starlit dinner, and the starlit suit. You’re not just showing off for me, or trying to show me off…”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but if I wanted a lover specifically to show off, you wouldn’t have been top of my list,” Glory said. “I mean, I don’t know if you realize how much of a cachet you do have in my circle, but since my circle really is my circle, that mostly comes down to how much I’m into you to begin with. But still…”

“I’m not objectively that impressive, I know,” I said. “But the clothes you put me in last night were, and I was thinking… well, I hadn’t actually thought about why, because it was neat enough to be distracting. And also because the obvious conclusion was you wanted me to be objectively impressive, or at least to look like someone who was.”

“Well, I mean, that’s nice… but no, it’s not the main reason,” Glory said.

“My reaction was.”

“Yes. Was that not apparent?”

“…maybe it should have been?” I said.

“Or maybe I should have explained,” Glory said. “The more freely others speak with me, the more I find that I often assume my reasoning is transparent when it isn’t… just one of the pesky things about having a rigidly stratified social order, I suppose, is that I never know how often I’m wrong about that sort of thing.”

“I don’t think that’s unique to middling culture,” I said.

“I suppose it wouldn’t be,” Glory said. “Well, anyway, yes… that’s the simple truth. I brought you here so I could see you enjoying yourself. How do you feel about that?”

“Like you definitely made the right move giving in on breakfast.”

“Oh, shut up and get your second plate.”


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32 Responses to “Chapter 277: Mornings Made To Order”

  1. zeel says:

    “You were excited because you knew you would be able to get as much bacon and scrambled eggs as you could put down your throat before you got bored of eating,”

    I wish I had that power. To eat until you get board of it. . . I wounder just how far you can push “all you can eat” before they kick you out?

    Current score: 6
    • Cadnawes says:

      I think they covered that when Mack ate the rib bones. 🙂

      Current score: 9
      • zeel says:

        That was more about the crunching nose than the quantity. “All you can eat” is not the same as “Anything you can eat”.

        Current score: 6
      • Minion says:

        It was Chicken bones that she was munching and crunching in her first real date with Amaranth.

        Current score: 0
        • zeel says:

          In fact, she specifically didn’t eat the ribs because of the sauce on them.

          Though I don’t think I would classify that as a date. Two was with them.

          Current score: 1
    • WsntHere says:

      Took me about 2 1/2 hours on all you can eat crab leg night at Red Lobster 25 years ago. About a month later that ended forever here.

      I’m steadily paying for that kind of excess now….

      Current score: 0
    • OmegaHavok says:

      After using coupons totaling enough to make them pay us to eat there. My family spent 4-5 hour steadily eating at an all you can eat Chinese buffet. They did not actively kick us out but they did stop refilling our drinks after two hours. Most of my family could easily keep up with Mackenzie in how much we can stuff down our throats.

      Current score: 0
  2. Peter says:

    Awwwwwww….

    Current score: 1
  3. Nocker says:

    So elven guts aren’t as limitless as elven stamina. Good trivia to know.

    Current score: 2
  4. Yumi says:

    I’ve been wondering this for a while, but where do you think ththe food Mack eats goes? She has the ability to gain weight, so obviously some of it goes back into her, but she doesn’t generate waste, so what happens to it?
    I’ve always imagined that somewhere down in Demon Land there’s a spot where food that Mack has eaten just drops down into a pile. Occasionally a demon strolling by will pick up a steak or piece of bacon to munch on.

    Current score: 6
    • Nocker says:

      I just assumed it was kind of like a bio incinerator. Mackenzie has MASSIVE amounts of muscle power and mana power that needs to be constantly topped up so a half demon needs an efficient metabolism to compensate.

      Obviously they can go without and just eat their requisite human bits, but that doesn’t seem to be a direct bioalchemical process so much as a more efficient digestion of specific properties in relation to ‘purity'(virginity, childhood, or whatever else works).

      Of course this raises a whole lot of questions, since if Mackenzie can get a months worth of sustenance from one cups worth of human-derived biomaterial, it stands to reason that the human body is also producing some kind of energy greater than one expects(the same components go into necromancy, so it also stands to reason that it’s the parts and not the demon doing the bulk of legwork).

      Of course this is a shaky line of reasoning based on processes we don’t know a whole lot about. A specialist like Bohd could probably explain it better but Mackenzie never really felt the need to pry beyond “I have massive quantities of power, no need to worry about that”.

      Current score: 2
      • zeel says:

        I assume it all simply goes nowhere. The real question is: is there anything a demon can’t eat? If she swollowed a metal ring would it sit in her stomach forever? Things humans can’t digest just. . . pass through. But if her digestive tract appearently goes to nowhere what happens to something she can’t digest?

        Possabilities include:
        She can digest anything (has interesting implications)
        She will puke.
        It will sit in the stomach indefinately.
        It will pass as if through a human body.

        Current score: 4
        • PrometheanSky says:

          Didn’t she vomit the time that she ate the “long pig,” to put it delicately? That would seem to indicate that the nowhere that food goes is at least somewhat tied to her stomach. And her alchemical birth control would have to do more than just go nowhere too…

          I’m just going to file the mechanics of demonic digestion as one of those magic things you don’t poke at too hard.

          Current score: 5
          • LukeLicens says:

            when the general rule of the MUverse is ‘poke the magic too hard, and it will blow up in your face’, poking the digestion magic too hard would be extra gross.

            Current score: 4
        • Nocker says:

          She’s been able to puke from the very earliest chapters, so obviously it’s tied to her body somehow. It was also mentioned that she needs to go to the bathroom so obviously a half demon also passes waste, it’s just something AE never bothered narrating for obvious reasons.

          She also acted like Bohd, another demonblood, would need to modify things like rocks magically if she wanted to eat them, or at least get any kind of nutrition out of the action. So she’s at least human-ish here in that she needs to eat and pass food and nutrition is involved at some point. Her stomach is “mundane”, for want of a better word. I doubt a demon’s stomach is actually that different, boring as it sounds. The original demons were basically just supercharged humans from the same order of creation as ogres and sea wolves, and mundane mortals like the rest of them. Immortality was just tacked on afterwards out of necessity along with a few other little-understood details. I doubt Khersis went to the trouble of adding “and your stomach is a sphere of annihilation” while at it.

          Current score: 0
          • zeel says:

            Yes, the stomach seems to be mundane. We know that for at least a short period things she eats sit in the stomach undergoing fairly standard digestion, and can be expelled if she becomes nauseated. Plus potions and alcohol seem to work normally.

            But at some point between the stomach and rectum the matter stops existing. Unless her body physically changed, we can assume she still possesses all the plumbing – she just doesn’t appear to use it. The same is true of Amaranth, though I assume the details are quite different.

            Current score: 0
            • Gruhl says:

              Transubstantiated into magic power? Also, the extra energy from the virgin blood etc, probably works because the ritual consumption of purity lets them leech energy from some kind of extra-dimensional place, perhaps hell?

              Current score: 1
          • Yumi says:

            To add on to what Zeel said, if you look back to the chapters where she first has anal sex with Steff, I believe there are some references to how she doesn’t deficate.

            Current score: 1
            • zeel says:

              Quite, it is specifically stated that she hasn’t done that since she turned. Something is happening to the matter. Whether it is destroyed, transported, absorbed, or otherwise – it isn’t being digested by conventional means.

              The question then, is what is happening? What are the limitations? And what happens in the event those limits are exceeded?

              Current score: 1
            • Nocker says:

              Huh, I can’t believe I missed that. I think at that point it was presumed that it was because she hadn’t eaten, but even if you’ve been starving your body might occasionally throw out something.

              My first instinct is to think it’s some weird psedudo-divine thing. I recall a longstanding debate to the nature of “do angels defecate”. So it could be something similar to that. Of course demons are pretty clearly distinct from whatever angels exist out there.

              …on the OTHER hand, Khersis did apparently kill the demon god so hard it wiped his name from history, and the demon that spawned Mackenzie seems unusually cagey about his name. Even in the Q&A sessions he got asked point blank and was incredibly cagey on the idea that he had one at all. We also know he’s incredibly old, at least past one thousand. He’s also alluded to the time before the curse as if he was THERE at one or two points, though only in passing.

              This is REALLY out there, but it stands to reason that two figures with similar detailing and backstory might somehow be related. I doubt our man is an actual evil god reincarnate, but I’d bet money that back in the day the actual god and some unknown demon got it on and made their own version of Anankha, or possibly multiple, who got thrown in with the rest. If their progenitor was denied his name they were probably given the same treatment. THEIR progeny would probably also be reasonably hard to detect, given that infernal interference stops a lot of measurement and a half demon is expected to have large amounts of power anyway. This could be the unspecified “pedigree” Mercy is always on about but never gives details to. I usually assumed it was due to human lineage but Martha’s deeds haven’t got many clear details and Laurel’s power was never exactly known to the general public. But if she were trying to breed an army of half demons, adding “spawned from a forgotten god” would probably give her extra bragging rights and a bit of an extra metaphysical KICK.

              Current score: 3
    • erianaiel says:

      I imagine eating for Mackenzie is not a physical process. It is not even a metaphysical process as much as a metamagical one.
      The act of eating is what provides the sustenance, just as the act of intercourse (in all its many varied glorious forms) provides Amaranth with the fertility she needs. And because she is only a single woman and she also is a large field, she needs a lot of fertility every day.
      And because for Mackenzie the substance of the food itself is of (relative) unimportance it can simply go ‘nowhere’ (as in: failing to go anywhere). In fact, given that (half)demons seem to thrive on the destruction of something intangible but precious, it may even be that the destruction of the actual food is what feeds Mackenzie, not some alchemical process as it applies to the merely mortal.
      For elves I’d guess the inverse is true. Not the whole destruction to survive part, but rather that too much food ties them too closely to mortality for a while. They can shed enough of their mortality to not even need to breathe, which strongly suggests the same is true for eating as well.

      Current score: 3
      • zeel says:

        I do believe that is correct. Mackenzie recovers from her hunger rage very quickly once she consumes virgin blood. Clearly the sustaining effect is not a function of digestion. Plus, there have been points where she vomited immediately after consuming virgin blood (and human flesh) – but the effect of the blood persisted even though it was removed from her body prematurely.

        It would seem that merely swallowing the target food is enough to fulfill their need. Everything else is fantastic waste disposal.

        Current score: 2
        • Seth says:

          Another factor to consider is that during her freshman year, Mack’ had managed to gain some weight. That said, she didn’t have the same kind of weight gain one would normally associate with consistently eating 6 times your share of meats and not exercising.

          One more data point – the weight gain occurred before she decided to increase her metaphysical feeding cycle.

          I think it’s plausible that she doesn’t actually need virgin blood, at least not specifically. Virgin Blood just happens to fall under the larger category of things that she can digest. Maybe her actual dietary requirement is something more vague, like “consuming innocence”, and she is unconsciously feeding from other sources.

          Current score: 1
          • Nocker says:

            Well her father also needs blood of a more specific type, and he hasn’t found any good substitutes. Likewise Bohd needs human hair of a very specific type and Sam needed laughter from humans within a specific age range. While it’s possible that substitutes can exist no infernal seems to have a working one or one they can rely on consistently.

            Though it’s worth pointing out Mackenzie DID get a decent amount of exercise. Callahan demands like two hours solid of fighting and that takes it’s toll on a body. By the same merit Mackenzie didn’t experience much muscle gain either so that’s kind of a moot point.

            Current score: 0
          • zeel says:

            When that weight gain occurred Amaranth speculated that her body was (prior to MU) basically always half starved, and her eating meant she would grow into it better. My guess is that Amaranth is right on this one, and that Mackenzie will (has) reach a specific weight and will keep it.

            I doubt that she can feed off of anything but virgin blood – if her grandmother knew anything, it was demons. I have to imagine there is some technique for determining the needs of a demon, and that it’s probably fairly accurate.

            Current score: 0
            • Nocker says:

              You know I can’t help but question exactly what Mackenzie’s physical body is actually DOING.

              She doesn’t need to breathe to survive, and her digestive system seems to may as well not exist after a point very early on in the process. She acts like demon strength is a fixed number that can’t really be modified so her muscles aren’t really contributing. Her skin, teeth, and nails are basically just platforms for an invulnerability bonus as opposed to relying on their own properties to do their usual jobs. Her eyes and other senses are picking up nomundane properties so I doubt they work anything like a humans at least beyond a certain point. Obviously doing damage is enough to kill her, since she has vulnerabilities undead like ghouls don’t and weak points that don’t seem to apply to them, but there’s a question of is that really an inherent thing to her or is the pain just something she’s feeling because she thinks it should be there.

              It almost seems like her body is basically just a platform for magical stuff to work through instead of the thing handling the processes itself. I’m curious as to if this is unique to Mackenzie, her particular genetic line, or half demons and full demons. I’m also curious as to how this plays out in the setting of an afterlife like the infernal plane. Because even if it’s unique to half demons under a specific demon, there’d be dozens of other cases roaming around there.

              Current score: 0
            • zeel says:

              Well pre-curse demons were mundane creatures. I would guess that aside from being a bit stronger, and having slightly better senses they were pretty much identical to humans. Their bodies probably functioned in exactly the same way.

              The curse was a clear case of “cursed with awesome” – sure it ties you to a lower plane, but the power boost is almost worth it. I think the bodies of demons are now primarily symbolic.

              If she had no muscles in her body she would not be able to move no matter how strong her demon blood makes her. Without eyes no vision, no intestines no digestion, no heart and she would die. Not because she needs those physical parts to do something, but because those parts symbolize certain functions, and are therefore a conduit for her infernal power.

              Remember her super dull knife in her enhancement class? She could make it deadly sharp with magic, but the physical knife was just a slightly tapered bit of metal. However without that bit of metal to have the properties of “knife”, it would have been far harder to magically create a cutting implement. Her body I would guess is essentially the same. The eye is a “thing for seeing”, even if the real work is being done by something mystical.

              Current score: 3
    • Trent Baker says:

      I imagine Macks stomach is like a self cleaning oven, what doesn’t get digested is simply broken down into its gaseous form and exhaled.

      Current score: 0
  5. Zathras IX says:

    Keeping on eye on
    The weather while others keep
    A weather eye out

    Current score: 6
  6. Arancaytar says:

    “Mackenzie… I am very fond of you, but sometimes I don’t think you understand what it’s like to have a stomach that goes somewhere,” Glory said.

    Heh.

    Current score: 2
  7. Arancaytar says:

    I brought you here so I could see you enjoying yourself.

    D’awwwww.

    Current score: 2
  8. Nigel says:

    Possible typo:

    “The more freely others speak with me, the more I find that I often assume …

    possibly should be

    “The more freely others speak with me, the more often I find that I assume …

    -unless this is some weird US idiom like ‘I could care less’ meaning the opposite.

    Current score: 0