A Disconcerting Procession of Demons

I mentioned some time ago, that I knew someone I thought might be an incubus.  He's no worry now since he's now in Turkey to study bears.  I also mentioned near the middle of last December that I literally had a roommate from Hell.  It turns out that demonic roommates have been somewhat of a trend since I got to college.

My first roommate was human.  A bit of a redneck, but not an idiot (which is nothing to bemoan, speaking as an Arkansas native).  About two weeks in to the first semester of freshman year, he made a friend and wanted to switch rooms.  The Housing office at our school screwed me over and, despite my protests, I was stuck with the other guy's roommate.

He was a nice guy.  He was also one of those people who seems to smell funny (and sort of unpleasant to me) all the time.  Which doesn't make sense since he was an almost painfully clean individual.  Now I'm not going to call him a demon, per se, but he struck me like a river spirit with junk in the trunk (if you'll pardon the Miyazaki pun).  He displayed a metanormal nature in that he seems to amplify the tendency of things to equalize.  Things neither failed nor resoundingly succeeded in his presence.  We got on amicably for a the rest of the year.

I didn't have such luck after that.

The next year, I ended up with a self-avowed bipolar redneck who liked to show me his "skinnin' knives".  Not a bad guy, but something struck me as wrong about him.  A little testing and research and I found out what it was.  It seems that my third roommate was a lower-level demonic entity attached to the slaughter of animals.  I doesn't do to ward against your roommate, so I changed rooms at semester.

The fourth guy was a ghost.  Figuratively.  I never met him, so I can't vouch for his nature.  The fifth I have already detailed in a previous post and have no desire to relive that experience now.  That brings me to the latest and (not-so-)greatest.

He claimed to be 34, living in the dorms.  It didn't take long for me to have suspicions, but longer for me to act on them.  It turns out he, like the one I met last semester, is an incubus.  And he liked little girls.  I finally acted on it when I walked in on him accessing certain content on the Glorious Series of Tubes.  The Police were notified and they got working pretty quickly on the matter.  Still, there was the matter that he was a demon to deal with.  It took some work, but some silver chains (silver screws with just about everything but the Fae (which begs the question of what I am again)) and a strange Hebrew incantation later, he was arrestable (and will continue to be so until the designated authorities (in this case, the Police) release him from custody).  I hate working proper magic, but a seal-and-binding was necessary to prevent loss of human life.

Back to topic (or tl;dr, as it were): all my roommates are demons!

I'm SO getting single next year.

Machine Elves and a Thought About Zombies

First, thankfully the Machine Elves have stopped screaming.  They quit about 2 AM this morning.  I really hope there wasn't too much damage.

The other thing.  I was just wondering why people assume that if zombies appear or (heaven forbid) there is a "zombie apocalypse", it will be some kind of disease.  I'm not a biology major, but I was kind of working under the assumption that when a disease kills its host, it dies too.  So how would a disease reanimate a formerly (debatably) intelligent creature into a rabid cannibalistic undead monster?  I can see brain damage reducing them to that state, but the reanimation itself is just too far fetched.  Heck, if the blood isn't flowing they shouldn't even be able to move!  It's called "rigor".  Human+Virus+Death=Alive because Screw you biology!

Now necromancy, that I know of.  I have seen on more than one occasion corpses raised to do the bidding of necromancers.  They prove delightfully vulnerable to fire and that is indeed the only way to actually kill them.  Of course since they're just puppets, you also don't have to deal with that "I'm rabid and I hunger for the flesh of the living" thing.  With magic it's possible.

So, regarding this rant anyway, "Magic good, biology bad."

Fairy Tales

I was going through some of my old storybooks this morning while packing up to head back to school.  I found lots of old stories with surprisingly harrowing events.  (My parents had good taste in picking books of legends and fairy tales.)  I know the Victorian Age and later Disney really sanitized the way we look at these things, but really they're incredibly dark.  And they taught us valuable lessons.  If you go looking for fear, it'll find you. (The Boy Who Found Fear At Last)  Don't trust strangers and don't get in bed with strange people. They'll eat you. (Little Red Riding Hood)   I suppose that darkness makes sense, though.  These stories were meant to protect us.  And not just in mundane ways as I said in an earlier rant.

I don't want a fairytale wedding.

Stephanie Meyer just made my list.

If I have to save one more fourteen-year-old girl from a four hundred-year-old vampire I think I'm going to have to do something terrible to the woman. I mean, it's always been bad. Ever since Interview With a Vampire, this cultural image of vampires as sex gods has become worse and worse.

People used to be afraid of the bloodsucking freaks. Then they thought, "Well, they're monsters, but they're less scary when they're channeling their inner beast into being sensual and passionate." (Damn you Anne Rice!) That was something that could be dealt with. People still knew they were monsters. Now the popular image is something along the lines of a "sparkly twenty-something cute vegetarian boy with pale skin". Oh yeah, and statutory rape laws don't apply to them.

Our old legends and stories existed to protect the people who had never met one face-to-face. Now they're just saying "It's okay to play with fire. It can't burn you; it just wants to sexually pleasure you!"

And people believe it.