The drive to the pizzeria, drive from the pizzeria to our place, and eating the pizza were spent mostly in silence, partly because everybody was hungry and a little tired, but also because there was no way we’d have a comfortable conversation with demon Mom needing to sit with her head bent waaaay to the side in order to not stab her horns into the car ceiling.

Apparently, she couldn’t hide her horns and tails like she’d done before because the way she did that was by bending the space they took up into the fourth dimension… somehow.

I was unsure of her limits of powers or the practicality of her methods, but upon hearing it, aunt Cristina ended up sending her a link to a pdf of an ‘Introduction to Transformation Magic’ brochure, which at first excited me because transformation magic was fun, but then I realized that my body already was exactly the way I wanted it, which turned it a little scary in my head.

Another thing was that aunt Cristina didn’t actually hate me or anything, she simply wasn’t really in contact with any of her family, so being referred to with a familial term spooked her a little.

And, like, demon Mom had cut all her ties with her family as soon as she could, and the only person knight Mom knew from her family was her mom, who had also kinda cut us off on account of the whole ‘trying to murder me’ thing, so I liked to think I understood at least a little.

Either way, we have eventually made it to the conversation time, or at least I have, on account of having eaten enough to be full first.

“I usually can eat more than that…” I mumbled.

“Sorry, being all tiny can’t be all good.” Lottie smiled.

I tilted my head to the side.

“What do you mean? This is great news! It means I can stretch my pizza for more meals now! More pizza per pizza!!!” I exclaimed.

“I guess that’s one way to see it… Most people don’t care that much for reheated pizza,” Lottie responded.

I considered tilting my head more, before realizing that’d be silly and tilting it to the other side instead.

“Reheated?” I asked.

“She doesn’t like microwaved food,” demon Mom explained.

Wasn’t that normal? Microwaved leftovers were weird and inconsistent and way too dry.

At that point, pretty much everyone seemed to have stopped eating.

I knew it was me being weird, but it felt nice not being the person who ate the most food…

Knight Mom clapped her hands to get our attention.

“Alright girls, that’s enough for now, we have three very important topics to address. First of them…” She turned to look at demon Mom. “Why is my wife friends with a fed?”

Demon Mom sputtered a bit.

“I… Cristina is not a fed, she’s not that kind of detective, and besides, I’m pretty sure she’s a contractor these days, so, like, more of a private investigator that’s being employed by the government. And sure, she can call in feds if it’s necessary, but I’m pretty sure the only reason she took a case where she had to actively work with them was because she knew I was involved,” she explained in a rush.

Knight Mom raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, that sounds… mostly like lots of excuses, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt… But also, you’ve known her for longer than we’ve been married, how did that even happen?” she asked.

“That’s… explaining from the start is probably the best way to do this anyways, you’re right. So, it started with the previous Demon Queen – she wasn’t exactly a perfect person. Sure, she meant well and all, but some of the things she did, and some of the alliances she made in service of her goals were… questionable at best. The alliances especially, they’re what started the whole thing – a bit after I started my activities, they caught wind of the fact that the Demon Queen was back, and most of them were… grown ass adult men who were rather creepy to me. And, well, since I didn’t really realize what this all meant about me, I just saw them acting like that towards who they perceived as a sixteen year old girl, and, well… I was naive back then, barely realizing how the world worked, so I just sort of… dropped each of them at the police station as they approached me.

“That, of course, did not work for a number of reasons, but it did attract attention. Not enough attention to actually do anything serious about me, but someone at the government decided my case needed to be investigated, and so they sent over Cristina. She was still very new to things back then, obviously, she’s only seven years older than me, but regardless, she had the skills, and so she eventually just found me after one of our fights, and confronted me. I had only recently realized the identity of the Magical Knight I was fighting, and so I was not exactly the most confident, and I kinda just ended up deciding to tell the ‘scary government lady’ everything… I ended up untransforming at some point in that, and she took me to a near-empty fast food joint to get the rest of the story. Let me tell you, I was so scared that she was going to, like, send me to a juvie, or even just to jail or something, but instead she just laughed, patted be on the back and said I was a ‘good kid’, which, of course, I found to be an offensive lie at the time, but in retrospect, I had to admit she’d been right…

“And so, she ended up being assigned to my case for good, and that included being assigned to the Magical Knight case, but she’d decided that confronting only one of us was enough, and that it was one of those cases where the government would be the best just letting it happen and observing… I have no clue how that’s decided, but it’s apparently a real procedure. And, well, she ended up helping me out a lot over the years, and when it was all over, I was eighteen, she’d decided to invite me to a bar, and somehow, that became a thing… She still gets really frustrated when they mix up her beer orders with my fruity drinks, but I guess now that I’ve decided to be honest with myself, I’m not turning back unless it’s necessary, so it won’t be a problem anymore…” she ended up sounding sentimental by the end.

Knight Mom sighed deeply.

“That’s… Okay, this is much better than I expected, and I have to admit that having people who actually make rational decisions have influence over what the feds do is better than just letting them cause problems on their own… But also, fuck, I had no idea that we even had a government case like that, though I guess it was naive for me to think we didn’t…” she admitted.

“Don’t worry, if it wasn’t for me having met Cristina, I wouldn’t have thought we had one either…” demon Mom responded with her own admission.

“Okay, so, if that was the first topic, I’m pretty sure I know what the other two are, and I’m gonna be honest, I have no idea which one is better to address first, given the whole…” Lottie said, finishing with gesturing wildly in my direction.

The way we’d ended up sitting left me and Lottie on the couch, and my Moms together opposite of us on the comfy armchairs that for once could show off their cool function of having detachable armrests for the purpose of attaching the two together to turn into a mini-sofa.

“Did I do something wrong?” I asked, not really targeting anyone.

“No sweetie, you didn’t…” knight Mom started. “But with the way you’ve been acting… Are you sure you’re okay? You said you were corrupted, but it doesn’t make any sense…”

I looked down, thinking it over for a moment.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. I sort of reached my limit, and then I transformed in a brilliant explosion of dark energy, corrupting myself while destroying my body to reveal my true form, and also turning me into a girl, probably because I always wanted to be a girl even though I never said anything because I knew there was something wrong with me and I didn’t want anyone to be mad at me… Why?” I tilted my head to the side innocently.

Demon Mom groaned and dropped her face into her hands.

“Aaaaa, I regret my life choiceeeeees…”

Knight Mom proceeded to pat her on the back.

“There there, sweetie, it’s partly my fault too…” she added. “That’s the next topic though… It just doesn’t make any sense, corruption is a side effect of having dark energy in one’s system, which I’m pretty sure someone with your powers should be immune to in the first place, and you have literally none right now, so how can you be corrupted right now?”

So that’s how it worked? I had to admit I had no clue about any of this, I just intuitively knew what had happened to me…

“That’s because she’s not corrupted in the way you know,” demon Mom explained. “There’s actually two ways to corrupt people – there’s the way you know of, where the dark energy actively blocks one’s inhibitions, and when it’s removed, they return to normal, and there’s the… permanent corruption, where someone’s capacity to hold dark energy is pushed to its limit and then surpassed, which causes the dark energy holding the inhibitions to surge, essentially burning them out. It’s not something even the Demon Queen is immune to, and no Demon Queen has done it to anyone for ages… probably literal ones, at this point. It’d be cruel to do something like that on purpose to someone, at least not without doing it to everyone at once, and, well… It’s not impossible to develop ways to inhibit oneself again, but it’s practically starting from scratch, so it’ll take years…”

“That sounds… really fucking bad, if I’m being honest,” Lottie responded.

Did it? Being honest, not needing to worry about being too ashamed to act like I wanted, felt nice.

“That’s true, but I have a reason to suspect it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds in this case, and we can do a simple test right now,” demon Mom explained, before addressing me directly. “Honey, can you do something for me? Close your eyes and try to imagine the wildest thing that you would have never done before today that you want to do right now. Don’t worry, if it’s really bad, we’ll stop you.”

Given I had thought that I was an evil person until an hour or so prior, and the fact that those thought patterns hadn’t just magically disappeared like my inhibitions did, I should have been more concerned, but somehow, all that I could think was that she was blowing this way out of proportion.

Regardless, I decided to humor her, and did as she asked, and sure enough, the thought came to me very quickly, and I instantly knew that I wouldn’t come up with anything more evil or more tempting than that. I’d tried resisting, after all, I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone, especially Lottie, but after the way she’d hugged me earlier, the sweet temptation was simply too much.

I opened my eyes, staring straight forward without focus, and very awkwardly tilting my body to the left until my head landed on Lottie’s shoulder.

Complete silence fell for a couple seconds as everyone looked at me, doubtlessly shocked by the depravity of my act, until I finally came to my senses and straightened myself back up.

“Eeeep! Imsorryimsorryimsorryimso–” I squeaked out towards Lottie, before she reached around my shoulders with her surprisingly still strong arm and pulled me back to the position I had forced upon her.

“Soooo… I wasn’t expecting anything even remotely evil, and I’m still disappointed with how tame that was, what’s up with that?” she asked as she held me in place.

“Not evil!? I literally forced my touch on you without your consent, how is that not evil?!?” I shouted.

Instead of dignifying me with a response, she simply rolled her eyes and then squeezed her hand around my shoulder a little.

Both my Moms chuckled, clearly also disrespecting my evil deeds.

“Okay, that about confirms it,” demon Mom stated. “I didn’t understand at first, why she was generating so little dark energy, and why it caused so much trouble to begin with, but now I get it. People don’t all respond to dark energy with the same magnitude, the personal capacity, emission rate, as well as, apparently in our case, generation rate, varies person by person. It’s a bit hard to explain, but, for example, a person who is inhibiting themself from being a violent criminal will have much higher dark energy capacity than someone who’s inhibiting themself from being more honest. I didn’t think I had to hurry managing it in this case because for me, it would take a year, maybe more to generate enough dark energy to reach my limit, and she was generating much less than me. I never would have thought that her dark energy capacity, despite being raised by being the kind of demon we are and not a human, would still be so dramatically low that she would reach her limit in literally just a week while generating practically nothing.”

I had a basic idea of what that meant, and I did not like it at all.

“So, what you’re telling us, is that our little Demon Princess is the sweetest of sweeties, a precious bean literally too pure for this world, so while she is corrupted, it’s basically not a big deal because she’s literally never even going to dream about doing anything bad?” Lottie asked.

Betrayal!!! >.<

“I mean, I’m sure it’ll cause some problems for her in everyday life, but besides that… Yeah, basically,” demon Mom confirmed.

“Fucked up…” I mumbled. “Can’t even hate myself in peace in this economy…”

Rainbow

She's so evil is the thing, way too evil to be an adorable little bean too pure for this world, and yet, she manages! Truly, the multitasker of the century!

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