Prudence and Malice had been talking outside when the others joined them. They had made plans for the next few days, things that Prudence wanted to do before her death and Malice was eager to help with that. The first thing on that list was a very specific dinner, which the two demons easily procured.
After dinner, Malice and Prudence left again. The list of things was long. Meanwhile, Kate and Lizzy took the attic.
“Amelia didn’t want to move a lot of your stuff up here and just keep your room as it was, Michael actually convinced her otherwise.”
Kate looked around the boxes, neatly stacked in one room of the large attic. “I suppose that makes things easier for us now.”
“Well, yes. But it would have been nice to be in your old room with you again.”
“Yea, that would’ve been great.” Kate opened one of the large cardboard boxes. “Still, many memories in one place is fun in a way. Oh hey, our chess set!”
“Your chess set.”
“I’d rather remember it as ours. Unless you want to put it up somewhere, I will take it with me and put it in my living room.”
Lizzy smiled. “It will look good there, no doubt. Do demons play games? Maybe it will get some actual use.”
“Something with so little... well, expressiveness like chess isn’t a thing demons like to play. But we do play a lot of games, card games, board games, sword games. Friendly competition is quite the big thing in Hell.”
“Sword games?”
“Fencing and stuff like that.”
“Ah, right, Amelia had mentioned that.”
“It’s great fun, better than tennis… mainly for the sultry stares and romantic wall shoving.”
Lizzy giggled. “Why am I not surprised. That means your little transformation also healed everything from the accident?”
“That even happened a bit before I changed, but that’s a long story for another day.”
“That’s very good news.”
“So much has changed over the last few years, I’m glad I can share it with you now.”
“I do actually wonder…” Lizzy opened another box to reveal a collection of books. “What was that decision like? I know some guy tried to harass you, Amelia has told me that much, but that wasn’t why you became demon, right? Still a crazy thing to say… and see.” She put the box aside and opened another.
“The horns and tail aren’t thing you see every day?” Kate chuckled. “To actually answer your question, the decision was remarkably easy. I was shown a set of possible futures, a gift from a now good friend, and the only futures I hated were the ones I stayed human. That one wasn’t a bad future, but it just hurt to see. Even in the supposedly worst future, where I turned out to be a rather bloodthirsty revenge-driven monster, I was a demon. I might not have changed so early after being given the option if it wasn’t for the things that happened to me, like Henry or Arakiel’s attempt to kill me.”
“Wait, hold on.” Lizzy interrupted as she set another box of books aside. “Someone tried to kill you?”
“Yes, Arakiel tried to kill me to some sort of twisted revenge on a friend. Bear with me, this is a bit of a long one.”
“I’m listening.”
“There were wars between the demons and the angels a very long time ago. A friend of mine, one of the librarians, was the leader of Hell’s armies during the first two wars, and apparently she beat an angel called Arakiel during them a few times. He wanted to get his revenge on her during the third war, but she didn’t participate in that one. Somehow, he figured out that I was getting involved with the librarians and figured that killing me would hurt my friend so badly that she would seek him out and finally allow him to get his rematch. An idiotic plan, frankly. Anyway, he eventually ambushed me, severely injured another friend, injured me, and got himself killed. The friend he wanted to get revenge on, my closest demonic friend still, made it clear that she would prefer that I wouldn’t leave Hell as a human anymore, and I agreed. She nearly lost me that day and I didn’t want to hurt her by dying. Demons are immortal, fully immortal, we can never die even when our bodies become unusable, we just wake up in a new one. And I know that if I had died, she would have carried that pain with her for the rest of eternity, blaming herself for not protecting me better. So, I let her turn me into a demon.”
“That’s quite the story. I’m glad that angel didn’t kill you. Makes me think actually, you having told me about how you became a demon, knowing that Prudence will die in a few days, I wonder what I would choose.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good line of thought.” Kate grimaced. “There is much there that is tempting to tell you, that I am not allowed to. And I don’t even know if you could be a demon. Not every human can be, it needs a special mind to be ready to exist eternally. I mean, I will be here when humanity has died out and when the sun dies and eventually when this entire universe flickers out. And after that, I will still not have even scratched the true length of eternity. I was told that most humans can’t withstand that and I agree. Just look at sand mandalas, they get their meaning from being a fleeting thing, from being destroyed and not existing anymore. Mandalas hurt me. I can’t deal with that impermanence, with things being gone, I never could.”
“Hm. That makes me even more thoughtful about it. But that’s not why we went up here, is it?”
“No, it isn’t. But I want you to know that if you could be a demon, I wouldn’t hesitate to ask you to join us. Now… let’s see what we have here.” Kate opened another box. “Look, I found the wood castle we played with!”
“A good time. Want to take it with you too?”
“Unless you want it.”
“Depends, where would you put it?”
“A shelf either in my living room or the reading nook. There are important memories in this that I don’t want to just burry in a box somewhere.”
“Important memories like crying in my arms when you broke the little tower and me glueing it back together. I told you to imagine it was a crack in the wall from when the dragon attacked and the knights successfully defended their home.”
Kate rang her ringers along the crack in the castle. “Do we still have that dragon?”
“Of course. Should be with the knights in the small box under the castle.”
“Very good, wouldn’t want to leave that poor guy behind.”
“You can just take everything with you, you know.”
“Yea, but I don’t know if I can or want to keep everything. The stuff that brings back memories is important, but I’m sure there are things here I totally forgot about.”
“I suppose you want to keep all the books?”
“Absolutely! The books are… special. There is a thing about books that I haven’t really understood yet. I don’t know how it works or why, but emotions sort of cling to them. When I open a book that was read before, I can feel what the reader, or many readers, have felt. This also works when it’s my emotions from reading it in the past. Or in the case of these books: our emotions.”
“I would want to keep them safe too if I could do that. What about the plushies?”
“There isn’t a demon who doesn’t love plushies, those are coming with me too. Of course, unless there is one you want to keep.”
“You know what? Yes, I want to keep one. Remember when you were maybe five or six years old and whenever I had a bad day you gave me that bear?”
“Sir Bearington, yes. I’ll even enchant the little guy for you, so he remains as cuddly as he is forever and can never get lost.”
“Ah the perks of knowing a magic being, thank you.”
“We just need to find him.”
“He will be with the other plushies. I think it was the box on top of the one with the posters.”
“Mum kept the posters?”
Lizzy nodded. “Made sure every single one was taken off the walls without a single tear or scratch, all rolled up nicely and stored properly.”
“I might have to frame those. Or at least show them to Polly.”
“Polly?”
“Apollyon. The close demon friend I told you about earlier. I’m sure she would love seeing stuff from my childhood.”
“And I would love seeing her.”
“I’ll introduce you two when you visit my new home. Did you also save the postcard?”
“Every single one of them, including the signed one.”
“In its original frame?”
“Of course. That little notch at the bottom adds character.”
“Perfect! I need to put that on my desk. Maybe get a new postcard and go to one of those book conventions again, get the signatures from the authors I didn’t get back then.”
“You should do that as long as the authors you loved back then still live. Some of them are in their seventies now.”
“Yea… humans are so fleeting. Anyway, let’s find Sir Bearington before we worry about all that.”
Memories indeed
Something solved like chess isn’t a thing demons like to play.
Don't let a chess fanatic hear you say that, you'll get savaged
Chess is definitely not a solved game, not even close. The key space is so massive that every game played should be unique unless intentionally replicating one. Even non-trivial board states tend to be unique due to the number of possible states you can reach after just a dozen moves.
taken of the walls
Off
Did you also save the postcard?
This question doesn't agree with the plurality of the answer... She asks about the postcard, Lizzy responds "every single one". I'm not sure if it's an error since that depends on Kate's intent
Maybe get a new postcard and go on one of those book conventions again, get the signatures from the authors I didn’t get back then.
That feels like a definite mismatch. "Go on [...] conventions" doesn't make sense, they're something you go "to" not "on"... Or there's a word missing like "tour" or "holiday" to attach the "on" to a journey.
While chess is a game that can be played in many permutations, it is a game that if played long enough will have a distinct best play pattern. The mere existence, no matter if humans have found it or not, of an objectively best line of play makes it uninteresting for the demons. Of course, you could argue that most trading card games also have a best deck or best strategy, but unlike the chess there is an inherent randomness to it. This isn't the only issue demons have with chess, but that will be a topic for when we get some older demons commenting on the board.
The postcard question and answer are meant as a "did you save the one you know is important to me?" "Yes, we actually saved all of your postcards, including the one you are asking about.". So that is entirely intentional.
And once more English as second language becomes a problem. In German, going "on" a convention would be the correct thing, like going "on" a funeral or "on" a birthday party. Fixed, of course.
The "off" mistake is also fixed. The off/of thing is just one of those idiotic English things that make no sense to me.
On a much more positive note: both Kate and Apollyon will get to reminisce some more in the future. It's not just (hopefully) interesting stuff, it's also just fun to write.
@Velhari nope nope. Ok, I'mma go lecturey for a minute.
"Solved Game" as a term has a specific definition, a game that the outcome can be correctly predicted from a position, assuming the players can play correctly. It's mathematical game theory. The problem is that you need a fairly extensive proof there isn't a better set of moves or that you can force the ones you have, which turns out to be kind of a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess is clear on why, there's just too many options when you have to start using numbers above 10^40. My usual go to for conveying the practical problems with numbers this high is to find other numbers in the same kind of ball park... so here's a set of 3 numbers:
The number of bacterial cells on Earth is estimated at 5 × 10^30. The proven upper bound for the number of chess positions allowed according to the rules of chess is 4.52×10^46. The estimated number of atoms on Earth is 1.33×10^50.
Consider the difficulty not of finding the best play pattern, or of finding an optimal strategy, but rather that of constructing a sequence of moves for one side that always has the same outcome regardless of what the other side plays. Consider white knowing the strategy black plans to play and selecting a set of moves that will win against that strategy, which leads to black changing to a response that counters that set, and then white countering the counter and so on. If every pattern and strategy has a counter, the game becomes an exercise in determining intent and countering them. Beyond randomness, or TCGs not being perfect information games, it's the pure number of possible counter plays that can be made by a capable strategist.
It's quite possible that there is no sequence of moves that would allow a player to force a given outcome, simply due to any such sequence being possible to counter before it can be played out to a point where it can be forced. If anything, the demons should be interesting because once you take away the computational difficulty for a human to evaluate and predict the game state it becomes a game of psychology, the skill and unknown being what's in your opponent's head. It's functionally the same problem as sword fighting, is there an attack a combatant can take that an equally capable opponent can't counter if they know it's coming?
Anyway, lecture over
"On" is weird... those are things you'd attend, so I guess it's being "on" the activity of participating? English treats those words purely as events/locations, hence the need to go "to" a place.
"Of" is possessive/subset (the King of England; the Crown of the King) while "Off" is a removal/separation (take clothes off; fell off my horse). Why one letter difference? Bugger knows.
@Kaithar I originally spent an hour typing out a partial disagreement with your lecture, going over mathematical solvability, the actual infinite availability of time in Hell, and the logistical troubles of solving chess. But in the end, I feel that was missing the point. What Kate said just didn't get the right thing across. That sentence was mainly a throwaway shorthand that demons don't like games like chess while giving a vague enough reason to elaborate on that further once Lizzy and Apollyon meet. I think it is obvious that I failed in writing it that way.
That just leaves the problem of how to fix that. Would you agree that "It lacks the expressiveness that demons enjoy" is a better way to give a vague statement to build on in a later chapter?
As for the "on", you are entirely correct. German treats locations and events mostly consistently there. You go "to" a restaurant, but "on" a dinner party. Most of those mistakes, same with the of/off thing, slip in because my brain eventually begins to autocorrect the meaning of the sentence without actually seeing the word. In that flow, "of" and "off" are interchangeable, even though the obviously aren't, because they are the same word in German. Both are mainly translated as "von". It's the same issues with "before" and "until". That's the kind of mistake I truly hate making and it slips in annoyingly often.
@Velhari mm
The infinite time aspect does mean Hell could potentially brute-force a lot of problems but that still has some limits. If approaching it from a matter of having computation time, it's still looking like millions of years to play a game out, possible but not helpful really. Assuming an approach of building a reference table instead, that runs into a problem of data storage that makes the Library's magic look trivial... I'd guess the lower bound for solving chess, even assuming magic compression/storage, would be a data store the size of the solar system and still require hundreds of millions of years to calculate. That also doesn't cover the complexity of the computer needed. My point there is that the amount of time available isn't the same as how long ago they started solving the problem.
If it's apparently lower level of expressiveness, that could be interesting. I can definitely see how they'd see it that way... it'd probably be the same when I'm playing, but that's more a skill issue of me. Many players, especially pros, do express their personality through their play but it's like the expressiveness of math, it seems like it's a particular neuro-atypical trait. I was hoping to find an example of it in pros but I quickly found this instead... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_therapy
I guess the obvious issue is that the expression is in the game play and not in the pieces?
@Kaithar That would be spoiler territory, but you are certainly onto something.
Chess would certainly scratch the itch of strategic expression, but it lacks, to use a TCG term, flavour. Knight to F3 is too clinical. The knight is replaceable by any other, demons would want a connection to their pieces that isn't there. And the move to F3 is too deeply abstracted, the knight isn't moving across actual territory or induces any sort of reaction outside of a purely mechanical consideration. Of course, at pro level TCGs face the same problem, but for most players, speaking in Magic the Gathering terms, there is an emotional difference between being beaten by an Emrakul the Aeons Torn and being murdered by fifteen squirrels, despite them both dealing 15 damage.
Demons also enjoy that expression during setup quite thoroughly. Chess, being always setup the same, lacks a lot (but certainly not all) of that joy of building something or preparing a new way to face an opponent that fiddling with your TCG deck would bring. In the same vein, chess gives both players the same pieces, your "armies" are the same, where demons would want some form of customization. In terms of tabletop strategy game, something like Warhammer might be more up their alley.
Someone like Apollyon might find entertainment in the occasional game of chess, but after a while that itch for bringing in a more obvious personal touch would overshadow the tactical fun.
Going over my original notes about demons and games from the first book, there was an idea that didn't get implemented. Nirrti was supposed to complain about there being some cards that are strictly better than others and that that stifles expression to a certain degree. I think that can be applied to chess as well, some moves are strictly better than others depending on situation. But like with the original complaint by Nirrti, I don't think I want to open that specific can of worms.
@Velhari
interesting... I can see that, yes. It would be interesting see them considering ideas of how it could be made more suitable for their tastes... it wouldn't fly in human chess matches but I could definitely see them having the idea to make it "bring your own pieces" in the same way people customise their tabletop minis. 
@Kaithar Might even be a demonic game already, like a Chess board with Warhammer minis. Just with 100% more Hell flavour.