The reason humans are such easy prey for all demons is that humans have a wicked disadvantage: language. Language is indeed their greatest asset in every other respect. Through language, humans were able to synthesize and communicate ideas, and everything else that has defined them as the dominant species on this planet came after that. Language itself comes from thought, and thought comes from the soul. (This is where the idea of prayer originated.) Humans can’t hear what transpires on the metaphysical plane, but demons can. Demons know your deepest desires if they are consciously expressed, even within the mind, because they are the truth known by the soul.
Forgive me for citing the previous tale, but I neglected to mention that the grimoire known as the Orrery didn’t always belong to Astaroth. In fact, its original owner was the Apokomistis Sitri. Astaroth only acquired it after she won it from Sitri, and he was forced to tender it or accept the consequences of her wrath.
Astaroth and Sitri weren’t necessarily partners in the sense of the typical demon partnership, but they definitely had an unusual bond. Over the course of two angelic generations—a generation is 2,058 years—they enjoyed a competitive relationship based upon the completion of specific wagers. Sitri issued the first wager, and it went on until he met his demise in 1967 at the hands of a Seraph named Zahar. The form of each wager was, “I’ll give you x-object if you can complete y-task over z-period, and I’ll bet you that you can’t.” Sometimes the objects were actual objects, like the Orrery, or money, and other times it involved the surrender of things like territories or Nekus or human souls. Sometimes the time frame given to accomplish a task took days, but one wager took 417 years to complete (which was rather impressive, considering that she’d had another 97 years to manage it). Astaroth and Sitri operated under the administration of a loose set of rules that evolved over time, the two most important rules being that, one—they had to submit to a third party’s judgment to rule that the wager had been completed successfully, and two—if the task wasn’t completed within the period stated in the initial wager, no gifts were exchanged. Occasionally it was a means for one demon to get the other to take care of dirty laundry, but most of the time they were assigned with a morbid sense of fun in mind.
Astaroth, Sitri and the Apokomistis Svipul met up in San Francisco on June 4, 1936. Svipul’s judgment was needed to finalize the completion of the bet—Astaroth had to procure a blood pact for the souls of both a mother and her infant daughter—and she ruled in favor of Astaroth. Sitri reluctantly handed over the deed to a building he owned under an alias in London, and Astaroth suggested that they take a stroll to through the streets to help her decide on a new bet upon which to set Sitri. They hadn’t gotten very far when Astaroth spotted a new target on account of his thoughts: his name was Thomas Carver, aged 23, and as he was passing by the triumvirate of demons out for a walk, he had the misfortune of thinking, There’s always hope.
All three demons heard his thought ring like a galaxy-wide broadcast. Astaroth then turned to Sitri and said, “I’ll give you back this deed to your favorite London property if you can permanently destroy Thomas Carver’s opinion about hope over the next twenty-four hours, because I’m absolutely certain that you can’t.”
Dominus tecum.