Delilah Goes To Yomi

Prologue

Delilah in the media.

"D-don't eat me!"

The Daemon gave Delilah an offended look. "Even if I had a taste for human flesh, which I don't believe me, honey, I don't want his junkie ass." She spoke in the feminine version of that deep rumble special effects people were always putting on people to make them sound "Satanic", sort of like James Earl Jones with a smoker's rasp.

Up until the point Damien pulled a knife on the Daemon, Delilah thought the young Japanese woman at the counter-pretty but bland in that way that Japanese women in their early-to-mid-twenties stereotypically were a human. That was until she snapped his neck. At least, that's what Delilah figured happened, it was all a blur. One minute, he was pulling a knife on this woman, the next he was on the floor, head twisted at an odd angle, a look of surprise on his face.

Delilah looked down at the corpse of Damien, his neck at an odd angle. Granted, he had been a shit boyfriend, dragging her to this hole-in-the-wall tattoo parlor at midnight with threats of violence if she objected, but she felt honor-bound to defend him regardless.

"He isn't-" Delilah sputtered.

The Daemon had quickly transformed, Incredible Hulk-style, from the pretty-but-bland Japanese girl to the most stunningly beautiful, yet inhuman creature she'd ever seen. The petite girl grew at least ten inches, her pale skin became snow-white, her hair-a shoulder length brownish-black in her human form-became ombre, going from jet black at the crown, bright red in the middle, and light pink on the tips,  dreadlocked then piled in a messy bun on her head. Her stick figure became curvaceous and lush. Her brown eyes became solid black, with only an electric white pupil in the center to accentuate the black. Delilah had noticed coming in that her clothes had looked like a child putting on her mother's clothes for dress up, seeing how tight-fitting they were now, she now understood why.

Her beautiful heart-shaped face, accentuated by a cupid's bow mouth that looked like it had been Chelsea Grinned with a piece of jagged glass, grimaced, exposing sharp, jagged crocodile teeth.

Overall, it gave off the impression of a Venus fly trap in human form: beautiful, but don't get too close.

With surprising grace for a woman of her size, the Daemon leaped over the counter, landing over the corpse of her now-deceased boyfriend and landing a few feet over.

Damien had been wearing a battered trench coat when they'd come in, and her new companion lifted one sleeve and raised his arm, looking at Delilah with a raised eyebrow.

Damien's arm had track marks all over it.

"We get a lot of addicts," her new companion explained. "Believe me, I know quite well what dope sickness looks like." She inspected the arm. "Looks like a careless junkie too, he kept going for the main vein. Don't feel bad, my murder of him is a mercy kill." She then dropped the arm.

A part of Delilah felt indignant that this woman would say that about her man, but it was quickly quashed.

"Huge asshole, huh?" The Daemon asked nonchalantly.

"That obvious?"

"Oh! Where are my manners?" the Daemon said, extending a clawed hand the size of an oven mitt. "Tomiko no-Izanami. Call me Tommie for short."

------------------------------------------

"Are you sure it's ok to leave him like this?" Delilah asked nervously as they walked out of the tattoo parlor, her new friend Tommie changing back into her Plain Jane form, rolling up her sleeves and cuffing her pants several times.

"Wish human clothing companies accommodated people like me," she grumbled, before adding, "This place is in a horrible neighborhood and the boss is known to sell beat drugs out of his office. I'm pretty sure the reason he asked me to do a late-night shift alone was a setup to get me raped or murdered by one of his angry clients. The form you see here is the glamourie I take on when I don't want to be noticed." Delilah remembered vaguely from what she knew of the Avalonian Nation gleaned from things that Daemons were known for their abilities to put on and off glamouries, elaborate, tactile body illusions with no issue.

Decades ago, a year after 9/11, a terrorist cell attempted to hijack planes to strike more fear into the American populace. Unfortunately for the terrorists, five members of the Autumn and Winter Courts, known more formally as the Unseelie Court, were on that flight. Witnesses reported that one of the terrorists tried to rape a little girl and the oldest responded by beheading that insolent man, then using some magic spell to do something that made the rest so scared, the terrorists had no issue with being taken in by the police when the plane landed at La Guardia. Many experts on the Fae would later explain that the Fae and Daemons had few cultural taboos toward sexuality: consent, incest, pedophilia, and messing with animals. That unfortunate terrorist had offended them by doing two of those things in front of them. After calmly handing them to the police, they disappeared, never to be seen again.

But the damage was done. Reports came in. A group of sex-trafficked Daemon women joined forces to kill their abusers in Mexico. A group of Indigenous Korean Fae prevented either (depending on who you believed) an attempt by North Korea to invade South Korea or a group of terrorists acting alone. The Westboro Baptist Church was completely owned by a group of Daemon counter-protesters, one of whom threw a car at them (the courts more or less told the WBC they deserved it, and that free speech worked both ways. They were never the same after that).

The head of the Rashadi, their version of the police, had to do a press conference admitting that supernatural beings existed. Not long after that, the Fae and the Daemons, who reportedly hated each other, joined forces to form the Avalonian Nation, after the island they claimed their people originated from.

Decades later, humanity had more or less gotten used to it. The island of Avalon had its representative a seat in the United Nations. Enterprising people had come up with ingenious products to deal with their kind. There was an entire genre of rock music devoted to them.  A ton of support groups for human partners.

Yet, Delilah knew vaguely from watching the news it wasn't all Utopia. In certain parts of the world, like Africa and some Asian countries, Avs still had to live underground, as certain fundamentalist groups of all stripes had no issue with killing as long as the blood they spilled was black.

"Plus, they've yet to make bikes that can fit my natural frame," she added, walking her to an alley where Tommie made a gesture with her hand that looked like she was ripping open time and space with her claws, and pulled out a sleek black motorcycle from it, one of those Delilah's bike friends would've, sneering, referred to as a rice rocket, along with a motorcycle jacket and helmet.

"Don't be that astonished, I'm a mere chunari," Tommie chided her as she put on the jacket and helmet. "The bike is real, I bought it and fixed it up myself. Where do you live?"

The change in topic was so abrupt that it took a while for her to get that the Daemon was offering to drop her off.

"Um, up until last night, I lived in a hotel room, but I got kicked out," Delilah admitted, her face burning up with embarrassment as she told the story of how Damien's erratic, dope-sick antics got them kicked out at three in the morning. And she didn't have any personal possessions but the clothes on her back.

"Ah, I see," Tommie said, her eyes filled with sympathy. "Tell you what. I'll take you to live with my family in Yomi."

Delilah sputtered a protest, saying she couldn't possibly impose.

"It's not an imposition," Tommie insisted. "My mother is Queen of Yomi and it's one of the richest nations in Gehenna. We also have a rep for taking in the outcasts of society. You'll be fine." An extra helmet appeared.

Delilah sighed and put on the helmet before climbing on.