FA+
Shop
1854
Views
Views
43
Favorites
Favorites
Category
Artwork (Digital) / General Furry Art
Species Bovine (Other)
Size 4096 x 2809
File Size 3.13 MB
Report this content
More from Balina
Listed in Folders
"Hey. Hey, Lo. Remind me again, are these things real, or just some kinda metaphor for the viewer? If I give it a little tug, what do you think will happen~?"
She'd gotten sold on the idea for the same reason a lot of people do. Mortality is a scam, bodies are gross, and like most members of her generation, she found the prospect of job security for the next few centuries tempting enough all on its own.
She'd fallen for the same traps as every other mortal who signs up. She didn't shop around, she didn't do any networking to ensure she had a safety net, she hadn't even been aware that there might have been other games in town. None of them would have taken her, of course, but the point was she didn't even try. In her defense, even if she had gone in fully prepared, it probably wouldn't have changed anything important. The deals are always rigged against you, and it takes a lot of doing to outsmart someone who has a few centuries of experience wheeling and dealing with people more savvy than yourself.
So like everyone else who went down this road, she found herself dependent on her new employer for her "health insurance" in the form of a regular supply of ichor (it was unclear if she was going to stop needing it eventually, or if she was stuck taking humanity replacement therapy for the rest of her unnatural life), doing base-tier office work seemingly (and likely intentionally) designed to make her feel somewhat lower than a temp. It wasn't the worst job she could have asked for; some of the jobs she had to fill into had been engaging, or at least entertaining. She'd done a few shifts as a sleep paralysis demon, which had been fun, but the fact that she kept finding herself longing for her call center days was telling. It was supposedly a "temporary position", just until she "got her wings under her", but she was pretty certain by now she wasn't going to get any more significant changes, either in her body or her job, any time soon. Her work days were still full to the brim of base-level errands and filling in for people who were somehow paid better to do less than herself, even when they don't seem to show up for half their shifts.
She was pretty sure that the job was some kind of test, but she either didn't really have the motivation and ambition to pass it yet, or there was something deeper she hadn't figured out. Truth be told, she was a little disappointed in herself; she had really hoped that literally turning into a demon would have helped with her ambition, maybe loosened her morals a little bit. It was almost frustrating that she was still the same insecure fool she was when she was human.
That's really the thing about going through with the whole process: infernal corruption doesn't change you, at least not in the ways that matter. As the worthless mortal parts of you are burned away, fel energies bind with your soul, allowing it to stretch out and rebuild with a vastly more suitable framework. The result is a body no longer hindered by such crass concepts as "biology" or "genetics"; you become a beautiful, perfect reflection of what the heart truly wants, and who you are underneath your mortal shell. It's who you were meant to be all along.
At least, that's what all the ad copy had said. In practice, it clearly had its own biases and limitations. Most people, one might safely assume, don't really dream of having wings sprout from their hips, nor do they want goat legs, horns, a spade-tipped tail, or claws. Well, okay, she really liked the horns; she would have asked for them if she was picking these out à la carte. Everything else was merely a price she was willing to pay to fix the mistakes nature had made when making her.
They tell you to hold onto yourself as it happens. Corruption is a slow process, so that's harder than it may sound, but they tell you that the first few weeks are the most important. As the ichor works its way through your systems, it starts puzzling out what exactly its new host wants, and giving it mixed answers can lead to complete disaster. Have a strong image of what you want, and keep it in the forefront of your mind as long and as often as you can. And for all that you might hold dear, don't lie to yourself. If you weren't here to indulge your deepest desires, you probably shouldn't have been playing with otherworldly bargains in the first place.
Like everything else they'd told her, she had doubts. The whole arrangement felt awfully arbitrary, and far too tidy; the notion that a strong personality was all it took made it sound like they should be pickier with who they hire. It might explain how a particular ditz turned out quite like they had, but so could a lot of things. Surely there were more factors, like the source of the ichor, the environment one was in during the process, methods and timing of administration, and who knows what else. It felt like something that should get a lot more research, at least if the legions of Hell wanted to improve their workforce. That led to its own horrible train of thought: maybe the failures were a necessary part of the whole operation. Someone's gotta bring the coffee and run the errands. Okay, even if she no longer had a stomach per se, she could feel it doing flip-flops if she thought too hard along those lines. Maybe she needed to get some distance between herself and this office before she tried to piece together the bigger pictures.
Still, it was better to be safe than sorry; she'd done as she was told, even if she questioned the point. Throughout the next several months, two things were on her mind at all times: she wanted to be tall, and she wanted to be strong. Obviously, having a nice rack would be great, maybe do something about that belly, but make her big and strong and everything else she'd take as it came. She'd seen firsthand what was supposed to be a worst-case scenario, and knew even "failed" succubi turn out beautiful, if not in the ways that make it into the testimonials. Mismatched horns, incongruous materials, a surplus of fluff where it wasn't expected; none of these seemed like deal-breakers to someone trying to work their way in from the outside.
Whether it really was the power of positive thinking, or just getting some lucky rolls on the table of fate, she'd gotten what she asked for. By the time the corruption had fully settled in, she was impossibly, inhumanly, intimidatingly tall. She was too tall for glamours to cover up. She was always ducking through doorways, sometimes scrunched up under ceilings. It was a good thing her horns would usually hit before the rest of her, and that they were made of such durable materials; it took a long time to get used to being so much taller than society was built to handle.
She'd gotten the "strong" part as well, just not quite in the way she'd expected. As her body had stretched relentlessly upwards, the fact that she wasn't gaining any bulk had worried her. It wasn't until her material affinities started showing up that she saw (and felt) the secret: her previous flesh and bone took on aspects of titanium and sapphire, leaving her light, strong, sharp, and hard in all the best ways and all the right places. When all was said and done, she felt nigh-on invincible; she wondered if the more stone-centric 'cubi felt the same.
As much as she adored the results, she wasn't really sure where those particular affinities came from. Neither material would have been her first choice; she'd expected to be made of something more like emeralds, obsidian, topaz, marble, or maybe silver. She always had loved silver. She wasn't even really sure if titanium counted as a precious metal, though she did enjoy the idea that this made her a titan in all senses of the word.
There had been a presentation about this in orientation, describing it as an evolutionary response. Precious metals and gemstones are considered to be desirable, and as creatures of desire, 'cubi tended to form affinities and unconsciously craft their new selves with them. Most found the majority of their new body taking on aspects of a more common mineral, with accents of a gem or precious metal for flourishes like their horns and hooves. As society changed over time, and technology adjusted what materials were considered precious, 'cubi of recent centuries found themselves comprised of a wider variety of materials. This explanation only went so far, especially as not all materials she'd seen even in that room could be considered the least bit valuable, but even the presenter got bored of the subject long before the fiddly details came up. A snide part of her wondered if this meant there were ancient aluminium demons out there who were very upset at being thought of as gaudy, or even more ancient ones based on meteoric iron. Thankfully, for once in her life her survival instincts had won out over her desire to appear clever, and she hadn't yet had the guts to ask.
There was one other lesson from her first few days that she wish she'd understood at the time. Like all the others, it was vague and deliberately unhelpful, only making sense in hindsight; lies of omission seem to be a favorite among the damned. An infernal makeover, they'd told her, will give you everything you know you want, but will bring out the worst in you to do so. It had sounded trite, disposable, and obvious; either a warning to not let newfound power go to your head, or encouragement that traits typically classified as undesirable in polite society would become more commonplace as one entered the corrupted workforce.
She'd learned the hard way that it was an extremely, viciously, sometimes even painfully literal lesson. Her skin's titanium affinity had manifested more viscerally than she'd expected, sharp slivers of the metal being extruded from inside. Within a few days, the blades would go from upright to laying flat, and one morning she would wake up to find they were now just more silvery-blue patches of skin. The process would repeat, over and over again, until all of her had been transfigured. The first few had been precisely as uncomfortable as one might expect, though subsequent cycles had come form those already-corrupted portions, and were much more of an inconvenience than anything else. Even if she hadn't outgrown nearly everything she used to wear, the sheer number of holes she'd poked in her old wardrobe had rendered it entirely unusable.
Some of those spikes never went down; every inch of her old self had been replaced months ago, yet her hips and shoulders were still exceedingly dangerous. Having some material left over wasn't, on its own, all that unusual: most of the infernals she'd met had at least some deposits usually located at their joints, hands, or sometimes around their hooves. Too much extra material was considered unsightly, and smoothness was prized, but as accents they had their own charms, almost like beauty marks. This was much less of an issue for most 'cubi, as most of them weren't made out of metal, and very few stone outcroppings are naturally honed to razor-sharp edges. At least the ones coming out of her forehead were cute.
The true meaning of the lesson came to her in the middle of one sleepless night, after several hours of staring at the creature in the mirror. This wasn't so much a change as it was a clarification, a warning to the world itself. She was prickly even before her transformation; she didn't like looking at it that way, but it took very little to ruin her mood, and when she was upset her mind almost invariably drifted towards fantasies of revenge. All it took now was for someone to simply stroke her arm in the wrong way, or put their hand on her hip without asking, and they'd be going to the emergency room with horrible lacerations. And that was just her passive defenses; her hands were now sapphire-edged talons, the hooks on her heels were devastating, her wings and tail could pierce glass like it wasn't even there. Every part of her was sharp, dangerous. Anyone that touched her did so on her terms, full stop.
The realization had been exhilarating in a way she couldn't have expected. Corruption simply reveals who you really are, it doesn't bother to change your personality. She'd never have dreamed to even ask for it if she'd had the choice, but in hindsight it was unmistakably her. She had become beautiful, but in a way that demanded respect, or at least fear. Inner demons had come to the surface, and now they were the rest of the world's problems, too. Maybe her affinities weren't quite as random as she'd first thought.
They don't tell you those parts, they're just fun surprises you discover about yourself.
Relearning to type had been an utter pain, though. Not to mention using a mouse.
Ever have one of those ideas that spins wildly out of control? A couple of months ago, Lo posted an open request to "tell me about your cubi sona". I was hammering away at a couple of ideas, not really getting anywhere, but then literally the next day Jill opens up for commissions in one of the rare times I'm actually looking at my Twitter feed. I took this as a sign from the universe that I had to mash the two against one another.
This is all derived and expanded from Fluxom's work on building a worldset around Loccubus, who I don't think really shows up on their main FA, as it's almost entirely personal work; you'd need to follow their Mastodon accounts to really see much of them. Check "The Loccubus Ramble" below if you'd like to get a better idea where to find them and to learn more about this wondrous creature.
This is, at least at time of posting, the longest vignette I've written for a picture. Not exactly a high bar, but I so rarely manage more than a thousand words, let alone 2200. There are another couple thousand words on the cutting room floor that are probably going to get turned into future pictures, too. Please look forward to them.
Art: Jill the Succubus (original)
Guest Ditz:
Fluxom (The Loccubus Ramble)
She'd gotten sold on the idea for the same reason a lot of people do. Mortality is a scam, bodies are gross, and like most members of her generation, she found the prospect of job security for the next few centuries tempting enough all on its own.
She'd fallen for the same traps as every other mortal who signs up. She didn't shop around, she didn't do any networking to ensure she had a safety net, she hadn't even been aware that there might have been other games in town. None of them would have taken her, of course, but the point was she didn't even try. In her defense, even if she had gone in fully prepared, it probably wouldn't have changed anything important. The deals are always rigged against you, and it takes a lot of doing to outsmart someone who has a few centuries of experience wheeling and dealing with people more savvy than yourself.
So like everyone else who went down this road, she found herself dependent on her new employer for her "health insurance" in the form of a regular supply of ichor (it was unclear if she was going to stop needing it eventually, or if she was stuck taking humanity replacement therapy for the rest of her unnatural life), doing base-tier office work seemingly (and likely intentionally) designed to make her feel somewhat lower than a temp. It wasn't the worst job she could have asked for; some of the jobs she had to fill into had been engaging, or at least entertaining. She'd done a few shifts as a sleep paralysis demon, which had been fun, but the fact that she kept finding herself longing for her call center days was telling. It was supposedly a "temporary position", just until she "got her wings under her", but she was pretty certain by now she wasn't going to get any more significant changes, either in her body or her job, any time soon. Her work days were still full to the brim of base-level errands and filling in for people who were somehow paid better to do less than herself, even when they don't seem to show up for half their shifts.
She was pretty sure that the job was some kind of test, but she either didn't really have the motivation and ambition to pass it yet, or there was something deeper she hadn't figured out. Truth be told, she was a little disappointed in herself; she had really hoped that literally turning into a demon would have helped with her ambition, maybe loosened her morals a little bit. It was almost frustrating that she was still the same insecure fool she was when she was human.
That's really the thing about going through with the whole process: infernal corruption doesn't change you, at least not in the ways that matter. As the worthless mortal parts of you are burned away, fel energies bind with your soul, allowing it to stretch out and rebuild with a vastly more suitable framework. The result is a body no longer hindered by such crass concepts as "biology" or "genetics"; you become a beautiful, perfect reflection of what the heart truly wants, and who you are underneath your mortal shell. It's who you were meant to be all along.
At least, that's what all the ad copy had said. In practice, it clearly had its own biases and limitations. Most people, one might safely assume, don't really dream of having wings sprout from their hips, nor do they want goat legs, horns, a spade-tipped tail, or claws. Well, okay, she really liked the horns; she would have asked for them if she was picking these out à la carte. Everything else was merely a price she was willing to pay to fix the mistakes nature had made when making her.
They tell you to hold onto yourself as it happens. Corruption is a slow process, so that's harder than it may sound, but they tell you that the first few weeks are the most important. As the ichor works its way through your systems, it starts puzzling out what exactly its new host wants, and giving it mixed answers can lead to complete disaster. Have a strong image of what you want, and keep it in the forefront of your mind as long and as often as you can. And for all that you might hold dear, don't lie to yourself. If you weren't here to indulge your deepest desires, you probably shouldn't have been playing with otherworldly bargains in the first place.
Like everything else they'd told her, she had doubts. The whole arrangement felt awfully arbitrary, and far too tidy; the notion that a strong personality was all it took made it sound like they should be pickier with who they hire. It might explain how a particular ditz turned out quite like they had, but so could a lot of things. Surely there were more factors, like the source of the ichor, the environment one was in during the process, methods and timing of administration, and who knows what else. It felt like something that should get a lot more research, at least if the legions of Hell wanted to improve their workforce. That led to its own horrible train of thought: maybe the failures were a necessary part of the whole operation. Someone's gotta bring the coffee and run the errands. Okay, even if she no longer had a stomach per se, she could feel it doing flip-flops if she thought too hard along those lines. Maybe she needed to get some distance between herself and this office before she tried to piece together the bigger pictures.
Still, it was better to be safe than sorry; she'd done as she was told, even if she questioned the point. Throughout the next several months, two things were on her mind at all times: she wanted to be tall, and she wanted to be strong. Obviously, having a nice rack would be great, maybe do something about that belly, but make her big and strong and everything else she'd take as it came. She'd seen firsthand what was supposed to be a worst-case scenario, and knew even "failed" succubi turn out beautiful, if not in the ways that make it into the testimonials. Mismatched horns, incongruous materials, a surplus of fluff where it wasn't expected; none of these seemed like deal-breakers to someone trying to work their way in from the outside.
Whether it really was the power of positive thinking, or just getting some lucky rolls on the table of fate, she'd gotten what she asked for. By the time the corruption had fully settled in, she was impossibly, inhumanly, intimidatingly tall. She was too tall for glamours to cover up. She was always ducking through doorways, sometimes scrunched up under ceilings. It was a good thing her horns would usually hit before the rest of her, and that they were made of such durable materials; it took a long time to get used to being so much taller than society was built to handle.
She'd gotten the "strong" part as well, just not quite in the way she'd expected. As her body had stretched relentlessly upwards, the fact that she wasn't gaining any bulk had worried her. It wasn't until her material affinities started showing up that she saw (and felt) the secret: her previous flesh and bone took on aspects of titanium and sapphire, leaving her light, strong, sharp, and hard in all the best ways and all the right places. When all was said and done, she felt nigh-on invincible; she wondered if the more stone-centric 'cubi felt the same.
As much as she adored the results, she wasn't really sure where those particular affinities came from. Neither material would have been her first choice; she'd expected to be made of something more like emeralds, obsidian, topaz, marble, or maybe silver. She always had loved silver. She wasn't even really sure if titanium counted as a precious metal, though she did enjoy the idea that this made her a titan in all senses of the word.
There had been a presentation about this in orientation, describing it as an evolutionary response. Precious metals and gemstones are considered to be desirable, and as creatures of desire, 'cubi tended to form affinities and unconsciously craft their new selves with them. Most found the majority of their new body taking on aspects of a more common mineral, with accents of a gem or precious metal for flourishes like their horns and hooves. As society changed over time, and technology adjusted what materials were considered precious, 'cubi of recent centuries found themselves comprised of a wider variety of materials. This explanation only went so far, especially as not all materials she'd seen even in that room could be considered the least bit valuable, but even the presenter got bored of the subject long before the fiddly details came up. A snide part of her wondered if this meant there were ancient aluminium demons out there who were very upset at being thought of as gaudy, or even more ancient ones based on meteoric iron. Thankfully, for once in her life her survival instincts had won out over her desire to appear clever, and she hadn't yet had the guts to ask.
There was one other lesson from her first few days that she wish she'd understood at the time. Like all the others, it was vague and deliberately unhelpful, only making sense in hindsight; lies of omission seem to be a favorite among the damned. An infernal makeover, they'd told her, will give you everything you know you want, but will bring out the worst in you to do so. It had sounded trite, disposable, and obvious; either a warning to not let newfound power go to your head, or encouragement that traits typically classified as undesirable in polite society would become more commonplace as one entered the corrupted workforce.
She'd learned the hard way that it was an extremely, viciously, sometimes even painfully literal lesson. Her skin's titanium affinity had manifested more viscerally than she'd expected, sharp slivers of the metal being extruded from inside. Within a few days, the blades would go from upright to laying flat, and one morning she would wake up to find they were now just more silvery-blue patches of skin. The process would repeat, over and over again, until all of her had been transfigured. The first few had been precisely as uncomfortable as one might expect, though subsequent cycles had come form those already-corrupted portions, and were much more of an inconvenience than anything else. Even if she hadn't outgrown nearly everything she used to wear, the sheer number of holes she'd poked in her old wardrobe had rendered it entirely unusable.
Some of those spikes never went down; every inch of her old self had been replaced months ago, yet her hips and shoulders were still exceedingly dangerous. Having some material left over wasn't, on its own, all that unusual: most of the infernals she'd met had at least some deposits usually located at their joints, hands, or sometimes around their hooves. Too much extra material was considered unsightly, and smoothness was prized, but as accents they had their own charms, almost like beauty marks. This was much less of an issue for most 'cubi, as most of them weren't made out of metal, and very few stone outcroppings are naturally honed to razor-sharp edges. At least the ones coming out of her forehead were cute.
The true meaning of the lesson came to her in the middle of one sleepless night, after several hours of staring at the creature in the mirror. This wasn't so much a change as it was a clarification, a warning to the world itself. She was prickly even before her transformation; she didn't like looking at it that way, but it took very little to ruin her mood, and when she was upset her mind almost invariably drifted towards fantasies of revenge. All it took now was for someone to simply stroke her arm in the wrong way, or put their hand on her hip without asking, and they'd be going to the emergency room with horrible lacerations. And that was just her passive defenses; her hands were now sapphire-edged talons, the hooks on her heels were devastating, her wings and tail could pierce glass like it wasn't even there. Every part of her was sharp, dangerous. Anyone that touched her did so on her terms, full stop.
The realization had been exhilarating in a way she couldn't have expected. Corruption simply reveals who you really are, it doesn't bother to change your personality. She'd never have dreamed to even ask for it if she'd had the choice, but in hindsight it was unmistakably her. She had become beautiful, but in a way that demanded respect, or at least fear. Inner demons had come to the surface, and now they were the rest of the world's problems, too. Maybe her affinities weren't quite as random as she'd first thought.
They don't tell you those parts, they're just fun surprises you discover about yourself.
Relearning to type had been an utter pain, though. Not to mention using a mouse.
Ever have one of those ideas that spins wildly out of control? A couple of months ago, Lo posted an open request to "tell me about your cubi sona". I was hammering away at a couple of ideas, not really getting anywhere, but then literally the next day Jill opens up for commissions in one of the rare times I'm actually looking at my Twitter feed. I took this as a sign from the universe that I had to mash the two against one another.
This is all derived and expanded from Fluxom's work on building a worldset around Loccubus, who I don't think really shows up on their main FA, as it's almost entirely personal work; you'd need to follow their Mastodon accounts to really see much of them. Check "The Loccubus Ramble" below if you'd like to get a better idea where to find them and to learn more about this wondrous creature.
This is, at least at time of posting, the longest vignette I've written for a picture. Not exactly a high bar, but I so rarely manage more than a thousand words, let alone 2200. There are another couple thousand words on the cutting room floor that are probably going to get turned into future pictures, too. Please look forward to them.
Art: Jill the Succubus (original)
Guest Ditz:
Fluxom (The Loccubus Ramble)
Category Artwork (Digital) / General Furry Art
Species Bovine (Other)
Size 4096 x 2809px
File Size 3.13 MB
Comments