About

Benji is probably the least frightening demon anyone will ever meet. With long, wavy blonde hair usually pulled back in a bun to keep it out of his face, and bright green eyes obscured by wire frame glasses, he's hardly intimidating. He is 6'0" tall, which is short for a demon, and though he sports fangs and pointed ears, curled horns and a long, hairless tail, it really doesn't make him any more frightening. Especially when you add in his love for comfy sweaters and scarves.

As one might expect from looking at him, Benji is a shit demon. He's generally gentle and easy going, curious and cheerful with a generally mild temper unless provoked.

Benji is the third in a line of 7 half siblings. His father liked to trade his magic and strength for sex whenever he found a customer attractive. Benjamin's mother is a human, though one who was skilled in magic herself. Benjamin never learned what she wanted from his father when she summoned him.

He was 19 before he was able to learn and control the magic necessary to hide his horns, tail, and ears, and so lived his early life within the confines of the Open Book Society, only able to go out at night or in the winter, when it was easier to cover his inhuman features with bulky clothing and shadow. To him, humans and human culture are an oddity, something he's very curious about.

Most demons sell their magic and strength in return for all manner of unpleasant things, trading blood for blood and willing to do anything for the right price. Instead, Benji runs a small shop downtown, where he sells occult oddities and second hand items. Most of them are fake; he keeps the real stuff in the back. His speciality is binding the souls of deceased animals to their bones so their soul can remain on Earth. He usually does it to people's pets; when the person dies, it is considered proper to crush the bones the animal is bound to so they are released, and both can cross over to the other side together.

Short Intro

In downtown Killelan, on Cedar Street, on the block between 9th and 10th, there is a small shop squeezed between a coffee house and a record store. It looks, at first, to be small and plain, built of a dull red-brown brick and only wide enough for two four-foot windows and a dark stained wood door between. There is a wooden sign hanging from a wrought iron bracket, with "Alvis' Oddities and Occult Shop" carved into it and a few small black symbols along its edges.

A curious eye and a closer look reveals similar symbols carved into the door, small and tucked into the corners, looking like nothing more than a peculiar design choice. In the windows, wooden tables are covered with all manner of strange things, from glass orbs the size of pool balls supported by pillows, to leather bound books with yellowed pages and embroidered covers, to the skulls of small animals, painted or carved or even with the top drilled through to make a hole for a thin candle.

Inside, the shop is overcrowded by bookshelves and tables stacked high with items in precarious piles, and though the lighting is dim and there seems to be no recognizable method of organization, there is no dirt on the floor or dust in the air, and it smells of leather, old books, and tea, with a slight tint of copper that settles almost pleasantly on the back of the tongue.

As strange as it might be, the shop is not really out of place in Killelan. Not three blocks away sits a similar shop, missing the symbols and adding in the dust and dirt and thick smell of incense that people seem to think makes such places authentic.

No, to the untrained eye, Alvis' Oddities is just one of a dozen shops designed to entertain tourists and trick the spiritual and the gullible. On some level, this is true. Almost nothing in the front of the shop is real. The crystal balls show only their viewer's distorted reflection, the leather bound tombs amount to little more than recipe books for foul tasting tea, and the skulls serve as nothing but decorations.

However, at the back of the shop, through a drab red curtain and down a narrow, dim hall, there are three doors. The one to the left bares a unisex bathroom sign; the one on the right stands locked, and leads up a flight of stairs into the studio apartment above, while the one in the back, which reads simply Employees Only, opens with a soft clacking of wooden chimes that hang from the ceiling, low enough to be brushed by the upper edge of the door.

On the other side stands a room that somehow manages to be even more cluttered than the first, with boxes and crates, tables and shelves, plants and all manner of objects taking up nearly every inch of available space. In the back of the room, a wooden workbench is set against the wall, with a myriad of scratches and a few scorch marks marring the top, and papers and books piled haphazardly to one side. Shelves of different sizes and kinds of wood hang on the walls at random heights and intervals, cluttered with jars and books and vials and pots and nearly obscuring the drab bricks entirely, while more plants hang in baskets from the ceiling. There are easily hundreds of different books and ingredients, objects and oddities, in this back room, and every single one of them is real. The small glass orbs on their pillows swirl with color like bubbles in sunlight. The books promise health and death, revenge and luck; many are locked, others tied, and a few jolt occasionally as though trying to open despite their bindings. The skulls, far fewer in number here than in the front, boast symbols slightly changed from their front-room counterparts, painted on in wax and ash and blood. One in particular, settled on a shelf directly above the workbench, rattles and unleashes black smoke, which gathers and congeals into a large grey cat, soft and real to the touch but without warmth or breath, who curls around her scull possessively and eyes the room and the man inside it with an affectionate disdain, then closes her eyes as she accepts the absentminded greeting pet he bestows on her.

The man at the workbench resumes his hunched position, bending low to read the book he has propped against a clay jar; it would be easier to sit, but the chair sits off to the side with the seat covered in papers and he hasn't the time nor the attention to spare for finding them a new home.

An outbreak of blackroot, a volatile and dangerous disease, has broken out in the western gardens of the Killelan City Park. Though normally it only effects plants, the number of plant-based humanoid species living in the city makes it an urgent matter. The plants carrying it can be killed with the right kind of poison, but they can't be cured; the same stands for those humanoids capable of catching it.

With leather gloves to his elbows, goggles lowered over his eyes, and his scarf pulled up over his nose and mouth, Benjamin Alvis mutters under his breath as he uses both hands to catch the small iron cup of freshly brewed poison between the curved ends of his tongs, slowly lifting it from the table and tipping it over an open vial, which has a conical base and a metal funnel set into the top. The poison falls like syrup, thick and smelling of rot, and settles in the bottom almost instantly, not a ripple created even when the last drop falls.

The demon quickly sets an iron cork into the vial, the metal spelled to be pliable enough to work properly without a rubber ring to create a seal, which would melt upon contact with the poison anyways. Then, he quickly places it into a small box, packed with fabric to cushion and made of simple brown card stock, and binds it closed with a thin strip of leather.

With a sigh of relief, Benjamin tugs down his scarf and drops the gloves onto the tabletop, then trades his goggles for wire framed glasses. The goggle lenses are prescription; he could use a potion or spell to fix his eyesight, but his glasses have saved him from more than a few splatters and explosions when he had forgone or simply forgotten the goggles in his haste, so the slight inconvenience of glasses seems worth it.

Benjamin finds a pot of ink and uses one sharp claw as a pen, writing a few more seals across the top of the box, then tucks it under his arm carries it out front, where hopefully the courier sent to fetch it is already waiting. As he passes through the curtain, a spell woven into the fabric automatically hides his horns and tail and pointed ears from view; they are still there, merely unseen; he has to be cautious not to accidentally let anyone come in contact with them, lest they learn the truth.