Kieran was a guide demon, he was the one tasked with bringing newly-arrived sinners to meet Lucifer for judgement. He was revered for his position, looked up-to by everyone he surrounded; Kieran was considered something of an adoptive son to the ruler of Hell, the two were close, and with that status, came respect.But Kieran had an issue…it didn’t go unnoticed to him, how everyone he talked to, sinner and demon alike, had some memory of their life on Earth. That’s something Kieran lacked. If he were to look inside himself, he saw nothing, he felt nothing, there was no sign that he’d even existed before arriving in Hell. A complete amnesiac, Kieran felt as though he were missing massive parts of himself.When asked, Lucifer revealed that he’d purposefully hidden Kieran’s memory, the experiences of his past life. Kieran found it difficult to trust the man he was so close to, and, over the course of centuries, the two drifted apart…Nina was an assassin. Vicious, uncaring, unfeeling. She found her home in the unforgiving steel of a dagger and the warmth of blood. So, she didn’t find herself too surprised, when she’d opened her eyes to fire and brimstone.But Kieran saw something in Nina. More than just a sinner, he saw an opportunity.Knowing she had nowhere else to go, he extended a deal. He would spare her from the eyes of judgement, and all she had to do was to help him attack Lucifer, stealing a piece of his heart in the process. If Kieran were to eat just that piece, he could regain his memories, and all his questions could be answered.In reality, his end of the deal was…stretching the truth, to say the least. She didn’t have to know that, though.Interested purely in self-preservation, Nina agreed. She was used to these sorts of deals, what’s another body count to a murderer?Unfortunately, things didn’t go precisely according to plan. They weren’t able to catch him off guard so easily, Lucifer defended himself against Nina’s attacks—knocking her to the ground—as he turned his attention to Kieran, betrayed by his son’s actions.Lucifer wasn’t angry. When Kieran looked up into his father’s eyes, he saw hurt. The boy unraveled with the guilt, and confessed his feelings to Lucifer, confessed that he felt empty, missing, broken, without his memories. He was truly honest for the first time, and told him that, without being able to trust the only man he considered family, he felt he had nothing.Lucifer met Kieran’s grief with compassion, encasing him in a hug, he whispered a sincere apology to his son.Nina looked on, and within her, something brewed.
Years of repressed emotions; hate, fear, anger. Things she was never allowed to express, a humanity she was never afforded.Nina had been used as a tool for as long as she’s been alive, an instrument of murder. And here, yet again, she felt simply used. It wasn’t fair, that Kieran got to have his happy family at her expense, while she was made an object—a means to an end.Fueled with her most primal of instincts, Nina stood behind Lucifer, and forced her arm through his torso. It was surprisingly easy, to pull his heart from his chest. It was even more satisfying, to watch the spark Kieran’s eyes die out, giving away to shock and horror, as his father’s body collapsed onto him.Wordlessly, and through tears she didn’t know she was crying, Nina ate all of Lucifer’s heart. Magic coursed through her veins, and for the first time in her life, she felt she was truly empowered.

Content warning: Topic of Sexual Assault
Reader discretion is advised

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A Tejano born and raised in Austin, Texas, Leonardo James Vela was a wide-eyed young man with a bright future ahead of him. Both of his parents worked most hours of the day, it took a lot of effort for them to make a living, but Leo didn’t mind, he was grateful for the hard work his parents put in to give him the life he had.More often than not, Leo’s parents weren’t able to come home until late into the night. Unable to afford a babysitter and concerned with his safety, they decided to place Leo in the care of their church; they trusted their local priest—a man of good community standing and a decent family friend—to watch over him when needed.In retrospect, it was the perfect cocktail of factors. Leo had no other siblings, he was a loner by choice and kept to himself most days. What his priest ended up doing became more a matter of opportunism, and the knowledge that no one would believe the word of a child over a man of God.Being a victim of childhood sexual abuse had fundamentally changed the course of Leo’s life. Frustrated by the lack of support systems for victims and failed by the community he was supposed to trust, his goals had shifted, and he decided to become a detective, seeking to enact real justice.It was made quickly evident, however, that real justice didn’t seem to be in the cards for people like him. The system simply wasn’t interested in accommodating victims of abuse, it was a badly-kept secret; everybody seemed to know it, but no one seemed to want to do anything about it.No one until Leonardo Vela, that is. Taking things into his hands, he became a sort-of vigilante. He had access to the records, and a back-log of cases to be inevitably shredded, so it was just a matter of picking up the gun. With his own two hands, he became a murderer, striking terror into the hearts of predators, and bringing peace to their victim.It was by his 17th murder that he was inevitably caught. By then, he became something of an urban legend within the location he occupied, so when his identity was confirmed, law enforcement and the court rushed through his trial as quickly as possible in order to sentence him to death. At that point, he became something of a media sensation, and had the press stumbling over itself to get a word in from him.Restrained for lethal injection and pressed for a final statement, he left the world with one last sentence;
“All of them got what they deserved. But that last piece of shit? He had it coming for years.”When Leo opened his eyes again, he was met with the foreboding figure of Lucifer, towering over him in Hell.
“Ah, Leonardo Vela,” He said, with a wicked grin, “I’ve heard of your…talents, back on Earth. What say we make a deal? One I think you wouldn’t want to miss out on.”In the afterlife, Leo serves as the head of the Department of Lust, taking it upon himself to torture the sinners guilty of sex crimes.

Sarai Nassif was only a young girl when she and her family had immigrated out of Bangladesh. Like many others, they came to London to seek out a better life for themselves. Sarai’s parents risked it all to bring her to safety, left behind everything for the chance of a better future, and for that, she would be forever grateful.She was raised in a neighborhood of other like-minded immigrants. Her community was disenfranchised, their schools underfunded and homes run-down, but there was a deep love and sense of shared struggle that connected them together. Sarai acted as the beating heart of that community. Her parents owned a small local bakery that served desserts and pastries from her childhood home. The best cure for homesickness was a warm meal, her mother always said.Sarai would do anything for her community, she told herself. She knew the names of the regulars, of their religious leaders and school teachers. Sarai worked overtime to make extra food to give to the homeless, and free banquet spreads for events and birthday parties which would’ve otherwise remained without any treats.So she found herself in a sticky situation, when her little neighborhood began changing upon the whims of gentrification. Opportunistic businessmen saw their home as low real estate costs and an ‘untapped market’, rather than the sprawling, interconnected web of cultures that it was. Their business struggled over time, and Sarai’s family were confronted with a decision, either to sell the bakery, or to have it fail altogether.Anything for her community, she said…with a heavy heart, her parents signed the deal.New ownership was awful. Her little bakery became an imitation of itself, cutting costs to turn out a profit, with focus shifting to margins and numbers rather than the quality of the food. As an inevitable consequence, the business had failed to get back on its legs, and it was no longer seen as the pillar of hope and warmth that had once appealed to its guests. Business was so slow, and the quality was so poor, that rumors began floating around that the bakery was being used as a front for some kind of criminal organization.As quickly as he had bought it, the new owner wanted to get rid of it. Inundated with his greed, he wanted to burn down the whole thing—blame it on the ‘uppity locals’—and collect the insurance money to pave the way for a new apartment building. It would’ve been the perfect plan, had Sarai not stayed up working late the night it was to be enacted.It all happened so fast. One second, Sarai was stocking inventory, and the next, everything she had worked for, everything she had loved, had gone into flames. Knowing there was no way for her out of the fire, Sarai scrambled to find any sort of escape route, only to find sight of the new owner, with a jerry can in his hands.Her mind going a mile-a-minute, Sarai was furious, and in the midst of the chaos, she dragged him back into the flames. If she was going to lose everything, if her parents were going to be left without their daughter, she wanted him to lose it all as well.Upon her death, Sarai woke up in Hell, confronted with the foreboding presence of Lucifer. She was initially panicked, but he’d calmed her down, and informed her of a business deal he knew she would love.Sarai knew a thing or two about bad deals, and this wasn’t one of them. Shaking his hand, she was quickly crowned the head of the Department of Gluttony.

There was a lot you could do to a child, if you were to simply dangle a sense of love and security above their heads.As far back as her first ever memory, before she’d so much as learned to talk, Nina knew danger. Orphaned at an extremely young age, she quickly learned the most important lesson she was ever going to learn, and what she would carry with her for the rest of her life; the only thing she’ll ever truly have is herself.Dr. Macias saw something within Nina. He saw a young, lonely girl, desperate for family. He saw enumerable amounts of pain, he saw a gentle soul that could easily be molded to become something dangerous. He saw an opportunity.Nina understood from day one what her role was. She was a replacement for Dr. Macias’ late assistant. Although technically her father, he refused to ever allow her to call him that. It was always ‘Doctor’, or ‘Mister’, whatever was most impersonal. Over the years, Nina was experimented upon, she was conditioned and eventually turned into an assassin for [REDACTED], she understood herself as nothing more than an object, a thing she knew could be discarded as soon as it was deemed convenient, existing only for the purpose of bringing [REDACTED] back to life.Nina told herself she was only ever interested in self-preservation. She was cold, hardened, strong, worthy. In reality, that little girl Dr. Macias had set his eyes upon was still alive, a part of her she never dared to acknowledge. Deep within her, she wondered, why it seemed that the world deemed her unworthy of having the only thing she’s ever really wanted, a family to call her own.

Cana Somlit Sayavong was an eclectic VTuber from Seattle, WA. He’d always had an affinity for gaming, art, and performing, so in his early 20s, he decided to take his life-long interests and start a proper platform with them. Since debut, Cana saw rapid growth; his natural charm, wit, and propensity for engaging an audience lended him greatly to the job of an entertainer.Cana saw great success, not just from the business side of things, but in his personal life, too. He never expected to be recognized in real life, what with him hiding his face from his audience, but found it flattering when a fan of his, a young woman named Brooke, stumbled upon him at a coffee spot he frequented.They bumped into each other quite a lot, and gradually learned about one another; Brooke, too, was a streamer, and although her setups were more elaborate and expensive, she found she struggled maintaining an audience. She sought Cana’s help, advice, his attention and energy; messaging him late into the night and video calling during the weekends. When, one day, Brooke confessed her feelings to him, Cana found he couldn’t say no.While Brooke’s eccentric behavior was endearing as a fan of his, it quickly became smothering and overwhelming within the context of a romantic relationship. She would demand things of Cana, insist that he act a certain way, change his fashion, his mannerisms and how he talked for her sake. Brooke couldn’t stand Cana’s friends or family, she told him that she should be the only thing that’s important to him.Over the course of months, Cana had become isolated and estranged. She took great pleasure in breaking him down, reducing him to nothing but a toy, perfectly moldable in every way. And if Cana had tried to push back at all, establish boundaries or seek balance within the relationship, Brooke would call him a horrible person, manipulative, an abuser, accuse him of infidelity and threaten to hurt him. It worked in shutting him up.Slowly but surely, Cana lost himself in that relationship. If he wasn’t numb, he was agitated, volatile, and reactive; lacking in energy and emotion, only a person in that he had the capacity to feel enough pain for Brooke’s pleasure, he crumbled from the inside-out.His viewership deteriorated as a result, Cana was the worst version of himself in that relationship, and it showed in his creative output. It wasn’t until he’d begun receiving messages from concerned viewers, telling him that he’d become a shell of himself, that he began to re-evaluate what they had.He began questioning the integrity of the relationship and the circumstances under how they met. And as it turned out, everything was not as it seemed.One night, through some snooping, he’d discovered that Brooke had orchestrated every meetup they had. She was more than just a fan of his like she’d led him to believe, she was obsessed with him, having stalked him enough to figure out his routine. Brooke was simultaneously deeply in love with him and had resented his success, she wanted both to be his one-and-only, and to bring him down, make him into nothing.The moment that Cana had discovered Brooke’s secrets, he began compiling as much evidence as he could of her intentions. Screenshots, videos, even- disturbingly- written manifestos she had on paper. He wanted to leave nothing out of a future police report.That night, however, Brooke returned home earlier than expected, and caught Cana in the act of uncovering everything about her secrets. She took him by surprise; Brooke didn’t yell, didn’t scream, didn’t start an argument like he assumed she would. She seemed to take the news in stride, merely accepting that she had nothing left to lose.Brooke had killed him once, robbed him of his personhood and reduced him to flesh with the audacity of pulse. Knowing there was no talking herself out of the damning evidence, she took things into her own hands, and strangled Cana at his desk.When Cana opened his eyes again, they were still stinging with unshed tears. Rather than Brooke, he saw Lucifer, towering and mighty.Knowing how he met his end, knowing that he’d fallen victim to Brooke’s bitterness, Lucifer offered him a specialized position in Hell; to work as the head of the department of Envy, punishing sinners who’d landed themselves in his domain, until the end of time.

For all his life, Isaiah Orunitemi Ogunkoya had been surrounded by illness in some way, shape, or form. Born in Manchester and being of Nigerian background, his community was very important to him and his family even moreso.It was at a very young age that Isaiah had learned that some people’s bodies were just different, in ways that created unique challenges and varying needs. His grandmother, for one, always seemed to be unwell. It was like she was always sick, he noted, and as he was told later on, he wasn’t exactly wrong. In fact, Isaiah was made aware that his grandmother had a specific kind of sickness, one that would never go away.She wasn’t the only one who was ill, this type of thing was hereditary, so himself, his parents, and siblings all had to learn how to handle chronic illness. But for Isaiah’s grandmother, having grown older, these things took a much larger toll on her body than anyone else’s. As Isaiah grew into an adult, he dedicated himself to being the one to take care of her in her final years.Isaiah’s grandmother was strong-willed, she had a fire in her chest and breadth to her voice, but she also understood when to let go of things she couldn’t control. Though her body was failing her, she was still very much exuberant and alive, up until her very last breath.Isaiah, for all that he grew up with, had never been afraid of illness. His grandmother’s life and legacy left a strong impression on him, and with him struggling with auto-immune diseases himself, he threw himself head-first into the world of medicine. It was far from easy, but with the support of his family, and the knowledge of how to manage his own conditions, he made it far within medical school, specializing in bio-medicine and the research of end-of-life care.Soon enough, he’d earned a role as a medical assistant to a set of clinical trials, helmed by Dr. Owen Maddox. His role was simple; he was to overlook the care of patients with terminal cancers of varying types, and administer controlled doses of Psilocybin (colloquially known as ‘magic mushrooms’) to see if the hallucinogen, combined with intensive therapy, could help patients find peace within the existential nature of their conditions.Almost right away, however, Isaiah noticed there was something odd about his patients. They were afraid, not just of their conditions, and not as a result of the hallucinogens, but of his supervisor. He got to spend a lot of time with them, talk to them about how they felt, how they were treated, and learned that they were in massive amounts of pain.Isaiah wasted no time investigating for himself, but when he approached Dr. Maddox, he was merely shrugged off. Told that the drugs were likely making them imagine things, told that the nature of their symptoms were interfering with their perceptive skills, that what they had to say couldn’t be trusted at face value. But Isaiah knew what it was like, to spend time with those nearing their end of life, and had done hours of research into what his patients were afflicted with. Something wasn’t adding up.Perhaps against his better judgement, Isaiah went digging through documentation his supervisor had been keeping hidden. What he found was unlike anything he could’ve imagined, Isaiah had uncovered something truly horrific.Dr. Maddox was helming an operation dubbed ‘Project Tithonus’, which sought to uncover the science behind immortality, and was using those with terminal conditions as low-risk test subjects he could enact horrible things on. This included replacing ‘diseased’ vital organs, cell networks, and entire systems of functioning within the human body with ‘healthy’ ones taken from other subjects.When they inevitably died as a result of the experimentation, no one would investigate the cause of death. And, if they were being administered mind-altering drugs as well, surely, no one would take whatever they’d say about the abuse seriously. Shocked and appalled at these findings, Isaiah knew that something had to be done about this.It seemed, at this rate, that confrontation was inevitable. Meeting his supervisor at a rooftop, isolated from prying eyes, Isaiah revealed he knew what he’d been doing. Dr. Maddox didn’t seem surprised or ashamed at all, he said, merely, that this was the cost of doing science, that suffering is the price of progress. He revealed to Isaiah that he’d been working with an organization entitled ‘Kismet’, and that he planned to become the face of this new innovation in science.Something within Isaiah snapped upon hearing this; though he’s not a violent person, he found he couldn’t bear to put up with one more second of this. To think of human lives as so easily disposable, to benefit off the abuse of the vulnerable simply to feed his sense of pride, it rattled Isaiah to his core. Faster than he could think, he tackled his supervisor, getting into a tousle that ended with the both of them hurtling off the edge of the roof, the two of them plummeting to the hard concrete below.Through everything, Isaiah was defined by his sense of justice, his drive to do good things and to protect vulnerable people. He understood that his life expectancy was naturally shorter by nature of being chronically ill, but that didn’t deter him from using the time he had on Earth to try and do good for people, to give his time, energy, and life for his values.Just because he was dead didn’t mean that had to change any time soon. Having been a victim of one man’s hubris in thinking he could usurp the natural order, having been the one to bring that man down, Isaiah was assigned the head of the Department of Pride by Lucifer himself.