Demonic Devourer's Development

There was one more thing for me to do in the meantime. I took my Ring of Thousand Faces and buried it in the ground in my cage so Aivena won't spot it.

She returned in a couple of hours with a bag of new journals, writing utensils, glass tubes, substances and other stuff she placed on the shelves of her tree house. After that, we were back to the question game, but this time with writing down the answers.

She drilled me on the parts I was made from and the abilities I had. I lied to her about the poison resistance, saying that it was from a malformed monster in the caves, and hoped that she won't test the extents of it in the future.

After the end of her questions, Aivena still didn't know about my blind sight, stinger, web spinning, cold affinity, heat vision, enhanced senses, steel soul, telepathy (that was only good for listening in on telepathic conversations of bugmen, of which there were none) and, of course, Pest.

She was curious about how I could just evolve features and eat everything, of course, but I was as dodgy about this as I could afford. I just said that I didn't know. She didn't believe me, not entirely—but for now, she backed off.

She never bothered to ask my name. And since I wasn't going to tell her, I didn't introduce myself either.

I had plenty of questions for her, too. Aivena talked with plenty of ease about herself. I found out that she was an angel for one hundred and thirty years, died at forty from claws of an Observer, a rare and very dangerous monster. As a druid in life, she became a lesser angel of Goddess of Druids in death.

Like all angels, she was given divine powers, which I witnessed just recently, and work to do. At first, simple and mindless jobs—someone, it turned out, still had to tile fields and grow food in Heaven, even if they did that with magic. Then she advanced in ranks and became an overseer of one of Goddess of Druids many holy groves. But these groves mostly overseered themselves well enough that Aivena could slip to the mortal world and do whatever she wanted.

As long as mortals didn't notice that she was an angel and told some priest who will tell to the Twelve Bastards, she was fine to do so.

All that information was interesting, but not very helpful. Aivena didn't even know how any of her spells worked, including the one that let her go to Heaven and back. But that was all I got, just like what I told her was all she was going to get.

And on that note began my dark days of imprisonment.

I kept studying Aivena just like she studied me. I found out, for example, that she was not a creature of routine and habit, as one would expect from a scientist. She wasn't even a real scientist, she just liked to use living creatures as pieces in some insane jigsaw puzzle.

While Aivena did have some organisation, like in her journals, she often acted on impulse and didn't stick to a rigid schedule. One day she was more interested in the extent of my malleability, and another she suddenly was much more enthralled in my carapace.

With my blind sight, and with Aivena's writing table placed mere steps away from me, I could easily read Aivena's writing without her even being aware of it. I found many curious insights here in the notes on the margins.

No matter what, she didn't dare to get into my cage. She even warned me that even if she died, the barriers would stay upright for a while after—long enough that she can snitch to her bosses on me.

The revelation didn't make my future brighter. She could've been lying, of course, but I was only daring to test the knowledge in the most dire situation.

Either way, Aivena was out of my reach.

Her "experiments" varied from scientific to completely random. One time she threw a heap of what looked like random rocks and herbs, and told me to eat them. Later, from her journal, I found they were all highly toxic to humans, and Aivena was testing my resistance to poisons.

Another time, she shot different attack spells at me to find out my resistances to different elements. Electricity, fire, acid, cold and just blunt damage. Earth, as it was also called.

I pretended that the cold hurt me the most, showing quite realistic, if you asked me, grunts of pain. The reward for that was that the next time Aivena didn't like my answers to her questions, or that I swore at her in a bout of anger, she shot me with rays of cold that, if anything, only made me feel better.

She didn't suspect a thing for an entire week until she cut off a piece out of me with a spell (as small as a finger, but it still hurt like a bitch) to look at it closer and found that it could burn and dissolve, but not freeze.

Aivena was so angry with my "intervention in the integrity of her research" that, I was ready to swear, she threw that entire week's worth of torture at me with a sadistic satisfaction when I twitched after a lightning bolt to the chest. My only grace was that she didn't have as much imagination when it came to torture as I did.

Pain. I can bear some pain. Pfft. I didn't have to bear it silently, though. My screams, besides making it easier on me, instilled in Aivena an assurance that she was slowly breaking my spirit. And as, with time, I became better at stifling my anger inside instead of telling Aivena to shove her commands up her ass, that image only strengthened in her mind.

And this wasn't the only impression that I noticed strengthening in her mind.