"Well crap,
this
is the wrong place," said the demon. "Where the fuck am I?"
Paul peeked around the corner of the door frame in fright. The speaker had to be a demon, there was nothing else to call it...call her. She had brick-red skin and short black hair. She also had the kind of athletic, muscular physique that Paul had seen on women who played a lot of soccer and lifted weights. A pair of delicate horns poked out of her hair and swept gracefully back along her head. She had a two-meter long prehensile tail that was about four centimeters thick and which swished around behind her. The tail had a slight bulge at its tip and the way that it lashed around reminded Paul of an unhappy cat. Oh, and most importantly...she wasn't wearing a single stitch of clothing.
The demon stood in Paul's living room with her back to him. She had her hands on her hips as she surveyed his tiny apartment. His eyes were almost hypnotically drawn to the firm cheeks of her ass, just below that mobile and expressive tail.
He had finished his senior project not twenty minutes ago, and had just been having a quiet and celebratory drink of bourbon when he had heard a loud sound that sounded like 'VWAP' behind him. Acting on instinct, he'd run to the doorway and taken refuge behind it. And now there was a naked demon in his living room.
The demon began to turn and he ducked back behind the door's edge. His frightened eyes now took in his small and sparsely furnished bedroom, with just held the one futon he'd managed to scrounge up. Paul felt his heart hammer against his ribcage. His eyes darted to the bedroom's little window and he thought about escape. But he was on the seventh floor, and that window had nothing below it but the cold hard ground.
He heard an amused snort from the living room. "I can hear you," called the demon. "And I can also smell you. Come on out."
Paul jammed a fist into his mouth to keep himself from screaming.
"Come out. Now."
His legs seemed to move of their own accord, and Paul found himself walking around the door edge and towards the waiting demon. Her face had high cheekbones and a narrow, pointed chin. The demon's eyes had yellow irises which seemed to glow with an internal light. She had a fine and shapely nose. His eyes roved downward almost on instinct. Her breasts were as spectacular as her ass, heavy and firm but not sagging in spite of a distinct lack of bra. Her areolas were a darker cinnamon color. The junction of her muscular thighs had a small patch of wiry hair. Her feet looked almost normal, but had three long toes instead of the normal five. The demon's hands, however, looked entirely human. She gave him an amused little smirk as he stopped in front of her. The statuesque devil-woman was at least a head taller than him, and also larger in almost every dimension.
His throat had been closed with fright, but now he began babbling. "Look, ma'am, or whatever, please, I don't know who you are and I don't know how-"
"Shhh." The simple command seemed to wire his jaw shut. It was odd - it wasn't like he was being prevented from speaking. It just seemed like the right thing to be quiet. It was the same as when he had walked around the door edge. It didn't feel like a compulsion, but just...something he should do.
The demon leaned over and sniffed at the crook of his neck. One of her hands then came up and cupped his chin, forcing him to stare directly into her unblinking yellow eyes. She leaned and sniffed the other side of his neck.
"Hmm. Human," she murmured. Her voice was low and throaty. "But I don't recognize your smell. You're not from one of the domesticated timelines, I take it?"
Paul found he could speak. "The what?"
"Obviously not, or you'd know what I was talking about." She let go of his chin and leaned back. "There's a few key inflection points that help distinguish the Earth timelines. When was the moon landing, and who did it?"
Paul almost said '
the what?'
but then his academic side took over. "July 20th, 1969. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins."
"Ah. That helps. Was President Kennedy alive or dead when that happened?"
Now that it looked like she wasn't going to pull out his spine right away, Paul began to relax just a little. "Dead. He was shot a few years before...1963, I think, in Dallas."
"Okay. Hmm. That means...when was the date of the invasion of the Japanese home islands?"
That flummoxed him a bit. "I don't know what you mean."
She looked a little frustrated. "During a really big war, it would have been around the middle of the last century."
"Oh! World War Two! Actually, there wasn't one. We dropped a couple of atomic bombs on Japan and forced a surrender without any invasion."
The demon blinked, clearly surprised. "I'm in one of
those
timelines? Sheesh, I'm really out in the boondocks. How did I wind up here?"
Paul suddenly had a notion of how. He flicked a guilty glance over where his senior project lay against the wall. It was a large brass plate inscribed with intricate and ancient script around its edge. The demon caught his glance and looked over as well. Then she looked back at Paul with a large grin. He paled as he caught sight of her stark white teeth. They were sharp and pointy, and clearly meant for stripping flesh from bone.
"Ohhh, somebody's been playing around with naughty things, I see." She tousled his short black hair. Her nails were long, almost like talons. The demon walked over to the plate.
"It...no, ma'am, it's just an art project! I never, ever would do anything like demonic summoning! I'm really sorry, I wasn't-"
"Relax, kid. I'm just messing with you." The demon picked up the plate and studied it. She traced a fingertip over the writing around its edge. "Ancient Sumerian. But you actually got the phrasing right. How did you manage that?"
"It just...seemed to make more sense that way, ma'am."
"Don't call me ma'am, kid. I work for a living."
"Sorry, look...it really is just art. I can show you, I've got my notes!" Paul forgot his fear in the face of being able to show his work to somebody else. He dashed into his bedroom and returned with large notebook. The demon took it and quickly flipped through it. Either she was skimming or she could read much faster than he could. Her tail began to lose some of its angry lashing around as she read.
Finally she closed the book and looked at him thoughtfully. "Yep. You redid the syntax of the language back to the way it should have been originally. And do you know what you've made, my clever lad?"
"A...a summoning spell?"
"Not quite. Think of it more like a beacon or a lighthouse for dimensional travelers." She tapped the spine of the book thoughtfully on her chin. "Very random. But in an infinite cosmos, even the unlikely is inevitable."
Paul was beginning to understand. His 'art project' must have disoriented this demon as she made her way across the dimensions, and had made her pop out 'here' instead of 'there'. Wherever 'there' was he didn't even want to think about.
"So then, can I just deface it a little?" he asked her. "Like I said, it's just art. I can change some of the runes around so this doesn't happen again." He wrung his hands in front of him. "And you'll be able to get back...right?" He really hoped the answer to that was yes. She'd probably kill and eat him if he'd trapped her here.
The demon carelessly slung the notebook onto his ratty sofa. A few loose pages slid out of it. "Yeah, I can head out in a bit. It takes me a while to recharge...probably about thirty minutes or so. And don't worry about changing your plate thingy. Now that we know it's there we can avoid it in the future." She clasped her hands together and stretched her arms above her head, making those amazing tits practically pop out in Paul's face. He quickly snatched his eyes back up to her face and saw that she was giving him another sharp-toothed grin.
"So you got anything to drink in this joint?" she asked. "And what's your name, anyway?"
"Ah, I've got some bourbon and my name's Paul. Paul Haskell."
"Pauuul." The demon drew out his name as if tasting it. "I won't bother telling you my name, since you don't have the right tongue to pronounce it correctly."
Paul had rummaged through his kitchenette and scared up a couple of glasses. He gave her a quizzical look as he came back in. "The right tongue?"
In reply the demon dropped her jaw open. A very impressive length of black and wiry muscle emerged. It was at least the length of his forearm. She waggled it at him and gave him a lewd wink before drawing it back into her head. Then she settled herself on the floor with her legs crossed. Her tail coiled itself on the floor around her.
"Come here," she said, and patted the carpet in front of her. "Take a load off. And you can call me Desdemona. I always was a fan of Shakespeare."
"Okay...Desdemona." He poured her a generous shot and then one for himself and sat down in the indicated spot. He tried very hard to keep his eyes off of her groin. The way she was sitting made it very difficult, but he managed. From what he had glimpsed, her 'equipment' looked much like any human female.
"Cheers," she said, and held out her glass. He nodded and clinked glasses, then took a shaky sip. Desdemona, for her part, just tossed the entire drink down in one go. "Aahh! Much better. So what do you want to know?"
"Know?"
"Come on, you've got a demon sitting in your living room. We've got a little time to kill before I can head back. And you must have questions. This timeline definitely doesn't get many of my kind coming through."
Paul thought for a bit. "You call yourself a demon. So are you from hell?"
"Hell? Wow, I haven't heard it called that in years. But yeah, that's where I'm from. Lakes of fire and all that. My home dimension is definitely hotter than here. In more ways than one." She gave him another lewd wink. Paul was still uneasy. This person, this demon certainly seemed to be coming on to him. But her idea of foreplay might involve biting out his jugular. Those teeth certainly looked like they were capable of it.
