With most of the dwarves now gone, Shasta has a lot more free time. She acted as the liaisoween the refugee dwarves and our try, as well as their de facto leader, meaning she previously was quite busy. Now though, I had the opportunity to talk with her more casually about a few questions that I'd thought of in the past month reted to demon behavior.

  Based ohing I'd heard sed hand, it seems like the dwarves, humans, and elves had done some study of demons, even gaining a rudimentary uanding of uage. So, given how our society in Kembora is an outlier because of our ins, getting an outsider's opinion on how demons normally behave should give me potential insights into more baseline behaviors of different kinds of demons, and might give me insight into ways to better orient our popution growth.

  Unfortunately, she didn't have any direct data on hand, but she could share a bunch of stories of adventurers and soldiers who had fought against demons in one text or another. While there are some minor differences between stories, I did get some pretty det data. There are three overarg texts that the aes take p. One is the text of initial ndings of demons at the beginning of an invasion. The sed is rge scale bat during the middle of an invasion. The final text is between invasions, because it takes quite a bit of time to uproot and remove all the demons that invaded.

  During initial ndings, things are chaotibsp; Due to the demons generally arriving in long oes, they're hard to spot from a distance, and they generally arrive spread out over a few hundred miles of coast, all arriving within a few days of each other. All those stories portray demons as absolutely ravenous mohat devour everything that moves and is alive, even their own on occasion.

  Based on what Zaka had told me of his journey here, ibalism is very ong demons, and when starved, they get quite aggressive. By the time they arrive, quite a few have usually died and beeen. So, while it's not surprising, I also couldn't gleam muew info from any of those stories.

  The set of aes focused on bat from the war. It seems that some time after arriving and g themselves, the demons anize and usually stake a cim, taking over the emptied towns and building rudimentary defenses. Usually, they anize around a handful of powerful demons, and will even overwhelm local defenses in small cities, anizing themselves into a makeshift kingdom. Depending on the initial invasion size, they tend to either hole up and grow their numbers quickly, or expand rapidly and cim even more territory.

  As for how Zaka or myself would measure up to these 'powerful demons', we'd be called them, but we aren't anywhere he power of the actual demon lord, at least not individually. We're somewhere he power of a demon who would rule over a rge town, or perhaps a small city during an invasion. Most of the individual aes came from the st invasion, though some date back hundreds of years. I trust the newer ones far more than the older ones, since oral tradition tends to exaggerate over time.

  As such, other tha invasion, with Gokura, I didn't trust any of the descriptions of the 'demon lords'. Gokura's description as a demon t three times the height of a man, with two pairs of arms with three fio each hand, and who could throw boulders hundreds of yards, already sounded something like an exaggeration, but I could imagi being real. Perhaps it's something above an ogre or a troll?

  The main piece of info on demon behavior that I could gleam from war stories was that while most weaker demoo serve more powerful demons, it also was rare that you'd ever see a lot of powerful demons in one pbsp; For a rge army to be seen, it usually needed an incredibly powerful demon on top. In fact, it seems that most of the historic demon lord defeats from their oral tradition cim that victory was assured when the lord fell in battle, and the demon armies would scatter. The remnants could take anywhere from a few months to a few years to up, but the tipping point was always that the most powerful demon died.

  Hearing that, I'm gd that Zaka, Zeb, and I have all been dedig adequate time to fog on leveling. Thinking back to our own society, we put down an insurre when a sed hobgoblin rose in power to the point where they matched Zaka. Perhaps I should have Zaka focus on training even more than he currently does, for the sake of keeping things in order. I really don't want to think about what kind of uprising would occur if all the fisherdemons suddenly became more powerful than us.

  Or perhaps I should do a show of military force through teology to keep them in line. I don't know if their obedience is actually instinctual or not, but we actually do have the ability to develop some absolutely devastating ht now, which would probably keep anyone fr anything funny. I've already been thinking over a on to potentially sy leviathans. If we were close to a dyihan, I'm almost certain we'd each max out our levels in a single day. In fact, if we killed a leviathan at sea, we'd potentially all drown because everyone on the ship would feel the same exhaustioed to reag max level at the same time.

  As for the on, it's actually a straightforward application of existing teologies we've made. Grow a moderately rge silver doped fluorite crystal, then e in a lead artillery shell. Then, all you o do is fire it into a leviathan, and wait a few days. If you mao do that, I'm almost certain the beast would die to radiation poisoning. Based ohing I know, I bet that magical healing would probably make things worse, since you'd be applying mahe crystal, increasing the amount of radiation released. Of course, the carcass would be pletely ruined, and you'd essentially be dropping nuclear waste in the o afterwards.

  The st text that the aes fall iween invasions, gave me some better insights. After a demon invasion, iably, there are stragglers who survive ie areas. The three main tis are all fairly well poputed, but there are still some moderately sized forests, or remote valleys where demons hide. Anywhere like that take months to years to find and properly remove the demons. Usually, after the majority of the demons are eradicated, there will be word every so often of a goblin vilge that has been found, that o be eradicated.

  In those vilges, there are always oo three hobgoblins, a few dozen goblins, and a dozen or so cages full of imps. Sometimes, there will be other vilges nearby with simir numbers. There are rumors that in the distant past, demons had a det foothold on the human ti, in their rgest forest, and a demon lord native to the human ti attacked from the forest, without invading from the sea. I don't know how much I trust that story, but it's at least iing.

  Mainly though, it's iing to hear that these vilges seem to keep imps in cages, and that there might be a few of them within a moderately small area. Whether that means that we might be so lucky as to get more imp summoners if we settle a little further from the city is hard to say. Perhaps they also had limiting summoning capabilities, and the cages were a way to move imps from the summoo the new vilges.

  Shasta did make a point that there were some differences between the way oblins behave, and the way that other adventurers have described them though. Acc to her, it's something like the tone of their obedienbsp; Most oblio obey more from fear, rather than from respect for power. Which is why they've been able to capture and study them. Higher demons, however, usually resist to the end, preferring to die in bat rather than be captured. Those that are captured rarely ever give any info, g it'd be dishonorable.

  oblins, by parisoo have more of a respect based obedienbsp; I'll have to keep an eye on how our new goblins from our summoning experiment behave for more insights. My current hypothesis is that the imp stage for demons is something like an aggressive toddler stage where a lot of their temperames set. In this hypothesis, the fight pits instill a sense of respect for other demons who survived the pits, and an admiration for those more powerful than themselves, the cages instill fear of their superiors, and the rooms we set up seem to drive some amount of entitlement. Though the natural tenden general seems to be obedie least in goblins, sihat is the baseline in all the imps that evolved within a day's time from summoning. Though that does bring up biological questions as to why demons evolved to have a variable length imp stage to begin with that would influeheir personality so heavily...