The Demon King Characters

Balthazar
A powerful demon wizard who just wants to be left alone. Likes trashy romance novels and dick jokes. The figurative and literal straight man of the group. Makes awful decisions and looks terrible doing it. Overwaters his plants.

Ceres
A magical elven princess who is 32 going on 65. A wine mom without the children (please don't let her near children). Will fuck anything that moves and many things that don't. Makes excellent decisions for all the wrong reasons. Is amused and delighted by your bullshit.

Weive
Ceres's former lover and close confident. Murders people for hire but has a good sense of humor about it. Nonbinary fashion icon. Abides by a stern code of ethics, and by "ethics" I mean "knives."

Gasper
A big buff axe-wielding orc. Simultaneously the mom friend and the aunt who constantly causes trouble in the name of having a good time. Makes worse dick jokes than Balthazar and thinks it's funny to pretend to be straight. Wants you to eat your vegetables.

Melchior
A book-smart wizard who intended to challenge Balthazar but ended up sticking around to observe his dysfunctional lifestyle like it was bad theater. Adventure is definitely not his middle name. A disaster bisexual whose one (1) fear is commitment. Enjoys the finer things in life.

Online Quizzes

A lot of professors at my university seem to be getting their panties in a wad over whether students are cheating on online evaluations. Is Our Children Learning, they demand of each other in endless reply-all email chains. I don't know why this is an issue, as I have no doubt that students are intelligent adults who are fully capable of using the resources available to them in order to solve the problems in front of them.

I also feel like, if you're really concerned about "cheating" on online evaluations, then you need to write questions that invite and reward attention and engagement. I was already completely checked out of this semester before it even began, so I'm probably not a good representative example, but this is where I am right now:

- If you were bodily transported to the world of an MMORPG, what's the first thing you'd do?

- One of the aphorisms on writing fantasy holds that "limitations" are more interesting than "powers." If you could use magic at the potential cost of shortening your life, would you do it?

- Finding yourself trapped in a time loop is not ideal, but you might as well make the best of it. If you had access to a 24-hour time loop, what would you use it to train yourself to get really good at doing?