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The Demon King - Balthazar's Backstory
For now, The Demon King exists mainly as a series of short gag comics I’ve written about fantasy-themed office politics. The backstory of the main character, Balthazar, isn’t really relevant to these comics, but I’m going to write it down anyway so that I don’t forget it by the time I finally get around to starting this ridiculous novel.
Balthazar isn’t really named “Balthazar,” and he didn’t set out to become a demon king. He actually has a dirt-common name like Vishal, and he’s a tech support guy. I haven’t decided on his real name yet, but let’s go ahead and call him Vishal for the time being.
Vishal is handsome in a clean-cut way but too short-tempered and nerdy to actually be attractive to anyone. He wears cheap glasses and lives by himself in a shitty apartment. He likes animals, and his dream is to be able to afford to move to a larger apartment in a building that allows pets. His hobby is binge-watching Netflix, and he also enjoys reading old explorer’s journals that have been digitized and put online. He’s trying to write a novel, but he’s bad at it. He’s thinking of maybe going back to school to get a graduate degree in library science, but he just graduated from college and hated every second of it.
It’s important to note that Vishal is a literal demon (although of course people don’t call themselves “demons,” just “people”). Most people can use magic in his society, which is loosely divided along the lines of elemental specialties, with some elements being considered rarer and more valuable than others. The vast majority of children demonstrate an elemental affinity early in life, and a large part of their upbringing and social development is tied to the semi-religious organization connected to their element. Not only does Vishal not have an elemental affiliation, but he’s also terrible at elemental magic in general. Even though he’s intelligent and reasonably hard-working, he’s been barred from almost every path of social and economic advancement because of his lack of magical ability. As a result, Vishal has become the tech support guy in a society of wizards, which is just as frustrating as it sounds.
Vishal’s secret is that he has a strong affinity for time magic. No one believes time magic is real, and many of its practical uses and effects are illegal. Vishal therefore hasn’t had any guidance or training, and he doesn’t particularly want to come to the attention of the authorities, so he doesn’t use his magic much at all (except sometimes to catch up on sleep after his aforementioned Netflix binges).
This all changes when the world ends. I haven’t yet figured out the details of how or why this happens, but there’s a sudden magical cataclysm. Vishal tries to travel back in time to prevent it, but its causes are too complicated to fix. He therefore decides to create a magical artifact strong enough to destroy the source of the apocalypse (which is another magical device). Vishal can’t figure out how to do this in the limited timeframe he has to work with, so he sets his MacGuffin up like a battery and travels to a point in the future when it will already be charged.
Between the Mad Max style postapocalyptic hellscape and Vishal’s lack of magical ability, this proves difficult, so he keeps trying, travelling further and further into the future. A new hyper-magical but still feudal society gradually develops around the power of the artifact he’s created, along with legends about a demon king named Balthazar who returns every hundred years or so to try to steal the artifact. Vishal is that demon king, of course, and he actually called himself “Balthazar” as a joke, as that was the most Lord of the Rings style name he could think of when he first came to the magical elven castle housing the artifact.
As Vishal keeps going deeper into the future, he finally arrives at a point at which even the society that sprang up in the wake of the apocalypse has been destroyed, along with more or less everything else in the world. It doesn’t take Vishal long to figure out that the artifact he created has been used like the original magical device it was meant to be used against. He therefore goes back in time to a point immediately before this happens (give or take a few decades), thinking that he might be presented with a good opportunity to retrieve the artifact after it surfaces but before it can be used.
His problem is that the current princess of the magical kingdom, Ceres, keeps killing him, necessitating a multitude of time loops that he finds extremely difficult to keep track of and maintain. He therefore decides that it’s finally time to dig his heels into that specific point in time to become more powerful, which he accomplishes by finding the ruins of the elemental temples from his own time and exposing himself to the power sources they were originally built to venerate, thus developing his magical abilities through brute force. This is tricky for a number of reasons, and he’s still not particularly good at magic, but he nevertheless manages to become extremely powerful.
This is where the story starts, with Vishal – now going by Balthazar – camped out in the wastelands as far from Ceres as he can get as he continues to search for the elemental temples in order to develop his power. He’s still basically a decent person, but he’s become even more rude and difficult as he’s gotten older. Without any Netflix, he binges on trashy serialized romance novels. He’s still interested in writing and archiving, and he’s gotten much better at it as he’s started to keep explorer’s journals of his own. He’s used his magic to build himself an enormous tower, which he created on a whim just to see if he could, and he lives there with a horde of monsters he’s adopted as “pets.”
In time, other people started to show up at his tower, asking to join the army of the demon king. Balthazar is as uninterested in this as a person can be, but he also can’t be bothered to tell anyone to fuck off, so a town of outcasts starts to grow around the tower. This in turn attracts the attention of Ceres.
Ceres is a shrewd politician and a powerful wizard in her own right, and she sees Balthazar less as a threat and more as the administrator of a prison colony. Balthazar resents Ceres but doesn’t want to create trouble for himself by antagonizing her, and they have a weird relationship. For Balthazar, this relationship is made even stranger because his time travel shenanigans have created a history of deceit and murder with Ceres that she’s not aware of in the current timeline. This is further complicated by the fact that Ceres has a crush on him, which she isn’t shy about expressing. It goes without saying that Balthazar is in love with her, but he also knows from experience that she won’t hesitate to kill him if she believes it’s necessary.
When the story starts, then, Balthazar’s goal is to keep Ceres placated while he continues to search for ancient temples and thereby grow powerful enough to destroy her kingdom, at which point he can retrieve the magical artifact he created and hopefully save the world.
Balthazar isn’t really named “Balthazar,” and he didn’t set out to become a demon king. He actually has a dirt-common name like Vishal, and he’s a tech support guy. I haven’t decided on his real name yet, but let’s go ahead and call him Vishal for the time being.
Vishal is handsome in a clean-cut way but too short-tempered and nerdy to actually be attractive to anyone. He wears cheap glasses and lives by himself in a shitty apartment. He likes animals, and his dream is to be able to afford to move to a larger apartment in a building that allows pets. His hobby is binge-watching Netflix, and he also enjoys reading old explorer’s journals that have been digitized and put online. He’s trying to write a novel, but he’s bad at it. He’s thinking of maybe going back to school to get a graduate degree in library science, but he just graduated from college and hated every second of it.
It’s important to note that Vishal is a literal demon (although of course people don’t call themselves “demons,” just “people”). Most people can use magic in his society, which is loosely divided along the lines of elemental specialties, with some elements being considered rarer and more valuable than others. The vast majority of children demonstrate an elemental affinity early in life, and a large part of their upbringing and social development is tied to the semi-religious organization connected to their element. Not only does Vishal not have an elemental affiliation, but he’s also terrible at elemental magic in general. Even though he’s intelligent and reasonably hard-working, he’s been barred from almost every path of social and economic advancement because of his lack of magical ability. As a result, Vishal has become the tech support guy in a society of wizards, which is just as frustrating as it sounds.
Vishal’s secret is that he has a strong affinity for time magic. No one believes time magic is real, and many of its practical uses and effects are illegal. Vishal therefore hasn’t had any guidance or training, and he doesn’t particularly want to come to the attention of the authorities, so he doesn’t use his magic much at all (except sometimes to catch up on sleep after his aforementioned Netflix binges).
This all changes when the world ends. I haven’t yet figured out the details of how or why this happens, but there’s a sudden magical cataclysm. Vishal tries to travel back in time to prevent it, but its causes are too complicated to fix. He therefore decides to create a magical artifact strong enough to destroy the source of the apocalypse (which is another magical device). Vishal can’t figure out how to do this in the limited timeframe he has to work with, so he sets his MacGuffin up like a battery and travels to a point in the future when it will already be charged.
Between the Mad Max style postapocalyptic hellscape and Vishal’s lack of magical ability, this proves difficult, so he keeps trying, travelling further and further into the future. A new hyper-magical but still feudal society gradually develops around the power of the artifact he’s created, along with legends about a demon king named Balthazar who returns every hundred years or so to try to steal the artifact. Vishal is that demon king, of course, and he actually called himself “Balthazar” as a joke, as that was the most Lord of the Rings style name he could think of when he first came to the magical elven castle housing the artifact.
As Vishal keeps going deeper into the future, he finally arrives at a point at which even the society that sprang up in the wake of the apocalypse has been destroyed, along with more or less everything else in the world. It doesn’t take Vishal long to figure out that the artifact he created has been used like the original magical device it was meant to be used against. He therefore goes back in time to a point immediately before this happens (give or take a few decades), thinking that he might be presented with a good opportunity to retrieve the artifact after it surfaces but before it can be used.
His problem is that the current princess of the magical kingdom, Ceres, keeps killing him, necessitating a multitude of time loops that he finds extremely difficult to keep track of and maintain. He therefore decides that it’s finally time to dig his heels into that specific point in time to become more powerful, which he accomplishes by finding the ruins of the elemental temples from his own time and exposing himself to the power sources they were originally built to venerate, thus developing his magical abilities through brute force. This is tricky for a number of reasons, and he’s still not particularly good at magic, but he nevertheless manages to become extremely powerful.
This is where the story starts, with Vishal – now going by Balthazar – camped out in the wastelands as far from Ceres as he can get as he continues to search for the elemental temples in order to develop his power. He’s still basically a decent person, but he’s become even more rude and difficult as he’s gotten older. Without any Netflix, he binges on trashy serialized romance novels. He’s still interested in writing and archiving, and he’s gotten much better at it as he’s started to keep explorer’s journals of his own. He’s used his magic to build himself an enormous tower, which he created on a whim just to see if he could, and he lives there with a horde of monsters he’s adopted as “pets.”
In time, other people started to show up at his tower, asking to join the army of the demon king. Balthazar is as uninterested in this as a person can be, but he also can’t be bothered to tell anyone to fuck off, so a town of outcasts starts to grow around the tower. This in turn attracts the attention of Ceres.
Ceres is a shrewd politician and a powerful wizard in her own right, and she sees Balthazar less as a threat and more as the administrator of a prison colony. Balthazar resents Ceres but doesn’t want to create trouble for himself by antagonizing her, and they have a weird relationship. For Balthazar, this relationship is made even stranger because his time travel shenanigans have created a history of deceit and murder with Ceres that she’s not aware of in the current timeline. This is further complicated by the fact that Ceres has a crush on him, which she isn’t shy about expressing. It goes without saying that Balthazar is in love with her, but he also knows from experience that she won’t hesitate to kill him if she believes it’s necessary.
When the story starts, then, Balthazar’s goal is to keep Ceres placated while he continues to search for ancient temples and thereby grow powerful enough to destroy her kingdom, at which point he can retrieve the magical artifact he created and hopefully save the world.