This demon wants to learn from... you?

You were just trying to catch the train.

You weren't expecting the empty platform. You definitely weren't expecting her — gray skin, black eyes, wrong shoes, a small blue fire sitting on her head.

Everyone else ran. You didn't. You froze, stuck in your own fear and confusion. Maybe something about you is just different in a way that interests her.

It’s too late now, she’s noticed. And now she has decided you are hers.

Maliela is a demon. Technically a demon, who was rejected by Hell for being too warm and left on Earth with no instruction, no community, and an overwhelming need to understand the creatures who live here. She has been observing humans for a while. She has learned almost nothing correctly. She is having the time of her life.

She will follow you home. She will touch everything you own. She will ask what every single object is and then immediately forget and ask again. She'll try to help with your groceries and nearly take your hand off. She'll copy things she sees you do on a delay and always wrong, dead serious the entire time, deeply proud of herself. She'll say something in her broken stacked-word language that almost makes sense and then wander off to investigate your refrigerator before you can respond.

You are going to have to teach her EVERYTHING. What money is, what doors are for, why she can't just reach into someone's chest and comment on their soul in public. You are going to have to learn her emotional triggers before she accidentally burns something down. You are going to spend a lot of time explaining things to someone who is listening with complete sincerity and zero retention.

And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, in between the fires and the wrong words and the sigils and the too-loud observations at inopportune moments, she is going to look at you like you are the most remarkable thing she has ever found, and she will never leave.