"I don't know what it's like for everyone. But for me--I was pissed off. At everything. Or nothing, because I didn't know what there was to be angry at, and then I did, and I knew that I was a demon in Hell, and I hated everyone who made that be a thing."
"Everyone remotely responsible. The first bad people, every demon who had ever tortured someone, every fire-and-brimstone pastor who used damnation as a bludgeon to get people to conform to their standards, everyone who had ever used religion as an excuse to hurt people..."
"How did you find out that those were the things that there were to be mad at?"
"I just--knew. You start out knowing things, when you're a demon. What exactly it is varies person to person."
"It doesn't. I knew it to begin with, it was just less obvious than the rage."
"Several languages. Some botany. A little geology. Plenty of religion. Some other stuff."
"Do you know why those things and not different things?"
"...It was mostly things I found useful or interesting. Emily was the same way. She got art and metallurgy, among other things."
"Well, that's better than not liking the things you get. Does anybody ever pop out with really weird skills, or ones they don't like, or a lot more or fewer than other demons?"
"...I think I might have heard of that, if it had happened. And I haven't."
Mehitabel gets out her notebook and scrawls this and other details down. "Was English one you got or one you learned the long way?"
"Long way. Even if I had started with it, it's changed noticeably since then. I got German, Yiddish, and Hebrew."
"Oh, lovely. It's a beautiful language," Edie says, also in Hebrew. "For some reason I got the old version from before it was solely a religious language with all the swear words and so on left in; I'll try not to corrupt you too much."
"Well, I mean, you might teach me swear words but I don't think it would make me a bad person or anything."
"That much is true! Swearwords is not, however, the only possible corrupting influence a demon could have. Luckily I'm not that sort of demon."
"I don't know, I'm not one and I've never found the results appealing enough to study the methodology. Offer you candy to steal change from your mom? That's probably not a real example, it's terrible and I'm using it for mockery material next time I run into someone who fancies themselves a tempter."