She pauses for a moment.

"...How do I tell?"

“...well, that might take some time to learn.”

She admires the hair.

“You’ll be able to curl it once you’ve got your practice in, but do you want me to do anything with the texture? You don’t want to go near an iron with this.”

She runs a hand through it. "It seems fine. Why not?"

"It's got sensation, hon."

"...Oh. Right. Normal people find that level of pain uncomfortable."

"But not you, mm?"

"I've had worse."

"...Well, you'll want to be easy on it anyway, sugar. It can be sensitive to heat treatment at first."

"Demons come from Hell," she says, shrugging and looking away. "We start out as the damned. I sold my soul to get out from under someone who was hurting me. I thought it was worth it. I was wrong."

“...well, I’m not sending you back there.”

"Even if you just sent me back to my Earth the other demons would find me."

“I have plenty of different places I could send you off to, hon. Just depends on where you want to go.”

She shrugs and looks away.

"It's...hard to know what I want, on a scale smaller than 'not get tortured' and bigger than 'air conditioning in the summer and a raspberry danish for breakfast'."

“...It’s hard for a lot of people when they come through here. It takes a lot of knowing yourself.”

“But you’ll have time.”

"Good."

“In the meantime...do you want a danish?”

Small smile. "Yes please."

She retrieves an order pad from behind the counter, scribbles something down and tears the slip off.

The slip is clipped to a wire above her head. Within a few seconds, it disappears.

“It’ll just be a minute. In the meantime, let’s see what we can do about your eyes.”

"What about my eyes?"

“You could keep them black, but if you want any special colors, or a glow, or anything else...”

"--My eyes are black right now? Usually I have to do that on purpose--oh. You just mean the irises, don't you."

"Mhmm. I can do your sclera too, though, if you want."

"No, I'd rather still be able to do the thing." She demonstrates the thing, blinking: her eyes are black all the way through when she opens them. She blinks again, and her eyes have gone back to normal. "Glowing irises seem like they could have...unwanted side effects."

She applauds quietly at the eye trick.

“Side effects?”