She holds even a hopeless line, because she can and so she must.

But it is the Outland adventurer that draws Alicia's attention the most.  She recognizes those demons.

"... --oh, well, and there she goes, even.  Did she just derive ana-kata Blink on the fly?"

"Wow, I wish I'd had her back when we were fighting Barvid!  Yes, if we want someone to help bring down a demon-summoning cult without the hands of Fate, she sounds like a good friend."

The angel does get enough feedback from the search-spell to notice that there's some connection between this pattern of alts and Alicia's own head.  But she's not going to mention anything - the multiverse considers this Diana a separate person, and Alicia apparently wants her to be treated that way too, so she's not going to point that out to the Will of the Multiverse or anyone else who isn't noticing.

There's most definitely a connection, but - in the aspirational sense.  In the authorial sense, even.  Not so much a connection between souls.  (Though perhaps there is a connection between the two souls in the 'sufficiently modeled character' sense; this author has not gone so far as to check this particular instantiation of a [TEMPLATE TRUENAME REDACTED] for a co-occurring Ophelia Vaudelle or Mondegreen - yet - though in truth she expects one to show up on the other side of the coin shortly.  (It's the villaingender; it's absolutely catnip for Opheliae.))

"...Other shenanigans I find myself thinking of, to silver some of these Drawbacks...

"...I have the option to give you a memory of a Bad Timeline, one that's...probably worth the capital letters... in addition to what 'canon' knowledge we will apparently be getting.  Something like a worst case scenario; the canonical villainess kills the prince rather than losing gracefully and letting you have them, and I've no doubt that - she would be very cruel.

"You'd...have to do a lot to me to drive me to that; I have no idea what the villainess would be driven to such lengths by - but it's also a way to steal 'dangerous super moves' and suchlike.

"I -

"...if anyone should try and bear up under that it ought to be me, you've already done - more than enough, and at least I'd - have a reason - but I don't know if you have the option.  Seems - unheroic.  But I've already had enough...nightmares of futile struggle...that...if I can make something of them...I'd rather.  ...Fuck, why did I admit that.  On national television.  ...Not literally, I fucking hope."

"I don't care for more bad memories, unless there's a point to them.  And you haven't been talking about the point of the story being overcoming our bad impressions of each other.  And I don't want you to have them either."

It could be a good story.  But it could be bad for Villarosa.

"...I don't want either of us having bad memories of a lying future.  I just...

"Have somehow argued myself into the corner that obtaining the strategic intelligence of who might bend the knee to an overlady, with what leverage...

"...If it outweighs the cost, for the gains in truth...I can't apply deontology to a world hanging in the balance, and the best lies...they need little bits of truth.  Little seeds.

"It's not...a narrative impression, if I recall correctly."

That... would help, if Lila could get a play-by-play version of her winning.  It'd be sort of boring to just step through it, but it'd work.

"But wait a minute - I'm the heroine; I win in the canonical version!  So couldn't we get that knowledge from just knowing how the canonical Roses of Villarosa goes, without having to have memories of living through it?"

"...we're Off The Rails, though.  And knowledge of canon...

"Canon knowledge is all well and good, but it's not going to tell you the things you come to know by living with someone for several years.  They're different knowledgebases.

"The lens of a visual novel or an anime has very specific things it focuses upon."

"Does it have to use that lens?  I knew a wizard who could give people the knowledge they'd get from having lived through things without feeling fully like they'd lived through them.  Can we do it that way so it doesn't feel so horrible for you?"

"I have had some ideas about 'knowing shadow or Void magic' as a Dark Secret, and those are certainly that sort of bad-end divinatory, uncontrolled..."

"That'd help with your canonically helping helping release the demon lord...  That reminds me, what Dark Secret should I have?  Maybe something I did back when my father was Heroically questing... I suppose that would mean he died rather recently..."

"You could be adopted.

"...Wait, no, Villarosa almost prefers adopted heirs.  They show that they've shown enough value to be worth expending effort upon promoting."

"...Anyway, hmm.  I dunno, really."

"If I'm looking for Demon-Lord–releasing magic, I probably want to go with my other Weird Magical Experiment of alloying Light with Chaos, though, in like, a more distinct way than smiting it really hard."

"... That just gave me an idea.  Let's say, when I was five or so, I caused one of the problems my father fixed up.  Maybe I even released a minor demon."

"Yeah, that could do it.  I - hmm.  Demons in the mold of Sargeras...I'm not sure what a 'minor' demon looks like from a physics standpoint unless...

"Ooh, yeah, that'd work.

"You accidentally - invoked one of the standard battle-summons of chaos mages, maybe - and the - maybe an imp, the smallest possible metastable unit of chaos, sets things on fire - kind of set fire to something important before you had any idea what you'd even done?

"Um.  Let me lay out what I'm imagining a demon to even look like, physically.  They're not exactly - the same sort of creatures as us.  So we have..."

She'll just...fetch some paper, and start drafting.

The most important thing to know about demons is that they do not have souls.  They cannot have souls.  Souls are ordered and demons are not.  Demons can only be metastable patterns of half-ordered chaos; if a soul is a stable region of a Game Of Life board, a demon is a glider.  It doesn't have identity as humans recognize it, only known response patterns.

Summoning demons is fairly straightforward to do with Arcane magic.  Summoning demons that do what you want them to do, and nothing else, is something equivalent in effort to a weapon of mass destruction program.  Imps, for example, can't be stopped from eventually fireballing anything that moves, not even their summoners; the key factor in imp development is maximizing the friendly delay.

 

A Demon Lord is someone or something that looked at the above paragraphs and laughed, because it is powerful enough to have a soul or something like it, despite running off of a chaos heart for power, despite consistent, soul-burning, immersion in the Twisting Nether Between All Worlds And Realms.

This gives them opportunities to accomplish great and terrible things by use of power overwhelming - but also presents the unique vulnerability that having a soul allows soul-related magics to work upon them, for better or for worse.  Demons cannot be killed, but Demon Lords can die.

"I think that's some decent worldbuilding, actually.  Come to think of it."

"That sounds good, except... 'powerful enough to have a soul' doesn't strike the right note.  Maybe demon lords aren't properly the same thing as demons; they came from elsewhere but they're just as chaotic.  Or maybe they stole a soul from someone."

"Yeah, demon lords are not things that just naturally happen; the example of Sargeras from Azeroth was originally a Titan of Order who went looking for power to punch the Void with.  First drafts and whatnot, I guess.  Or - mm."

"I think it is possible for - ensouled demons, really; that's the trick of it - to naturally happen.

"It's just statistically so improbable that it hasn't happened yet, compared to - the normal way.  Where you start drawing on fel and drawing on fel and drawing on fel until you can't notice how you've changed from where you were, anymore.  Or something.

"I don't think stealing souls is a Fel thing.  I think it's a Shadow thing.  Wanting the realness of a soul."

"So some very misguided mages might want to become demon-lords, and might someday achieve their wish...  And when a Shadow-creature does steal a soul - what sort of Shadow-lord does it become then?"

"It kind of doesn't?

"In that...

"Okay, so let me tell you about Glitch, the TTRPG - tabletop roleplaying game.

"The story of Glitch, insofar as it has one particular narrative in mind, follows player-characters that are what are known as Strategists, a type of Excrucian, an existence that Is Not," and she makes damn sure to pronounce the capital letters, "but is inextricably entangled with what Is in a way that is a dark mirror of the Nobilis - defenders and definitions of a single aspect of what Is.  There's a whole thing about Imperators who appoint them and embody the things, but they're not relevant - actually, wait, wasn't there a whole thing about - was it Rule, or Game, that was 'some random Voidy bit wandered into the weave and doesn't seem to want to go off' - but that's still not relevant except as an example of Void coexisting with Light sort of.  Whereas Mimics just sort of explode if you look at them funny - anyway I'm still getting sidetracked."