Memoirs of a Devil

By R. F. DeAngelis

Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven. 

Whatever weakling said that is beyond pathetic. I've ruled in Hell. It was easy. So easy I got bored with it after only two years. Evil is for the lazy and unimaginative. Being good? That takes real work, dedication, and self-reflection. I see the face of evil every time I l

• Language: English
• Publisher: R. F. DeAngelis
• Release date: Apr 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9798989504701

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Introduction

Memoirs of a Devil

I won’t bore you with insignificances, instead I will tell you a simple truth. I, Jessica Jameson, am - or rather was - a devil, ruling in Hell and all. I nearly took over an entire world. In my life, I have done things that not only should no one ever do, I also took great joy in causing the suffering of others. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think of myself as a fiend. I had rules, standards, even my own twisted sense of honor. Children, for example, were sacrosanct as the only accidental death I am guilty of was a newborn.

Thought I was going to skimp out on the full truth? Be unreliable? I don’t blame you. Someone comes up to me and goes Hi, I’m a devil and I’m going to tell you the truth … well, let’s just say I’m a fool, but I’m not that big of a fool. I’ve thought for years on how best to tell my story, or if I even should, but circumstance has now made what I want a moot point. I could explain why, but as one of my teachers says, If we could understand without context, I could simply tell everyone the meaning of life and all would be well.

She’s quite serious by the way, and I think I believe her.

So, how to start. I could use the cliche of ‘in the beginning’, but which beginning should I choose? The first? It won’t provide a lot of context. A girl standing on a street corner after martial arts class, tears sliding down her face as she waits for a late father who will never come pick her up again. I could say I was a white girl from the Deep South that grew up in the city best described as the Lady with the Dirty Face. I could say I always had anger issues and violent outbursts. I could plead for sympathy as I spoke of a drunk stepdad who tried crawling in my bed when I was eight.

I’m long past such things.

No, I think I’ll start with a girl going home from work one night. She was out for a walk as she solidified the ideas that she would use to bring the entire world under her heel, when she met a man. That man offered her power, more power than she already had, and all she had to do was get into the van. Said girl - by luck, dark magic, or whatever odd quirk of an uncaring universe - could change her entire form into living electricity. She didn’t care about such mundane things as a strange man and his strange looking pedo van. She could handle him.

I did handle him, and he made good on his promise of power.

The downside was I wound up in a place where magic reigned; men flew, dragons and demons raged, and things that looked as if they came out of James Cameron’s nightmare roamed the land with guns that spit fire and brimstone upon all who weren’t pure human.

I was, in fact, in Hell.

The power of the place intoxicated me. Its raw magic filled my very being to the brim and expanded my already considerable abilities far beyond anything human. Which was fine by me, humans were beneath me after all. I embraced my new form and abilities and got the hell away from that idiot as soon as I could.

I think it’s time I put things in perspective. Power sets come in three types: physical, mental, and dynamic. Most people have a blend, but your highest ranked ability determines how you are classified. The system goes from 0-5 and while a full one third or more of people are estimated to have powers, 70% of those are 0-2. Zeros are ‘normal’ except for something odd. If they are physical, they might have green hair like Mitch does, if mental they might get hunches that are right more often than not. If Dynamic? I know a girl who never needs a lighter, she goes by Zippo and, well, her flame is just big enough to light her cigarette. I am a type 5 dynamic.

Beyond being able to become a being of living lightning, I have almost complete control over the flow of electricity and can ‘see’ the otherwise invisible electric charge of our world. I can sort of teleport. I either arc like lightning, which has a limited range, or I can jump into electrical wiring. I have to be careful with that method, so I don’t blow a breaker or, God forbid, an old fuse. Thankfully, there aren’t many of those anymore. I heal a little more quickly, like knock a day or two off a cut, and it’s harder for me to get sick. Plus, I get over it faster. That is, right up until I get some juice from outside myself, then the sky’s the limit. I may need external energy - face it, the human body can only produce so much at a time - but I heal fast.

How fast?

Well, from my little stint in ‘Hell’ I have a belt with four fusion reactors in it: mini ones. Don’t ask me how they work, but they have a half-life of oh-my-god. When I wear that, I can take bullets, car crashes, and lots of other not-so-fun things.

I carved my own kingdom out of this Hell just for lil’ ol’ me. I think I was there two years, two winters anyway, when I came to a startling realization. I didn’t like myself. In fact, I downright hated me. I did the standard evil thing and took it out on people around me; my minions, peasants, inanimate objects and so on, but at the end of the day it really didn’t help. All the right people cowered, all the right ass kissing happened, the groveling and so forth, but life had lost all its flavor. I had really wanted to rule the entire world, and here I was with my small kingdom and I was already bored out of my skull. I had loyal followers who sucked up to me regularly. We had plans to expand the kingdom and take on the other devils as well as the humans trapped in this hellscape with us, and I could do it. Thanks to said humans and scientific leaps I couldn’t comprehend I had access to almost limitless electrical power; power I could use to heal myself. More juice, more healing, unlimited juice? It’s not hard math. Add into that equation that I could levitate, shoot lightning out of my hands, and could see and manipulate the electric field of everything around me. Oh, and as brutal as I was, I still had a never-ending supply of people I could rightfully point out that were far worse than me. After all, children were fed and protected, women were looked after, men were … well, men were fodder for war.

My plans for world conquest, my cult of personality, all those things were right on target. I lived like a god. I acted as a god, I let the people claim I was a god. I betrayed allies when it was convenient, and I used people. I even had my pick of willing women.

Not bad for a girl who was 14 when she got transported to Hell.

I hated everything about it, and the more I thought on it the more I understood why. Evil, it seemed, had a shelf-life and a cycle. As long as you could keep the cycle going you were fine, but if it ever stopped you realized you had nothing. So, you keep the cycle going: always a new enemy, a new other to villainize, a new foe to vanquish and new people to kill.

It hit me one morning as I was eating my breakfast that no new heroes had come to slay me lately. I knew sooner or later they would, as fear only works until someone has nothing left to lose. In that moment, however, I knew with no uncertainty that I would die as the last thing on this rock with no one left for me to rule. The winner in a game no one else could really play at my level. I knew at that moment why I hated myself so much: I was selling myself short. Evil was just too easy. I had done what no one else would ever be able to do, I had defeated myself. Sure, someone could - possibly even one day would - kill me, but they couldn’t defeat me.

I got up, took my gear, and left. Off to go do the only option I felt I had left, which was to go out in a blaze of glory. Turns out, I’m not suicidal. So, when, sans my power belt, I took on a full conversion Nazi cyborg, I quickly came to regret my bullshit, short sighted decision.

I should take the time to point out here and now that I am obviously here to record this. As such I realize it somewhat kills the suspense as I do stupid shit such as use my bare fists to punch the metal face of a death bot. When I call these things Nazis, I’m not kidding. Skull motifs, gleaming halls, race purity, humanity first, kill all deviants, one true way, so on and so forth. Personally, I think either they managed to accidentally rip a hole into this place back in the 40s, or this really is where you go when you die.

I have no idea where I really was to this day. Some of the humans I ran into thought it was some future Earth, some thought it was a past Earth, some thought it was just Earth but disagreed on what year it was, going from 1126 AD – 2078 AD. Despite being there for two winters I never saw anything I wouldn’t call a gross mockery of the world of my birth. Add into all that the hundreds of different sapient and sentient creatures I ran into including literal dragons, devils, and demons? I stand by my belief it was in fact Hell.

I bring this up for three reasons despite the fact that most of what I am about to tell you hasn’t got any real connection to that place. First, because I was strong enough, vile enough, and depraved enough to hang with the worst of the worst despite my age. Second, due to the fact that I had rules and standards I wouldn’t break I wasn’t the evilest thing there. Third, to get out of there I did the exact same thing that got me whisked away the first time. If you live in Hell, even ruling it, and do not take the first opportunity to get the hell out of there (pun intended) you aren’t just a fool, you’re a fucking idiot.

The first guy (no, his name doesn’t matter) was a blonde haired, blue eyed, chiseled god and yes it did turn out he actually was part of the Nazi faction. The second? A black-haired, darker-skinned guy with a pronounced English nose. Turned out he was half English and half Native Alaskan. His name I would find out later was Kyle. Yes, he was hot. No, despite my interest he and his jet-black horse didn’t ride me off to some smoke-filled bedroom for some quality mattress time. Dude was in his 50s for god’s sake. Not that he looked it.

He showed up, helped me out with Nazibot 5000, and asked if I wanted to get out of here. I did have enough sense to ask him where and he said the first words to make sense to me in a long time.

New York, USA? Good pizza, ok subways, bad TV? His voice, his mannerism, his band shirt, his absolutely cute ‘I have no idea how hot I look’ face, and the fact that I thought he was 20-something and we’re talking major hunk. Look, I’m kind of bitter quality mattress time wasn’t in my future with him, ok? It’s complicated. I’ll get to that. Oh, and his band shirt? My absolute favorite, Metallica. What can I say I am a little cheesy, Ride the Lightning and all.

I said yes and got on the back of his horse. I also giggled a bit at the idea that my knight in shining armor wore black jeans, a black shirt, had black hair, and we rode off on his black horse. Who cared that it was New York and not Savannah? Who cared that he was a Yankee? I was going home, he was hot as hell, and I really missed good pizza.

Who cared?

Me.

See you may have noticed I was on my way home from work at 14. Once upon a time a 14-year-old could get a job, with their parents’ permission. Hell, it was common in the 80s. When I left the number one pop song had been played to death on the store radio, George Michael’s Praying for Time. I was more into Mötley Crüe, Motörhead, and so on, but kept up with pop because I was a cheerleader-good-girl an’ all.

I got back to rap being mainstream, cellphones, the internet, and pop music that made my teeth hurt. Though to be fair Gwen and Pink rocked. I would hear a lot of them over the next few years.

See, my knight? He was a cop, a do-gooder, and basically a social worker. I went from growing up an only child to sharing a home with sisters like Cat, Maria, Sarah, Mitch, and Jen. The preppy kid, the religious kid, the slut, the druggie, and the nut. They all took me in and I had thought I had fooled them until my new mom, Kyle’s wife Renee, let it slip everyone knew I was a user, liar, manipulator, abuser, and all-around piece of shit. But, since I hadn’t done any of that here and had seemed genuine in my ideas and desires to turn my life around, they didn’t judge.

That was the day I started the monumental task of pulling my head out of my own ass.

Miss Preppy? Cat was a shape shifter, a real life cat girl who gets shit for it. She got knocked up and the baby daddy, a man from a ‘good family’, split. She decided to keep the kid. Little miss Cath-o-holic? An ex-prostitute rape victim whose last John left her with a present with no cure. Her faith and grace are real. Slutty McSluterson? Yeah, turns out, her family liked taking turns. She took control of her sexuality in an attempt to find worth and a way out of her nightmare. Drugs-R-Us? Turned to alcohol to dull the pain at eight. And the Nut?

The Nut is a 3-foot-tall teen girl who honestly looks like a living doll with her blond hair and blue eyes. What I took for paranoia wasn’t. An ancient cabal of fuckwads that were actually real, kidnapped her… did things to her…

Look, I got this thing when it comes to kids. You don’t hurt a child. You certainly don’t hurt a child ‘that way’.

Jenny was my real wake up call to how bad I was, to what I had done. My pathological fixation on don’t hurt children and watching what was done to her over and over again, paired with my inability and absolute powerlessness to find these sub-creatures and make them pay, finished breaking me.

If there is one thing Kyle’s Home for Wayward Super Powered Girls was good at, it was taking broken toys and turning them back into real people, whether we did it to ourselves or not. Yes, all my sisters, and one eventual brother, had powers. All of us were sob stories in our own right and, slowly but surely, I came to understand not only the harm I had done but how I had allowed myself to do it.

So why am I glossing over what has to be an absolutely fascinating bunch of tales of redemption? Simple: they don’t matter. Their stories are not mine to tell, and other than the divine revelation that I was a fuckwad, very little of why I am recording this has anything to do with it. It’s context. Frankly, if you couldn’t figure out I was a shit person despite how many times I have said it so far, then there isn’t any help for you.

Shit, I’m getting off topic.

Look, I love my family. They helped me in ways I will never be able to repay. They’re all good people, none of them deserve what happened to them. To this day they are all trying their best. If this were merely me trying to soothe my conscience or make excuses for who and what I was, and still am, I would throw this file on a magnet and let it be lost for all time.

No, this, this rambling incoherent mess is because I am what I am. It’s because I went from a nobody to the ruler of a kingdom in Hell in just a few months. It’s because I know my way was working.

Now I am watching my oh so careful original plan, my first plan, play out beat for beat. I’m going to have to take a page out of Sonja’s book and tell this as a story. Hope you get it. Either you will or you won’t. I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.

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I’m cobbling this stuff together to the best of my ability. Most of it is from memory, though some is from a journal Kyle insisted I keep while I lived with him. I kept it up out of habit once I was on my own. I read the entries and it sparks memories. This is big, huge even. If I just tell you what I know and what I’ve seen you’d call me mad. So instead I will tell you how I got here, one story from my life at a time. I was about 17 when I came home, and 20 when I moved out to start my next chapter. The first few years was me getting everything set up. See if you spot the problem and understand before I did.

Beginnings

Chapter 1

When I was 7, my dad died. He was on his way to pick me up from martial arts practice when he was hit by a car. They never caught the guy.

Don’t feel bad for me. I mean sure, he was the only real person in my life, in my world, in my everything - but I was at martial arts because in kindergarten I split a kid’s head open on a desk because he called me a girl.

I mean, I am a girl. It was the way he said it. So, I smashed his little face right against the corner of his desk. Left him scarred for life. In my defense, I was trying to kill him.

Go me.

My dad knew I had a temper, and he had heard that Karate would give me the discipline to control it. He also suffered from clueless white guy syndrome. So, his idea was to find a studio that wasn’t about tournaments or shit like that, but about rigorous discipline, self-control, and being at one with oneself. He also wanted something a bit more traditional and not ‘store front’ as he put it. When he found a place like that, they wouldn’t take me, being very Japanese and me very white, until my dad told them about my little incident.

So, Mr. Koga or - as I was to call him - Sensei took me to train. A good lesson for her to become Shinobi. He said. He didn’t teach me much culture, not that I cared, but I did learn the language. My dad had no idea what a Shinobi was. This was ’81 in Savannah, Georgia, after all.

Don’t think too hard about it, I’m in my 20’s and I was born in ’76. I’ll get there.

Two years into my training my dad never makes it to pick me up. Instead, several hours later, a cop comes. My mom picks me up shortly after midnight, and within a week my new daddy moved in. A week. We had literally just buried my dad the day before.

Sensei taught me power wasn’t about size, it was about leverage and control. So, when ‘new daddy’ came into my room drunk 6 months later and tried to tuck me in, I used what I had been taught and got both over him. Needless to say, he was extremely pliable to my suggestions after that and my ‘allowance’ went up accordingly.

When I was 11 I started getting headaches, migraines really. They lasted about a month, and it was debilitating. I kept seeing auras around everything and everyone. As the pain began to ebb, I noticed that I could see where the electrical wires were behind the walls. I started to imagine what it would look like if those little pulses in those lines stopped.

My TV shut off.

Everyone around me glowed, but only faintly, while I could be nearly blinding when I looked at myself. I started experimenting with this and learned I could ‘turn myself down’ so I tried to turn myself up instead. The first time my body dissolved around me I wish I could say I was terrified. That would have been, you know, normal? No, the first thing I did was try to jump into the wires in my wall. It worked, but on my way out I not only flipped all the breakers in my mom’s new house, but blew the transformer.

The fire that night was the first and only time she showed any interest in my welfare. She was terrified I was in the house when it went up. When I came walking up the street, still buzzing from my first trip through the lines, she came running over to hug me. That’s when I told her I knew she killed my dad. She was so shaken that she stood there for a moment and said something I took to heart.

Sometimes that’s how you get what you want, baby girl.

I could have killed her then, but I needed parents, even if they were murderers. No way I was going to be one of those trash bag kids from school. I was a cheerleader after all. A month and a new house later I pretty much did what I wanted. I stayed out of their way, and other than buying me things when I told them to, they stayed out of mine.

After we were settled into our new ‘home’ I went out to practice my new gifts. I chose an old warehouse down by the river, the kind that was abandoned. The smell of the pulpwood plant would hide any ozone I created and the noise of it would cover what I was up to. I reveled in the freedom of sheer destruction, and when a trash person came into view, I had a little fun.

I have no idea how long I spent terrorizing that poor woman. I wish I could say I didn’t know better, but the truth was I didn’t care. The dumb bitch wasn’t smart enough to run away from her new god, so she would get exactly what she earned for not fearing me. Eventually I slew her by collapsing things on her as she was bent over.

She had been going to retrieve a hidden baby…

Her child.

I had killed them both.

It … it got into my head. I meant to kill the woman, but the child? That was an accident, that was a lack of control.

Never again.

I became much more controlled after that, but it kept running through my head again and again. How could this mom, a real mom willing to die for her child have been a trash person, and my mom, a real trash person, lived like a queen?

I decided to do something about it, to put things right. Over the next few years, I started on my grand plan. I became outgoing and active in politics, first at school then writing letters to the newspaper. All with the goal of getting my name known to the right people. That was my day job. At night I started stalking the streets and taking care of petty crime and helping the police, that was my night job. I even had a neat little costume to go with it.

Then there was my side hustle.

I began stealing money, putting pressure on dealers, offering protection, and consolidating power. All as quietly as I could. Killing when I meant to do it was nothing to me. I even found out I got a thrill out of hurting people. I wouldn’t have a name for that for years.

See, it was simple: not so mild-mannered activist by day, crime fighter by night, and behind it all a mastermind behind a criminal empire. An empire that I would eventually wind up fighting valiantly against only to be unmasked… right as I was running for office. I was going to be the first female president and I was going to fix this sick and twisted world and rule it as its rightful Queen.

Till the day The Devil came for me.

He was all smiles, no nonsense, and quite happy to have my superhero identity come and help him take care of a threat to mom, apple pie, and the American way of life. He had the bearing of a military man. How could I say no?

I was 14 and stupid. Seriously. If you don’t look at yourself from back when you were fourteen and go, damn what a dumb bitch, then you haven’t grown up at all.

To his credit he didn’t lie to me. He was in the Military, a Captain of The Restored United States. He picked me to come to his time because… well it didn’t really matter since I was nothing more than cannon fodder. He had no idea that with enough electricity I could heal myself. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have given me fusion reactors that could fit in the palm of my hand.

His America wasn’t just dystopian, it was Pure. As in blood-pure. The kind of place where merit was what mattered unless you were a deviant, or of the wrong faith, or used magic, or were born gifted like I was. He had intended to collar me. He wasn’t ready for what I could really do. Lady Lightning, after all, didn’t turn completely into electricity.

So, on a hell-world with no way home, I teamed up with a mage to make my own little slice of Heaven within this Hell. When the mage was no longer of use, I killed him. His last breath was a curse, May your outside’s match your insides, a warning to all who see you. It was quite poetic, but nothing happened.

I ruled for over two years, laying waste to any who opposed me, taking any pleasure I could find, taking my just due.