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an nsfw thought related to something mentioned in here

Vox has a very vivid memory of being told to crawl under his boss’ desk, shut off his screen, and give him a handjob in the most uniform, mechanical way possible. His boss got something out of seeing him as a literal object.

Vox was completely dissociated at the time, but he hates that memory in hindsight. He hated being “weak” and he hated being dehumanized in such a literal way. His experience with his old boss didn’t make him a more empathetic person, it just made him determined to never be in that situation again. He’s the one in control now and he’s never going to let go of it.

Some Vox early demon life headcanons that have been developing in my brain over the past few weeks

Companion piece to this. Also, part one of two because holy shit this got long. This is less a list of headcanons and more like four mini short stories minus any narrative prose.

Vox happened to manifest in Alastor’s territory, and he was lucky that he did. He was incredibly disoriented at first; he died almost instantaneously, so he had no idea where he was or what was going on. Disorientation quickly turned to terror once he realized he was naked, surrounded by monsters, and had what felt like a giant cage around his head.

It’s incredibly common for newly arrived sinners to freak out once they realize where they are, so no one paid him any mind as he stumbled around, panicking. A gang of sinners did take notice of him though. At the time, robotic sinners were pretty rare and the tech that made up Vox's body was hitherto unseen in Hell, so the gang decided to try and jump him while he was disoriented and strip him for parts. They would’ve easily been able to overpower him had it not been for a shopkeeper stepping in and offering him sanctuary.

Pentagram City has an informal rule about not attacking newly arrived sinners until they finish processing where they are, but how strictly this honor code is enforced is entirely up to the local overlord. Alastor was (and still is) very strict about those in his territory adhering to it, so the shopkeeper was able to scare the gang off simply by reminding them of what Alastor would do to them if he learned of them praying on vulnerable newcomers.

Vox was blessed with a quiet place to process where he was and what had happened to him. He went into a prolonged dissociative haze once he finally had a chance to take inventory of his body and realize that not only was he no longer human, he was no longer even a biological being. Everything hurt, the TV head was uncanny and unwieldy, and he was forced to confront the fact that everything he’d had when he left for work that morning— his career, his good looks, his kids— was now gone forever. All in the corner of a shitty little clothing store while people went about their business around him.

After an hour of silent despair, Vox forced himself to pull it together. He was angry— angry at God for doing this to him when, for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what he'd done to deserve this— and he used that anger as fuel. He stole some clothes off a rack and went back out on the streets, determined that if this was what his afterlife had to be, then he was going to survive.

Vox learned very quickly that he couldn’t afford to live out on the streets like most newly-dead do. He was too conspicuous and Hell was full to the brim with desperate people willing to tear him apart for scrap metal. He was also at a disadvantage because his body didn’t seem to regenerate like other sinners did, instead needing to be repaired.

Desperate to get a roof over his head, he found himself going to an overlord, offering to do whatever they wanted in exchange for protection. The overlord was more than happy to give him a job... for the price of his soul. Despite how desperate he was, Vox resisted. The idea of giving up his soul to someone else was terrifying and he was pretty certain that whatever kind of protection this overlord was offering, it wasn’t worth the price.

When he declined the deal, the overlord instead asked what Vox could do that made him worth actually employing over any of the thousands of other sinners that arrived in Hell every day. Vox realized he didn’t have an answer. He didn’t understand his powers yet, his performance skills were less than worthless to this particular overlord, and he couldn’t even offer sexual favors as he no longer had any holes (or even a physical mouth at the time) to speak of. He found himself back on the streets that night, searching for a place where he could rest without the fear of being attacked in his sleep.

He didn’t find one. Instead, he found himself cornered by another group of sinners looking to smash his screen and take apart his body. However, during the attack, Vox made an invaluable discovery: he could teleport through electrical devices. He did it involuntarily; one moment he was being thrown against a telephone pole, overcome with fear, and the next he was on the opposite side of the city in an area he’d never seen before. This changed everything.

Vox spent the next several weeks honing this ability. First, he had to figure out how to do it voluntarily, then he had to learn how to actually choose where he wanted to go. He struggled greatly with the latter, often overshooting his intended location by a several blocks. Eventually though, he felt confident enough in his abilities to approach a different overlord, asking for a place to stay in exchange for his services rather than his soul.

The overlord was skeptical about Vox’s claims of being able to travel through electrical currents since teleportation was an ability only powerful, well-established demons possessed, but they decided to give him a chance to prove it: if he could travel through the phone lines to the location of whoever the overlord chose to call, then they’d hire him. Vox was beyond nervous, terrified that he’d overshoot it again and ruin his best chance at protection, but he succeeded, arriving at the correct location and returning with no issues whatsoever. The overlord was good as their word, hiring Vox to run messages for them with no soul-strings attached. For the first time in months, Vox was finally safe.

Vox stayed in the employ of that overlord for a good few years. He was provided with a crappy little apartment and a meager paycheck, but anything was better than being out on the streets. Vox ran messages for the overlord that couldn’t be communicated over the phone, as well as running general errands for them. At first, he wasn’t as useful as initially thought since he couldn’t bring objects with him through the current without them being destroyed or left behind, but he slowly worked toward building that skill.

As time went on, he started to rise in the overlord’s favor, moving up from errand boy to quasi-secretary. Things also took a turn for the sexual— as they so often do in Hell— and the “no holes” situation was circumvented by the overlord simply having Vox use his hands. Vox refused to let himself think about the situation in depth— he’d been in show business, sexual favors weren’t exactly a foreign concept to him (although he’d never been in the position of giving them)— and besides, it wasn’t as though he’d be in this situation forever. He was rather proud of himself for managing to negotiate a deal without giving up his soul and looked down on his peers who were stuck in binding, life-long contracts. He could leave whenever he wanted, and he knew exactly how he would go about it.

Since he didn’t need to eat or pay rent, Vox could spend his pitiful paycheck on whatever he wanted, and what he wanted was tech. Every week for years, he’d travel to the black market (or, given the circumstances, just the regular market I suppose) and purchase scrap materials: metal, cathodes, wires, and so on. Using his knowledge from his time as an electrical engineer during WWII, Vox slowly built a television.

He technically could have stolen the materials he needed instead of buying them, but between how hard it was for him to not destroy things when teleporting and the fact that most of the stuff he needed would’ve had to be stolen from the Radio Demon of all people, it was safer to bide his time and go through the proper channels. Once he had a functional TV, he could pitch the concept to another overlord or one of Mammon’s representatives, gain funding and a manufacturing source, and start his own business. He’d seen first-hand how quickly television could spread once it became accessible. Once he opened for business, it’d only be a matter of time before his power started growing and he'd be able to ditch his old job for a brand new life. It was just a matter of patience.

And Vox’s patience paid off. One day, after years of work, he finally got his TV working. Amazingly, he also discovered that he could use his powers to get it to tune it to Earthly broadcasts, something he hadn’t even anticipated it being able to do. The ability to connect to the living world made his pitch even more appealing, as the majority of sinners desperately want to know what's going on back on Earth. What he was selling was so valuable that the first overlord he approached instantly agreed to give him all the funding he could’ve hoped for. It didn’t even matter that the overlord was taking a massive cut of the profits– Vox knew that, with his abilities, if he could be the first person to introduce television to Hell, he would dominate a whole new field in due time. Now the only issue was his boss.

While his lack of a soul contract gave him the freedom to come and go as he pleased, there was still a real danger of retaliation if he left, especially now that the overlord had become so “fond” of Vox. He needed to find a way to protect himself from the overlord’s wrath, and the perfect opportunity presented itself in the form of that year’s Extermination.

Overlords tend to hole up in their bases during the Extermination in order to avoid the Exorcists. Fortunately for Vox though, his boss had recently chosen to start using electricity in their security measures. It was child’s play for Vox to simply override the locks and then cause an explosion to attract the Exorcists, leaving the overlord defenseless against their onslaught, all while Vox hid safely in the current. He told himself that the whole thing was strictly business– that he was just doing what was necessary to improve his lot in life– but really, if he was being honest with himself, he loved watching the old bastard die.

Now free from his previous obligations, Vox was ready to start a new phase of his afterlife; one where he was the one in control. He was prepared to carve out a new space for himself in Hell's hierarchy and no one was going to stand in his way.

That was, until a certain deer demon chose to pay his shop a visit.

#hazbin posting #nsfw

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