Sean E. Britten

All There in the (Monster) Manual are stories based on creatures from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Over 2022 I released a different story fitting the theme every single week and I’ve now expanded to Dungeons & Dragons’ Monsters of the Multiverse and even the Pathfinder Bestiary. Could be fantasy, science fiction, horror, or something else entirely! Check them out on the main page of the website.

This Week’s Inspiration: Succubus

Dating can be hell, especially if you’re an eight-hundred-year-old demonic succubus specialising in the seduction, defilement, and damnation of all mankind. But that doesn’t mean you just stop trying, right?

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“You don’t look like your photos.”

“Really? Most of them are pretty recent.”

“Well, the horns.”

“Oh,” she laughed.

Unselfconciously, Lily reached up and brushed one horn as if pushing back an errant bang. Thick at the base and tapering to a sharp point, each horn twisted along its length like those of an antelope. Unlike her photos, her hair was silken black instead of blonde and her skin was a dark, burnished red.

Bryan surreptitiously opened the dating app he used, holding his phone in his lap, and clicked through to his date’s ‘lilyhunter1224’ profile. Flicking through its photos, he could see the facial features of the woman in the profile were undeniably similar but with a more human skin tone.

“So, this is you?” Bryan asked, lifting the phone to the table.

“That’s right, I mean, it’s what I usually look like for work. I don’t photograph very well in this form but I didn’t want this to be a work thing either.”

Bryan continued swiping through the photos. He stopped on another one of an oil painting. The woman in the painting looked undeniably similar, just with red hair instead of blonde. He’d thought it was a joke as the painting was clearly centuries old.

“So this is you as well?”

“That’s right, that’s an older picture. I’ve changed my hair since then.”

“And this one?” Bryan stopped and showed her a photograph of a stone carving on the outside of an old building.

Lily laughed. “They call that a sheela na gig. I think it captures my best side.”

“So you’re a-,”

“Pisces? Yes.”

“I was going to say demon.”

“Succubus is the correct term.”

“Isn’t that a kind of demon?”

“I suppose so, in the sense that all succubi are demons but not all demons are succubi.”

Gentle music filtered through the restaurant, accompanied by the low drone of conversation and the ring of cutlery against porcelain. Lily and Bryan drew plenty of sideways glances, although no one was rude enough to outright stare. A waiter appeared beside the table to take their drink order. Lily asked for a scotch on the rocks while Bryan ordered a glass of wine.

Lily probably would have drawn looks even without her red skin and her horns and the thin tail with its arrowhead point poking out of the back of her dress, flexing and waving as if it had a mind of its own. Her body was poured into a black dress that was the envy of every thread of clothing in the room. The proportions scarcely contained within it were mathematically improbable. A strap hung off one shoulder, her exposed clavicle as erotic as anything ever committed to paper or celluloid by the late Larry Flynt. A slit up the side of one thigh showed a vast and yearning landscape of red flesh. At rest, she might have been mistaken for a work of art that would have sent Pygmalion into rhapsodies of helpless lust. In motion, she risked the heart health of any number of older men dining in their immediate vicinity.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. I was just surprised,” Bryan said.

“We all have our crosses to bear, so to speak,” Lily said. “Some of us are literally demons, some of us have unnecessary ‘Y’s in their name.”

“Where are you from? Originally?”

“Hell, originally. Well, the Judeo-Christian Hell.”

“Does that mean there’s more than one? More than one Hell?”

Lily’s eyes burned with yellow fire. “I can’t talk about that, I signed an NDA.”

“An actual NDA?”

“What, like it’d be such a challenge to find a lawyer in Hell?”

“I guess I walked into that one. But you live locally?”

“Oh, yeah, I haven’t been home in a few decades. I still have to commute a lot though.”

“What exactly is it that you do for work?”

“Seduction, defilement, leading souls into lives of sin and damnation. I don’t want to talk about work though. You’re an architect, right?”

“Oh, not quite! You read my profile?”

“I skimmed it.”

“I work in a firm right now but, well, the plan is to become a qualified architect in the next year.”

The waiter returned with their drinks and checked to see if they were ready for food. Bryan ordered the lobster mornay while Lily asked them to walk a steak through a warm room. She toyed with the cubes of ice in her glass. While they waited for their food to arrive, Bryan explained more about his study and work for the firm.

Blood leaked out of Lily’s steak as she sawed it open. She popped the dripping chunk into her mouth. A snakelike tongue flitted between small, pointed fangs. Bryan speared bits of lobster with his fork.

“So, do you do this often?” Bryan asked.

“Eat?”

“The online dating thing. I’ve been trying for a while but I haven’t had much success.”

“Good looking guy like you? Future architect? Well, I mostly use it for work stuff.”

“I guess it’s pretty good for that kind of thing? You know, hookup culture and all that?”

“Yes and no. On the one claw, there’s a lot of competition for attention. But on the other, I can work from home if I want and still make amazing numbers.”

“How does that work, working from home when you do what you do?”

“I’ll just add a guy and offer to send him pictures of myself if he’s willing to swear his soul to Satan.”

“And that works?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe. Especially with the foot guys. You know, I’ve been seducing humans for the better part of eight hundred years and I still don’t get the foot thing.”

“Oh, yeah, me either.”

“You know Jesus was a foot guy? I haven’t been around that long but a friend of mine told me that’s where all the washing and anointing stuff came from. Total perv job.”

“That’s all it takes though? They swear their souls to Satan in exchange for foot pics and they’re damned for all eternity?”

“It’s more complicated than that. It’s, like, establishing a pattern of behaviour. Chances are most of you are going to end up down there anyway for wearing mixed fabrics or eating shellfish or for that time you hit a homeless guy with your car and just kept driving, you know?”

Bryan looked down at his plate and pushed away the last of the lobster mornay. Lily’s tail whipped from side to side behind her, agitated. With a sigh, she slumped forward.

“To tell you the truth, I haven’t been on a real date in, like, a century. This modern technology, sometimes it’s too easy, you know? I feel like I’m losing sight of the real world. There’s an incubus I know, you know, other side of the coin. This guy seduced queens, empresses, popes, bigtime Hollywood-types. Now, he’s addicted to internet porn and weighs four hundred pounds, never leaves the house. One time, I spent six months posing as a nun to seduce this young and super pious priest, a real goodie goodie. Oh, it was so frustrating, but when I finally got him, there was satisfaction in that, you know? My numbers are great but it just feels artificial sometimes.”

“I get it, well, sort of. Everything feels like a performance. I guess dating was always like that but now it’s even more so. You’ve got to say all the right lines, dance the right dance, or you’re ghosted. Sometimes you get ghosted and you’ve got no idea why. At least face to face you’ve got a chance to make a real impression.”

The waiter returned to collect their plates. Bryan suggested another couple of drinks and they placed the same order again.

“I guess that’s why I agreed to a date,” Lily said. “It’s not so much I’m looking for something romantic, but just a real conversation. A real connection, maybe, if it’s there.”

The two of them savoured the drinks as they continued to talk. By the time they were done, most of the restaurant had cleared out. They split the bill, and Lily collected her jacket from the coat check. Somehow, even over her dress, the jacket fit the succubus like paint. Bryan felt the night coming to a natural conclusion so he waited with Lily for a cab.

“This was fun, we should do it again sometime,” Bryan said.

“You know, I like you Bryan,” Lily said. “I want you to know though, if you want this going any further, I do have a full and very healthy set of teeth, you know, down there.”

“Vagina dentata?”

“We just call them cunt fangs.”

Bryan laughed. “You said you read my profile, right?”

“I skimmed it.”

“I mean, I’m ace. Asexual, although not aromantic. It hasn’t made dating any easier, but I wasn’t looking to-, check your dental hygiene. I was just hoping for a connection, a relationship, friendship, whatever might come out of it.”

“Oh, well, I could work with that.”

“Really? Not a dealbreaker?”

Lily smiled, fangs dimpling her lower lip. “Deals are my speciality.”

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Sean: I’m very glad I never did online dating or dating apps, to be honest. Obviously, for one, I’m very, very happily married – as of February of last year! But I met my wonderful wife when we both worked for the same radio station and were friends before we started dating so it worked out very happily.

But not to be judgemental to modern dating culture, I just don’t feel like I’m very well suited to it. Any time I actually liked anybody in the past I’d be way too emotionally invested from the moment a crush developed, and while plenty of those crushes also ended in disappointment I don’t know how well I’d have handled having my heart broken every time someone swiped… left? (Left is the bad one, right?)

As I mentioned in the note for Eyes of the Beholder, I liked the idea of fantastical creatures just having conversations in mundane situations and so this idea came from a similar place. I hope you enjoyed it for something different!