Whence came the name Pyraxis?
"That's what I do. I walk into hell and I call
people."
The original Pyraxis was born in the first and only
BESM (Big Eyes
Small Mouth) campaign I've ever played. In the first scene,
the party discovered, to their horror, a beautiful winged blond
girl lying on a grassy field reading a book. Now as any good gamer
knows, that's nearly as dangerous as a 5-year-old elven child wandering
alone in the deep forest. They were poised to run; Pyraxis walked
right up to the girl and uttered "Whatcha reading?"
It was the Book of Ultimate Evil, of course. What
else would a massively powerful demon pick for a light summer's
reading? She was amused enough to let Pyraxis live. So Pyraxis asked
to borrow it. Such began the insanely lucky career of the multiverse's
only flame vampire. 200-odd years old but a wild thing with the
naivete of a child, Pyraxis survived by sucking heat from her victims,
leaving them icy shells. She killed them with the same instinctive
bliss as a tiger snapping the neck of a gazelle.
She once walked into a church, cheerfully asked the
priests to teach her how to pray, knelt for five minutes mimicking
the ritual, and then looked up at the sky and demanded they explain
why God hadn't answered yet. "This is a gyp," she said
and walked out.
Throughout the campaign, she kept pulling stunts like
that, until the poor bewildered gamemaster couldn't figure out how
his evil archvillain demoness had morphed into the campaign's greatest
victim. At the end, Pyraxis gathered powers from the temples of
good and the temples of evil, waltzed right into hell, and pulled
the demoness out.
I decided she'd make an excellent avatar.
August 5, 2006
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