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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

Copyright ©2007-2012 Joanna Erbach. All rights reserved.