Woodcutter 5

Four – The greatest deals

Non-humans are really weird, we don't really get each other, turns out in a world where every race was created by a different pantheon of gods, interspecies understanding is hard to come by. According to the texts, and corroborated by certain mystical beings, humans have been around basically forever, at some point various deities decided they wanted someone to lord over and created their own races, but if humans have a creator, it has never revealed itself, our reactions are based on a mixture of self preservation and procreation instincts combined with sheer bloody minded stupidity. The other races weren't, they never had the same history of competitiveness that we did, and tend to form more homogeneous groups. Take elves for instance, though only the gods know why you would, have you ever encountered one that was anything but at peace with the natural world, claimed to know ancient secrets that would change everything, and also blamed anyone who isn't an elf for all the bad things that ever happen? This despite the fact that at least two despotic overlords and one entire subrace of evil beings can be blamed directly on elvenkind. Additionally at least once in the past civilization waas nearly extinguished because the elves couldn't be bothered to lock up their powerful magical artifacts, and when they did start causing trouble their response was to flee to an isolated island and only return to help save the world after almost every army and bastion of civilization was wiped out.

We don't get along is what I am saying, similar things can be said about dwarfs and gnomes, it's like their various creators took a human and then added ridiculous obsessions with whatever the deities liked best.

There are exceptions, groups of mixed race that do work together, but they are largely larcenous sociopaths and usually cause just as much trouble as they solve, we call them adventurers.

The point is they aren't human, and trying to act like we know how they think is an exercise in futility, but at least they rely on commonly accepted rules of biology.

Demons don't, they aren't even from here, call it Hell, for lack of a better term, demons exist in a different dimension and have their own goals that bear no resemblance to those of the mortal races, where sex and food are at least something of a common ground for us, and individual survival is virtually guaranteed, the same cannot be said about demons, we can never understand why they do what they do, and it is a mistake to even try, not because the knowledge will harm you, but because it is inevitably wrong, and making assumptions about the motivations of a twenty foot tall half goat half monitor lizard with a whip made of flaming vertebra is a poor survival mechanism.

But we can understand some of what they do, if not the whys, and that is why we even bother with them, because demons have power, and some demons can be convinced or compelled to share that power...

(Opening section of “The (Witch)Craft of Negotiation”, author unknown)