/[worldbuilding] my brain wants to do things with Belial/Lollipop but idk if I have enough stuff figured out to DO much with em yet??

so anyway, Imma jabber itp, why not

Belial is a very high-ranking demon, a prince of hell.

in this setting, "prince" is a gender-neutral term for demons. I'm /wobblyhand about whether demons actually have genders? they at minimum know the concept, just because hell is a place mortal souls can be sent to post mortem and the inhabitants of the mortal realms tend to do genders one way or -

- another.

demons are their own type of entity, native to the realms of hell. they're more or less gods/demigods? hell is kinda like. a bad-vibes-elemental plane or something. demons aren't born like mortals, I think they maybe like, coalesce from the essence of hell itself? anyway, they can die, but only from getting killed. they don't age at all.

one thing that's tripping me up about whether demons do gender is I'm still deciding:
a - are all demons shapeshifters to some extent or another, or is that more specific to Belial themself?
b - is Belial a "they" just because they're Belial, or because demons in general don't do gender?

basically a worldbuilding vs character design dilemma.

Belial is a very, very old demon. they've been a prince for a very long time. this is both because they're extremely powerful and why they're extremely powerful.

the way hell works, demons are always vying against each other on some level. as a demon continues to survive, they gradually hone their power simply by surviving, and if they want to -

- keep surviving, they'll continue to hone their power. the ones that last longest are not only powerful, they're skilled at manipulating others as well: lower-level demons can't gang up on ya if they're too busy fighting against each other, every equal-level demon that's busy with something that's not ya is one ya don't have to overcome right now, and -

- every higher-level demon that finds ya more useful in one piece is a higher-level demon who is not interested in curb-stomping ya just yet (and potentially willing to dissuade other high-level demons from doing so just yet, too).

a prince of hell is a demon who only has equals and underlings - eventually, any demon can become a prince, but only for so long as they can continue to hold their own against the other princes. the only way to stop being a prince is to get offed.

Belial's outlasted a bunch of other princes, as various princes either get a chance upper hand on another or are destroyed by a newcomer. part of that is simply no one's been able to take them out yet! but by story-start, part of it is also that Belial's become reclusive out of sheer boredom. Belial is the prince the other princes don't have to worry -

- about unless they specifically go out of their way to pick the fight themselves, and millennia of princes not surviving such fights tells the others that maybe that's not a fight worth picking so long as there are still other princes to overcome. of course, if there's ever only one other prince left they'll immediately go after Belial as their final rival.

so far the state of hell has never reached "Belial and only one other prince" though. at the the start of the story, hell is divvied up between Belial and two other princes who have each other stalemated.

when Belial finally goes "ah, fuck this :/" and just disappears from hell altogether, everything is thrown out of balance, hell descends into pandemonium (yes, pun intended, shh), and that in turn disturbs the celestial and thus the mortal realms as well.

(Belial's ~magical adventure vacation~ doubles as ~great googly-moogly it's all gone to shit~ for the rest of existence.)

now, imma turn to how the various planes interact with each other, to show how hell being out of whack matters to the other realms.

the celestial realms are various heavens, governed by gods in hierarchies of an assortment of pantheons. to an extent they rely on mortals for worship, and mortals rely on the gods to deal with their souls after death (not that all mortals are aware of this arrangement, but the gods very much are).

when a mortal dies, their soul is usually claimed by a servant-being (aka an angel) of some god. sometimes this is because the mortal had a lot of dealings with/dedication to a specific god or set of god(s) and the angel in question essentially has collecting that soul on a chore-list. if the mortal isn't claimed by anyone specifically, somebody's angel -

- will eventually be in the neighborhood and collect the soul in passing. (yes, mortal souls are a bit like litter - once the mortal isn't alive, their souls kinda just accumulate and will eventually start causing the metaphysical equivalent of pollution).

mortal souls need to be processed by the celestial realms before they can be reborn into being alive.

this processing is essentially a reincarnation cycle, but it can get very convoluted depending on which god gets involved & the state of the mortal soul in question. possible routes include:
> reborn again as a mortal as soon as possible (on occasion the gods who go this route don't clear away enough memories first and the mortal can remember a bit too much)

> accepted into an afterlife, run by the appropriate god, until such time as the mortal is ready to be alive again and opts back into the reincarnation cycle (gotta offer rewards to keep mortals invested in helping the gods out with their worship)
> deemed a Problem and sentenced to a period of time spent in hell before they can be processed properly.

spending time in hell, as might be expected, really sucks for the mortal. no mortal soul is powerful enough to pose much of a threat to any demon, and demons mostly see them as funny toys.

the idea behind sending mortals there is that the "problem" supposedly interfering with their processing will get beaten out of the soul's makeup during their stay.

angels are sent to hell to collect souls whose sentence is up. the soul in question nearly always still exists in a recognizably-"mortal soul" fashion at this point, and can therefore be reborn.

if the soul in question got a little... too beaten out, uh. welp, guess that's why hell sits between the Abyss and the rest of existence right? toss em back -

- into the primordial soup, maybe they get reintegrated into one of the realms' essence or something, who can say! it's probably fine though, acceptable losses etc right? (the celestial realms are full of dicks, yes,,)

so: there's the celestial realms, then the mortal realms, then hell - which is the divider between "existence" and "not". the Abyss is a measureless void, somehow being nothingless that Is Something. it creeps pretty much every entity out.

a "realm" here is basically like a world/plane/dimension/whatever in D&D
some "setting locations" are the homes of the gods and their angels (celestial realms), some are home to various fantasy-world-type places (mortal realms), and then there's hell, which is uniformly awful enough to mostly count as just one "realm"s worth of existence.