history of los bichitos
Before I explain the concept itself, I want to explain how we got here, because it's a bit of a journey.
Roughly two years ago, I wanted to come up with a story concept specifically so I could make a silly self-insert character. I hadn't made one in years, and I was having a bit of a tough time, so I decided I deserved a little treat and invented Evil King Salthammer.
[PICTURE HERE]
The point of Evil King Salthammer was that she was a tiny creature trying to become a great and fearsome leader, but at the beginning of her story, she doesn't have anything. No castle, no subjects, no underlings. I liked the idea of her doing stuff like looking online for Evil Real Estate and Evil Minions For Hire. Completely mundane stuff with Evil tacked on in front of it. I thought it was hilarious.
When I started taking it a little more seriously, I asked myself, "What would I want to do if I was just starting out at being an Evil King?" and the answer was "create creatures." This is where the fun begins.
I came up with the idea that Evil King Salthammer uses alchemy to create her creatures, but because she doesn't have many resources, she makes them out of a bunch of random things she finds on the ground. The concept I want to convey with the creatures was something that looks adorable and tiny, but can grow up to be very fearsome. I made a few designs for the creatures before I made this:
[PICTURE HERE]
And then I designed these three:
[PICTURE HERE]
I named them Michael (after an old photograph of a cat), Chelsea (after an old photograph of a kid and his puppy), and Craig (after a creature I saw in a Squiddo video). The idea was that Evil King Salthammer, for all her attempts to adhere to the Evil King Code, couldn't help but adore these little guys.
After I designed them, I played around with the concepts I'd come up with, and they slowly started to shift and solidify. I specifically came up with Craig being alligator-like early on, and that stuck. I thought of other ways to make the Saltmonsters distinct from each other, and I think around here is when I came up with giving them unique abilities.
I also came up with Bruno, which is another Saltmonster (as the creatures were affectionately called) that Craig creates later on. The idea was that as the kingdom was built up, more Saltmonsters would be made. And Bruno was so adorable, I made a little ceramic sculpture of him.
[PICTURE HERE]
The idea sat like this for a while before I thought "What's stopping me from making an AU of my own story? Nothing!" I wanted to do two things: one, play with putting my characters in a new setting, and two, practice drawing humans more by creating human designs for the Saltmonsters.
I thought about how I could do this for a while. My first idea was to do a sort of reverse-isekai situation where Evil King Salthammer is ejected from her world to a world more like ours with her creatures in tow, but I wasn't super happy with this concept. I tried to sort the details in a way that would make sense, but none of them really did. Around then I also decided to change Evil King Salthammer from a self-insert to her own character, and eventually I settled on naming her Laura.
Eventually I figured out an idea I really liked: put away the fantasy concept and replace it with demons. Laura makes a deal with a demon and that's where the Saltmonsters come from. By this point, since the story wasn't about Evil King Salthammer anymore, the name "Saltmonster" was phased out and replaced with "bichito".
I liked this concept so much that it became the new home of los bichitos. I leaned hard into the demonic aspect of the story, coming up with my own system that would work with the themes of the story, and that just about brings us to now. I felt like the history of how this concept evolved and changed like a Ship of Theseus situation was pretty cool and warranted a place on this page.
With all of that laid out, it's time to talk about the actual story!
los bichitos
(A.K.A., How To Spit In Satan's Eye and Get Away With It)
I explained a bit on the previous page, but here I can go into as much detail as I like!
I originally wanted to research actual demonology for this story, but as a writer, I like room to get weird with it and make the story my own, so instead I designed my own demon system.
The short version is that the demons in this story are roughly based on the phrase "fighting my demons" and what that entails. They rule over specific fears, vices, torments, et cetera. As their domain gains influence in the Mortal World, they gain power in the Demonic World.
Los bichitos - Craig, Michael, and Chelsea - are beasts of demonic origin created by their mother, Laura Knight, and an unknown demonic power. Laura broke her pact with the demon, cursing her but freeing los bichitos from the demon's influence. All things considered, the four of them were very lucky. The siblings have to make sure no one sees their true forms and hide their demonic abilities, but aside from that, they grow up like normal kids.
But one autumn, demons start taking interest in their home. There are monster sightings, strange happenings, general unrest, and fear starts to take hold. The siblings recognize demonic activity and refuse to let some demon waltz into their home and ruin it. Armed with little more than their demonic nature and a fierce desire to protect their home, they start hunting demons and doing what they can to dispel them.
As their hunt continues, they must confront their origins, untangle uncomfortable truths, and learn their place in the grand demonic scheme.