Lord of the Underworld: Notes by Willow ("Stands So Far" Series)

[madimpossibledreamer]

Information about this particular demon is taken from https://www.mexicanist.com/l/mythical-creatures/, https://aminoapps-com.translate.goog/c/naciondelfuego/page/blog/la-leyenda-de-Tukákame/LLl8_4Yi8uYaqmodo8k5J43ZmVmd0P5mPr?_x_tr_sl=es&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc, https://www.latinpost.com/articles/145056/20200425/monsters-men-mexicos-creepiest-mythical-creatures.htm, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql9qLNltp00 (con subtítulos en inglés, o with subtitles in English), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cj17qpsgh4 (también con subtítulos). All mistakes are mine; let me know if I’ve messed up anything.

So for this particular arc I knew I wanted to use a local demon, and tried to make it a little more accurate than your traditional Buffy demon. I looked one up, found one that was looking to take over the underworld, and said “there’s one that would make a deal with W&H”. Also, Tukákame is considered a kind of sponsor of evil, in the “I’ll protect you if you keep being bad”, which I found interesting. The trap stuff with the squirrels and the invitation to dine I found later on, which would’ve been interesting to work with. Oh well. I considered rewriting, but it probably wouldn’t have served as the perfect place to talk about Nazis in Jojo’s and the real world, so I think this version is staying.
Once again beta'd!

Some sort of celebration is in order. We’re currently taking suggestions about parties. You see, we have our first collaboration with a completely unrelated organization! Passione doesn’t count, as it’s under the control of Mr. Giovanna, so technically it’s a related organization. What’s that? Mr. Higashikata has a senior position in the ISWC? …True, but he’s not in charge of the organization. All right, we’ll amend that to ‘partly unrelated organization’, but still, it’s a step forward and still worth celebrating, though maybe we should cancel the expensive cake and get the second most expensive cake. We’ll get there eventually.

To the point, we’ve gotten our first information directly from the ISWC files, though not the first time we’ve gotten a contribution from them. It’s also the first entry about a demon in our database.
 

Hi, this is Willow again. So one of my most important tasks is rewriting some of the old stories about demons for the younger Slayers, Watchers, and Witches. See, a lot of them complain about the archaic tone and everything, and I’ve had some experience dealing with Xander. Er, Johan for you. Of course, he can read most of the languages and archaic language, but he doesn’t want to, and sometimes it was easier to just…play along. So that’s what I did. (Buffy also appreciated it but she didn’t really complain.) Giles…doesn’t really do the Cliff Notes version.

So, the Tukákame or Tikakame. We’ve got records of him specifically because he’s listed as a ‘cousin to the vampire’, which, now that I think about it, I should probably add stuff about vampires at some point so we can compare notes. But for now, I’ll try to concentrate on the one I researched specifically to help you out, and that’s Tukákame. He’s probably closer to a ghoul (that’s from Arabic myth) than a vampire, but vampires are also considered distant cousins to vampires, so there you have it. Ghouls are specifically demons that eat the bodies of the dead. Many demons eat the living or the dead, so this isn’t a unique trait. It’s more a matter of…motivation? Ghouls specifically exist to go grave-robbing and eat the dead. Other types of demons just do it to survive, or because they find causing despair in humans funny.

Like Tukákame, though, ghouls aren’t just limited to eating the flesh of the dead. Their insatiable hunger leads them to trap the unwary traveler in order to eat them. The exact rules vary based on the legend and ghoul in particular. The original called them either demons or djinn (from what we know of various Hell Dimensions, djinn is just a specific name for another kind of demon, or rather, group of demons, since they’re one of the dimensions with human-like politics, but that’s beside the point for now).

This also, interestingly, means that zombies are a subset of ghouls. I say subset, because, like vampires, they began as humans. But that’s also not exactly the topic. I will say that most ghouls around the world have a lot more intelligence than your average zombie.

It’s possible that the same Ancient, or Old One, created the ghouls, or maybe that Ancient was an Ur-Ghoul. If you think about it that way, it makes sense. Only drinking blood is a watered down version of scarfing a corpse for breakfast. But that’s speculation. I don’t have anything to prove it yet.

So with that background in mind, we turn specifically to Tukákame, a well-known ghoul in Mexican legend.

The story goes that Tukákame is a god of death, specifically of the Huichol people. He also goes by El señor del inframundo (Lord of the Underworld), Luna-araña (Moon Spider), and Demonio necrófago (necrophagous demon). (He’s also associated strongly with the mind, which explains why he was able to create a mental plane of existence when he’d gotten strong enough. He can cause dementia, but some of his servants can do so as well.)

In their mythology, the moon gives birth to the darkness, and hides in the ground during the day. She creates a spider to gather energy for her to come up at night. She also created his servants, the birds of death, and other ghouls. While we can’t be sure of whether the entire legend is true, given that, well, none of us was there and we definitely can’t trust old Watcher records given the fact that they liked to twist the truth whenever they felt like it, it wouldn’t be the first time the moon was important for something supernatural (see: werewolves). So I wouldn’t rule it out. (And werewolves aren’t always evil, but then, neither are bats or vultures or owls, no matter what Twin Peaks would have you believe). She does apparently have the power of hypnotism, so he might’ve partly inherited his powers.

They didn’t know what to do with their dead at first, but weren’t happy with the situation of their dead just being eaten by the birds of death and the possibility of disease. Tukákame, pretending to be one of them, first suggests that they eat their dead, but they reject that idea because it’s kinda gross and they’ve been told not to, both because souls couldn’t go to heaven that way and also because dementia would set in if they did. Which, given what we know now about Kuru and Creutzfeldt–Jakob, among other diseases, makes their gods pretty smart. His second idea was to bury the bodies and then Grandmother Moon could take the souls with her to the underworld and get strength for coming up at night. They probably should’ve questioned the suggestion, given his first, but they don’t.

So then Tukákame makes a habit of going to the cemetery at night and digging up and eating dead bodies, then reburying them. Sometimes, like a serial killer, he keeps trophies, making a belt of bones that make maraca sounds as he walks. (So he’s not particularly subtle, but then, he wasn’t going to be anyway, given the fact that he feeds on rotten flesh and hates water, quenching his thirst with blood, so it’s not like he’s going to bathe anytime soon. Just to make absolutely sure people know him for what he is, the gods sent a hero to paint a white-dot mask on him when they found out.)

Tukákame used to have a ranch, but his hunger just kept growing—not just a physical craving for raw meat, but since he’d mentioned getting strength he probably also gains spiritual strength from eating the dead. And he’s ambitious, too—he respects Grandmother Moon, but also wants to replace her as the only ruler of the Underworld. So power is definitely a goal, too. The ranch still stands, but nothing is left alive there, because one day, he butchered everything and ate all the meat. Even the non-herd creatures there, like the birds of death and wolves that came to maybe get a feast themselves. But he didn’t eat the bones, or take them for trophies, and they just got up and acted like his servants. There’s only two animals on his farm that he hadn’t killed, a single white owl that he uses as a messenger and the black horse he rides. Why he didn’t eat those too is anyone’s guess.

Sometimes, if he can manage to confuse a human’s mind enough, he’ll lead them to the ranch and convince them to sit down for a feast. The seats are enchanted, though, so when you sit down you can’t get back up, and he just leaves them to starve to death. He then strings up the corpse to rot, because rotten meat is his favorite, and if any scavengers come by, he kills them and prepares them in the same way. Any animals that die join his skeleton pets. If you manage to escape the magic seat, a human will become, for some reason, little hairless squirrels that also cause dementia, which is probably the only hope he has to hunt while being so blatantly obvious as a demon.

His usual stomping ground is either the underworld or the Wirikuta Desert, which is in the far west of Mexico—so yeah, he was out of his normal range when he met Xander and the rest. Even during the day, though, no matter exactly where you are in the world, if you take a hallucinogenic and have what they call a ‘bad trip’, he can totally use that as a route into your head. Those sick enough to hallucinate might also be contacted by him. It’s likely this is how Wolfram & Hart and probably some of his other clients contacted him.

Which leads us into our last function of Tukákame—his patronage of evil. Evil people can ask him for protection, which he’ll grant. He especially likes murderers, particularly mass murderers, because hey, two-for-one deal. He gets more dead bodies he can eat, and a follower, because conquering an underworld requires power and a lot of followers. He also likes to heal seriously ill people based on the promise that they be evil, and more than a few are desperate enough to go for it. Sometimes the extremely poor will also ask him to make them rich. If they betray him, though, he’ll cut off…let’s just say, parts usually hidden by clothing. Which, if not treated, will probably end up with the person dying, which means the only person who wins in the end is probably Tukákame, even if you happen to be Wolfram & Hart. And he also undoes his magic, so the rich return to being poor and the formerly ill sicken again, so they’ll probably also die.

Three forms: All three forms share the white-dot mask for reasons I mentioned above. All forms also retain the unnaturally bulging eyes and forked tongue, and both the wolf and rancher form have ears that cut like saws, though obviously it’s kind of hard to use those as weapons. The first form, a black wolf with white stripes covered in blood, is probably his fastest form, although he also tends to like to taunt his prey. Perhaps he thinks it makes the rotten meat taste all the better. His skeleton form has wings of one of the birds of prey, horns, and messy hair matted with blood. The last is his ‘rancher’ form, in which all of his organs can be seen, including his heart which is a parakeet for some reason. He can cover those up with his black Mexican cowboy outfit, for the most part. This is probably his least suspicious form to someone who doesn’t know what’s going on.

Weaknesses: Water. Tukákame hates water, even, as they found out, somewhat illusionary water, so that’s helpful. Burning might help you drive him into water if you don’t have any on hand and/or can’t control water. Even in the desert there’s a sacred swamp to hide in. Like several other demons, like vampires, Tukákame can be repelled by belief in some sort of pantheon—for me, either my Jewish or Wicca faiths would work. For you, it would vary. If you’re more of an atheist, though, try another method, as this probably won’t work for you, though as a last resort even if you’re probably not Huichol you can try to ask the Sun and Moon deities for protection, since protecting humans kind of is one of their functions. (Yes, even the Moon lady—it’s not clear how much responsibility she should bear for literally all of this.) A Huichol shaman can make an amulet, such as the arrow amulet, or use a ritual to protect you beforehand, which reminds me, we should probably schedule a visit to get a few amulets because I’m pretty sure Xander ticked off Tukákame and we have a bad record of Big Bads seeking revenge. If you can manage to stay out of his hands until daybreak, the rooster crowing and the first rays of daylight will make Tukákame retreat to the Underworld, even if he happens to be in a conjured illusion world of his own making at the time. Like a lot of demons, Tukákame is also prideful, and between that, and his greed, meaning greed regarding food and greedy ambition, it is possible to trick him if you’re careful, clever, and know what you’re doing.