Spores.

Before you ask more, it's one of the basic facts we understand about Demons.  The other is that they must be extraterrestrial in nature, yet the Scientific community has remained silent on investigating or even confirming it.  Of course, that could be due to the same infliction all serious studies of this sort have.

But back to what I had been saying.  Spores.  Write it down, it'll be on the test.

And there you go, you now understand the second step of Demonic development.  No, it isn't writing.  It's getting a subject to do some action they've suggested.

Religious texts have long referred to this as temptation.  But this isn't a theology course.  I've monitored this process a few thousand times, and never have found any particular texts helpful.  Not in precise ways.  Superstition is guesswork.  This is science.

Demonic spores require sentience to form sporelings.  The spores react to any sentience.  Sentience, not intelligence.  Any life that can sense something, the spore reacts to.  They then grow.  And grow and grow.  But first they need a host to act.  To sense something.  Anything.

Demons are parasitic.  Their spores have the most basic facet of their digestive process.  A spore needs little to provide the spark and energy that enables the spore to form a sporeling, a raw collection of cells that implant themselves inside or upon their host.  Demonic cells each work to drip drop by drop material into their hosts.

They spike emotions, or in life without them, find ways to agitate.  They whisper incoherently into the host's subconscious.  The host whispers back.  The demon, is a blank slate.  Even demonic DNA seems to lack speciation as we find it in terrestrial life.  They can alter it.

We still struggle to understand the mechanism of that.  Demonic proteins react to their hosts, becoming whatever horrors their host's subconscious informs them.  But we don't know how they alter their DNA to enable that.  A demonic spore isn't a specific demon.  Its host makes it into whatever demonic species we think we can categorize them in.

In time, the sporeling grows from of the negative wash of the subconscious host's emotions.  Demons grow faster in reaction to negative emotions.  They triple in size.  Eventually a sporeling reaches the larval stage.  By this point, it no longer needs a host.

There are some conditions that can drive demonic spores to remain dormant.  They are not deleterious to their first hosts.  But their first hosts shape what they'll grow into.  This facet means demons often are a reflection of other wrongs, not the cause.  This contradicts classic superstitutions.

Tomorrow's lecture will go over the proper conditions for the spread of demonic spores and their prevention.  Questions?

No?  Then class is dismissed.