"Kim, what the Hell is happening? You're… Changing." Mike's eyes grew big, wide, terrified as he witnessed his friend's transformation.
The flame was growing brighter by the second, and the roses were losing their colors rapidly. Soon, an idea fluttered to his head. He looked over and asked: "Hold on… Would you go next to these pinkish ones over there?"
Kim raised what was closest to an eyebrow and obliged, heading closer to the azalea growing just a few feet away. Her color changed a bit again, less red, still not quite purple.
She was overjoyed. He was curious.
Mike smiled and exclaimed: "Let's experiment! We have dozens of flowers here, tons of colors and a lot of time left."
From red roses to pink azalea to white orchids, a few yellow buttercups here and there, beautiful bluebells, violas and calendulas.
This was the perfect experimenting ground for them. The people around had stopped paying attention after about 30 seconds, deciding that Mike was some ventriloquist lunatic with a very impressive talent in makeup. Some of them even had the guts to toss him a few cents, but what would a Demon do with money?
Now red roses, as you might already know, are the symbol of passionate love.
Azalea, on the other hand, are for joyous love and temperance.
White orchids signify purity, innocence and joy. If you offer someone one of these, you're telling them that you find them beautiful and close to perfection. Even if they can't sing, but that's a different matter.
Buttercups are for joy but also blame, as they are the flower of children but can be just as toxic. Flowers are a very interesting subject, but I digress...
The thing with Kim and flowers is that not only does she feed on their colors, she also takes in their significance and symbols.
Hell doesn't hold many emotions, especially not good ones. You can then imagine her delight at the things I just described, while feeding on colors she had never seen before in the entire 3 weeks of her life! Melancholy was a brand new one too, and one that surprised her the most.
Hell holds regrets, hate, ire, angst sometimes, but melancholy? That is a sweet and sour, comforting, yet a tad depressing feeling that you can only find in people who have actually enjoyed something.
Azazel has made sure that none of this happen in his realm. It would be very inconvenient to have Demons daydreaming of better, long gone days when they're supposed to be bringing destruction and despair!
Melancholy isn't good for discipline. Kim wasn't a very disciplined being however, and she loved that particular emotion.
She hovered over the kindly Demon with an unconventional request: "Mike, I have found something odd and I think I like it. Help me now, my boy, we need to find the flowers that make it! I want more. I need a lot more of that."
And so, forgetting all about their original quest, our friends decided to go in search of the flowers of Melancholy.
More precisely, in their heads, the flowers of "I don't know what that emotion is but I want more of it and we need to find the name of it at some point don't we just so we don't explain it like this ever again."
That being a bit long in the tooth, we'll just call it Melancholy, if you agree.