My friend Giantessfeferi on tumblr runs a blog about an AU Feferi who happens to be a giant and does stuff; sometimes I write her stuff because 1. Feferi is cool. 2. Giant girls are cool. 3. Giant Feferi is clearly mega cool. This fic was originally a submit that ran on a bit and I decided it was long enough to be its own fic.
This incorporates aspects from Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition (in regards to the nature of the devils and mention of the Blood War), and a principle viewpoint character from C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters.
Disclaimer: I don't own any copyrighted intellectual properties appearing in this work of fiction; this story is purely for entertainment without monetary gain.
From the view of Wormwood, apprentice devil (and even eons in service had yet to see him promoted past the caste of spinagon, which was an embarrassment even though he quite liked the wings and spikey bits) and generally the sort of devil whom the Infernal Hierarchy tended to point to as an example of a career loser.
(The narrator hastens to add that while our unfortunate devil here is referred to as such, it is significant to note that the morality-made-personalities that expand to the fiends, celestials, and other varieties creatures of the outermost realms are technically gendered in the same way that some languages give to abstract terms; Wormwood, it must be said, had a certain affection for the idea of being male for sentimental reasons, and his superiors thought this was an unacceptable degree of non-evil. Fiends, as a rule, don't much like anything that can be conceivably considered good or positive; it's a point that makes absolutely no sense when you look at it closely, but fiends are not known for being especially logical.)
The sort of devil who existed as an example of what not to do; someone so consistently incompetent that he was permitted to exist, in defiance of the usual devil-eat-devil competition that was quite literal in the Nine Hells of Baator, because he was a sort of lightning rod for misfortune and failure that might otherwise afflict more suitable devils, fiends, renegade demons, yugoloths on hire, angels in the process of being maddened into Hell's servitude, corrupted souls, stray bits of rubbish, and the occasional adventurer who wandered in for a bit of a drink at the local Bar of the Damned.
(He was still suffering a bit of humiliation from an earlier assignment on a mundane human world. That he had been eaten and somehow survived it was a question of some significance. He liked to think it was because his stuff had been too tough for even hellish guts.)
He alighted upon a broken outcropping against a protrusion nearly sixteen hundred miles above the ground level of the nearest street, and his wings fluttered with... not exactly power, but with the kind of obnoxiously stubborn determination that was nearly the same thing. Eyes both narrow and bulbous watered behind rows of teeth so overlarge they affected his peripheral vision looked down, down, down the enormous span of distance of vertical walls of brass gleaming from within with sickly shadows casting reflections on things outside, twisting shapes calculated to hurt the eyes, all manner of protrusions that were incidentally quite convenient to land upon if you didn't mind the spikes... and so on and so forth all the way down to the street, all in a space so big that an ordinary human town would have fit inside.
And it was one of the smaller skyscrapers, growing up from the street below like a malignant blade of grass, and like grass, so many others just like it were all around, some bigger and some taller, and they spread for as long as there was a horizon, from the brass metal arising from the sea of tears shed by every broken heart (And the smell of their weeping did his awful heart good). It made a quite nice skyline, from a diabolic point of view. He had little truck with aesthetics, and liked the image of this city, vast beyond human measure, and every building utterly alike in form (if not actual function). Laboratories of depraved magic, factories crafting engines of eternal war, infernal law firms dedicated to making things worse for everyone, cathedrals of the evil gods (of which the less said, the better), abattoirs where countless damned souls were prepared for being perpetually digested, and many other nasty things, the buildings were home to these works and others far worse.
He felt a surge of pride (and it probably would have been marked on a chart somewhere, had not for present events) at these buildings beyond; he could see far, and see so very well, but he could not see even a single point where the skyline of the damned ended. He settled back with a rather dopey expression of satisfaction (and it is quite hard to look dopey when you have mismatched eyes, a body shaped like spiky sacks of walnuts with wings on and a mouth like a gore-stained beartrap, but it is a testament to Wormwood's fundamental lack of competence that he could make all that look dopey), and daydreamed idlely about somehow becoming the President Viceroy CEO Major Domo In-Chief, a rank that fortunately was too stupid to exist even in the Nine Hells-
And consequently, he was looking right at the ocean when the Bad Thing, as the replacement administrators would call it (or That Totally Awesome Thing We Set Up, as the angels of the celestial realms would call it just to spite the devils)... happened.
"What the Father Below is that?" He said, for his diabolic eyes were well-engineered and perceived a faint glow in the Sea of Tears, the vast and dark sea shifting in peculiar ways as a soft glow appeared within its depths. Very, very deep within its depths, so deep that the water above bubbled and frothed ferociously, and the glow beautiful such as was anathema to the ugliness of Hell. Wormwood frowned, peering closer and vaguely aware of dozens of other spinagons and other flying fiends storming upwards to watch too in their role as spies and living cameras.
He paid them little mind. He tuned his consciousness into the infernal archives, searching out what it meant for the sea to be bubbling and so fiercely. Presently the knowledge arose in his brain like a bit of ice in hot soup, and soon melting away in the same way; it meant firstly that the water was so hot it was boiling away, and he quickly discounted that possibility. It was not possible for such a thing; the Sea of Tears couldn't be heated, and indeed there was no way to heat it, great works going into ensuring that it did not ever change in its fundamental nature and thus ruin the aesthetics agreed upon by innumerable infernal councils.
The other one, and the archives took all relevant information and confirmed it, was that there was something deep in the water and rapidly coming to the surface. And, in order to displace all that water with such violence and volume... and this was the bit that made Wormwood and presumably the other extremely worried minor devils nervous..
It had to be something big.
Something very big.
Distantly, Wormwood thought he heard alarms. It must be said that while Wormwood was incompetent at all aspects of his infernal station and a danger to the cosmos because he might encourage others to take his kind less seriously (And thus perhaps the only lesson of his uncles he took to heart), he had nonetheless endured a long time being so unlucky. As a matter of survival, he had refined some very well-honed senses for knowing when things were about to go extremely very bad.
Slowly, very, very slowly, he shuffled away from the teeming crowds around him, making sure that none of the higher-placed devils appearing in the sky and windows could see him, daring to flare his wings-
The tremendous pulse or shockwave from deep within the sea did more to send him flying away than any intentional effort on his part. By sheer dumb luck, he was positioned in just the right place that he was knocked loose and just barely avoided clipping a wall at sufficient speeds and force to rip him apart or cost him a wing; as it, a full third of a spine was ripped out of him bodily, and he spun away like a runaway sports ball against the almost musical sound of his rivals and coworkers and superiors smacking into the walls of the building so suddenly it came out as a single huge noise (POCK, his muddled mind registered it).
A noise dwarfed by the roar of the ocean as countless thousands or millions of tons of water was displaced, and something impossibly big, even by the standards of realms where the square-cube law was an idle curiosity rather than a scientific law, stood within it as though a holy queen announcing arrival with a curtain and train of the very elements.
Then, a roar that by far dwarfed any sound of the ocean, a roar from a voice; at such volume that it's tenor shattered glass and shredding those against the building, the sound blasting as a solid impact turning a full third of the beach-front into powered fragments, carried by this noise up as dust to mix with the sea foam and still-falling water.
There was a very brief moment while Wormwood was freefalling before he caught himself and the building he had been perched on abruptly exploded. In this moment, he saw the big something come from the sea, no longer completely obscured for at least a few seconds. A minor matter, as he saw the building mighty and massive beyond mortal constructions, and still the something loomed over it, far above it and large like an adult overlooking a child's toy. It was big. So very, very big.
(Wormwood had never been honored to be in the presence of one of the gods that called Baator home. He wondered, distantly, if perhaps it was a god. Only a god could be so impossibly big.)
The only actual sight he got of the creature was quite brief for the moment. He thought he saw horns (but quite unlike that of a devil or even a demon, or any sort of fiend) rising up like the tines of a crown. He thought he might have seen a cape, or something of that nature fluttering around it. But he certainly did see the outline and general shape of the something, and he thus knew that it was stumbling towards the city, perhaps confused.
The more relevant detail considered it's identity was that he saw enough of it's outline to realize that it was not a something, but a someone. It was a sapient thing, he could feel it's mind... but those were poor words for what was happening, it was so very large and its mind even more so, and the enormity of it made him nearly black out for a second at touching something so vast, like a bit of copper wire plugged into a planet made of lightning... and no, it wasn't a god, and 'it' was the wrong word. If god it was, goddess than she would be, for he felt her self-perception of herself as female, and her shape was most certainly a humanoid mortal definition of female. She was... very female. Abundantly female. Almost absurdly and excessively female, even considering that her outline blotted out the stars hung up in the sky for lighting purposes.
(It was an odd thing to focus on, but he was in a great deal of shock at the moment.)
And then, the building exploded.
Wormwood was aware of that not happening, but that it had happened; the rubble and dust was falling and hitting the ground, smashing hundreds of devils to etheric mist before he was even aware of the building's collapse. He had an impression; of so many miles of metal coming apart like sticks in a gale, the creaking of so much structural endoskeletal material wound up into a second and just snapping like that, and all the rubble exploding outwards with such force that it went up and then down.
And then, yes. Something was moving through it, had smashed it to dust, had destroyed it in the first place.
It transpired, Wormwood observed from a distance, to be a knee. Similar to a human's, elegant and anchoring athletically shaped muscle. A biological hinge between a round thigh (almost absurdly round and smooth with little definition to show distinction between soft flesh and developed muscle) and a calf tapering with more defined muscle. Wormwood's mind took notice of irrelevant details like that. The knee, he noticed, was bigger than the palatial office of his immediate supreriors. It occured to him that that very office had probably just been obliterated, by that same knee. It felt an offensive notion to him.
The giant (for giant she most certainly was, though on a scale he had not even seen on a visit to fair Jotunheim of the planes of cold) had gray skin. Lovely colored, a faint flush of coloring it, and so beautiful that it felt more offensive still.
She came out of the rubble, and another leg, as big as a dozen of the hell-towers put together if not even bigger, swung into view. He glimpsed a body, curvaceous and slim in such a combination as might befit a natural swimmer that had put on a great deal of mass in recent times, standing in such a way and with stature such that he could still see very little of her, let alone identify her. Her stance was unfocused, and she delicately put a foot down, stamping down and realigning herself with a quake that tore the ground asunder, cracking through the street and underground as his eyes could see; a rift, and then an abyss, splitting off from the devil city the part of it that stood behind her, all the way to either side of the island. All that collapsed and fell away right off, the sea frothing in savage spit as the collapsing buildings and all their devils vanished beneath the waves-
She had stumbled, Wormwood realized numbly. She'd arisen out of the sea, perhaps dazed by whatever mysterious transition had taken place, and tripped. She was so big, her strides so long, and the geography accommodating enough that in one awkward movement she had collapsed right through the building and maybe a dozen others, smashing every last one of them to dust.
He considered the rubble below. There were acrid fumes there, of dead fiends collapsing into their components; crushed either in collapse or by the rubble, perhaps slain by the giant indirectly.
He was about to articulate some manner of insult; he smacked into some form of modern art that made a suitable thing for him to hit, before he could voice his displeasure with current events.
The entire city shook as she took a single step to reorient herself. Every building's windows rattling in their frames and the streets trembling and every single object not anchored firm coming loose. Trophies fell off walls, little memorabilia fell off tables, and in accordance with the laws of comedy stuff tended to fall on the heads of devils. (And since devils liked pointy things, this caused a few impalings. Nothing fatal for them, but certainly embarrassing.) Secondary quakes opened up more rifts in the devil city, various streets sinking deeper and deeper from further quakes and weakening foundations.
Wormwood looked up, up, and up more at the giant; she was not, as he had first thought, especially broad or with that build sometimes described as amazonian. She might almost have been pear-shaped, if not for the particularities of her body type; certainly, her hips and legs were considerably more pronounced than most of her upper body (a common adaptation in beings that required exceptional support to stand up properly), and there were traits obviously contributing to an amphibious existence: he saw gill-like structures high up, somewhere over her shoulders. He thought her body shape reminded him of a violin, a little.
What he had thought was a cape fluttered in a thick heavy mass, as splendid as any fabric; hair, black and slightly curly and certainly quite wet; one heavy strand slapped off an unlucky building, carving a narrow chunk out of it at the momentum it was going. Her hair was enormous, nearly bigger than she was. It was't quite long enough to reach floor level, but it quite nearly was. Defining her silhouette at the peak of her height were the horns he'd seen; tall, long and thin, and they certainly looked like the outline of a crown. Metal shone below them; a tiara upon her brow, and he didn't doubt that if they could remove it from her it would prove so large they could use it as a highway for vehicles.
She took a few awkward steps, finding her balance. Each one send more earthquakes and bits of the city into the ocean, and he hated to think of such precious art (in the warped thinking of a devil) disappearing beneath a sea of mortal sentimentality. The irony failed to occur to him. She wobbled somewhat before she righted herself, and yawned; her lips were black, her mouth filled with teeth like a terrible mixture of shark and crocodile and tyrannosaur (with a small hint of poodle), and it dawned on him that she moved with the careful coiled energy of a predator; her hands were tipped with thick claws, and her voluptuous body was the byproduct of eons of evolution producing a killing machine.
She yawned again, wiping at one fuchsia-colored eye with a fist, mumbling to herself and shaking her head. It seemed peculiar that she looked... well, in the parlance of mortals, adorable.
It didn't fit with the rubble at her feet, or the legions of devils now cautiously approaching. Some of the rubble was on fire.
He connected with the archice again, and the connection was spotty; one purpose of the buildings was as infrastructure to the communal archives of the Nine Hells, and she had done considerable damage in less than five minutes. Nonetheless, relevant information arrived as he conveyed her appearance to the archives and a match was found: one of the species of troll upon the mortal worlds, an Alternian troll. Her name, it transpired, was Feferi Peixes, and she was one of those people who had many reflections across various timelines; this particular incarnation of her came from a world where those trolls of her caste grew to enormous sizes and indeed never stopped growing at all.
There was footage of this particular troll's predecessor in relation to her fleet that conquered planets, battled foes in her name, and treated planets as households. A massive fleet of space; she dwarfed all its ships.
"Hrm," Woodworm said. "What is that doing here!? I hope she doesn't have a fleet too. That would just be the capper to a terrible day."
"No, I don't," the giant troll said offhandedly. Under her hair, her ears twitched with sufficient strength to hear even a voice that by all rights shouldn't have been audible to her.
There was a long pause.
Feferi looked around; at the devastation she had wrecked, at the remaining vastness of the city, and eventually at Wormwood.
Her nose wrinkled.
"Where am I?"
Wormwood didn't appreciate her tone of disgust. "You, miss excessively tall mortal, are making a royal mess of the devilish city of Name Pending, a crown gem of the Nine Hells of Baator, embodying Outer Plane of all that is Lawful Malicious and Maliciously Lawful. You have incidentally sqaushed a good number of my cohorts by accident. I'm not complaining, mind you, it probably opened up promotions for me, I just wanted to point that out."
Feferi stared at him. "...Huh? I'm in glubbing Hell!?"
"Indeed. You may have gotten terribly lost. Or some manner of power may have attempted to kill you by dooming you to a death here. Ah, well! It's on you, then. Shows what you get for being a giant and smashing up a city of devils. ...Wait, did that 'royal mess' comment count as a pun, owing to your station among your people? I promise I did not intend a pun."
Feferi was still staring at him, frowning faintly. She had a look he recognized from the occasional adventurer who then typically proceeded to kill him (thus banishing his essence to the Hells again, but being slain in the Hells actually had more serious consequences). This was quite worrying in the circumstances.
Behind her, a mighty battlecruiser encrusted with many guns and stabby bits floated into the sky (and borrowed off a Khornate demon who owed a diabolic viceroy a couple favors, but never mind that), directly behind her. It was quite large, nearly as big as one of the gills between her shoulder and neck. Weapons charged up, weapons that had annihilated entire planets in fires of horror that damned their population to fury and hate as they perished.
A concentrated beam of coherent hate ripped through the air and made a faint mark on her skin. She glanced aside a few seconds later, absently rubbing her neck and frowning at the ship. She raised a hand, thumb and forefinger rubbing claws together. She brought her hand to the ship and flicked; the resulting shockwave ripped a small hole into the fabric of existence itself, and Wormwood's jaw dropped as he saw a number of shining glorious figures standing with recording equipment. They shuffled out of sight until the hole closed by itself.
The ship's remnants fell down. Feferi turned to him and crossed her arms. She smirked. "Is that all you glubbing got? Because I kinda was expecting better from, y'know, the place where devils and demons come from-"
There was a great roar from the assembled legion of devils, hissing and snarling and hatefully shouting. Feferi winced and took a step back; this was just as well, as it made another vast quake that swallowed a lot of them up. The resulting silence was interrupted by the devils reassembling themselves in orderly fashion and merely booing quietly.
"We are nothing like those brutes, thank you!" A CEO of some operation or another declared through a megaphone. "We like our annihilation and perversion of all that is good and pleasant and fun organized and tidy, thank you!"
Feferi gave a kick in his general direction; approximately several miles of diabolic city ceased to exist, and the devil himself incidentally. Water was starting to fill up all the rifts she was making in the city. "Bit of a sore subject, you and the demons."
Wormwood thought she had a pretty acute grasp of the matter, if not an understanding of the political situation. He thought he had avoided her attention, being less than an ant to her perspective, and recoiled when she turned her head back in his direction. Every single other devil around him took many moves away. "Hey!" Feferi said. "The spiky one with wings!"
Approximately eighty-nine percent of the devils went very still.
"...The really, really tiny one."
The devils relaxed; the spinagons looked nervous.
"The really, really tiny one who was talking to me before."
Some other spinagons looked at Wormwood meaningfully. One gave him a push. Hoping to buy some time before someone important sent a battlefleet to contain this giant troll threat, he fluttered forward (hoping like mad that she didn't intend to eat him; while the scale involved was ridiculous, it was a bit of a phobia with him after the messiness with the Patient all those years ago and he had a suspicion that whatever mysterious biological processes kept her functional might do what diabolic metabolics couldn't) and he said, "Um. Yes? Miss?" In case this wasn't respectful enough, he added, "Queen of Alternia? Oh I hope you have that title for real."
"Nah, I don't do titles. I think?" She shrugged indifferently, displacing enough air to level a couple skyscrapers by her. She took exactly six and a half steps towards him; more and more of the city crumbled away, the sound of water rising closer and closer... and she stopped in front of him, close enough that he could see the highway-sized seams of the one piece swimsuit adapted to her size. She pointed at him. "Okay. You! What kind of people live here?"
He blinked. The other devils sidled away from him. "I don't... understand the question. Devils? Souls of the damned? Beings sufficiently evil to be called her for service? A couple pet rocks, very evil pet rocks."
"No, I mean... is everyone here pure evil? This is a city in Hell. So it's evil, right? It being around makes things worse, right?"
"Yes, that's sort of the point of it. Yes?"
"So..." Feferi put her hands together. Her claws tapping together made an echo like the memory of explosions. "If someone, say a colossus with good taste in shiny things, was to break the whole thing... that would be a good thing. Right?"
The devils around him were gasping and whispering 'no' at him in increasingly strident tones. He didn't notice, thought about it and said, "Well... as a rule we don't truck with Good except in defiling it but, I suppose yes, removing this city from existence would be a positive thing. I don't see what that has to do with any- OH SWEET NOT-AT-ALL-MERCIFUL ASMODEUS I have made a terrible error in judgement."
"Thanks," Feferi said sweetly, smiling in a way that was adorable and also incidentally exposed every one of her dozens of slightly hooked and extremely sharp tank-sized teeth. She cracked her knuckles together. It made more shockwaves.
Slowly, very slowly, she changed position. Her weight, pistoned down by one powerfully flexed thigh, split the entire remainder of the beachfront off from the mainland to crumble into pieces by more quakes, fading into the sea. She lowered herself, readied-
"Wait, wait, wait!" a spandevil (which is like an archdevil but much less important and supportive to the overall organization) said, with a megaphone. "Don't do that thing! We, uh, uh! Wormwood does not speak for us! He is silly and filled with dumbness that is itself silly! Destroying this city would make Evil stronger! Uh, yeah! It... controls evil energy or something? Yes!"
"Sir, try harder, she's not buying it," Wormwood said.
"Shush!" said the Spandevil. "Destroying us will make, um, evil energy go across the multiverse! Yes, yes! It will make... things happen! Bad things! Very baaad things! So very bad! And filled with naughtiness and general unpleasantness! Kittens will cry! Babies will feel discouraged! No one will find clothes that fit! Entire species will die screaming in despair because of a misfired spacebattle cannon! Taco night will be canceled for an indefinite amount of time!"
Feferi considered this. "I'm not buying it."
She charged. To attempt to describe the fantastic array of muscular action this involved, actions of a body with measurements better summed up in distance, and general coolness is insufficient for the purpose of the narrative.
It is enough to say that the first thundering poundings of her approach made a full third of the devil city break. It made them quite sad.
Devils died by the thousands with her every step; the impact of her running steps, the secondary shockwaves they set off, the resulting collateral damage; she was heralded by rising plumes of smoke and dust rubble, vast rifts spreading across the island in less than a minute...
And the assembled devils could only freeze as Feferi charged, mere ants before a particularly bouncy apocalypse. The spandevil sighed, pinching her spikey brow. "I blame you for this, Wormword. That's worth at least five demerits. Maybe even seven."
"How is this my fault!?" Wormwood snapped as the building he'd been perched on collapse under him.
All the devils started at him.
"...Just because I gave her the idea to wreck everything for the cause of Good doesn't necessarily make it my fault. Maybe, maybe a little bit?"
They continued to stare at him, even as the light around them was blotted out.
"...Eh," Wormwood said, Feferi's shockingly fast bulk defining the entirely of the world. "You know, she's got a pretty decent turn of speed for something so big-"
Wormwood, the spandevil and the rest of them promptly ceased to exist as Feferi charged right through their ranks, and onwards. She charged right through buildings as though they weren't there, her impacts often shattering them before she got near them; her footfalls caved in streets, and the force of her presence on the world folded most of it right in half just in passing. Water flooded in with dozens of pounding roars, and she laughed joyously, shouting a mighty cry that for countless billions of devils was the last thing they heard: "OH MY GLUBBING SEA-BASED PUNS, I'VE ALWAYS WANTED TO DO SOMETHING LIKE THIS, THIS IS SO COOL!"
She kept charging, and it was an ecstatic, mad joy in her heart then.
Feferi was bigger than other trolls. Friends of hers often thought that this was true in certain overly sentimental ways; she was nicer in a way that just wasn't common in Alternia, certainly not in these generations. She took care where she stepped so that she didn't crush even a single thing. She restricted her truly monstrous appetites to the big things beneath the waves, and monsters that only she could slay. (That Eridan periodically tried to convince her that populations of obnoxious people qualified as monsters wasn't helping much.) She knew perfectly well the impact she had on the world, and took every effort to restrain it.
She dreamed about doing stuff like this; finding a place that needed to go and just have fun breaking stuff.
It was exhilarating, at the very least.
For such a large city (it was a big city, very, very big), it took her a surprisingly short time to end it. She charged in a completely straight line, and she kept running through administrations and butcher's places and the foulness of an place fundamentally evil, and it was cleansed with every step she took, and run she did until her feet hit water at the other side did she stop, noise still echoing in her ears from all the buildings crashing down or exploding and entire blocks rising up and tumbling in so that the whole effect was of one continuous explosion.
She turned around, only now registering the thunderous sounds of the water reclaiming the city of devils, ocean filling in every crack she had made until it could no longer support itself. Pushed down by her weight, it was sinking faster.
She thought impishly about jumping up and down. She giggled at the thought, and chose just to run around smashing everything that was left.
A short and fun while later, Feferi swam out to sea, backstroking and floating with her body upon the surface, raising waves that might have been reckoned tsunamis.
She smiled, at a job well done, at the ruined city already sunk beneath the waves, soon to be little more than a distortion in the outline on the surface. And then, not even that.
Smashing evil stuff was fun. She was wondering if there were other places like that with guilt-free breaking involved.
The air shimmered in front of her, slowly and gingerly opening into a portal; ink-dark water poured out, brilliant and lovely, and it tasted sweet on her gills. Invitingly, sweetly; she drank of it and it tasted good. Feferi heard a song on the other side, wordless and speaking to the soul, and she swam to wherever it led.
(The beings of pure Good who sent her there to do what she wanted weren't so impolite to just leave her there. She came to their realm, found many nice accomodations and thanks for her aid, and for a time found much entertaining adventures in their interests, but those are stories for another time.)
Here and now, though, in the lost city of devils...
A fleet abruptly appeared in air no sooner had the portal vanished, blotting out the sky in their numbers. They bristled with weapons, apocalyptic energies sizzled, and war beasts roared to be unleashed. Great leviathans were dropped, swimming beneath the sea to do battle.
(It was quite a big fleet, thought not by the standards of the numbers fielded in the Blood War.)
"The forms came in late, you'll be made to pay for that! With many demerits!" The greatest ship of them all, itself a mighty devil, boomed a loudspeaker over the realm. "Now, to show this interloper what happens when you... attack... a city of..."
There was a long silence as all concerned processed the absence of a giant troll and, more importantly, the absence of any city.
"...Hrm."
A scanner beeped up. A lowly abishai alerted the fleet, "Local tethers to the reinforcing malefic energies of Baator are greatly weakened! And there's holy water in the ocean! It's causing a reaction-"
It would explain a lot to elaborate that, for the most part, the matter of the Upper and Lower Planes mix extremely badly; they dissolve and disrupt each other when one is stronger, though in their own planes, the home is stronger. But in the current state of the area, its influence was much weaker and the holiness trumping the evil and blah blah blah it was much more interesting and short to sum up the reaction:
This particular slice of Baator exploded.