PROLOGUE2: ANTI-HERO, GUNSLINGER AND PROF.
SEIFER
Detroit is the closest thing to hell that Earth can manage in Seifer's opinion.
Makes sense that the demon in his head named "Diablos" would want to live there.
Sandwiched between two day-old fried rice and a monstrous pile of dirty dishes, Seifer curses out the voice in his head. 'I blame this all on you. I hope you fucking know it. It I didn't have to cart your useless self in my head most of my life, I would have been able to finish school. I wouldn't have to work three jobs to pay rent on a shitty apartment in the shittiest part of town.'
Diablo laughs. (I never told you to go to our parents. Let them shuffle you away to the nearest psychiatric center, like a living tumor. It's your fault your life sucks. Deal with it. Don't come bitching to me.) His voice is smooth like smoke and the power of it just as suffocating.
Seifer looks at his burnt and bruised hands through a near-constant veil of rage and wishes he was anywhere else.
(Wishes don't do you that much of good Blondie. Mind your head, there's an angry Asian with a skillet behind you.)
Seifer leaves this job to go to one as equally unglamorous. He doubles as a bartender and bouncer in a seedy underground bar. The only perk is the free drinks.
The strobe light hurts his eyes, so he always squints. The women perched on the stools in front of him twitter that it makes him look stoically serious; they keep pushing their chests at him. Seifer looks away and wishes for a bar fight.
The only way for Seifer to control Diablos is to grapple. But in the way of anger they are even. They go for each others necks and the leash Seifer has on the voice is so insignificant that he sometimes wonders who's controlling who.
He's angry and he's frustrated and he just so very tired that some days he wishes for the calm of the asylum. Just so he'll have a chance to sleep.
He's on his way home from the third job (pressing clothes at an all-day drycleaners) when he gets jumped.
All of his control on Diablos breaks. He's screaming in a language that has never been on the face of Earth and his eyes turn red in the ugly light streaming from the florescent lights above him.
The muggers-turned-victims feel real fear for the very first time. There's an invisible weight pressing them down, everything turns negative.
Light, Dark. Dark, Light.
Then Blackness.
IRVINE
There's so much fire, separated by such a thin veil between him and its source.
The days when the urge gets bad, when Irvine can barely restrain himself from blowing off all of the tops of the mountains on this small island and bathing in all the wonderful heat, he calls in sick at work. He takes the train to Sakurajima volcano and hides in the craters and whirls of the black ground until the urge passes.
It ruins his boots, and one occasion his hat, but that's a minor sacrifice compared to torching all of Japan.
The heat makes sweat run down his face in rivers, the only time that it really bothers him is when Ifrit is close to the surface.
The girls of the Harajuku Station love his American cowboy look. They'll miss him today and come into the café he works at with "Get Well" gifts for American-san, but he won't be there. Ifrit's not exactly the type of person you'd send to accept gifts on your behalf. He doesn't have the gentle touch required.
Irvine perches himself on the side of a gentle slope and lays back in the yellowing grass. There are flowers all around him, small animals running through the tall grass; the area is full of life.
Ifrit is roaring, demanding to be released. Running claws up and down the mental barrier separating his and his guests' consciousness.
Irvine smirks and pulls his hat lower. "Hold your horses." He likes to make him wait, force the power lurking behind his eyes just who the boss really is. Ifrit might have all the power. But Irvine's the one who decides when it's time to play.
Irvine never told a soul about what he heard. The things that Ifrit had shown him in the dim, suffocating moments between sleep and wakefulness. Not his foster parents, not the teachers at his small country school. Not the first girls he kissed. Not the first boy.
What happens in his head is between himself and Ifrit. And that's the way it'll stay.
Irvine kicks off his boots and places them carefully in a gully behind him. The jacket goes next.
Heat is rising up off of his arms, disrupting the air around him. The dry grass at his feet begins to spark.
His shirt goes next. Followed by his pants. He's lost too many good clothes because Ifrit was antsy.
Clear flames begin to run up his wrist and toward his elbows. First they glow blue with extreme heat, then they fade back to deep orange. He gives no sign that it hurts.
His body is outlined by a foreign shape. Large muscular wrists, forearms and back. His head is framed by a pair of black curving horns.
The grass at his feet erupts as the outline becomes solid. A roar echoes across the hills.
The hat is last to go.
QUISTIS
She wears her hair in a bun to keep it from whipping around her head.
A head that is currently sticking out of the window of a car going sixty miles per hour.
The vast column or rapidly spinning to the right of her car is attracting her complete attention. The video camera that she's holding to her eye to record it is merely a bonus. Quetzalcoatl is crowing with excitement and sheer exhilaration.
Quistis narrows her eyes against the dust that's clouding her glasses; she refuses to wear the goggles the rest of the team wears. A part of her wishes that she was chasing a lightning storm instead, something big and powerful, frying the ground the moment it touches down, rendering everything to ash-
She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes for a moment. All she can hear is her driver yelling in her left year and the giant vacuum of wind in her right.
'Keep a barrier. Keep control. This is not his body. This is yours.'
Quetzalcoatl tries to speak. She shuts the door as quickly as possible and steadies her arm against the door.
The man at her back, driving an SUV into the heart of a storm wants to start a relationship with her. He says she's unlike any woman he's ever met.
But how can you devote your life to another person when most of your time is spent on the thing residing in your own brain?
Electricity crackles between her hand and the door frame.
She can't keep up enough focus. There's too much static. Too much going on at once. Once this run is over she should go on a vacation. Use all the time she has stocked up. Go to Colorado, or Minnesota.
They're used to thunderstorms there.
Quistis wouldn't feel that bad if she had a voice in her head under normal conditions. She'd go to the doctor, get some medication, and take care of it.
She'd like it better if it didn't talk to her like any other normal person.
And if it'd stop telling her to find the other ones like her.
