Signing her life away.

Alice sat up, awake, intermittently staring at the bloodstained walls and then back to her cat. Dead cat. Very dead cat. Her tail was still missing, she noted, unsure whether to be displeased or relieved, because she was not the person who found the pieces of her cat.

Marisa was the one who found them, when she walked - alone - into the obsidian door frame that appeared every once in awhile, and came back out with some new, powerful horror she had obtained courtesy of the Devil.

Who was also apparently selling pieces of Alice's cat.

Dead cat.

Which was mildly confusing to say the least. When it was alive, said cat did not act demonically in the least - in fact it actively avoided her mother (Alice thought it might have been psychic), so no easy answer could come to mind as to why the sinner to end them all was offering pieces of her cat for pieces of her friend's immortal soul.

In fact, she wasn't entirely sure how the Devil had gotten her hands on the pieces of her cat in the first place, given that they had been stashed in a box under Alice's bed ever since she found them one morning. The only reasonable explanation for that was that her mother had given the bits and pieces of the dismembered cat, personally, to the Devil, which by this point didn't sound so very farfetched.

Alright, so, disregarding the enigma of how the cat even got down here in the first place.

The child sighed and adjusted how she was sitting against the wall, and wondered briefly just how her friends could stand to sleep in a place like this. They'd literally just finished killing five horrific, half-petrified brain-monsters - their innards (of which they seemed to have a lot) were still warm, not to mention splattered on every surface in the room. And they'd just looked at each other, laid down in one of the few relatively blood-free spots in the room, and passed out.

Right there.

Alice could hear the snarls and groans of horrible things from beyond the two other doorways in the room - wide open, but the creatures in this hellish basement didn't seem to have grasped the concept of doors yet, thank you, God - and still she sat there, not exactly wanting to wake up her exhausted friends but quickly becoming too terrified to keep from wetting the floor. Which might not actually wake them up, seeing how they were sleeping through everything else.

To keep herself from having a mild nervous breakdown, she looked back down at her cat.

Very dead cat.

Why had Marisa been signing her soul away for pieces of a dead cat?

It wasn't even Marisa's cat. She wasn't even keeping the pieces to use. She'd come out of those rooms with a carving in her chest or her forehead or blood dripping from her eyes or bloody horns growing from her head (and that one time she just caught a cold), and other times she'd come out holding... a cat's paw or a fly-filled head, and she'd look pleased as punch as she handed it to Alice so they could go on their merry way.

Digging herself into Hell for literally nothing. Nothing that could help save her from these horrid monsters; nothing that could keep her alive for another few hours. Just Alice's best friend, digging herself deeper, dealing with the Devil and grinning all the while, for nothing at all.

Okay, so maybe this wasn't helping with the nervous breakdown part.

Marisa rolled to the side a bit, semi-roused from her (much needed and much appreciated) nap by the stifled sounds of... crying. Not an unusual sound - you cried or died down here - but this sounded a little bit less like a 'please god don't let me die' sob and more like a...

A...

Okay, she didn't know. But it was different, and she was now curious, so ignoring her body's annoyed complaints, she pushed herself to a sitting position and looked around, eyes still bleary, to see what exactly was the matter-

Oh.

"... uh, Alice?" She rubbed at one of her eyes with the heel of her hand - grinding dirt and blood and some other disgusting things into it, but she couldn't really care less - and stared at her friend, who was half-curled against the wall with the mostly-intact body of her cat and quietly /sobbing/.

"... Alice, y'know, those zombie-things are dead. Y' can stop cryin'." She crawled over to the whimpering blonde, poked her in the side. "Alice, c'mon. What's wrong?"

Alice thought frantically of some way to reassure herself that her friend would be fine. There had to be some loophole in those stupid deals, right? There always was. Maybe if she gave back the cat (maybe the Devil just liked cats?), Marisa could have what she traded for them back as well? No, that wouldn't be enough, and it wasn't like they could trade back the carvings. Where were they going? To Hell, right? It was down, right?

"Alice?"

And the Devil lived in Hell. They'd killed things scarier than the Devil by now. It should be easy, comparatively, right?

"Uh, Alice?"

Right. They were going to kill the Devil, then. They'd killed Mom, they'd killed Marisa's Dad, they'd killed a dead baby (somehow) and quite a few live ones and the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and some god-doesn't-even-know-what-HORRORS and the Devil had just made it to the very top of her hit list.

"... Al-"

Her head abruptly snapped up to meet Marisa's rather surprised face.

"If you die before we get to Hell, I'll kill you!"

Marisa blinked. Pulled her head back a bit.

"Er... if... you say so? Um, are you... okay, Alice?"

Alice stared at the other blonde. She... looked really worried, and it was only now that Alice realized she had been crying. Had she woken her up?

"Sorry." She said, quickly scrubbing at her cheeks with the back of her hands, wiping away the water before it balled up and hit anything of its own accord. "I-I'm alright."

"... are you sure?" Marisa tilted her head to the side, the sixes-mark on her forehead peeking out from behind her scruffy bangs. "You sounded kinda upset."

"I'm okay, okay?" The other girl slumped down the wall until her head met the floor. "... I'm just tired."

"Oh. Then you should probably take a nap while we're here anyway..." Marisa was curled back up before her sentence was even finished.

"I know."

"Then go to sleep."

"I'm trying..."