"White eyes, huh? What is this? An old super-Nintendo game; the same dude with a different color scheme is magically completely different?" Dante mocked as he woke up on his couch.
Lady sighed, knowing she wouldn't be able to get her point across if she got worked up.
Vergil and Diva were both on their own couch, though Diva much like Dante was taking a bit longer to wake up; she decided to remedy this by napping on the couch with her head in Vergil's lap.
Saya and Haji were on their own furniture and Saya seemed a bit surprised at her mention of the strange creature she had encountered last night.
"You mean it looked more bestial than normal?"
The elder girl turned to face Saya, glad that someone was taking this seriously.
"Yeah; it had fur and stuff on it, as well as glowing white eyes. And it didn't look like it was trying to grab me to bite me either; it just wanted to kill me."
"You said that Enzeru guy took care of it, so what's the big deal? They'll still die if we cut its head off."
Lady sighed again and sat on the arm of a couch.
The large room was quite cold; being that it was late Fall and though they had gained more money over the years heat was still an issue with such a large space. And the cold air that permeated the room chilled her unprotected legs.
"The point isn't that the chiropterans are looking different now; it's that the whole thing that Enzeru was talking about looks like it's already happening. And chiropterans aren't demons; they come from the human world. There shouldn't be anything different about them."
"A demon could have possessed it." Vergil commented, having previously just been listening to the conversation.
Lady shook her head.
"I don't think so. From what I could tell its abilities weren't any different, and it acted more or less the same way the others usually do in terms of the way it fought."
"So we have to worry about why they're different." Saya explained, voicing Lady's semi-hidden point.
"Exactly."
The cold air that hung in the room didn't ease the atmosphere in the slightest. In fact, the thinness of it added an air of pessimism to everything.
"Perhaps some sort of pharmaceutical company got its hands on that substance originally used to turn people into chiropterans and altered it slightly." Vergil spoke, though he was obviously just voicing one of multiple possible theories.
"But what did they change then?" Lady asked herself more than anyone else.
Vergil leaned back into his couch more, Diva following after him and now cuddling against his chest as he thought.
"Maybe Saya's blood won't kill them now. That would be a practical change."
Saya bit her lip in thought as the other two active members of the conversation thought as well.
Dante scratched his head and leaned forward on his couch.
"Eh, it's nothing to worry about right now. We've got a whole legion of demons headed our way; we can save the "who" and "from where" and "why" until we've cleaned up this big mess that's coming."
"I guess you're right." Lady spoke with a tone that made her troubled thoughts evident in it.
There were a few moments of silence before Lady remembered something else.
"I also got the feeling last night that I was being watched when I came home."
"Probably just some demon." Dante said, blowing it off.
"Maybe. But I don't think so. I didn't get the 'demon' vibe. It felt like something or someone else was watching me."
"You've got a stalker. Congratulations."
"Very funny. At least I don't need to go to 'love planet' to find someone who'll chase me around."
"Oh ho! Ouch!"
Both they and even Vergil gave a little chuckle to that.
"Hey, what you laughing for asexualle?" Dante joked, making the last word sound like a Spanish one as best he could.
"You couldn't get a-"
Diva rose up slightly from Vergil's chest and turned his head, locking her lips against his and moaning as she "unintentionally" waved her rear in the air.
"Woah." Dante spoke.
Saya blushed.
"Diva!"
She giggled and returned to her previous sleeping position.
Vergil recovered from Diva's "attention" and shook off the embarrassment.
"I wonder when Enzeru's going to call." He spoke, trying to get a new subject going.
"Yeah, I want to get some demon ass-kicking in before breakfast." Dante concurred.
"It's eleven-forty-three, Dante." Lady reminded him.
He shrugged.
"Lunch then."
"Now that I think about it, what if the demons completely take over the city? Who will be able to pay us for slaying them if they are all dead?" Vergil questioned.
Dante clicked his tongue.
"He's got a point."
"Well what are we going to do? Refuse to save the city if no one will pay for it?" Lady retorted.
"Nah, nothing like that. But I would like to make some money off of saving everyone's ass. With my kind of luck anyone I still owe debts will survive somehow and want me to pay them right back after that's all done."
"You've got bigger problems to deal with than who you owe money." Vergil spoke, drawing everyone's gaze.
After a few moments of silence Dante spoke.
"Like what?"
A verbal response was not Dante's answer, though it was audible; they heard dozens of screams coming from down the street, and from the sounds of the screams, they were all coming from love planet.
"I suppose whatever that is." Vergil answered with some humor as he lightly shifted Diva off of him, starting to get up as the others immediately got up from their couches to go to the windows and look out on what was going on.
"Well, no super-sized demon yet." Dante commented, seeing nothing but half-naked girls and old dudes running around screaming their lungs out, some covered in blood.
"Huh, guess there's something kinky going on."
"Dante…" Lady warned him.
He smirked a bit at that and moved over to the doors, opening them and walking out into the parking lot outside.
The people were all running to their cars, fumbling with the keys to get into them or just outright smashing the windows in so they could get into the believably-safe confines of their vehicles.
Dante still didn't see what was causing the trouble; the building looked fine from what he could see. As he gazed at the place the others came out as well, though they were all wearing some manner of sleeping clothes or "I'm waking up" clothes.
"I wonder what the big deal is." Dante mused, walking down the street towards the building.
The others began to follow after him but he waved them away.
"Don't worry, I've got this. No big deal. Go eat some cheerios or something."
Dante continued walking confidently down the street, screaming people running past him in terror as he drew closer and closer to the building. Though it took him about two minutes or so to reach the place at his current pace, by the time he'd reached it there were still no signs of violence other than the people who were fleeing.
He thought about what kind of demon it could be for a second before shrugging and walking through the door, going down the short hall before he came to the main room of the love planet.
"Home sweet home." He said while observing the garish red furniture and décor, as well as the bar covered in broken glass and booze from those who'd fled from it, and pairs of pants some jackasses had actually left behind.
"Oh. There you are." He observed, seeing some sort of man-sized plant sucking in a stripper's body. The plant looked much like a gigantic flower from what he could see; its leaves were purple with red at the edge, conveying a sort of poisonous atmosphere even though he didn't think he smelled or felt anything in the air.
"But how the hell did it manage to kill everyone if its just a venus flytrap? What's it got free tickets for two to Cancun or something in its mouth?"
The flower finished sucking the corpse in and one of her shoes flew up into the air, only to be snatched by something that looked like a tentacle or tongue, and got pulled back down. However, it was soon launched back up into the air and the thing landed, dissolving in some kind of acid it was covered in, near Dante's feet.
"Thanks, but they're not my size." He spoke sarcastically as the shoes was completely dissolved by the acid which then ate its way down through the floor and out of sight.
He looked at the flower for a few more moments before searching for something to kill it with, as he hadn't brought any weapons with him but his own two "guns".
As he did the petals suddenly drew down, spilling the corrosive acid out onto the floor, eroding it in an ever-expanding circle. The acid smelled like some kind of weird exotic plant, which made sense, he guessed.
"Told those guys they should've let the 'planet' thing alone and not grow plants in soil they got from the moon but did they listen? Nope."
The fumes from the acid rose about the flower and he saw something a lot easier to look at than some red and purple leaves.
"hey, babe, what're you doing in a flower like that?" He asked the pale-pink-colored girl who stood within the middle of the flower. She had a nude, humanoid body but dark purple veins running up along her legs from the flower as well as hair that looked to double as an iv feed.
"Hey, get it? Iv… ivy…"
She looked at him with a monotone expression and he drew closer, making sure not to step into the pool of acid about her.
"Hey, what say after this we go get a bite to eat?"
Her eyes flared and she opened her mouth, her tongue whipping out at him and blasting him through the building's walls, across the street, and through his longest-lasting doors. The man crashed into his desk and tumbled over it, landing perfectly in his chair behind it.
Dante leaned back in it, pushing himself and his chair up and down with his legs on the desk, thinking about it as his gaze fell to Ebony & Ivory.
"Guess not."
