Moments in the past, but not many…
Jesus and Friends™ rose into the air while within the Bentley, which was not so much a car as an extension of Crowley. This was done against Crowley's will.
"Who's doing that?" he asked. His tone was deceptively calm. Deep within his mind, he was screaming. Someone was manipulating his car – manipulating him! – and he had no idea how it had happened or how to stop it.
The occupants of the back seat* looked between each other in mild confusion. They had assumed the Bentley was supposed to fly, probably because they had grown up on Harry Potter and never before had cause to question how fictional magic was supposed to work when it wasn't fictional anymore. Wizards drove flying cars. That was just how it was. None of them were wizards, but wizards were much friendlier in concept than some ancient story in which people got turned into pillars of salt for basically no reason… So, wizard-logic it was.
"Well," Crowley said, "whoever it is will stop it! Now!" He was relegated to dad-like shouting again. This would not do. He was the Serpent, the Tempter, retroactive winner of Hell's Most Lolworthy Prank award six centuries in a row and running. So help him if any low-level demons got whiff of this and added Hot DILF to his list of Names, someone was getting spritzed in the face with holy water.
"It's gotta be you," Sollux said to Eridan. "You've got smite powers and a magic wand, and I've read your Harry Potter fanfiction. AZ mentioned something about how angels and fallen can make anything happen with sufficient belief."
Eridan stared incredulously back at Sollux across the chasm of Karkat. He said, "You say this while you are, in fact, levitating a phone right this very moment. This car is levitating. You can levitate things. Smitin's all I got that I know of."
Sollux opened his mouth to object because, while it was true that he was telekinetically holding a phone with Google Maps opened before him, he was consciously doing so, and he was not consciously doing anything of the sort to the Bentley. Then he realized that all of them had ridden in a landbound Bentley before… All except one person. He closed his mouth and looked meaningfully to Karkat.
"Fuck," Karkat said. "It's me, isn't it?"
"Now we know. Now stop it," Crowley commanded.
"I don't know how, you asshole! This Jesus Powers shit is probably too much for my mortal meat-sack to handle or something, which is why Past Me had to fucking die and resurrect as a spirit in order to access most of it. And how do we even know it's all on me, huh? What if we're all contributing to this massive clusterfuck roadtrip that's just giving the middle finger to physics because it can!"
Aziraphale had thus far been ignoring the squabble. He'd been having a delightful telepathic conversation with some of the bees, as a matter of fact. They were all very young, since earthly bees only live a couple months at most, or a few years for the queen. These now-perhaps-immortal bees had only gained such high levels of self-awareness through Sollux's demonic awakening, and were reveling in their newfound intellect. Aziraphale had been recommending his favorite children's books.
Nevertheless, he was roused from this most pleasant of conversations sometime during Karkat's rant when he realized that the Bentley was drifting slightly off course. Crowley had also noticed and added to the ruckus by cursing loudly as he tried to steer the vehicle, to no avail.
"Karkat, please pay attention to the, oh, what do you call it these days? The navigation system, yes. You're drifting, dear."
Karkat sucked in a deep breath. He held it, as if physically holding back the slurry of profanity that threatened to spill forth. Aziraphale's advice made something connect in his mind, and it was then that Karkat fully realized how he had been warping reality with the unchecked power of miracles that was indeed too big for his mortal meat-sack to properly contain.
He panicked, breath still held, and the Bentley began to plummet from the sky.
"Aaaaaaah!" screamed the other passengers.
"Mmmmfff!" Karkat screamed behind closed lips.
Hyperventilating through his nose, Karkat snatched Sollux's wobbily floating phone before it could drop and stared very, very hard at the map. He prayed to Google. Google had never led him astray. Prayer had never done anything for him before, but he supposed things were different now. Karkat thought very hard that the Bentley was following the nice two-dimensional lines Google had laid out for it, and this was enough to straighten the car's path. He tried to compel Maps to lead them to Adam's whereabouts.
Destination: Antichrist – Error
Huh. That was strange.
Destination: Adam Young – Error
Destination: Adam Young's house – Error
Karkat was not aware, but he had run afoul of Adam's more mature powers. Adam did not want to be found by strangers, so Adam could not be found by strangers.
Destination: Tadfield. Destination: Wherever the stench of Hell is strongest.
Success!
Unable to pinpoint Adam by name, Karkat repeated these instructions in his mind instead, figuring it was close enough. What else could be the focal point of Hell's energies if not the Antichrist? Google Maps miraculously updated their new destination to Starbucks.
"Turn left!" Crowley shouted at the critical juncture. He threw his hands in the air when he was ignored due to Karkat's strict adherence to the Gospel of Google.
That was how the Bentley dropped into place by the witches, a few miles away from Adam.
Dog stuck his head out the window, tongue lolling in the wind.
"None of that now, boy," Adam said.
With a whine and a huff, the Hellhound-in-a-tiny-mutt's-body settled down in the back of Adam's car.
"It's nice weather now," Pepper noted. "We could have gotten the old gang together. Broken out the bikes."
In a brief flash at the corner of his eye, Adam saw Pepper as her alternate self from a timeless future that already was, yet would never be. War rode beside him, scarlet hair billowing, whooping in joy as she led the other Horsepersons of the Apocalypse toward battle. But it was just for a moment. The overlap of the universes slipped, and Pepper was Pepper again.
Some other Adam in some other universe had been raised to be violent and bad. Some other Pepper had followed that other Adam.
This Adam followed Anathema's very sensible pickup truck as it trundled down the road. They didn't need a map or any sort of supernatural navigation to figure out where they should be going. All they had to do was follow the line of Mysterious Cloaked Figures on their pilgrimage.
Adam was sure it was some sort of cult. He wasn't much fond of cults. He reckoned they were always up to no good.**
The first of the Woegoths had arrived at the Waterstones a few hours beforehand. They were content to be mistaken for very dedicated cosplayers. Some had joined the book signing line with their copies of Complacency of the Learned out at the ready. Others were relaxing at the coffee shops and restaurants nearby. At Feferi's scream, and then the screech of the Bentley's tires, the Woegoths who had been in Starbucks, as well as plenty of regular customers, rushed outside. This was what they saw:
Two newly arrived cars flanked a scene of battle in the Starbucks parking lot. A brightly-dressed woman was defending a mass of pulsating purple tentacles. Her hands were held up like claws as she made swiping movements against another woman who, for some inexplicable reason, smelled of sweet herbs and fear. Pure, unadulterated existential terror. She smelled this way even to those who were too far away to see her clearly.
A third woman, dressed in red, was hacking at the tentacles with a knife. She was a fierce mafia-looking dragon lady who was being helped by a slick mafia-looking bastard with a tire iron, who alternately whacked determinedly at the alien goo and shook his weapon free with a look of utter disgust. At his back was another man, blond and angelic and utterly homosexual, whose palms were glowing golden with unknown power. The tentacles seemed to shrink away from this light.
More figures jostled each other and stumbled out of the black classic car. They panicked and screamed and there were bees. If they could even be called that. Bees weren't each the size of a golf ball.
"Whoa," said a young fan. He clutched his copy of the book to his chest while he looked questioningly at the cosplayer beside him. "Is this some kinda preview of the next book what Miss Lalonde all up and arranged in secret, you think? Motherfucking miracles..."
"No," said the Woegoth. "This is your doom."
Their master Shub-Niggurath dodged a swipe from her opponent. She rose up on misty tendrils which solidified into more of those vile burbling tentacles. Wielding but a sliver of her full power, she flung her arms wide, and the human sacrifices blinked out of existence.
To the remaining cultists, she said, "Finish the ritual."
They tromped back into Starbucks.
In the next moment, the disapparated fans came back into existence at the other Starbucks - the one within the bookstore. They were none the worse for wear, save for the disorientation that comes from suddenly existing elsewhere.
"Maaaaaan, teleportation!" said the young fan. "That's just… miracles."
Damara had known they would lose as soon as Feferi blew their cover. They should have waited until after Grandpa's angel reinforcements arrived to ambush Jade. What did Feferi really think she could accomplish against an Outer God with her fake martial arts? But, well, now she realized they were always doomed from the start.
There were plenty of cultists already in the cafe, and while most of them weren't witches, there were a few witches among them. Damara and Feferi weren't needed to complete the ritual after all, especially not now when their previous rituals at all the other coffee holes of mass consumer whoredom were siphoning enough infernal energy toward this center so that even the weakest of evil witches could summon a hellhound if they'd felt so inclined.
It didn't help that the only useful ones out of the sorry lot of reinforcements, by Damara's estimates, were the demon with the tire iron and the angel who had been warding the group from Jade's Eldritch powers. However, there was no way this not-particularly-evil demon could out-demon a Duchess of Hell, and there was only one angel who seemed to know what he was doing. The other douchey-looking angel had cried "White Science!" as he launched a bolt of holy power toward Jade. It had only stunned Jade for a second before she struck him with a tentacle, sending him flying across the parking lot.
Damara felt it when the energy increased once more, signaling that this territory had been claimed in the name of Hell. Jade sighed, basking in the new burst of power. Damara wanted to kick the smirk from her face, but Jade was floating twenty feet in the air now, and all they had done to lesson her powers was free Grandpa.
Everything escalated too quickly after that. Jade's massive influx of power cracked the asphalt beneath their feet. Buildings begain crumbling in the distance, and a second moon rose from the east, this one crimson as fresh blood. Grandpa squeaked and trembled from where he rode on Damara's back in the form of a small child.
Jade laughed, the sound full and hearty. She disappeared in a swirl of dark mist, only to reappear across the street. She had arrived at her final destination.
"We're fucked," Damara said to the demon.
He quirked an eyebrow above his sunglasses. "So it seems, sweetheart."
They shrugged and gave chase.
"Down, boy," Adam said to Dog.
The mutt was jumping up and down excitedly at the scent of Hell. The four of them – Adam, Pepper, Anathema, and Newt – had been forced to park at a vehicular blockade that barred the road leading into downtown Upper Tadfield.
It was nearing midnight, yet the horizon was illuminated with a blood red glow from the new moon that had just appeared. The further they walked toward the center, the more the landscape took on the appearance of a cartoon rendition of the dystopian future. The main road was cracked as if there had been an earthquake. Cars were flung onto their sides. Buildings crumbled onto the streets. Strangest of all, there were no people around except for the last of the cultists, who scrambled over the rubble to catch up to their brethren.
The cultists paid no mind to Adam's crew, though one girl had given him a small wave. Then one of their own number had broken down.
The boy flung off his hood and sank to his knees. "By God," he said, "this is all wrong. Wh-what is this? It's terrible and needs to stop and I didn't sign up for this! I wanna go home!"
He continued to babble, and before Adam could approach, the "friendly" cultist who had waved said, "Whoopsies, we've got another one!"
She held her palms out toward the boy. Occult symbols glowed in the air before her, and then with a -thwip- the boy disappeared.
Friendly threw a grin at Adam. "He's off to join the sacrifices," she said. "You're welcome to see the show with us, Mr. Antichrist, sir!"***
What was he to do but go with her?
They headed for Tadfield Mall, which was a mall, and therefore the worst place to hide during the zombie apocalypse. Adam wasn't sure this tenet didn't hold for regular apocalypses, either.
"Watch out for zombies," Adam told Pepper. In having this thought, Adam had shaped reality once more, and this time he was too distracted to fix it right away. Shambling zombies began appearing at the edges of their vision.
"Adam!" Pepper and Anathema chastised him in unison, but Adam was too focused on getting to the mall to pay them any mind.
Newton was confused, but he was also armed with a heavy rolling pin. At his wife's nod, he readied it just as she took out the foot-long bread knife she always sensibly wore on her belt for excursions which may require self-defense. Pepper cracked her knuckles.
When they came upon the mall, they noticed the Waterstones, which was an anchor store, was shrouded in swirling mist. Desperate screams and sobs came from the entire structure. They could see that the whole mall had been converted into a prison. Vines, half wood and half pulsating other, grew from the cracks in the ground and wound up the sides of the building. People were banging on the windows, which wouldn't break no matter how they were hammered.
Cultists surrounded the whole structure.
"Iä! Shub-Niggurath!" they chanted. "Praise be to the All-Mother!"
"Praise be!"
"Iä! Shub-Niggurath!"
The calls echoed from all around. Adam and his crew were surrounded by agents of chaos and destruction. They were led through the mist and into the building.****
Bookshelves were tipped over here and there, and posters torn. There were groups of civilians bound and gagged by the same pulsating tentacles that had sprouted everywhere. As they walked further in, the figure of a woman immediately caught their attention.
She stood in the center of a Satanic circle drawn over the wooden flooring of what used to be the bookstore's cafe, with cultists bowing their heads to her. She could have been beautiful, with her long dark hair and expressive eyes. Her cheeks dimpled when she smiled, and she was the heart of the unknown terrors, the diseased womb from which countless monsters were born, an otherworldly parody of a goddess of creation: Shub-Niggurath.
"Welcome," she said. She had dimples and tentacles flowing out from who-knows-where under her skirt.
At her feet were angels and demons and witches alike, two of them very familiar to Adam. They knelt solemnly. The two witches were silent, too. They held an unconscious angel between them. The other three non-humans were younger beings, less powerful and less composed. They held tightly to each other, the two who Adam presumed were angels on either side of the demon, who was sobbing softly yet piteously over the tiny corpses of his familiars.
Adam understood, and he sympathized. He would cut a bitch if anyone had touched Dog like that. At his side, Dog whimpered too.
Before the two parties could say anything to each other, Shub-Niggurath spoke again.
"Ah. It's almost time." She pointed at the wall clock. It read 11:59. "I suppose I should tell you my evil master plan. Well. Rose will arrive, and then the Hellmouth will open and demons will arrive, and then angels will arrive, and while we're all distracted having a grand ol' apocalyptic showdown party, Azathoth the Daemon Sultan, the Nuclear Chaos who bubbles at the center of all infinity, will wake for a brief moment and devour us all as a tasty little morsel of a midnight snack."
She blinked for a moment, then two. Most everyone else blinked, too.
"Oh dear, I shouldn't have said that." She giggled and wagged a tentacle at Adam. "Naughty Antichrist, making me spill the beans with your influence like that."
Adam wasn't much paying attention to that part of her speech. He was looking back out the windows at the sky. For the first time in his life, he was able to visualize what the world would look like under Hell's reign. It wouldn't just be this. What happened after would be a devouring of all mortal life, by that.
The Blood Moon was no moon at all. It had steadily been growing larger, moving closer to Earth. He could now see, though indistinctly, that it wasn't a smooth sphere. There were tendrils – tentacles – sprouting along its surface every which way, accompanied by mouths and eyes and pustules. It was sleeping, Shub-Niggurath had implied, and when it woke...
Tick.
Midnight.
A sound like nails on chalkboard rent the air. A black gash upon reality opened, and another elegant woman stepped through, this one with fashionably short hair and exuding a Gothic feel. One would almost expect her to be a vampire, if not for the tentacles also flowing out of her skirts.
"Rose!" cried Shub-Niggurath. "Oh, I missed you so much!"
"It's good to see you, Jade," said Rose.
"Iä! Nyarlathotep!" the cultists called in greeting.
Nyarlathotep, Black Pharaoh, Stalker Among the Stars, embraced Shub-Niggurath, Lord of the Wood, Mother Goddess. Each looked in the other's eyes as their tentacles brushed tenderly. The cracks in the floor grew wider, and flashes of fire could be seen within them. Rose brought her hand up to cup Jade's cheek. From the flames came the sound of hounds baying. Dog yowled too, a shade of his former self returning his eyes to their original red glow.
The two Grimdark vessels kissed, a soft flutter of lips…
The Devouring Star continued to descend…
The first of the Hellhounds broke into the world…
And Karkat, who'd heard and seen the interactions between the hideous beings holding him and his friends captive, called out to the girls within the Lords of Chaos. "Fight it, Rose! Fight it, Jade! For her! You love her!"
His voice broke at that word, that word which was most precious to him.
"That's a good story. It's a good ending," Adam said. He liked it when stories ended neatly. In a romance, it's only fitting for true love to prevail. He hadn't been thinking of this story as a romance, but see, that was why he liked the world as it was. Other people saw things in different ways that were sometimes better than the stories Adam conjured up himself. This was one of those times. Yes, this story was clearly a romance.
Adam was inspired. He had been about to smack the world with another hard reset like he'd done before, but now he realized that was no angel. The power imbued in that word, "love", had felt so much like Adam's own, but flipped, mirrored. He stilled the world and walked up to the young man who had spoken, beckoning him to rise.
"What's your name, kid?"
"Ah… Whuh… I'm… Karkat?"
"Okay, Karkat." Adam put a hand on the younger man's shoulder. "Maybe it's harder for you because you haven't been practicing. But it's all right, I'll help you."
"Um… What?"
"I'm Adam," said Adam. "The Antichrist. You can probably harness all the love and prayers and stuff from the human sacrifices here. There's gotta be half of Tadfield stuck in this darn mall."
Karkat squinted at Adam, seemingly deep in thought. As a matter of fact, he was contemplating how Adam was too perfect and too charismatic and looked a lot like a Renaissance sculpture that shopped at the Gap. This, to Karkat's well-honed people-reading skills, was suspicious – if not outright dangerous – for a multitude of reasons. *****
He then looked around at the frozen world around them. They were the only ones moving in this little bubble of time. Things weren't going very well for the world, and Karkat loved the world. If he didn't, he wouldn't have invested so much energy into yelling at it to correct its injustices.
"Okay, I'll trust you," Karkat said.
Time resumed.
Hellhounds poured out of portals, followed by demons. Outside the bookstore, Hastur clawed his way out from the infernal abyss to regard the Devouring Star. "Oh Father," he cried, arms stretched out to the bloodied sky, "awaken once more! Return your loyal sons to their former glory!"
Karkat thought about his love for his friends and for the world and for all of existence. He directed all this blessed energy outward, and Adam shaped and molded it into a more effective weapon.
The Love Beam hit Jade, then Rose, and it so enhanced their Love that they awoke with gasps.
Their eyes filled with tears as they realized the madness that had gripped them, and how horrendously they had been transformed.
"But it's true," Jade said in a whisper. "I do love you..."
Equally quiet, Rose responded, "And I, you."
The sky tore open. Angels rained down.
"No," said Adam.
"Fuck off," said Karkat.
Love prevails at the end of any good romance story, they agreed. They set their metaphysical feet down very firmly on this point. The Love Beam washed over everything.
And lo, Heaven and Hell and all the tentacle things fucked off.
* The Bentley was Crowley's car-sona. Crowley liked being as sleek as possible at all times. Therefore, there was never a back seat unless one was needed.
** For the most part this was true. However, some local branches of the Woegoths were also big on volunteerism. Why, the New York branch ran Hell's (Soup) Kitchen, and the London branch donated many hours and copies of Lovecraft to their library's childhood literacy program.
*** After the previous Nopocalypse, Adam had wiped everyone's minds of his existence as Adam Young, but he wasn't able to completely erase the fact that there was an Antichrist somewhere. Too much of history would've had to change for that. Hell assumed the child had been lost due to incompetence or angelic intervention, and Heaven proposed that the child had been lost due to Hell's convoluted bureaucracy backfiring on them. (Aziraphale planted this rumor when Crowley got too smug about his pet project.) Human minions like Friendly only knew what Hell's energy felt like, and that if they felt something like this coming strongly from a human, there was a good chance they'd found the missing Antichrist. They assumed he was evil.
**** Perhaps this was not the smartest thing to do, but it was the way things were supposed to work in stories. Adam liked stories a lot. There was a formula to them that shouldn't be broken unless the author had a very good reason to do so. If the hero was too smart and thwarted the villain's plan too easily, there wouldn't be any dramatic tension, and then what was the point of telling such a tale?
***** First of all, no one that physically perfect was ever trustworthy. Those sorts of good looks always went to a person's head in some way, even if it was only to make them neurotic about others only wanting to be their friend for sex. And second of all, the only people who got their whole wardrobe at Gap, and therefore were accustomed to paying upwards of $30 for a single plain t-shirt, were 1) rich bastards failing spectacularly at trying to blend in with regular people, and 2) not-humans failing spectacularly at convincing others they were human.