Husk was smoking a cigar and tapping the ashes into the alley below when Chay climbed to the roof. His wings were close to his back, and his head was hunched over the side, staring off into the bloody crimson of Hell's sunset.

"You wanted something?", Chay asked.

"Yeah...sure. Join me for a smoke?", he waved his cigar towards her, not even bothering to turn around and look her in the eyes.

"No...I don't smoke. Never liked it." Chay felt her skin prickle. She had only known Husk for a few hours at this point, and yet his entire body language had her on edge. He was oddly reserved, even methodical.

"Have it your way." He puffed on his cigar again, the cloud of smoke rising up over his head.

-Alright, fuck it.

"Husk...what's your problem? You've been eye-balling me since you showed up. You look like you expect me to stab you in the back at any given nanosecond. Just come out and fucking say what's going on!"

Husk didn't immediately respond. He simply kept puffing on his cigar and staring out into the distance.

Then he started to chuckle. Lightly at first…and then louder. By the time he turned around to face her, he was almost doubled over with laughter.

"Expect you to? Bones, where the fuck do you think you are? How long have you been down here, exactly? I don't know how they do shit in Imp City, but here in PC you trust no-one. This world is the fucking industrial run-off of humanity! And the world before was barely any better. Open your fucking eyes."

Chay grumbled to herself. Why does everyone keep calling me Bones?

"Is that what you brought me up here for? To bitch at me about things I already know?"

Husk wiped away a tear from his eye, still chuckling in his throat. "Naw, that's not it. I did enjoy it though….no, I just have one more thing to you, and it's really fucking important so you better listen."

Chay crossed her arms. Her scarf billowed in Hell's breeze. "Alright, I'm listening."

A grin slowly grew at the side of Husk's mouth.

"Bones…."

Husk put his cigar back into his mouth, his grinning teeth gripping it in his maw.

"Meak robsa anak kuchea sreisaamphoeng."

Chay blinked.

Then her eyes grew larger as realization slowly washed over her.

Then the yellow pupils of her eyes shrank with anger.

"You son of a bitch…what did you just call my mother?"

Husk snapped his fingers. "I fucking knew it! Holy fucking shit but I fucking knew it!"

Husk threw his cigar to the floor of the roof and stamped it out. "I cannot believe I didn't figure it out sooner! That accent! That get-up! That fucking scarf! I knew I recognized all of that shit!"

Husk walked up to Chay, and got directly in her face. He poked her chest with one of his claws.

"You were in the fucking Khmer Rouge!"

Chay said nothing. She just stared at Husk with...she wasn't sure what she was feeling at this very moment. Contempt? Impressed? Some mutant combination of the two? She's been so used to not being recognized for so long that at this point she wasn't sure how she should react in the first place.

Husk shook his head, laughing to himself like he'd struck oil.

"Why didn't I realize it sooner? Of COURSE you weren't partyin' with Ho Chi Minh! 'Grew up in the region'? Yeah, cuz you were fightin' under goddamn Pol Pot!"

"….I don't want to talk about this right now.", said Chay quietly and mostly to herself (or menacingly. At this point Husk was too drunk to tell the difference).

Husk reached back into his collar and pulled out his flask, gulping from it loudly. He wiped away stray liquor from his whiskered face.

"So tell me...how'd you die? Massacred in the Killing Fields? Starved to death on a collective farm? Bite it at a re-education camp? Maybe you got your ass handed to you during a raid on a Vietnamese rice paddy…..Oh wait, I know!…."

Husk lurched forward and grabbed a piece of her scarf.

"You got purged for being outta uniform! You fuckers didn't wear checkered scarves, you wore fucking plaid!"

Chay stared at the floor, grinding her teeth.

"...I couldn't find a plaid one when I got here.", she replied quietly. "This was the closest thing I could find in the jungle. I was lucky to find clothes at all".

"Uh huh, I'm sure you did Chay."

The feline-demon retook his spot at the roof's edge. He reached into his collar and produced yet another cigar. He snapped his claws like a pair of fingers, and the friction produced a small flame he used to light it.

"I just realized…", he said as he took his first puff. "It's even in your name. Chay Ong. Like 'chhaoeng '. As in 'Bone'. And I thought Al had picked the laziest nick-name…"

"….You're enjoying this, aren't you?"

"Damn straight I am. It's one of the small pleasures I can get in this afterlife."

Husk took a long drag on his cigar, exhaling smoke rings into Hell's evening. "So you didn't answer my question….how did you die?"

Chay sighed with all the weight of her guilt.

"I was purged."

Husk chuckled a single laugh under his breath. "Fucking called it again."

Chay walked over to the edge and took a place next to Husk.

"It was 1978, a year before the Vietnamese invaded. Things weren't going well. Brother Number One had decided to come out of hiding and start pushing his image among the people. At that point he'd done everything through a proxy, never showing his face. But now he decided he wanted idols built for his personality cult."

Chay looked down at the alleyway below. A couple of demons were shooting up heroin. One of Val's girls was among them.

"I'd been part of the Santebal. I was responsible for weeding out counter-revolutionary thoughts and actions. I snatched people in the dark of night and delivered them to the re-education camps, naked and shivering. I shot farmers who were starving and begging for increased rations because their selfishness would jeopardize our plans for Year Zero".

Husk took another puff of his cigar. "That about lines up with what I'd heard was happening back in the day. Then 1978 happened."

Chay shook her head. "That wasn't what got me killed. The Vietnamese invading was only a matter of time. We'd already been having border skirmishes with them when they ended our alliance the previous year. Then a bunch of Khmer crossed the border and razed several villages. But I wasn't alive to see it."

"Mmhm. I'll bet."

Chay turned and gave her current companion the side-eye. "You want to hear this or not?"

Husk grunted. "Just get to the point."

Chay grunted herself. "Fine. To make a long story short: I, at some point, commented about how I thought Brother Number One putting his face out there went against our ideological ethos. Somehow word got to him, and I was liquidated. Fifty years later, and here we are. The End."

"Yeesh, talk about going around your ass to get to your elbow". Husk took one last drag of his cigar before dropping in into the alleyway below. It bounced off of a junkie's head before falling into a trashcan, lighting its contents on fire.

"So because of your previous life, you ended up like...well, like that."

Chay curtsied sarcastically. "A Hungry Ghost. An undead embodiment of pure, un-ending desire. Just like in Chinese myth. Karma has a sick sense of humor."

"Heh, well there's something we both have in common then."

Husk spread his wings out wide, showing his entire feline form.

"Ya know what I really hated when I was alive? Cats."

Chay was almost asleep on Crol's couch when her hellphone vibrated.

She drowsily looked at the Caller ID. It was Lucius's number. 'Before too late', he'd said. Funny.

"Lu?"

"Try again. It's Viola."

"Why are you using Lucius's phone?"

"Because mine needs charging and we only have one working charger."

The ILF's infamous incompetence strikes again.

"But to get to why I'm calling: Me and Lu got that info you wanted...mostly me, but Lu helped."

Chay sat up, stretching out her back and yawning. "Nice timing you got there. It's nearly one in the morning…"

"Lu didn't account for time changes. But you'll want to hear this now, because we haven't just got second-hand information here."

"...Explain."

"The ILF doesn't just have information about these guys. We've met."

Chay's eyes widened. She shot up from the sofa and was on her feet. "You better start talking, Viola. If Lu has gotten me into even more trouble because of his bullshit…"

"Relax, Chay. This was from one of our soldiers, not Lu. Were it otherwise I would have mailed you his head."

She was getting really irritated at having people tell her to 'relax'. There was nothing to relax about here.

"Do you remember the Imp who greeted you at the door of our Headquarters?"

"The one who screamed 'let her in!' at the top of his lungs for every goddamn citizen of Imp City to hear?"

"Yeah, him...he has trouble controlling the volume of his voice. But he's the one who tipped us off when we started our research this morning. He used to live in Pentagram City…"

Chay walked over to the window and looked out into Hell's night. The city was still heavily illuminated with neon, spot lights and the occasional bonfire. The Pentagram moon loomed below the celestial Pentagram that was the permanent marker of this city's skyline.

"So he's encountered them before?"

"They actually tried to recruit him. Once we showed him the emblem you described to us he instantly recognized it. Then we couldn't get him to shut up about it. From there we were finally able to deduce who these guys were, and what they're trying to do."

"Hold on…" Chay swiped through the apps on her hellphone before she got to the 'record call' function. She hit the record button.

"Alright, tell me what you have."

"So first thing's first: they're called Inferna."

"Not terribly creative."

"This is Hell, we're not exactly swimming in genius down here. Anyway, they've been publicly active in Pentagram City for a while...three years, at least. Lu thinks they've actually been operating for longer than that, but they didn't really make any noise until the Extermination last year."

"But they had been causing havoc before then?"

"No more than what's average for PC. Turf wars are always a thing there, and there's always some new wannabe trying to hone in on someone's territory. But it was last year's Cleansing where they started doing the high-profile shit."

"Like…?"

"Like bombarding a small bar with grenades as the Exterminators were cleaning up."

"Damn."

"Didn't phase the owner though. Two days later he came out of hiding and rebuilt the place. But he must have gotten cold feet because he left town right around the time of the last Extermination."

"….I'm gonna need to talk with Husk and Crol about this in the morning. I think they actually knew the guy who owned it."

"Oh, but it gets better. We have some info about the guy who supposedly runs Inferna. He's some guy they call The Prophet. Nobody knows who he actually is, but whenever he's seen in public he's always making these grand speeches about manliness and the glory of bloodshed."

"Like Hell isn't already filled with assholes exactly like him."

"Here's the fun part: That symbol that you asked us to look into? It actually has precedent. Historical precedent."

"Historical like in the living world?"

"Yup. How familiar are you with World War I?"