"Are you certain you want to be working again so soon?" Apoc asked, as the taxi puttered its way toward the Pride Wall. "Most people would take a very well earned vacation after a hit like that."
"Charlie won't let me fix the hotel. I'm getting bored out of my mind," Sam said. He still felt stiff, and every movement felt like it was tearing at a barely-holding scab on his chest. It was strange, how he'd literally had his arms ripped off, but they grew back within days, whereas the puncture wound still sometimes cracked and bled if he twisted the wrong way.
"That is a perfect excuse to go to the movies or go to a boxing match, not launch yourself into your vocation. I know that you don't suffer from Protestant Work Ethic," Apoc said.
"Suffer from. I like that," Sam said.
"Why are you here, Sam? Let's be honest," the goat said.
"Honest like how you dodged answering how you found me at the hotel on a day I specifically told you not to come looking for me?" Sam said. Apoc just shrugged. "I figured out how you did that, by the way."
"Do tell," Apoc said, leaning in slightly.
"I reread the fine print of my contract, and found even finer print there," Sam said. "You put a tracer on me when I started working for you."
"Sam, my intentions were," Apoc began.
"Sneaky little fart you are, you put an alarm system on my life," Sam cut him off. "I'm honestly not even mad. That was just smart. But I do need to know, right here and now, the extent of that tracer."
"Life-state only," Apoc said. "I can no more read your mind or listen to your ramblings than you can see through Weepstone. It's a lesson I learned from Celeste, back then."
"You are remarkable at bending rules to your favor," Sam said.
"I try to be," Apoc said.
"But you've still violated my privacy and lied to me again," Sam pointed out. "So I figure you owe a penalty for that."
Apoc sighed, but shrugged. "I suppose I do. What humiliation will sate your rage?"
"Do I look like the kind of guy who cares about humiliating people?" Sam asked. "I want that bar of Seraphic Steel you keep in the bottom of your satchel."
"That is entirely..." he began, then paused, as though realizing that what he was about to say would paint him into a corner he would starve to death in, and then balking. "Well darn. Hrm. I can't just hand it over, Sam. That is a significant amount of money in transferable medium. And while I do consider you a friend, there may come a time when I need that metal for myself."
"One pound of Seraphic Steel for twenty five thousand Souls, then?" Sam asked.
"That's essentially everything I've paid you since you got to Hell," Apoc said. Sam silenced him by pulling the wad of money out of his pocket and plopping it onto the seat. Apoc blinked at it. "Have you spent any money on anything since you got here?"
"Cigarettes and a plasma cutter," Sam said. "Deal?"
"...Very well. I will sell what I don't want to sell at any price for its market rate. You're thinking of getting a weapon made? Shrewd, but I'd be careful about who you tell you have it," Apoc said, digging into the satchel and extracting the shining white ingot, still stamped with the outline of an imp's head.
"You let me worry about what I'm going to do with it," Sam said. "As for the annoyance I had at your tracer, and the fact that you're more miserly with the truth than Ebeneezer Scrooge is with coin at the beginning of the story, it is now considered a part of the past."
"You can't just say mistrust is paid and dealt with, Sam," Apoc said.
"Could you?" Sam asked.
"Obviously not... Sam, what are you planning on doing?" Apoc asked.
"Nothing that will threaten the good name of the Goat of the Apocalypse, and his services as a Dealmaker," Sam said.
"Don't be a fart, Sam," Apoc said.
"I have business I need to take care of, and somebody I need to make sure is completely dead," Sam said.
"Ah. I suppose that stands to reason," Apoc said. He sat back in his chair. "I hope you are sure about what you're doing. Revenge is not something that is very copacetic with the notion of Redemption."
"Revenge no," Sam agreed. "Overdue justice, more so."
"I'd ask who pissed you off in Hell, but the list of people who have caused harm to your person and weren't immediately either corrected or killed by yours truly is small," Apoc paused, thinking. Then, a concerned look came to his face. "This wouldn't be about Nathan Birch, would it?"
"What? No," Sam said. Birch was a name which kept coming up in people's minds, now that Sam was able to look inside and see them. One of the most hated people in all of Hell, kept alive entirely and solely by the fact that you had no choice but to do as he said, and maintained against assassination by the power granted him by the Remit of Lucifer. While Alastor reveled in being feared for the monster that could and would strike at the mighty with uncaring ease that he chose to be, Birch just seemed to get off on being the ultimate bully of the weak.
But for the moment, he was just another asshole in the tide of Hell. Evil in Hell was like the weather. You could try to endure it, but it was always there. And if you evaporated one drop of rain, there were always ten thousand more falling to take its place.
"Good, because you'd have no chance at all of harming Birch with that," Apoc said, tidying his satchel. "Just because I've handed you a gun, doesn't mean you can use it to shoot the president without consequences."
"I'm not going to use this against Nathan Birch, I promise you," Sam said with a fair amount of honesty. Birch was somebody else's problem for now.
"As long as you're not going to make a run at that particular cliff-face, then I can, in good conscience, allow you to keep that ingot," Apoc said.
"Like you could even take it from me," Sam said. Apoc just turned a look at him. "Try it."
"Like this?" Apoc said, pulling an ingot of Seraphic Steel out of his satchel. Sam frowned at it, then patted his pocket. Empty. Apoc then smirked and pulled Sam's wallet out of his satchel as well. "Don't ever think you'll get one over on me so easily," the goat said.
"Noted," Sam said, and collected what was his.
Chapter 10
Half-Cocked is Half-Assed
The situation was so far beyond hopeless that it somehow managed to loop around back into a place of disciplined action. Moxie had expected that he would spend every day until Lucifer kicked down I.M.P.'s door huddled in a corner screaming how doomed they all were. Instead, he sat at his desk and he cracked book after book, delving into mysteries of the occult that were beyond his paygrade as an imp. In fact, some of them were beyond the paygrades of Overlords.
As his eyes started to glaze at another ritual that required the blood of an Elder Devil – who were essentially extinct because they could not breed and had been hunted down by Lucifer during The War For Hell – Moxie leaned back and turned a look to Millie. Millie, love of his life, was picking through tomes far more... elementary... in nature. She stood even less of a chance finding something in those than Moxie did, but unlike him, she didn't flinch or glaze or mope. She just dug into those tomes as much as she was able to.
"What's this word?" Millie asked, not the third time this hour. Moxie lolled his head over.
"Parauranion," Moxie said.
"Which means?" Millie asked.
"It... it doesn't have a meaning, it's a place. Or it might be one. People think that's where the Shards of Ruin come from," Moxie said.
"Shards of what now?" Blitz leaned past his doorway, on the verge of falling to the floor.
"Pieces of higher hyperrealities that can be used as weapons. Hell was built around two of them," Loona said with a distracted tone, eyes on her phone.
"Yes... actually," Moxie was surprised to have somebody else in the room who knew that. He gave his head a shake. "Sir, we can't use a Shard of Ruin against Birch."
"Why not?" Blitz asked, sounding outright insulted at the thought.
"The only one still in Hell is the Altar of Worms in Satan's Cathedral. We can't exactly get Birch into Wrath to use it against him," Moxie said.
"Well if that's an option, why not just yeet the asshole into the Pride Wall?" Blitz asked. Moxie almost snapped at him, but took a breath, and made the next come out calmly.
"We've been over this, sir. He would bounce off, like he was made of rubber," Moxie said.
"What about the other one?" Millie asked.
"What?" Moxie asked.
"The other Shard of Ruin?" Millie asked.
"That one was the Stone of Farewell, which was the Realm Heart of Purgatory. It's not a weapon. And I don't think God would take it kindly if we sent Birch to Heaven," Moxie said.
"Holy shit. A piece of rock can do that?" Blitz asked, emerging to loom – or more accurately impose – on the imps out here doing research.
"It's not just a piece of rock, sir. And it doesn't matter if it could, it can't now because Purgatory is lost to the Abyss!"
"Then let's go get it!" Blitz offered. Everybody stared at him.
"Uh, Blitz? Are you alright?" Millie asked.
"Are you insane?" Moxie asked flatly.
"Yeah, he is," Loona nodded, still fixated on her hellphone.
"Nobody comes back from the Abyss," Moxie said.
"Well there's a first time for everything!" Blitz said.
"And even if somebody could come back from the Abyss, we, as imps, could not," Moxie said.
"...why?" Millie asked.
"Imp's... souls, I guess... are made of Abyss. If we go there, we just dissolve into it again. Even if you could theoretically have somebody retrieve a Shard of Ruin from the Abyss, it won't be an Imp who does it," Moxie said. He moved over to another book, and flipped it over to the Testament of The Fundament of Heaven. Stabbing the page with a finger, he continued. "According to Purson's Record, even GOD was changed for the worse when He touched the Abyss. If there's a way to kill Birch, it's not in the Abyss."
"How about chucking him into it?" Blitz said.
"That wouldn't..." Moxie began, but then paused, and thought. "...Fail immediately. It probably wouldn't kill him because of the Remit, though. And getting him to a place where you could push him would rely on Birch being an idiot."
"Well darn. Plan B, then?" Blitz asked.
"Hello, is this I.M.P.?" A Damned with a spiny exterior asked at the doorway to the hall.
"Who the fuck is askin'!" Blitz snapped at him, causing the hedgehog man to flinch back at his intensity.
"I... ah... was told you can kill people in the world of the Living?" he asked.
"Oh right yeah, that," Blitz said. "Come into my office, let's talk this through. M & M, keep doin' your nerd shit. I want five more ways to buttfuck that urethra-canker by the time we're done!"
"Yes, sir..." Moxie muttered as the Sinner went to talk with turkey. If Blitz couldn't get turned from this course soon, they'd need to start investing in some truly rare books of lore, because the answers to how to circumvent Lucifer's magic just weren't here to find. But if there was one thing the two lover-imps were good at, it was finding ways to kill a man.
With a groan of pain, Sam fell to one knee, clutching a head that felt like it was trying its best to explode.
"Maybe we should try this again when you're not in so frail a state," Alastor said, looming over him. But then, Alastor would have loomed even had Sam not been on the floor.
"No, I'm gonna do this," Sam said. It took a few seconds for his vision to unblur, for the pain to ebb to the point where it wasn't monopolizing his attention, merely dominating it. As far as Sam was able to discern from conversations with people who knew anything about it – Husk, Alastor and Apoc, basically – learning hellish magic was an endeavor of months at the least. To understand the importance of the symbols used, the energies they manipulated, those required experimentation and tutelage. Sam, though, could just look at magic in action and have it punched into the surface of his brain like a cattle-brand.
Finally, there was a benefit to having his intensely intrusive vision; he could pick up in days what most people had to work for over the course of years. Or a lifetime, as was the case with Alastor. That didn't mean he had the experience with them that Alastor did, or that he knew the nuances and edge-cases that Alastor could probably rattle off with half a thought. He wasn't going to hoodwink his way into being an archmage by Elemental Bullshit, but he might be able to skip the hopeless apprentice stage, at least.
"The last time somebody tried this hard to cram arcane knowledge into his head, it was me," Alastor said with a nostalgic grin. "Do you know how much harder it is to use magic in the Mortal World? It took all I had to make the bridges I did, to accrue the power I had."
"I don't doubt," Sam said. A glance at Alastor revealed that there was a long-ignored hunger in him, a lust that didn't give the first toss about fleshy distractions. Weird. "Why did you start learning magic, then, if it's so lackluster up there?"
"Oh, I'd not say it's lackluster," Alastor said, instantly pushing the hunger to the back of his mind. "When I was a boy, I caught a glimpse of something I shouldn't have, a peek behind the curtain of reality. I saw a man who was not there. A child who was not born. A wizened fool who would never die. And I watched as a local Bokor split his skin open and showed how he was hollow inside, kept alive by a wick made of flax and symbols of gruesome correspondence. From that moment forward, I hungered to know more. To know everything."
"So what was that guy? It sounds like an Exorcist made of meat," Sam said.
"Don't blinker your vision, Samuel," Alastor chided. "There are far more things in the Mortal World than Heaven or Hell has ever seen! For all the Pantokrator Above claims that He is the master of all creation, other Powers grow in the world despite His distinct lack of say-so. I grew up hearing of a Hell of infinite suffering for the damned, and thought it a fairy-tale. But after seeing the candle-man, I let my vision grow wider. Yours should grow wider as well, Samuel. Just because you are in Hell, doesn't mean that is all of Reality."
"So what? Did Heaven create the candle-man?" Sam asked.
"Far from it. He was a living piece of Unreality. One of many things which those of learning call Powers From Outside. There are oh so very many of them, these days. More than when I was a boy, even. When I was a man, I had only just learned of the Nine Principles to the extent that I could use them, before my... ahem... demise."
"And they would be?" Sam asked.
"Are you sure you want to try? They would likely afflict you just as badly as the rest of my works," Alastor's grin grew only a little sadistic.
"How do you make floating runes, anyway?"
"I am an Elemental," Alastor said. When Sam gestured for him to elaborate, "Do you know what radio waves are?"
"Electromagnetic radiation with a long wavelength," Alastor nodded, and was about to continue when Sam realised what he'd meant. "And you can manipulate radio waves. Which means you can compress the wavelength down until it's infrared... and then, into the visible spectrum. Which is why your runes are red."
"EXACTLY!" Alastor was delighted, inside and out. "Oh, you cannot know how long I've gone without being able to talk to somebody who can discuss things as a peer! Had I known I would be this bored for this long I would have balked at hurling the Crone of Cruac over the edge with the rest of her impish spawn."
"Can you get anything past visible light?" Sam asked.
"Not for lack of trying, I'm afraid," Alastor said. "Once you pass the threshold of visible light... they just aren't radio waves anymore, now are they? My powers might be many and deep, but they are not omnipresent nor omnipotent."
"Didn't think that they were. After all, I'm an Elemental and all I can do is look inside people's hopes and fears," Sam said. There was no point lying about his capabilities to the only other being in the Hotel who could help him understand them.
"Blinkered thinking, Samuel," Alastor said. "You're not seeing hopes. You're seeing something far more fundamental to a person. You're seeing the fire that drives them. For many enough, that is hope, or fear, but that's not the only thing which can make a soldier march. Duty is another, far colder flame. Hate is colder still, but burns long."
"I'm... pretty sure I can't see those," Sam said.
"Can you not, or have you not tried, being satisfied with the low-hanging fruit?" Alastor teased with the cockiest grin.
Sam stared at him, seeing the glee of the man having a sounding board worthy of the name, and the twisted desire to see just how far Sam was going to go. There was more there. Sam focused, shutting out the glee, and looking... deeper. Past the obvious.
He might be blind, for all the outside world imparted itself on him, so focused was Sam on that which lay within. Not a flame of hope or fear, but flame itself. Will. Drive. Desire at its most basic, closest-to-the-metal, somewhere between axiomatic mathematics and the wiring of a lizard-brain. He looked and Saw inside of Alastor, saw the drive of him.
Curiosity.
That was the beginning and end of him. That was the flame that burned Alastor from his childhood and into his damnation. He wanted to know. He wanted to know everything. Everything in all the World, everything in Hell, everything in Heaven. Everything in all of the places beyond the two. He wanted to dredge the cosmos for its deepest held secrets, its most closely guarded enigmas. He wanted to drag them screaming and naked into the daylight, so he could know them so completely that they would never be secret again.
Everything that Alastor had ever done in his life was subservient to that goal. In the instant that ignited his fiendish curiosity, he realized that he would not be allowed to learn all that he wanted to. But he also learned that Power Is Permission. To be powerful was to be able to dare the world to stop you from doing whatever you wanted, even if what you wanted to do was to unearth blasphemy. Every whit that Alastor's living curiosity had given him also gave him power, power he used as permission to learn more. In his perfect, ideal world, he would not live in Hell for all eternity, but neither would he live in Heaven. He would sit no thrones, command no legions. Instead, he would Discover. He would scour the world of all knowledge, and know all.
Sam leaned back, the world returning to him showing the conservatory around them, now replete with recovering plants of myriad description. Alastor had a contemplative smile on his face. "And in this moment, Samuel, you know me better than anyone ever has."
"You are a monster," Sam said.
"Gladly and eagerly," Alastor agreed. "Let's see what kind of monster you can become."
On a rooftop quite a distance away from the Happy Hotel, a very special imp stared through the scope of a sniper rifle. He regretted having to leave that masterpiece in the hands of Blitzø and his clowns, but when given the choice between gear and life, always choose life. It was an idiot who gave his life for a gun. Striker had many guns. He'd get another rifle like that one again someday. There were always enough tomorrows to buy what yesterday cost you.
"What are you doin'?" Striker let the words hit the air as he stared through the glass of the conservatory at the two in its midst. The plants looked like they belonged in a Goetia palace, and this was absolutely no Goetia palace. Alastor stood with his back straight, long fingers playing along the head of his cane, as another Sinner kept standing up, staring at him, and then falling to his knees in pain. Well, say a Sinner; from the look of him, he could either be an Elemental or maybe a Wrath Fiend. It was hard to say from a distance with only the burning hair to go by. But Alastor had held little truck with the hellborn in the past. Why would that change now?
Again, the flame-headed man with Alastor stood, braced himself, only to fall again. All of this struck Striker as so very, very odd. Alastor was historically a solo act. He never had a partner, let alone a clan. He was always The Radio Demon, a pillar of Hell that shook it to its root, a singular and blessedly isolated phenomenon. He doubted that Hell would have been able to survive having two of him around. And from the look of the poor bastard with Alastor, that still hadn't changed.
"Conditioning, maybe?" Striker used. "Gettin' him used to pain?"
The thought didn't jive. If you want to condition to somebody to pain, you keep going at them, even when they tell you to stop, until they have the will to endure it or the capacity to make you stop. This seemed like something else. Like the pain was a side-effect, not the goal. Training him in something else, then?
Truth was, Striker needed more information than he could find through a telescopic sight. He would need to get boots on the ground in that building if he wanted to figure out what Alastor had over the Princess of All Hell, and what he was very likely hiding in that building. He needed an in, so he could get something more salient than rumor. There were all kinds of those flying these days, everything from more of the Overlords learning that a Sinner had left Pride, to the greatest Soul Surgeon in all of Hell going missing, to word that the V Triarchy was preparing for war. He needed something substantial to move on.
His gaze swept the windows, leaving the two of them surrounded by greenery, until it settled on a room elsewhere on the first floor. His lips pulled into a smile, as he beheld the cyclopean Sinner there. "And there I have my way in," he said. He was fast with a gun, but he was even faster with his tongue. And that one looked like she'd really appreciate his tongue.
Everything was finally in order in Wendy's sliver of Hell. The greenhouse was in good repair, and its plants starting to bloom again. It smelled of pollen, of humus slightly damp by the sprinklers near the ceiling. The air was damp and warm, like Panama all over again. And here, as nowhere else, she was able to keep things alive.
"So what's that one?" Sam asked, dabbing at his shirt where it had turned pink from his wound opening. After a moment, he scowled and started pulling the thing off, tackling the bindings holding saturated gauze over where an Exorcist stabbed him. Ordinarily, the sight of a man like him whipping off his shirt would have terrified Wendy, of what he was going to do next. Sam, though, didn't even turn a glance to her, just watching the plants as he stripped soiled dressings and replaced them with something that wouldn't leak into his shirt any more. She was of no relevance to his shirtlessness, and she knew it. She felt it.
"The pink one?" she asked. "If it were on Earth, I'd call it a Lady Slipper. It's an orchid native to New England and Atlantic Canada..."
"I've seen Lady Slippers before. I'm asking why that one is so... gigantic," Sam said, already rewinding himself.
"Hell doesn't abide by the rules of the world. I don't even know what's supposed to pollinate these things. I haven't seen any bees down here, or anything that fills the bee's niche. And there's no way that an orchid is a wind-spreader," she said.
"Why not?"
"Orchids are highly specialized cross-pollinators," Wendy said, feeling lectures last delivered over forty years ago instantly sliding back into place. "Most depend on bees and birds like hummingbirds to spread their gametes. Some, though, are self-pollinating, though those are far rarer."
"I can see why. Even haploid-diploid that's not enough diversity," Sam said.
"Who even taught you about haploid-diploid?" she asked.
"Library. Cold snap. Boredom," he said, buttoning his shirt back up. "You know how it goes."
"I really don't," Wendy said. She'd been a full-ride all through school. Her mother had waited late to have kids, citing not wanting to repeat some unsaid family tragedy, so they'd been wealthy as a kid. That family wealth finally dissolved right around her graduation, as the global economy finally admitted to itself that unchecked capitalism might have been an apocalyptic mistake. She still had her job, though. That gave her purpose. "That... that orchid brings back a lot of memories."
"What kind?"
"It's why I killed myself," Wendy said. She moved to Sam's side, leaning back against the same patch of wall he did. "When the Lady Slipper went extinct, that was the last straw."
"What were the other straws?" Sam asked.
"A lot of reading. Fish populations obliterated in the arctic circle and Southern Ocean. Topsoil erosion in the Amazon Basin and American Midwest. Pollinator mass-extinctions. Expanding oceanic dead-zones in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Plastic poisoning of the marine and agricultural food chains. The Desertification of Louisiana and Brazil. End of the Jet Stream and increasing unreliability of seasons."
"Yikes," Sam said flatly.
"If the information I read was right – and I'm convinced that it was – then humanity had maybe ten to fifteen years before the complete collapse of its ability to reliably feed itself. I decided not to have kids when I was twenty," Wendy said. "It was already bad back then. By the time I did my reading... it wasn't bad. It was hopeless. Within twenty years, the human population would have fallen by a half from mass starvation and what had once been treatable diseases. Twenty after that, there'd be less than a billion. Twenty after that, there might be a hundred thousand left on the planet, locked in savage, feral combat over a cup-full of drinkable water, and a mouthful of food, on a world that would bake them alive for the sins of their fathers. I didn't want to live like that. I didn't want to die like that."
"Good to hear my generation did absolutely fucking nothing to help save yours," Sam muttered.
"I'm sure a lot of you did. The problem was that the 'lot of you' who tried to right the ship didn't have a fraction of the power of the oligarch's who capsized it, willingly and eagerly. I really, really hope that those would-be-dragons get peeled out of their bunkers and kicked naked onto the wasteland of the world that they built. But I doubt it. I doubt it because the Living World cares less about justice even than Hell does. Then a lovely flower was declared 'extinct in the wild'. The only Lady Slippers still in all existence were in the dilapidated seed-arc sinking into the thawing permafrost, and in a few rich assholes' collections. And that was it. I got some hemlock..."
"Took Socrates' way out?" Sam asked.
"M-hm," she said. "And I took a powerful antiemetic with it, so I wouldn't survive by vomiting it back out. Which was singularly awful, of what I can remember of my own death. It wasn't fast," she said.
"I know what a slow death feels like," Sam said with a nod. "I know that helpless feeling."
"You'd be the second person in all of my time in Hell to ask me why I'm here. And the first was Charlie, and she doesn't count because I'm not completely convinced that she should be down here at all."
"Hardly seems like a denizen of Hell, does she?" Sam asked.
"A unique specimen worthy of a pot," Wendy gestured to a few pots which now stood empty, their cargo beyond even her ability to revive.
"I wouldn't say unique," Sam said. Wendy turned a glance to him. If there was one advantage of having one, large eye, it was that she got a lot more field of vision than a normal one would offer. "Just saying, I'm pretty sure that Apoc – the Goat of the Apocalypse – isn't a Fiend."
"Really? If he's not a fiend, then what is he?" Wendy asked.
"I've got two possibilities. Apoc is incredibly legalistic, lies like a rug despite managing to be mostly honest, has obviously far more power in him than he shows to the people around him, doesn't seem to need sleep, and ingratiated himself with imps, Sinners, fiends, the Ars Goetia, and even the Deadly Sins. There's a couple other reasons that I won't speak on, but they give some weight to my notion. There's a good chance that Apoc is an Elder Devil."
"And that differs from a Fiend... how?"
"Elder Devils are more like Sinners than Fiends," Sam said, rubbing his side where the bandages pressed at him. "Only they aren't born, they were Created at the moment of Hell's formation. And like Sinners, they can't breed. I can't even tell if they're even supposed to have genitals. It would explain why Apoc has the kind of work-ethic he has. He has literally nothing else to do, and the only other Elder Devil that he can find to talk to is Satan himself."
"That sounds... kinda bad, Sam," Wendy said.
"Being a friend to an Elder Devil does strike me as not the best thing from a moral standpoint," Sam nodded. "But that's only one possibility."
"The other?"
"That Apoc is a Fallen Angel like the Ars Goetia," Sam said. "It would certainly explain his clientele. And even offers a reason why he decided to peel me off of that alleyway wall, outside of pure pragmatism."
"So he's either an angel or a devil. You're casting a very wide net there, Sam," Wendy said.
"I'm interpolating from some very incomplete information," Sam said.
"I suppose you are," Wendy said. She took in a sweet breath of that warm, damp air. "I'm glad you're here, though. It's been a long time since I had a friend."
"You went forty years in Hell without a friend?" Sam asked.
"Without a male friend, yeah," she said. "I always felt... closer... to men than to other women. But down here, all they want from me is what's hanging off my chest or nestled between my legs. Which must be why I'm so comfortable around you," she said.
"I don't follow," Sam said.
"It just figures that I'd latch onto the first decent, asexual man I find in Hell," she said. Sam pulled a face at that. "What?"
"Wendy, I'm not asexual."
"Yes you are," she said
"I think I'd know my own sexual orientation," he said.
"Sam, if you were homosexual, you'd be fucking Angel Dust by now. And if you were heterosexual, you would have either made a pass at me, or 'allowed' yourself to be dragged into a cupboard by Niffty. You're Ace."
"I'm really not," Sam said, looking a bit upset.
"Well you..." she began, only to trail off when she focused on him, and saw the concern on his features. "...you didn't used to be, I take it?"
Sam just stared out at the glass and the city in the distance, as though coming to a mildly horrifying realization. "Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I think there's something that's gone wrong," he said with a voice quiet and distant, pushing off and heading into the hotel proper. Wendy just watched him go. And she wondered if what she'd said might have just been something really, really bad. But then decided that if it was, he still needed to hear it. He left her alone with her plants, which turned toward her and brightened, as though attempting to lift her mood. It almost helped.
"Vaggie, could I borrow you for a minute?" Sam said, leaning through her door. She was tempted to tell him the truth, that she was busy, but there was something about his expression that told her that might be a bad idea.
"I... guess?" she said. Sam nodded, and opened the door, revealing Niffty standing directly behind him. "What is this?"
"I need your help in determining something," Sam said.
"You're going to need to explain this a bit more, Sam," she said. "And you, Niffty, do you need something?"
"I'm part of his experiment!" Niffty said with slightly unhinged enthusiasm. Vaggie turned a confused look to Sam.
"I tried asking Niffty, Alastor, and Angel Dust, but I'm guessing none of them have a sane answer. No offence," Niffty didn't even seem to react to his couched insult. "I need to know about what coming to hell does to your sex-drive."
"This is very inappropriate," Vaggie said.
"This is not a wind-up. This is not a prank, or a jape, or a set-up. This is important," Sam said, with a sort of burning earnestness that made her actually believe he was telling as much truth as he could know. "A very well written video game once asked a very important question – What can change the nature of a man – and I'm finding that I'm going to have to get an answer to it here in Hell."
"What does this have to do with your sex-drive?" Vaggie asked, rounding her desk to stand in the other end of the tiny room from the two of them.
"I don't seem to have one anymore," Sam said. "Does landing in Hell tend to do that?"
"Fuck no," Vaggie said. "The opposite, in most cases."
"So losing your body tends to amplify the tendencies that you had in life, likely because you aren't confined by actually having flesh anymore," Sam said. "Alastor is asexual now, but if I know what I know properly he was always like that, even when he was alive. Other than that, the Fall is an amplifier; it can't create a zero where there wasn't one to begin with."
"This is starting to sound heavy on theory," Vaggie said.
"I'm getting to the point. The point is, I should have a strong sex drive," Sam began.
"Yyuuuuuuussss," Niffty whispered behind him.
"Bad," Vaggie took Charlie's spray bottle and gave her a blast, causing Niffty to recoil and cover her face. "I still don't see the point. Or why you need me."
"Niffty," he said, gesturing toward her, "has consented to an experiment to gauge my reactions to something which should ignite my libido. You know the difference between a sexual preference and a fetish, right?"
"Uh huh?" Vaggie was now extremely wary of what he was going toward.
"I am going to give Niffty some mild to moderate strangulation. I need you to stop it from becoming more than moderate, and to give me an exterior opinion of my demeanor," Sam said.
"What? You're going to..."
"I took off my scarf just for the occasion!" Niffty said, pointing to her bare neck with a lunatic grin. Sam just reached down and put one his hands around her entire neck. Niffty practically vibrated with excitement.
"Are you willing to stop me from going too far?" Sam asked. Niffty was gently trying to pull his fingers tighter around her.
"I want to stop you now," Vaggie said.
"Please," he said. "I need to know."
Vaggie stared at him, then groaned and nodded. "Fine. But if this gets weirdly sexual I'm stopping it right then and there."
"If it becomes weirdly sexual to any degree, that will be a discovery of its own," Sam said. He then turned to Niffty knelt down so that he was more on her stature level and began to squeeze. Her grin became rapturous, as the sinews of his regrown hand pulled taut against wet-ash colored skin, as fingers pressed hard into Niffty's throat. She breathed deep a few times. Then, with a new twitch, her next breath was aborted before it could get in.
Sam just stared at her, his expression the farthest thing from turned-on. As he squeezed harder, and Vaggie began to feel more weirded out, she started to think... he might be feeling weirded out, too. While Niffty's eye began to roll up and back into her head, he stopped looking neutral, and started to seem... afraid. Concerned. As Niffty continued to twitch, her grin beginning to drift, he even started to wince. To grimace, as though he were receiving the strangulation instead of dealing it. Finally, after far too long a time for Vaggie's sanity, but likely not too much time in the grand scheme of things objectively, he let her go and shifted himself back.
"Aw! Why'd you stop? I was almost there!" Niffty complained.
"Well? What was I supposed to see?" Vaggie asked.
"Did I look sexually excited?" he asked, his expression more fitting on a medic standing over a wounded soldier than what the situation actually was.
"You looked like you were in pain," Vaggie told him the truth.
"...I was," he said. He stood up. "Thank you. I've got to do some thinking on this."
Sam turned and left the room, leaving the two ladies alone. Vaggie just shook her head.
"What the fuck just happened?" Vaggie asked. Niffty got a comically serious look on her face.
"He's mine. I will have him," she said.
"Be my guest," Vaggie said. Niffty's grin was back in a flash. She made for the door, by the time Vaggie realized what that sentence needed on the end of it. "With consent, Niffty! Only with his consent!"
"So how do we keep the fucker from talking?" Blitz asked, counting the hedgehog-man's money as he did.
"Break his jaw!" Millie offered.
"See? That's the kind of forward thinking I'm looking for. Why can't you be more like your ho, Mox?" Blitz said.
Moxie sighed and rubbed his brow. "Even if we break his jaw, sir, it won't stop him from slurring. And that will probably be enough for us to lose. You'd need to prevent him from making any coherent noise from his mouth at all!"
"So a stapler!" Blitz said.
"A stapler," Moxie repeated, flatly.
"Yeah, one of those big industrial bitches they use to nail down shingles!" Blitz said. "Let's see that taint-fistula try to order us around when he can't flap his fuckin' lips! Great idea, I'll order one right now!"
"That... might work," Moxie admitted. "It still doesn't get us into a position where we can either break his jaw or staple his lips closed."
"Must you ruin every ray of sunlight that comes into our lives, Moxie?" Blitz asked. "Must you always pucker the anus of God and send shit flyin' down on my wedding day?"
"...what?" Moxie asked, but Blitz was in Drama Mode™ so it was no use.
"I give you a roof over your head and put food on your table and you do nothing but BUTTFUCK MY DREAMS!"
"You don't put a roof over our heads, we do! You just pay us!" Moxie countered. "And we are doing everything you're asking of us to fulfill this suicidal mission against one of the most dangerous people in all of Hell! We're doing everything you ask!"
"All I'm hearing is a bunch of pessimistic whining, about how every single plan that I come up with 'is doomed to failure', and 'would be objectively worse than shooting ourselves in the face'," Blitz's tone was mocking.
"They ain't wrong," Loona said, from where she lounged in her chair trying to get a bunch of skull fragments out of the receiver of Moxie's rifle. It was slow going. There had been a lot of bashed-in skulls. "Birch says word one and we're all boned," she then paused. "Yo, can we afford some Riot Brim? He can't order us around if he's too busy coughing his guts out."
"See? That's why Loonie is wonderful, and you two need to get your shit together," Blitz said. The door opened to the office, and there was another man standing there, looking somewhat uncomfortable, or even lost in thought. "Whadd'ya want? We're almost closed so either talk fast or fuck off!"
"Right. Might as well," he said. At first, Moxie thought he might be one of those few male Furies that popped out, considering his burning hair. But what would a Fiend want with the human world, after all? No, this had to be a Sinner. And an Elemental one, at that. "I'm here to commission a job."
"Everybody is. Who fucked you over?" Blitz asked. The man swept his gaze across everybody in the room, pausing for a long moment on Loona, and then past Moxie. The moment it did, Moxie felt oddly exposed, as though he'd in that moment not only realized his fly was open, but that his marital-tackle was hanging out. The feeling passed when the Sinner's gaze locked onto Blitz.
"Bit of a long story, but it matters to the mission. Will you indulge me?" he asked.
"Oh, this guy's fancy. Sure he ain't from your theatre group, Mox?" Blitz said.
"There are three targets," the Sinner said. "The first is Ben Vanderkleuw. He was my landlord when I was alive. He caused a lot of agony to a lot of people I cared about."
"So what does this have to do with you?" Blitz demanded.
"Gimme a second. The next target is Casper Marquis, who killed a friend and buried the police report so that officially it didn't happen," the Sinner said.
"Uh huh? And the third?" Blitz was starting to lose attention.
"The third is the primary target. If the first two I mentioned survive, that's unfortunate but I can live with it. Jean-Pierre Dufresne is an absolute priority. If we don't capture him, the mission's not done."
"What's your beef with that guy?" Blitz asked.
"He killed me," the sinner said. "Wanted to test his new pistol. I was nearby."
"Wait..." Moxie said. "What do you mean 'if we don't capture him'?"
"Oh, it's simple," The sinner said, rubbing at his side as though it ached. "Dufresne doesn't get the luxury of dying in the Mortal World. We're going to kill him here in Hell, And he's going to have to stare one of his victims in the eyes as he perishes, just like he did for too many of the people up there. Any problems with that?"
Don't let your powder get wet. Don't let your knives get dull. Don't let someone you don't trust stand behind you.
Know how to kill your enemy. Take what you want, and pay the price for it. And for Satan's sake, don't fly off the handle half cocked.
Half cocked is half assed. And folk with half an ass tend to be dead ones.
-Striker, on why he lasted 10 years as a Gun of Satan.