A/N: I justcouldn't resist the urge to follow up the events of the first installment with an account of what the result of Hastur's littleforray into the world of adult entertainment would be.
"What do you mean 'it's not good enough'," demanded a glowering, and verging on homicidal Hastur, as the woman who seemed to have been allotted the role of de facto spokesperson for the group handed the DVD back to him.
"We clearly specified 'two hours of uninterrupted hot demon/angel action'."
"And that's what you bloody well got."
"Well, not exactly. What we seem to have here is 'two hours of hot demon/angel action interrupted by somebody in the background muttering about lack of proper demonic pride'."
Hastur snarled in a manner that caused a satisfying ripple of terror to sweep through the assembled humans. It had taken four days of endurance lurking in the upper branches of a venerable old oak tree outside the Wildrose Park Country House Hotel to get the footage specified in the unholy contract, not to mention the countless hours of frustration he had endured before realising that the camcorder was pointing the wrong way round, and he wasn't in any mood to put up with a bunch of tricky homo sapiens trying to wriggle out of their deal with him. He snapped his fingers, and an ancient looking piece of parchment adorned with worryingly brownish red lettering at once materialised in his hand.
"I think you'll find that if you look at the tiny words at the bottom of the page... Eh, it's not here, where fuck is it." He stared at the infernal document for a moment, looking desperately for the standard 'We reserve the right to alter the specified terms and conditions of the agreement without notice' sub-clause that had been a requisite feature of all immortal soul contracts for the last forty years. It was no used though, the parchment didn't even bear a basic 'Satisfaction not guaranteed' disclaimer.
For a few seconds there was silence as Hastur began to seethe.
This was however, very quickly followed by the shouting.
Well, to say it was shouting would be a slight understatement. The seismologists would be scratching their heads at the resulting tremors for months to come.
"The thing is," said the now trembling spokeshuman, once her hearing had partially returned. "That we want our souls back."
Hastur didn't answer. It was just too galling to concede that, due to his inability to create an armature porn movie meeting their exact specifications, hell had no legal basis on which to claim possession of their souls upon death. Instead he opted for a maximum impact departure, which involved him, and several items of nearby furniture spontaneously combusting.
"Well, at least we made copies," said one of the women, once the unpleasant smelling smoke had cleared.
"True," said the man standing next to her. "The question is, do we keep it to ourselves, share it with the rest of the fandom or put it on e-bay?"
Several hours later and an extremely pissed off Duke of Hell was storming through the Seventh Circle. This was the last time he was going to jump the queue in the legal department by getting one the work experience fiends to draft a legally binding document for him. Severing the head of the little shit responsible for the cock up had made him feel a little better, but it had done nothing to make up for the humiliation of his inability to secure a measly fifteen souls being inadvertently revealed to Dagon and Belphegor as he had raged uncontrollably at the imbecile. He knew that both of them would be standing by the blood-of-the-damned cooler in their respective departments, sniggering about it to all and sundry. It wouldn't be long before the entire population of the pit knew of his failure as a demon. Of course, what really irked him was the fact he'd been obliged to spend all that time up a tree, watching that bastard Crawly disgrace demonkind with that angel, in several novel positions, in return for nothing but the opportunity to - yet again - be the laughing stock of hell's bigwigs. It was Hastur's considered opinion, after many hours of observation, that if the little angel shagging creep was going to…well, shag angels, he could have least have insisted on being the one on top.
It was then that a deviously cunning plan began to formulate in the down on his luck Duke's mind.
Actually, by most demons' standards it was less of a deviously cunning plan, and more of a completely blindingly obvious plan. However, Hastur, whilst a lurker of the first degree, was not one for whom strategic thinking came easily. Nonetheless, it did provide a way to salvage the previous week's work.
Hastur leered smugly as he faced the two entities standing opposite him. The spot they had chosen for the meeting was located in a particularly remote area of Scotland; neither Beelzebub or the Metatron had really ever got the hang of inconspicuous, and it had been found by both sides generally best to avoid attracting too much unwarranted human attention; especially after the incident with those two FBI agents a few years ago.
"I told you it was all on there, didn't I?" he said, triumphantly.
"It wazz mozzzt dizzzturbing," buzzed Beelzebub.
"We found it a lot more than disturbing," said The Metatron, clearly of the opinion that anything hell was horrified about heaven could be horrified about better.
"But there izzz one thing Hazzztur."
"What's that?"
"We need more evidence," said The Metatron, expression ever impassive.
"More evidence?" Hastur suddenly felt very much off balance, neither Heaven nor Hell was usually that concerned with matters of absolute proof. "But there's two hours of the stuff on there."
"But ve need to make zzure of the zzituation."
"If there was more evidence then we could act."
"What sort of evidence?"
"Zze zzame zzort of thing, but maybe if one of them wazzz tied up perhapzzz."
"Or they were using feathers."
"Or if food wazz involved."
Hastur looked from the Prince of Hell to the Voice of God with something akin to absolute shock in his eyes. They were almost as bad as those bloody humans.
