The security guard on duty, as well as employees dressed in the business-casual cloak of managerial officiality, stared at the cameras. Nothing had gone according to plan. One of the feeds cut to static. "What's going on there?"
The security guard, a cigarette chomped between his teeth, pressed a couple of buttons on the console. "…yep, that one's dead."
"Can you get it back up?"
The guard turned to face the manager. "It's dead. Gone, destroyed. We ain't gonna get a feed from that one until we replace the entire camera."
Another feed goes down, staticky pops through the speakers. The security guard whistled. He pressed the buttons at his workstation. No response. "…ye, he's goin' for 'em." He puffs out a cloud of smoke.
One of the managers waves the smoke out of the air, sputtering a bit. "Can you please put that out?"
"Wha', you think you can handle this crap? Go ahead." He sucks in another noxious cloud of nicotine. "…that's what I thought." Pop pop pop. Another camera gone. "Aight, can ya get me that…" He snaps his fingers. "That blue schematic-lookin' piece of paper over there." The managers stood by. The security guard scoffed, getting it himself, along with a red marker.
Another fireteam, sprinting in the halls, their gear clacking and rumbling like an avalanche against their bodies. Their rifles were in front, fingers off their triggers, as they swayed them side to side, their exertion giving them momentum. They had been dispatched to the entity's last known location. The bulletin boards hastily pinned on the hallway walls had a fresh sheet of paper with an arrow on it. "MDT Storage, Wing E." The fireteam turned the corner.
The hallway was pristine. The door to the storage was closed. They continued down, their fingers slipping into the trigger well to ready themselves.
The security office was now filled to the brim with smoke, and in the process of scribbling down the location of the cameras, circling possible routes for the entity, the guard had burned through half of his cigarette. "…ah boy."
One of the few managers who didn't leave because of the fumes squinted at the sheet. "What?"
"Where'd ya send Delta and Epsilon?"
"Wing E. That's MDT storage, right?"
The radio on the desk crackled. "Dispatch, Delta. We're at the storage now. Door is locked." A little beep sounded to denote the end of a transmission.
The guard, clicking a button in and speaking into the microphone, replied. "Delta, Dispatch. You guys are in the wrong wing. It's Wing B. That's MDT storage in Wing B, as in Bravo." Beep.
"…Dispatch, Delta. Uhh, understood, moving to Bravo Wing." Beep.
The suited man coughed and cleared his throat. "That's the other end of the building."
The guard nodded, using his marker to point to the areas he circled. "The cameras don't lie. Even if they ain't talkin'." He looked back up. More of the cameras had come offline. More to mark off. The man, realising what he was looking at, traced a line from the first camera disabled, following the general path, to the last. His mouth opened, and down dropped his cigarette. "…tell Bravo that this thing's coming right for 'em."
It wasn't obvious from the cameras which squad was Bravo. All the fireteams looked similar, and so did the rooms. The last cameras to be disabled, however, were marked down near the grimoire, the area that Bravo was tasked with protecting. A cursory glance… they were nowhere to be found.
The dispatcher cleared his throat before clicking a few buttons and speaking into the microphone. "Bravo, Dispatch. Be advised, entity is approaching your location." Beep.
No response.
"…Bravo, Dispatch."
Deafening silence. The slight crackle of static on the other end.
"Bravo, Dispatch."
"Dispatch, Bravo. He's, uh… he's dead." The person on the other end had a hoarse, awkward voice, distraught, panting.
The guard blinked a few times. "Bravo, Dispatch, the entity has been neutralised?"
"Yeah, the entity has been neutralised. Uh, dispatch, Bravo." A nervous laugh. "Nerves are shot."
The dispatcher looked over to one of the managers. They shrugged. He swiveled back to the microphone. "Bravo, Dispatch, uh, copy, we'll send an MDT team."
A few seconds of silence. "…Dispatch, Bravo, that's... that won't be necessary." He coughs.
The guard frantically pushed several buttons in. "Alpha, Delta, Epsilon, dispatch. Be advised, entity is in the grimoire room."
The imp, covered in gore, both vibrant new wounds and dried splotches of varied ownership, webbing vest hastily thrown onto his emaciated frame, stood over the mutilated remains of fireteam Bravo. The leader's radio, pried off his caved-in chest, was soundly in the demon's hand, and he attempted to get back in touch with his captors. "…hello? Dispatch, Bravooo?" There was no response. He threw the radio down, stolen rifle in his hand, and marched into the supposed location of the grimoire.
He was expecting it to be enshrined in some sort of glass cabinet, shown off for the world to see, a centerpiece for the humans. Instead, Blitzo saw a disgustingly professional menagerie of metal cabinets, bookshelves, desks. The stench of the oils of human skin mixed in with the painted steel, the ventilation stifling, only worsened by the freshly dead in the hallway.
His breathing grew shallower, quicker, and he frantically sprinted towards one of the shelves. "No no no no no…" His eyes darted, scanned, tried to get as much as they could in the few seconds he thought he had. He could hear their footsteps out in the hallway. He could feel his final moments approaching. The movement ripped his stitches fully open, and he grew weaker as the trickle of blood from the carving of captivity turned into a waterfall.
His old life. Running through a bookshelf to find something to steal. His head grew light. The purple book, thick and embroidered with gold. He could no longer tell reality from memory. The metal bookshelf. The bookshelf of Stolas. His neurons firing on all cylinders, shouting their last hurrah. The book was opened, a cheap, plastic bookmark slipping out.
Opening portals to the living world requires a significant amount of energy. These reserves can be acquired through tapping into the innate magical abilities of the user of the grimoire and concentrating them in one location. It is important that the user of the grimoire is authorised to do so, as Goetia are not the only ones capable of opening portals; imps have stores of energy which allows them to use grimoires in this fashion concentrated within their tissues. Therefore, imps should not have access to the grimoires lest they disturb the balance of power.
While this magical concentration can be a downside if the grimoires fall into the wrong hands, they are also a boon to lesser Goetia. By consuming impish flesh after it has been properly salted and drained of blood, magical reserves can be repleted in a significant manner. If, however, the imp is more useful alive (e.g., a court eunuch), the skin has the highest magical potential and can be either physically extracted or siphoned off with invisible incantations. Focus on those with red skin; white skin has already been siphoned of magical potential and is thus useless for this purpose.
His splotches. They started when he met Stolas. Tears welled in his eyes as his pupils unfocused. Was he really reading this? "…no… no no no no no!" He started screaming out, flipping through the pages, trying to find an escape. He felt his heart pulse quick in his chest; the calmness of his circulation gave way to raucous chaos.
The humans had arrived. Clang. Clang. Clang! The various doors in the room were hit with a steel ram over and over again, ushering in the imp's demise like an echoing sacrificial drumbeat. The lock strained, the hinges groaned, and soon, the ram broke the door down. It wasn't just the front door; every single entrance was broken, and the three fireteams streamed in, rifles pointed in all directions.
And as the humans stormed in, ready to execute the mass murderer, the energy of a closing crack in spacetime caused them to stumble, bookshelves to fall, and papers to scatter.
At its epicenter was a pool of blood.