SpiritOfErebus presents
The fifth chapter of Schrodinger's Sanity.
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The conspiracy board was looking excellent. The tangled red yarn and tacked photos that were there since the beginning of the investigation have already started to show their age, the hastily scribbled pencil sketches of suspects smudging and the marker used to point out the important aspects of the investigation had bled through the paper that it was on, forming a bit of a splotch.
After getting berated by my mother for my abysmal math grades, I had been punted into the conspiracy room and told to "figure out my own brain first instead of figuring out something else".
This was the wrong place to put me in.
With the mysteries of the worlds at my fingertips, why would I ever want to study something as mundane as calculus?
I nodded. Yes! Math is but a mere obstacle to my path to glory, and even then it was not critical to my success! (Even if work in the non-science departments were increasingly harder to find these days).
I cackled. Now, the mystery at hand would face the wrath of-
A door opened. I looked behind myself and saw Sakura with a very unamused expression on her face, her wooden sword slung across her shoulders casually.
"Yeah. You're not staying here."
"Nooooo!" I said, as I was dragged to his room.
….
The door shut behind me, and I got up after being shoved in there. Standing up, I pounded on the door, pleading for anybody to help me.
Anything would be better than this.
"Little demon… you've arrived…" an old, raspy voice said.
It was my grandfather. In all of his paranoid glory, holding a woodcarving knife and his next project, he sat upon his workbench. The room was filled with scraps, wood shavings, and dull knives. Three conspiracy boards lined the walls, each connected with our family's signature red thread. Several of the newspaper clippings were yellowed out, presumably from the early 1960's. Pictures of pentagrams and sketches of swords and spears were lined up on one board, with ink splattered across multiple sheets of paper, with the word Demon and Angel appearing several times.
Clearly, he was, well, paranoid.
"Hey, Oji-san. I sighed, sitting down on the bed and dusting some wood splinters off of it, ignoring the pricks of pain I still felt as I sat on the splinters my brief cleaning had not yet taken care of.
"My math grade is horrible, so they sentenced me to hard labor in the salt mines." I said, sighing.
"There are no salt mines here, little demon. Unless-" Oji-san's eyes darted from corner to corner of the room, probably looking for the salt mine I had mentioned.
"It's figurative."
"Ah." He nodded, looking back on the figurine he was carving, though his eyes still lingered around the boxes.
I really didn't want to turn out like him. But as my father grew increasingly dramatic and paranoid, I wondered that if this was some sort of curse. Would all of us Keiji detectives turn out like this? After a house fire some couple of centuries before, we had lost some of our ancestral records that probably detailed our medical history.
My grandfather was diagnosed medically with paranoia and insomnia, along with occasional hallucinations. Clearly, he wasn't the most stable person.
With nothing better to do, I sat up and inspected the conspiracy board.
We all had the same template after all, with the suspects and related people on one side connected by string to the events that they have participated in.
It was eerily similar to my conspiracy board. The sketches of people with weird hair colors, an association to an organism, and people being inducted into the supposed cult.
"That's the only case I haven't solved." My grandfather says. "And you can't either. It involves too many people. Powerful people. People that won't die, no matter what."
"What?" I said, looking at my grandfather's surprisingly coherent and sharp eyes.
"I know what you're doing. You've already talked to one of them."
Was he talking about Issei?
"How do you know?"
"I could sense it. The darkness surrounds him, empowers him, even if he doesn't realize it yet."
This was really getting confusing.
"Are you… one of them?" I said, looking at the various figurines of angels and tengai that were lying about on the floor.
"In order to fight a cultist, you must lower yourself to their level." My grandfather said, looking up at his dark ceiling with a faraway gaze.
And then he returned to carving hastily, mumbling once more.
"… Okay."
…
For once, I saw my dad back in the conspiracy board.
"What's wrong?" I said, doing my biology homework while also absent mindedly smoothing out some red threads.
"Murder case downtown. I've been hired to investigate." My father said grimly. I've been called in to investigate. "Somebody missing has been confirmed dead."
"But I thought the Yakuza were down." I said, concerned. Even if the prospect of a new mystery was enticing, the fact that somebody had died never bode well.
"It's probably cultists this time." Dad said, putting a picture of the scene on the wall. It was almost… visceral. The corpse had animal bite marks all over it, with slashes and bruises on the one arm that I could see from my limited point of view. "Plus, with all of the other severed arms and the fact that the scene had taken place in a church… it's pretty obvious."
He then left the room, the clacking of his (totally unnecessary) cane could be heard down the hall.
"I've got work to do." I mumbled.
…
"Any reason you're currently eating that disgusting piece of … thing you call pizza?"
I swallowed my perfectly normal (thank you very much) choice of pizza topping and put the remaining slice in a Ziploc for later.
"I've just got wind of another cultist sighting."
Sakura gasped. "Really?"
"Yeah. Apparently, they killed somebody in a church. Severed arms were everywhere." And just thinking of that picture was going to make the food I just ate escape rather unpleasantly.
Maybe coming to a restaurant was a mistake. The pizza slice I was still holding felt a bit like the cold, dead hands that were lying on the floor of the church: rough and clammy.
"We're going to follow the only cultist we know. Since they're active and all recently, we might find some leads."
"What about homework?"
I looked at her incredulously.
"Sakura, our town is teeming with threats like these and you're worrying about homework?"
I wish I could actually believe my own advice though. Still, rest in peace, Calculus grades. This is for the greater good!
Sakura… sort of looked inspired?
"Yosh! When are we going?"
I smirked, though internally I was screaming.
"Tonight. Bring the katana. I'm going to loot Gramp's room for all the charms and stuff he makes that make Christian connections. We're going to go cult busting."
…
Walking on the dark streets of the downtown area, we followed Issei, who was apparently riding a bike the whole way to wherever the cult was meeting. Thankfully, we had bought our own bicycle , and I was sitting on the backseat, organizing the tengai/demonic and Christian charms into different Ziploc bags. I had also gone and acquired holy water from a nearby church and loaded it into a spray gun.
To make sure that the cultists thought that the water was actually "holy" or something, I roughly sketched a cross onto the container of the squirt gun.
It was probably the most idiotic thing I could ever think of doing.
At least Sakura was bringing a katana. That way, we could hopefully just run and avoid confrontation with drug using bomb carrying insane people.
Issei stopped before a house, looked at what probably seemed like a map, knocked on the door, and went in.
And then, something white blazed in there. A girl screamed. Issei screamed in pain.
"It's starting." I said, grimly. "Prepare the tools."
Sakura drew her katana and slung two charms on to it, both holy and demonic. I reached into my bag and got out-
"My pizza?" I said, looking at the now cold culinary creation that was slumped limply in my plastic bag.
Sakura facepalmed.
"Why did you bring pizza to an exorcizing session?"
"I thought I might get hungry…?" I said, almost asking myself why I did this.
"Whatever. Let's just bust in."
And then the squeals and cackling grew in intensity. What sounded like portals opening or something happened.
"Let's go, Sakura." She nodded grimly and we marched into the house. I kicked the ajar door open and we ran in.
"This is an intervention!" I shouted, holding up my spray gun and pointing it at the… what in the world was happening right now?
A girl was lying on the floor, trying in vain to cover up her almost topless self. Her dress was split in half by… a sword? Issei was wearing some sort of gauntlet with a green gem on it. Behind him, various girls in the Kuoh academy uniform stood, holding up glowing circle things?
Another man wearing a white overcoat and looking like somebody about to climax from excitement was holding a lightsaber(?) and a pistol made out of white metal. There was also a corpse in the corner of the room. Behind him, there were several almost naked people floating in the air and oh god, was that a dead body?
Said room was actually very nice. Soft candlelight illuminated the background that the unhinged cultists were fighting in, and the fireplace really was adorned with silver candlesticks and a fruit basket.
I really wanted one of those fancy candlesticks.
"Oho, so now even regular mortals enter the fray? How… interesting."
"Stop with your deceiving statements! We know what you're up to!" I said, putting the spray gun in Sakura's unresponsive hands and got out the bag full of demonic charms used to ward off other demons.
I opened the bag and began tossing the wooden pieces at the almost naked people and watched as they actually avoided the projectiles. One grazed their skin and they hissed in mild annoyance.
Were they really that insane? It was literally just wood.
I got my squirt gun back from Sakura and started to spray holy water at the other people.
"Back, you demons! Taste this holy water!"
The devils actually recoiled away from where the short streams of holy water landed.
What.
Then the cultist with the sword laughed.
"You have no idea what's going on, do you?"
"We know exactly what's going on!" I shouted, putting the gun in my pocket and throwing more demonic figurines at the man, who actually started to deflect the projectiles.
"Foolish mortals. I, Freed Sellzen, will eludicate you."
We got a name of one of the lead cultists. I mentally high fived myself.
"You are but mere insignificant ants compared to the greater happenings of the town. Devils, monsters, must be eradicated! "
He then pointed dramatically to the other group, who actually seemed content to let this continue.
"These monsters in human skin are going against his will!" He said, even if a little sarcastically.
"But all I really want is to hunt. But you two." He gestured towards me. "And her." He pointed at the girl lying on the ground. "Are in the way of my goals."
"So perish!" He yelled and charged at Sakura.
Sakura seemed to finally snap out of her haze of oh god what am I seeing and cultists are actually real and whatnot, and parried the blow. The "devils" seemed to wince as the katana collided with the blade made of light, but to their surprise, it actually held.
What, were they expecting a metal sword to break against whatever that other sword was made of?
Still, when a man with a sword runs at you, you tend to panic.
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" I shouted, throwing the whole bag of charms at the exortist.
"You complete idiot!" the now named Freed Sellzen said, "I am an exortist, not an angel! Your cursed charms have no effect on me!"
And then I realized that I was out of demonic charms. I reached into my bag for something, anything that the "holy faction" would be scared of. I still remembered that I kept two really big demonic charms at the bottom of the bag in a Ziploc and reached into the bag, not looking at what I got in fear of Freed losing interest in Sakura and bisecting me or something.
Random chance made me get the pizza out.
I almost cursed. I was going to die right here, right now.
Issei laughed. "A pizza? What's that going to do to…"
The whole room suddenly got quiet. The light saber flickered and died, revealing a really ornate sword with no particular glow. The "angels" (the nearly naked lolis) fell out of the air and looked at the object in my hand, seemingly shocked.
"Y-you wouldn't unleash such demonic power." Freed said, slinking back and holding out his sword defensively.
I looked at the cold pineapple pizza in my hand. Then, I looked at the obviously insane cultists that were either staring at the "weapon" with wide eyes or actively trying to get in the corner of the spacious room, whimpering and cowering. Issei was just confused.
It was time to… I guess just go along with their irrational fear?
I steeled my gaze, held out the pizza like it was the holy grail or something, and looked straight at Freed Sellzen in the face.
"Yes, I would."
And… scene!
Yes. Pineapple pizza is apparently demonic and the ultimate weapon in the Dxd universe. Totally canon.
(It's just a joke plz don't kill me this fic is just pure crack lol)
On a less insane sidenote, please follow, favorite, and review!
Hope you enjoyed!
-Spirit