Revisions
by Concolor44
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Author's Note: Humans have been interacting with demons for millennia ... just not exactly like this.
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Chapter Three
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Titans' Tower, 7:38pm
"What … is … that?"
Jinx looked up from where she was leaning on the counter and eyed the slim demon standing in front of the huge window that made up one wall of the common room. "What's what?"
She pointed a black-clawed finger. "That. It's … got colors … all over the sky."
A smirk ghosted across the pinkette's lips. "You talking about the sunset?" She ambled over and stood beside the infernal creature. "You're Zori, right?"
"Uh … that's what the Dread Lady said to tell everyone. My name's a little hard to pronounce for mortals." She pointed again. "What's it doing? Why is it doing that?"
"The skies of Earth are a lot different from whatcha got back in the Eighth Circle. I mean, you got a planet and all, but Trigon sorta … screwed around with the natural order of things, ya might say."
The succubus only nodded.
"You can't see the sun from your, ah, home, can you?"
"No." She couldn't tear her gaze away from the glowing clouds. "Does this happen every day?"
"Eh. Some days are better than others. This one's kinda average." She shoulder-bumped Zori. "Distracted you, did it?"
Suddenly seeming flustered, Zori scooted back to the console she'd been working on. Jinx ambled after her and watched for a minute.
"Would you … please not tell the Dread Lady I got, um …"
"Chill. You keep forgetting she's not her father. She'd understand. Trust me."
Zori's eyes were … unsettling: translucent pink pupils in a shiny black iris surrounded by crimson. But it worked, given the dark-gray shade of her skin. Jinx didn't mind, though. She'd had to put up with people giving her crap about her eyes all her life; she wasn't about to dump the same load on anyone else. At the moment they were filled with what Jinx interpreted to be gratitude. She turned back to her work.
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Cyborg held up a hand. "Whoa-stop. Lubrique?"
"Um … yeah?"
"What's that?"
The demon quailed just slightly under his laser-like gaze, her wings drooping noticeably. "… It's a filter."
As it happened, every tech-savvy demon that Glitch could round up was also a succubus. The coincidence puzzled Raven. She wouldn't have made the connection. But, as one of them explained, the goal was misdirection. It was easier to hide in plain sight as what most would consider a purely sexual creature than it was to try to pretend they didn't have any abilities. Trigon had ferreted out all the others and consumed them.
"A filter?"
"Yeah. Crystal filter. For keeping out the vibrations you don't want."
He took a step closer, made some subtle adjustments to his bionic eye, and stared at it. For all the world, it looked like a fist-sized pearl that someone had faceted and polished into a perfect icosahedron. It was also opaque to X-rays, terahertz waves, and microwaves. "That's a crystal?"
"Um … yeah?"
"Of what?"
"Well …" She took a big breath. (Vic did his best to ignore what that did to her skimpy outfit. Really, he did.) "See, there's this creature, it's called a pagollon, an' it's native to the Circle, an' it looks like a big wormy-snaky sorta thing, an' it lives in the ground an' hunts other smaller things an' it takes in hellstone along with krebbets an' zdroles an' such, an' the hellstone collects in its gut an' over hundreds of years it compacts into a trubb and sometimes the pagollon pukes one up an' leaves it in its burrow, an' then if there's a firestone flow that gets into the burrow an' covers the trubb an' ya know what to look for, you can dig it up an' if the conditions were just right an' ya know what you're doin', you can polish it into a crystal filter. See? Simple!"
Vic didn't say anything for several moments, then muttered, "Damn good thing I recorded that." Gesturing at the bank of instruments they were reconstructing, he asked, "What's the point of putting it in here?"
"This is the control center for the Tower perimeter defense."
"… Yes. I know that. I built it."
"Yeah …" she breathed huskily, her barely-covered bosom rising and falling in such a way as to command his attention. "You sure did."
He backed up a step.
She blinked and dropped her gaze, mumbling, "Sorry. I – I didn't mean to … the Dread Lady said we had to be, ya know, safe an' stuff, an …"
"Hey …" He blinked a couple of times and shook his head. "It's no big. Don't worry about it. I'm just, you know, glad for the help. And you've been a big help."
Her eyes grew dewy, luminous. "Really?"
Fighting his heart rate back down, he swallowed and averted his gaze. "… Yeah." Lubrique was quite stunning. Apart from the small, black horns at her hairline, claws of the same hue, and a long, thin tail, she looked damn close to human, with light brown skin, white hair with just the faintest bluish cast to it that fell to her waist, and deep green eyes. Her fangs weren't even very pronounced.
She blinked a few times then, herself, and said, "Damn it. Sorry about that. It's a reflex, y'know? I just … well, you're damn cute an' I … I wasn't there when Jinx was dancin' with the Dread Lady so I didn't get to taste it, an' it's been kind of a long time since … since I …"
"Hey."
Gradually, she met his eyes (eye?). "Hmm?"
"You wanna talk about it?"
"… Talk about what?"
"Tell me what it's like being a succubus. Rae said you … eat emotions. Sort of."
"It's a little more complicated than that. What we can do is generate feelings of lust in other beings, an' then sorta … soak up the vibrations." She toyed with the tip of her tail for a bit. "Our metabolisms are different from yours."
"Do you need to eat physical food?"
"We can. But …" She pondered a conversation she'd heard earlier in the day. "Okay … okay, think about it like this: If you didn't have anything to eat but tofu, would you starve?"
He had to think about that one for a bit, but finally shook his head. "Maybe not. Probably not. For a while, anyway."
"It's kinda like that. We can eat physical food, and it'll keep us going. But emotions are soooo much better, and strong positive emotions are the best of all. Lust is good. It's what we can generate, so it's usually what we get. Friendship and affection are even better. But love? Real, live, actual I-care-more-about-you-than-I-do-for-myself love? That's a feast." She sighed wistfully. "I was so pissed that I missed the rave."
"What Jinx was feeling, you mean."
"Yeah."
"What about other demons?"
"… What about them?"
"Can you soak up emotions from them?"
"Ew! Ew-ew-ew-ew! Gross! No! No, we have to use mortals."
He stroked his chin. "So you're immortal."
"Yep."
"But you need to eat."
"I need to eat to stay conscious. If I go too long without anything, I'll slip into a sort of stasis until something comes along."
"So … okay, but …"
"What?"
"Raven killed Trigon."
"Oh! Well, yeah, we can be killed, under the right conditions. But we're pretty tough." She shrugged. "And if something damaged this body bad enough so that I couldn't heal my wounds and it stopped working, I'd just reappear in the Eighth Circle in a new body."
"Huh. Handy."
"Eh. It hasn't been much fun lately."
He cocked a puzzled eyebrow. "You mean since Rae took over?"
"What?! NO! No, I mean under Trigon. No, things have been SOOO much better under the Dread Lady! She'll actually listen to you! She won't even hurt you unless you piss her off! It's totally great."
Another question occurred to him. "Would you mind telling me how old you are?"
"Um … huh. Lessee … fourteen thousand eight seventy … eight? Yeah. Umm … convert to Earth years … that'd be … almost twelve hundred and forty."
"I see. So you were born … hang on a sec. Are demons born?"
"Well, of course."
"Okay, just checkin'. Trigon was already in control of the Eighth Circle when you were born."
"Yep."
"Then what did you mean by 'lately'?"
"Huh?"
"You said it hasn't been much fun lately. That implies that …"
"Oh! Yeah. Demons have racial memory. I can remember what the last eight generations before me experienced. It gets hazier, the farther back you go, but Trigon got here when my great-great grandmother was alive."
"… Is she dead?"
"Yeah. Trigon ate her. He ate a lot of us."
"And she didn't just re-form in a new body?"
"No, no. That only works if you get discorporated on a different plane."
"Ah."
"No, if a demon from the Eighth Circle dies in the Eighth Circle, she's gone."
"Gone?"
"Yep."
"Define 'gone' for me."
"Umm … no longer in existence? Un-made? Dispersed? Our, uh, souls, I guess you'd say, are different from yours. If you die, there's an extradimensional part of you that carries on. We just … cease to be."
"… Whoa."
She shrugged again. "Like you said, it's no big. After you hang around for a few dozen centuries, it gets old. You guys hardly ever make it to one, so you've got this great big mystical hard-on for some kind of afterlife. Trust me, it's not perfect."
He pondered that for a bit.
She asked, "So can I install the filter?"
Bringing himself back into the task at hand, he asked, "If you do, what's the advantage?"
"The Dread Lady said that the machines you fought used vibrations against you."
"Yeah, they did. What of …" His human eye got very round. "That filter … incorporated into the security field …"
"That's the idea. It'll cancel out any vibrations used against it, anywhere on the electromagnetic spectrum, and down into what you'd call the subsonic range."
"… Hot damn!"
"I guess that means you want it, then-" She gave a small 'Eep' as he picked her up, twirled her around, and kissed her soundly. Once he set her back down, she sort of leaned up against the console with a goofy expression. "Yeah. … Okay. … That. … Right."
Cyborg was as excited about the new technology as he'd been in a while. "Just show me how to install it, right?"
"… Sure." She shook her head, still grinning, and said, "Thanks."
"For what?"
"That snack."
"…"
"When you picked me up and …"
"OH. Um … oh. Right. Sorry."
"Don't be sorry on MY account! If you're up for some more later, I won't object." She crossed her heart. "And I'll be good, just like the Dread Lady said. No soul-stealing or nothin'. Promise."
He gave her a grin. "Walk on the wild side, huh?"
"Walk. Skip. Slide. Hell, fly if you want to." She ran a hand up and down the gleaming super-alloy of his arm. "For that matter, you could probably take anything I could dish out."
"I'm open to suggestions."
Showing lots of teeth, she answered, "Let's get this thing installed first, eh? Oh, and, uh, Vic?"
"Yeah?"
"Call me Bree?"
"Sure thing."
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Nightwing was pacing slowly along one of the residential corridors, tapping away at his datapad, when he came across a sight that brought him up short, staring.
He was near the room that Terra shared with Changeling. Their door was closed, which usually meant one or both were inside. And piled up against the smooth metal were five of the eight demons that Raven had brought with her when she and Jinx had returned from the Eighth Circle. They looked sedated.
Taking a few steps closer, he noted with alarm that they all had wide grins. Had the Joker somehow gotten inside the Tower? Were demons even subject to his fatal laughing gas? He bent and checked a pulse, finding it rapid and strong … which was very much at odds with the being's facial expression.
She flopped her head over a few degrees and slitted her eyes open. Her grin grew wider. "Heeeyyyyyyyyyyyyy."
"Are you … okay?"
"Mmmmmmm. So … gooooood."
That's when he heard the muted sounds coming from inside the room, and abruptly stood. Raven had given him some basic information on succubi, mainly so that he wouldn't do anything to distract or antagonize them, but he did remember about how they fed on emotion. And apparently what Terra and Gar were up to was some kind of banquet for these girls. He cleared his throat. "Aren't you supposed to be helping Raven and Cyborg and Starfire with their rubble-clearing?"
She waved a languid arm. "Alllllll done."
"… Done? Already?"
Another one slurred, "Dr'd Lady said we c'd have a break."
Hmm. Raven must have known about Gar and Terra. He shrugged. "Okay. As long as it's done, I guess. Your Mistress knows what she's doing." He stepped around the pile of demons and continued on toward the common room.
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End Note: No, you could say Raven's subjects were definitely something of a surprise for the Titans. More surprises to come! (Literally.)
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