The world was so different than how she remembered it.

Fiona could recall with crystal clarity the depravities and excesses of Hell, every feast and every violence that she had inflicted, been subject to, or been party to. She could remember every decision she made, and how shitty her thinking was that made her do it. She could remember being less than a monster. Less even than an animal. She had been hunger incarnate. All because of a knot of diseased tissue crushing her brain and inhibiting her ability to feel satiated. By anything.

The approaching summer was at this point merely as warm as the Mediterranean, balmy and pleasant, thick clouds bunched up in the sky but drifting well away from the City of Lucifer's Ambition. There was no rain called for today. Just steadily increasing heat, and a Hell that still flinched at explosions that they once ignored. Because now, there was no telling if that explosion was merely the result of another Sinner being an asshole, or if an Exorcist was currently engaged in a rampage. The former was a temporary indignity. The latter was rather more permanent.

She could walk again. Fairly normally, even. Months on end of being in a place that guaranteed her safety – except for the understandable blip that was the beginning of the Purge Unending – had finally convinced her at a visceral level that this was not, in fact, a pleasant dream. That she would not, in fact, wake up dressed in rags under a corroded chain. That her body was her own again. For what it was still worth.

"You've got a grim look on your face," Maelstrom said, sitting beside her on the bench outside the Hotel's conservatory. As much as Fiona enjoyed the company of people like Roz or Cain... they just couldn't possibly understand. To have been ground down so thoroughly. To be so disqualified as a person. But Maelstrom did.

The Dog On The Chain... he understood.

"I'm trying to figure out what I'm even supposed to do," Fiona said, slumping out of her more dignified posture with the admission. "The old me, the broken me... she'd be taking revenge right now. Destroying people who insulted or belittled me. Starting with all men Birch gave me to. But... I'm not that me anymore. And I think I'm better off just... fuck me... letting that be the past."

"I know," Maelstrom said, not opting for florid words when simple ones did all the same work. "I know."

"If I was so diseased that I can do that now what I couldn't have done then... well, where does that leave me? Would I still be down here in Hell weren't it for my stupid fucking brain?"

"Looking back at the maybes and the possibly-s hasn't helped me," Maelstrom shook his head slowly. "Moving forward has. You should try doing something. Get active again."

"Doing what? Last I checked my Barony was split between three Overlords and all of my Good Companions now work for other folk or are dead," she pointed out.

"I didn't say go back to being an Overlord. I said do something. I didn't go back to being a valet and a housepet, Fiona. I'm an assassin now. And also a drug smuggler, but let's keep things focused in for the time being," Maelstrom gave a shrug as though he knew he was getting distracted and had to pull himself back. "The fact is, you're still The Dragon of Ulster." She wasn't. She was the Dragon of Connacht. "Now that your legs work again... there's nothing stopping you from using that strength for some better purpose."

"That's contradictory talk from a pup who kills men for money, now," she pointed out, not even bothering to correct him. He'd never learned about Earth. How could he know the petty bitchiness between Connacht and Ulster?

"I don't give a shit how I get my money. I spend that money on making sure that Hellhounds in general have a better life than the one I did," Maelstrom pointed out. "You're still stuck in old ways of thinking. That the only thing you can do is reave and rampage, because that's what you used to do. But I can tell you first hand that there's a lot of vitally important, morally good, and fucking satisfying things that you can do with raw physical strength."

"Like what?" she asked.

"Breaking an old hag's jaw for one," Maelstrom seemed very pleased with that.

"I'm not going to go around bullying the elderly," Fiona said, which was a departure from how she'd been in the past. Once there was nobody sacrosanct to her eyes in the name of her hunger. Now? Things had changed.

"Trust me, she'd earned a broken jaw a thousand times over. Moxxie says that in the grand scheme of things, that old bitch was almost as bad as him," Maelstrom motioned downward, again doing her the courtesy of not mentioning her former slaver's name aloud. Not because she feared it, but because that was one of the few things that could ignite anger the likes that she had once lived with daily. Now, it only rose to the memory of one of the greatest Monsters In Flesh of Pride Ring for the last century.

"So what? Try being somebody else's thug for a while?"

"How about a bodyguard? Maybe second with the Peacekeepers; I know they'd love to have a Most Ancient Dragon on their side, since the Walton Dragon certainly won't," Maelstrom pointed out.

"Yeah fuck that milk-skinned bitch," Fiona said. At least her enmity with the Walton Dragon had not been attenuated by her return to mental health. She still couldn't stand that greedy shit of a woman. Possibly because Rebecca Ravenous was as greedy as Fiona was gluttonous. It was easy to hate somebody whom you saw too much of yourself in.

Or want to have sex with them, but in the end of the day, Fiona only had eyes for men, and that excluded the Walton Dragon out of hand.

"What are you two sad li'l bitches doin' out here? It's too blowy to be sunbathin' yet," Angel Dust's voice intruded on the two of them as he carried a big sack of something into the yard behind the hotel that had been turned into the local militia's stockpile. Currently it was only manned by one soldier, who was asleep on the desk. Things were quiet in this section of Pentagram City.

"She's getting stir crazy," Maelstrom said.

"So go and fuckin' do something! There's no lack 'a shit to do down here! Get off yer ass and pick up a hobby!" Angel Dust said, plunking the sack down on a rack. "Hey, is Stewart back yet?"

The dozing soldier snorted himself awake, took one look at Angel Dust and shook his head. "Stewart? He's doing Perimeter work. We can't keep him in the building or he'll sneak off to fuck you."

"Aw c'mon!" Angel Dust complained.

"You got that man addicted, my dude. This is your fault," he said. He then looked at the sack. "And the other six?"

"Fuck it, I'm going, I'm going," he shook his head. Angel Dust glanced at somebody who was standing at the gate of the fenced in back yard of the Hotel, somebody bearing the same Gapped Halo that Rachel had. "Tell me, have you seen anybody like that what might wanna take a trip up top sometime?"

"Still no, buddy. The Betrayed I do see just want to decompress for a while."

"Decompose, more like," Angel Dust bitched. "Fine. I'mma go out and have a quickie in an alleyway. You can't stop me."

"Don't see me pulling a muscle trying, do you, buddy?" the soldier laughed.

"Sinners," Maelstrom shook his head at the display that they'd borne witness to.

"What was that about?" Fiona asked.

"Oh, he's recruiting for some mission topside, I hear," Maelstrom said.

"He already tried that. And failed miserably," Fiona said.

"Oh, I'm not disagreeing with you, that did happen; I'm saying that he's recruiting again," Maelstrom said.

"So he's what? An idiot?" she asked.

"Maybe he's an idiot. Maybe he's desperate," Maelstrom said. He shook his head slowly. "I can only say what I've heard while in this building but rumor has it that he's trying to save family from Heaven."

"Foolishness," she said.

"Not foolishness," Maelstrom said, staring into the infinite distance. "Sometimes you have to do something crazy to get back the people you love. I saw it happen. I was there."

"Is this about those witches you killed?" she asked.

Maelstrom was silent for a moment, then looked at his hands, how they tensed and flexed into and out of stone-crushing fists. "Have you ever felt really... justified... in killing somebody with your bare hands?"

She looked to him, and in that gaze, there was understanding. "Once," she said. Just once. Even as her mind was returned from its fall to madness, she had exactly one murder that she felt no guilt for. Only satisfaction.

"Then you understand that there are some fights worth taking on," Maelstrom said. There was a cartoon boop sound from his side as he was preparing to extend his point, and he broke off to pull out his Hellphone. "One second."

"Don't mind me," Fiona said. Maelstrom took the call.

"Loona? What's up?" Maelstrom asked. There was a long pause. "That sounds complicated. Who else is in on this? I mean, I can understand that. I'm shocked either one of them wants to leave arms'-reach from her right now. Of course he's up to it. Count me in. I'll be... well, um..."

Maelstrom glanced at Fiona then to his phone, a bit of guilt furrowing his brow. "Thank you for visiting, Maelstrom," she said, to give him at least an out, and a reason not kick himself for walking away from the only person in Hell who understood the pain of being slave to Birch. Maelstrom gave a kindly nod, then rose up and started to lope toward the side of the building, likely wanting not to chance a portal where the military might be spooked enough to shoot through it.

And Fiona was left alone. She got up, making her way back through plants that, despite nobody offering any real attention to keep them cared for, were flourishing in the conservatory and toward the hotel itself. The din of people and activity now repulsed her somewhat. It never felt safe. And the pit of her stomach still ached, hunger claiming her but not the ravenous maw into oblivion she once was.

In the Lobby, she could see Charlie and Vaggie talking to Rachel, and the latter looking not-best-pleased by what they were saying. Probably levying another stricture against her good ideas because one or the other of them couldn't stomach Rachel's means. Sooner or later they'd stop. Rachel was the most effective person in this building. Make no mistake on that.

She passed through the lobby without notice and then past the dining area. It was between meals, so while there were still people eating, it no longer smelled that delightful way when a kitchen was going full tilt. Instead, just the back area had one window open, and within Fiona could see Nasir and An engaged in a calamitous argument over what to put into a mass of bread dough. One said nothing, it's good as it is. The other wanted honey and salt and sesame. Fiona found them amusing, even if their antics back there never actually resulted in them coming to blows.

And just through the window into the kitchen, Fiona saw a loaf of bread, still in its tin. She reached through and picked it up out of the tin with her long-clawed fingers. It was still very warm. She brought it to her nose, and smelled a memory of her childhood, of peeking around the corner as the castle baker made confections. Those had been sweeter. But this had an appeal all its own. It was substantial. Welcoming. She turned and ripped a section of the loaf off, revealing the faintly golden crumb.

She ate the chunk.

It tasted like being whole again.

And it rested in her stomach like a lazy stone.

She needed to find her purpose now. It was just a question of where, and how.

Chapter 27

Beside Canute In The Sand

Things were changing.

Husk was not an optimistic person by any stretch of any imagination, even the most fevered. He knew that given a likely procession of events that caused a situation, the worst, most unfair and most unkind layout of beginning factors could probably be presumed to have led to it. An idiot said to never attribute to malice what can be explained by idiocy; Husk knew that idiocy was malice. It was malice with a helmet on, something that might absorb some small part of the impact of the deeds done by the idiot wearing it, but still allowed those deeds to transpire. And for a long time, Husk just accepted that such was the way of Hell, just as it was of the World before it.

But now Husk had his dick back.

Not to be crass, but when his junk vanished from view back at the turn of the new century, he didn't exactly mourn. Hell had been especially shitty for an especially long time. No great surprise that it had killed any thought of libido, of pleasure, of euphoria in him. But now he had his dick again, which was proof in his own flesh that things were changing, and they were specifically changing him.

He sat behind his bar, not having to pass out drinks because people at this point were just digging into the beer-cooler rather than ask for something more high-test or requiring any artistry whatsoever to create. It suited him. Let these jarheads and grunts swill their piss-water. It left more vile rotgut for Husk. He turned a glance to the Betrayed who sat down on the stool, which hitherto today had gone unpeopled. "What'd'ya want?" Husk asked.

"Sake, warm," the degenerate said.

"Fuck you and fuck your warm sake," Husk said, but nevertheless did grab the bottle that had been left perched on the inactive radiator, pouring the Korean some miserable swill not unlike Husk's own. "I don't know how you can stomach that shit."

"Coming from the man who's blood still has enough alcohol in it to fuel a car, that is praising with faint damnation," Jun-Ho said as he sipped at the rice-wine and looked at the hubbub around him. "Rachel is acting strangely of late, don't you agree?"

"What?" Husk asked.

"Ever since your little... adventure... into Angel Dust's room, she's been distracted more than usual. Usually, her distraction has material cause, a problem that she's working extra hard to solve," Jun-Ho took another sip, using the time it took to measure out his words. "But this time? This time it seems more like the time she spends trying to solve her current issue only sees her more and more mired. It is not my intention or nature to intrude on where I stand to gain nothing, but..."

"But you Betrayed gotta stick together, and she's got you worried," Husk finished the thought for him.

"That's one way of putting it, but yes," Jun-Ho said.

"You're usin' her as an excuse. That's obvious as the nose on yer face," Husk pointed out, tipping the mouth of his bottle toward the Betrayed when he did. "I know a spook when I see one. Takes one to know one. And yer just burning up to know what she saw in the whore's room, ain't ya?"

"I am not a 'spook', Husk," Jun-Ho said evenly. "I'm a professional. And my profession requires that I know things. There's something askew in my world. And I would like very much to correct it."

"I can't speak on what I saw in there, what we saw. Apparently even thinkin' 'bout it's dangerous," Husk said, managing to not think about the events of that place, other than the indignity of walking in on Angel Dust while he was currently mid-hump.

Jun-Ho cracked a smile at that. "Dangerous information tends to be the most important," Jun-Ho said. He then frowned and narrowed his eyes. "Does this have something to do with that Hellphone that found its way into your hands before I got here?"

"You know about it?" Husk asked, wary.

"That you don't is surprising. You did confide in me..." Jun-Ho's head tilted aside, suspicion on his face. "And you were made to forget, from your expression. I trust then that you have no recollection of the discussion of Samuel Scailes, and his phone full of magic?"

"Anybody could have learned about..."

"The lockscreen password is Engage Ridley Mother Fucker," Jun-Ho said. That got Husk's attention. He hadn't learned that until Rachel told him. After their last run-in with the Scarlet Fucker. Jun-Ho started to smile wide, but showing no teeth. "And now you're interested."

"How did you figure that out?" Husk demanded.

"Methods and means, Husk. Methods and means," Jun-Ho said. He set his cup of sake down for a moment, staring into Husk's jaundiced eye. "You and I should be candid. I have a vested interest in making at least some portion of Hell as livable as I can manage. That will necessarily improve circumstances for those living in it, yourself included."

"So not a spook but a 'wrangler, then," Husk said.

"Spoken like somebody who's been on the wrong end of one, then," Jun-Ho said. "You have an information network in place. Very ad hoc, very loosely held, but it is in place. I can make it something greater."

"Pass," Husk said.

"I veto your pass," Jun-Ho said. The audacity of this bitch.

"I don't think you get that luxury, comin' up here with all that audacity and tellin' me what to do with my gambling network," Husk pointed out. "So you can either sweeten your offer or piss off. I don't care much which you do."

"Rachel's distraction is about you," Jun-Ho said. Husk rolled his eyes hard at him. "Dismiss all you want, she has been making surreptitious glances your way for weeks now. Had she been anybody but Rachel Scailes, a grown woman and dead, I would have called it a schoolyard-crush."

"Fuck off," Husk said.

"However," Jun-Ho held up a warding finger, "since I do know Rachel Scailes, a deeply damaged grown woman and dead, I know enough to know there's more to it than that. You should talk to her. Privately. Get to the root of things."

"And how does that benefit you, exactly?" Husk asked, leaning against the pillar which dispensed his bottles of swill.

"I get two idiots to stop making goo-goo eyes at each other across the lobby and people starting to pay attention to what they're actually good at," Jun-Ho said.

"Mark my words, you're full of shit," Husk said.

"Then how about this; if I'm wrong, and there's nothing there, then I will never bother you again as long as we both dwell in Hell," Jun-Ho said.

"Alright, that's sweeter," Husk said. Not having to deal with people was always a bonus if you could wrangle it properly. "And if you're right? What's my penalty?"

"You talk to me like a coworker instead of like a pest," Jun-Ho said. "I am not Angel Dust. I am not here to annoy and seduce you. You're too male by three quarters for my taste."

"I still don't get it. You wanting this, I mean. I thought you'd just be vacationing, down here where there's food and barricades..." Husk pointed out.

Jun-Ho was quiet for a moment, almost sullen, as though looking back across a long and wearied life. And when he turned to Husk again, there was little of his usual smug humor. He looked like any of the hundreds of shell-shocked soldiers that Husk had come home with from Verdun. "Soldiers have to pay a price for the things that they want. I wanted a sweet, kind girl to live a happy life, sheltered from the cruelty surrounding her. And I paid everything I had to see it done," the Korean puffed out a breath. "I have a chance to do so again down here. To make less mistakes. To me, that's worth almost anything."

"So you're doin' this for Charlie," Husk said.

"She has a way of inspiring that kind of instinct in people," Jun-Ho said. "I dare say she's even doing it in you."

"Yeah, I'll buy that and the bridge you're selling me," Husk laughed darkly.

"How much of what you're doing now would Husk of ten years ago have done? Husk of five? Of two?" Jun-Ho pressed.

"Fuck you," Husk answered.

"Exactly as I thought," Jun-Ho said. He paused, watching as Angel Dust, in his new, more imposing persona, made his way across the lobby and made for the kitchens. "He is planning to go up again, you know?"

"Yeah, I figured he's as stubborn as he is stupid," Husk noted.

"Perhaps more stubborn than stupid. He hired me for when he goes back up," Jun-Ho said.

"What? Do you have a death wish or som – fuckin' right, you just pop back like nothin' happened. So you got nothin' to lose goin' up," Husk cut himself off when he remembered the obvious that he really should have been informed of before he made an ass of himself. He barked a staccato laugh. "So what's he payin' to get you up there?"

"Inverted thinking," Jun-Ho said. "I lived for more than two centuries on Cloud 5. I did a lot of work there, and earned a lot of... let's call them 'favors'. I was evicted from Cloud 5 to the lower Clouds rather unexpectedly. I want to collect them."

"So you're usin' him and his want of getting his sister out of Heaven to suit yer own ends. How in the sweet fuck did you get into Heaven, again?" Husk asked.

"I took great personal pains to ensure a happy girl lived a happy life in a cruel and war-torn time, and managed not to cross any irredeemable boundaries while doing so. Apparently that made me 'good enough', in the eyes of the Gatekeeper," Jun-Ho said with a shrug.

"Man, they must'a had really fuckin' low standards back then," Husk bitched into his liquor.

"That they accepted me, a spymaster who held a nation in his web, and not you, a petty thief, is just a sign that Heaven has fallen far in the centuries from what it once stood for," Jun-Ho said, finally finishing that cup of warm piss he seemed to favor. "You should let that ignite anger in you, not despondency. Anger gets things done."

And with that, Jun-Ho pushed off. He had to be off his nut. But a wager was a wager, and getting somebody to piss off forever was not something to be undersold.

"I'm goin' on break," Husk announced, not caring if anybody heard or anybody wanted him to. And he went back into hotel, travelling up the elevator to the room that Rachel had claimed for her own. He'd get to the bottom of this right fucking quick.

Things were bad in the Veloce Family. Arackniss knew that even before he had his confab with Rott and came to his realization. The entire organization was entirely top-down, which meant that if the top went rotten, the rot spread far and spread fast. And until recently, he'd been a part of that rot, another snivelling do-nothing feeding from the scraps of his father's table. Then he got set on fire by a pimp in an alleyway, and his body was turned into what it was now.

It wasn't fair, but Hell seldom was.

No, the main thing which bothered Arackniss was not the symptoms of the disease which he was now unable to ignore ravaging the family Veloce; it was the cost of the medicine. Which was why he found himself in this really unexpected and out-of-the-way spot in Imp City, in a building which looked from without to be nothing but another victim of urban decay, and the shuttering of industry. An old factory had been left a shattered hull on the outside, but within had been gutted, and converted into a goddamned temple.

The bone-shaking drone of the chanters arrayed behind a huge, rough iron effigy of Satan was so deep and visceral that each word seemed like it physically touched him, and was unimpressed by what ended up under was under its metaphorical fingers. Arackniss may not have been much on religiosity when he was either alive or dead, but he knew as well as the next Sinner that Satan had little good to say about his kind. But he wasn't the only one here. Shit, he could see a Flame Elemental dame over there in a conservative sweater and skirt looking like she was trying to mull something over, and had hit a block.

That was exactly why Arackniss was here, in fact.

Here, far away from the Veloce's battlegrounds in Pentagram City, far away from their subsidiaries in the Warren of Imp City, he could sit on the hard pews of this temple of Satan and try to think. Try to not think traitorous thoughts. Try to think about how to save his father from the doom that was rapidly approaching him. Try to think of how to save the Veloce family from imploding.

Try to think of if he had to abandon one to save the other.

There were no easy answers. If there had been, somebody smarter than him would have found them a lot earlier than Arackniss had. He knew that while he now had a fair measure of brute force, he had a lot more experience being a sneaky little shit. So the number of people who were smarter than him in regards to the criminal underworld were comparatively few. And those few would all be high up in organizations who had much to gain in the death of Veloce. Names like Magianno, Salamanca, and especially Capone. In a word, he was shadow-boxing, but his shadow was faster, and its fists were made of bricks.

"You aren't a usual supplicant of Father Satan," a dry, grinding and barely feminine voice came from Arackniss' side. He turned, and beheld a succubus, but one wearing the form-concealing red robes of one of Satan's adopted children. Her neck was host to a grisly hanging-scar, and her pink eyes nevertheless had the quality of nailing a man's feet to the to the floor not in wonderment but in fear.

"You're right. I'm not," Arackniss said.

"If you seek boons from Father, you would best live according to Good Standing before attempting it. And few of your kind ever bother to," she said with fried dismissal.

"I'm not looking for Satan's help. I'm just trying to think a problem through," he said.

"There are places not dedicated to the worship of the Last Paradox King where you could do that," she pointed out without humor.

"Places where I'd get distracted by other people's bullshit, sure," Arackniss said. He glanced around. The temple, lit by bloody red flames, played host to less than a dozen people, which looked to be nearly a fifth of its capacity. "And I'm not exactly hogging space. So unless I'm gettin' pitched for bein' a Sinner, leave me alone and let me think. I don't see you hasslin' that chick!"

"That 'chick' has earned two Boons by Satan's own hand in a single day. She is far more welcome in this place than your kind, mafioso," the Daughter of Satan said.

"Look, if you wanna help, how 'bout you stand there and be a sounding board for a bit? That's all I need from all ya's," Arackniss said. The succubus in the red robe lofted a brow, but moved around Arackniss and sat on the bench one maximally-stretched arm's-length away from him.

"Speak," she rasped.

"I'm pincered," Arackniss admitted. "On one side, I've got my loyalty to my father. On the other, I got my loyalty to the rest of the family. And those two are pullin' me in opposite directions and I don't know what to do about it.

"Which one is stronger?" she ignored all confounding issues and cut to the heart of the matter.

"What?"

"If you are pulled in two directions, one of them is necessarily pulling harder," the Daughter of Satan said. "That one will move you from your starting point, even against the struggles of the opponent that uses your body in their tug-of-war."

"So... just go with the one who's pulling harder?" Arackniss asked.

"No. Find out which way they are pulling you, then dig in your heels and pull with the opponent against them," the Daughter said. "The one who pulls you harder is one who is using a weakness in your mind against you, who has fostered frailty and attached a chain to it so that they may be your master. In this moment, when you are finally aware of the links that dangle from you, you have the opportunity to look upon them and resist. To become more than what others made you, out of sheer and naked spite."

"So just fuck over whoever's pullin' hardest? Don't that leave me bein' exactly what the weaker guy wants?" Arackniss asked.

"At which point you turn, dig your heels in once more, and drag them into the abyss as well. Then, with no chains remaining on you, you can forge a path of your own choosing, in bloody defiance of those who would have subjugated you," the gravel-voiced Succubus said. "You use the tools that are being used to enthrall you against your would-be-masters, and consign them to the grave that their weakness demands of them. And then, you are made stronger by your strife and struggle. That is the path of true power. And if you are not a coward, you will take it."

Arackniss didn't answer her, not right away. If she wasn't completely full of shit – she wasn't – and he wasn't a craven mook – which nowadays he wasn't – then her point actually landed pretty neatly. Yes, he was irrationally attached to Henroin Veloce. Yes, the Veloce Crime Family had essentially staked out the path he had been walking his entire life, and afterlife. Now in this moment where service to the former was in tension with his service to the latter, he could finally see a truth that had been denied to him his entire existence.

He didn't just want to serve, until the end of time.

He wanted to build something. To make some mark on Hell that he couldn't make on Earth.

To defy Henroin would cause the old man to lash out, maybe even try to have him destroyed, which would ripple through the entire organization, and see the thing shatter. To obey Henroin was to clench the Family in a vice-grip fist until it cracked and crumbled under heedless pressure, and the shards stabbed into his fingers. Both options were terrible. But if he didn't just disobey Henroin, didn't just curb the fossil... but took a hammer to the Family himself? If the Family didn't break as a result of anger or pique but by design... what could he make of it?

"I don't know if I got the mettle for this," Arackniss admitted, after his long, thoughful silence. The succubus hadn't moved in the entire duration, seemingly growing more satisfied the longer he was quiet and pensive. As though glad he was actually thinking and not just following how his knee jerked. "I'm just a crook and pusher."

"Father Satan was a rancher. Where you begin has no bearing on where you end," the Daughter said. She shifted, leaning down to look him in the eye. "You have a choice; to either attempt what your blinders say is impossible, and become stronger for it, or to obey your blinders and be weak forever."

"And I'm sick and fuckin' tired of bein' weak," Arackniss finished her point for her.

"Go then. Go and shatter your binds and use the shards to stab the hearts of your enemies. And know that Father Satan is with your defiance in spirit."

"I don't need Satan's say so. I got my own," Arackniss said as he got up from the pew and started toward the cleverly hidden entrance to this factory-temple. It was one thing, he realized, to know that he had to defy his father. It was another to know that he had to fuck over everybody, and to thereafter know that it was going to be the best for everybody.

Was this what Angel Dust felt when he landed in Hell?

Shit, man; no wonder Angel Dust was so snippy when Henroin and Arackniss landed. He owed that lusty queer an apology for that if nothing else. Plans began to snap into focus. Not just the broad strokes, of having to 'do something to save the Family', but of 'how to kick Henroin out', 'how to push against the Dust King' when he would need to... all kinds of things that his narrowed direction pushed him toward. The traitorous thoughts could no longer afford to just be thoughts now.

A rebuilt Veloce family was no longer a dream for Arackniss. Because dreams were fragile, flighty things. They fled from you the moment you woke up to reality.

Now, a new Veloce family was Arackniss' goal. And men worked toward goals. Step by step.

She had that fucking skull on her workbench again.

Husk made no bones about how he found it fucking creepy, the hobbies she maintained, and the way she was utterly unperturbed by carcasses no matter how intimate to her they'd been. Husk'd seen mind-blasted soldiers less casual about carnage than Rachel Scailes. Of course, maybe it was because of her damages from her childhood, or maybe it was just because the carcass in question was her own. Hard to say.

Rachel, thankfully for Husk's state of sanity, wasn't actively engaged in reconstructing her own pulverized skull again when he pushed the door open. She was sitting across the couch, her feet not even reaching its full length, with one 'a them old fashioned 'Game Boy's in her hand, tinny Russian chip-tune music coming from it as she stared at it to the exclusion of all Hell.

Probably Tetris again. That chick had an obsession with that block-stacking game.

She flicked a glance at him, then half-moved to hide the Game Boy out of sheer reflex before she got a cold look in her eye and stopped herself. "I didn't hear you knock," she said.

"Prob'ly 'cause I didn't," Husk said. "I figured you'd be workin' this hour. Sun's still up."

"Charlie's being difficult and I need her to calm down before I try convincing her again," Rachel said. "Is that a shirt? Are you wearing shirts now?"

"Well, I figure if I gotta wear clothes, I might as well wear all'a'em," Husk muttered. "Listen, you an' me 'gotta have a talk."

"Regarding?" she asked, getting to her feet. It was still stark how much taller than her he was when he actually stopped slouching. She must have been a poster-child for stunted growth, because Husk had met Sam. Sam was six feet easily. 'Parently every single one of Rachel's kids shot up a foot taller than her.

"Jun-Ho's got it in his head that you're all distracted," Husk began.

"I am," she cut him off, with an earnest nod. Husk was tossed off his rhythm for a second by it, so when he started again, it didn't quite flow true.

"And he says that what you're distracted by is apparently me," he again attempted to get back into his groove.

"I am," she again cut him off, and this well and truly tossed his locomotive off of its tracks. The fuck was this?

"'Xcuse me?" he asked.

"Jun-Ho was an ancient Korean spymaster for a royal family. Of course he has aptitude at dissecting interconnections between people," she pointed out. "The dynamic between the two of us must have been simple for him."

"And what exactly is the dynamic between the two of us?" Husk asked.

"That would depend on our level of maturity, really," she asked. "You died an old, angry, bitter man. I lived a cold, robotic, manipulative life. Neither one of us is a good person. But I lucked into Heaven, and despite being no worse than me, you were Damned to Hell."

"Yer point?" he asked.

"I obviously make you feel alive and vital. You make me feel appreciated. And for the last few weeks I've been trying – and frankly failing – to imagine what having sex with you would be like," she said.

Okay, fuck a train derailing. Somebody had just blasted this train into outer-fucking space, for how off of the trail it was from where Husk had thought it'd go.

"What the fuck are you even saying?" he managed to ask through his bulletproof belt of confusion.

"I'm saying that we be adults about this and have sex so that I no longer need to spin my wheels about this, and so you get to have some fun with a 'pin up girl'," she said.

"I'm sorry, but I'm about a hair from stabbin' you to make sure that The Glimpse ain't come back in here to fuck with us some more," Husk said, taking a step back from her.

"Oh for crying out loud..." Rachel muttered, rubbing at her brow.

"I'm serious. This ain't the way you act," he said.

"And if I were The Glimpse, what material benefit would I gain from engaging sexually with you? Beyond the fact that apparently The Glimpse likes to masquerade as beautiful women and have sex as them. Which by the way that is actually a very high compliment. Thank you for that," Rachel said.

Husk had a laugh escape him before he could stop it. That one involuntary laugh greased the skids so that a few more could follow after it. And before too long, he was stumbling backward wheeze-laughing harder than he had for more than a decade.

"I don't see the joke here," Rachel pointed out, having halved the new distance between them.

"I was just thinkin' that you've pretty clearly shown that you're you right there; the Glimpse ain't got a tenth of the crazy to come up with that kind of thinking," Husk said.

"It's fortunate that I don't disagree that I'm rather insane, otherwise that might be considered insulting. So are we going to have sex or not?" she asked.

"You're serious about this?"

"Do priests rape choirboys?" she asked with a lofted brow.

"Christ almighty, woman! Say somethin' like 'do bears shit in the woods?', not that!" Husk had another few wheeze laughs escape from him. She nevertheless started to smile, a satisfied and victorious smile.

"That's what I thought. Now let's see how this goes. I want your A-game. And I'm not stopping until I get it."

"Well fuck me, I guess," Husk began.

"That was the plan," Rachel interrupted.

"I guess I've got to knock some rust off," Husk finished.

Today was a very strange beast, in Husk's experience; it was the best kind of weird.

"Sweetie, are you alright? You look... tense," Vaggie said, which intruded on Charlie's annoyed, dark thoughts.

"I am tense!" Charlie answered her, managing to moderate her tone around her girlfriend, but only just barely. "We're out of rooms! Or at least we're out of rooms that aren't in biohazard quarantine!"

"That sounds like a good problem to have," Vaggie noted, rounding the desk so that she could tuck in beside Charlie, pull her clenched fist from the tabletop and give her hand a squeeze. "It sounds like exactly the kind of problem you would have begged for two years ago. This is good!"

"There's no place for new patients to come in. And I have no idea which Sinners living here are actually undergoing their treatments properly. And even if they were undergoing their treatments, I have no idea if those treatments are even going to work!" Charlie bemoaned.

"It worked once before. It will again," Vaggie tried to council her.

"But that might have been a fluke! A completely one-off event never to be repeated! And Wendy was barely even a Sinner! All she did was kill herself! That's not even evil!" Charlie said.

"She was a Sinner, judged and Damned, who made it out of Hell. And she got out because of you," Vaggie pulled the proprietor of the hotel into a sideways hug, which Charlie finally allowed herself to loosen up and melt into.

"I wish I knew how. I wish I knew what went right. I wish I wish I fffffucking wish," Charlie said.

"Come on. You didn't come to bed last night and I wouldn't be surprised if you were here since yesterday," Vaggie pulled Charlie to her feet and away from the dingy darkness of her office, here in the middle of the first floor of the Hotel. The lights were dim, because the bright had given her a headache at some point and she just hadn't raised them back up again. "No, Charlie, not to the stairs, we're going to somewhere where there's sunlight."

"But I have to..." Charlie pointed to the door which effectively lead to the bunker at the heart of the Hotel.

"You don't have to do anything right now. You've been 'doing' for too long at a stretch to begin with. You're getting some sunlight. You look like a ghost!" Vaggie said. And while Charlie absolutely had the strength to bring Vaggie to a halt and refuse, she didn't actually have the will to summon it. Thus it was that she was escorted as though sickly by her lover through the main hallway that rain through to the back of the Hotel, and to the Conservatory that could be found there.

Logistics continued to hound Charlie's thoughts as the passed the halls now replete with guests and clients and people hiding from various stripes of violence. A more cold-hearted Charlie would simply have ejected those latter ones for taking up valuable space and resources for the middle ones and simplified things for the former ones. But the truth was, a more cold-hearted Charlie was not a Charlie at all. Thus her current choice-paralysis. There were no easy solutions. But then again, this was Hell. How often were choices ever supposed to be easy down here?

"I should be looking after the books right now," Charlie groused as the pair of them entered the greenhouse which, while not in quite the same pristine state it had been when Wendy was living here, had not nearly backslid to the state it had been before her arrival. The reason for that maintenance was twofold. Both of whom were involved in kitchen duty, but in very different ways. One did so because she enjoyed the delight of cooking. The other did it, by Jun-Ho's declaration, as a form of penance.

The latter was here at the moment, leaning against the door to the outside and letting the warm winds of early summer ruffle his fluff as he smoked.

"The books will still be there tomorrow. Or even later today if I have to chain you to the bench for what hours I can manage. Relax for a second, Charlie. You're not going to do anybody any favors if you burn out," Vaggie pointed out, navigating Charlie past Angel Dust and plunking her onto the bench. Vaggie sat down beside her, puffing out a breath and idly running her fingertips across a brace of knives that belted her narrow waist. They were all Seraphic Steel. With the current industry in Hell being what it was, nobody was willing to splash a large amount of Angel Steel on a single weapon that could be lost or destroyed. A bunch of throwing knives, though? And with Charlie being more insistent than usual? Those he could part with, even if he had to part with them personally.

"Vaggie... tell me the truth," she said. Vaggie narrowed her only eye at Charlie. "Am I doing the right thing, letting all these people who aren't in the program stay here?"

"Sweetie, I don't know," Vaggie admitted. "I barely even know what I'm doing around the Hotel! Between the Radio Demon being an absolute fucker, an army that for some reason I've been put in charge of, and a war against God, I'm completely out of my element. But I still have to do something, because doing nothing I think would just drive me insane!"

"Doesn't it just make you want to run away somewhere?" Charlie asked. "Maybe go up to the Human World and hide for a few decades?"

"Um, Charlie, are we forgetting something?" Vaggie asked, pointing at her own ashen pallor and likely meaning her status as a Sinner.

"Oh. Right. Sorry," Charlie muttered slumping against the bench and staring up past the ordnance dump that had been set up in her hotel's back yard. There were few truly tall buildings in that direction, so the sky reached out in its bruised glory, bearing wispy clouds driven by summer winds, unable to drop any meaningful amount of rain. And there, stubbornly still in the heavens, Heaven's Gate barely visible against the daytime sky. Only the top half of the bisected orb was visible right now. What was going on on the other side of that gateway, she wondered? How many of her people, her hellish citizens, were dying right now because her dad wanted another goddamned throne? "Sloth then?"

"Charlie..." Vaggie said again.

Oh. Right. Same problem.

There seemed to be literally nothing that Charlie could do to make even the lives of her closest loved ones better. So what place did she actually have to try to shift the tides of Hell's souls' progress on the broader scope?

She was in the middle of a bleak melancholy when she turned to see Fiona who was standing near where Rachel's 'grave' had been dug. She was looking at her left hand, and the stump of her right, with a deeply introspective look on her face. But given that she had spent much of the last half-year in essentially uninterrupted introspection, it was becoming exactly what Charlie expected of her. But even as Charlie watched, that distant, pensive expression hardened, her lips pulling into a stubborn line as though she'd just made a decision.

Fiona cracked her neck to a modestly horrifying crunch noise, then looked first at Charlie and Vaggie, then beyond them through the glass of the Conservatory. Her eyes locked onto Angel Dust, and she began to move with great intention. That was enough to shake Charlie's doldrums for a moment, because she had no idea what was going on and felt a need to moderate things if her worst expectations were about to come to pass.

"Charlie, stay..." Vaggie began, but Charlie was already grabbing Vaggie by the arm and dragging her up at Charlie's side. "Okay I guess we're both going." Charlie never actually internalized just how much physically mightier than Vaggie she was, that she could easily manhandle the former human. And right now she wasn't even thinking of such things, as she barely managed to intercept Fiona as she reached the spider-demon.

"What's shakin', toots?" Angel Dust asked at Fiona's approach.

"You are still planning on saving your sister, aren't you?" Fiona asked, utterly ignoring Charlie.

"Fuckin' right I am," Angel Dust said. "Why? What's it to you?"

Fiona scowled for a moment, but flexed her one remaining hand, and stared hard at Angel Dust. Like she was about to say something she knew she would never be able to take back. But before Charlie could intervene, to mediate things, a strange beam of light appeared on the far side of Fiona's head, pointing distressingly up and at a slight angle.

"I heard last you went to Heaven, you didn't have enough people. Not enough strength. This time you will," Fiona said. Charlie glanced to Vaggie, who was likewise turning a baffled glance to Charlie. It was Vaggie who pointed up into the sky.

That burning line was pointing up from Fiona to Heaven's Gate.

"You want in? What's your angle?" Angel Dust asked, either not seeing the line or not caring if he did. Probably the latter.

"My angle is that I want to hel–" Fiona said.

But even as she said what was probably the word 'help', that line flared outward like an opening fan, blooming into a pane of white light arrayed on the far side of Fiona O'Daire's head from where Charlie and Vaggie were standing. And the instant that it finished its circularity, was a strange, stone-breaking snap sound, and a flash of light that though utterly blinding in intensity didn't burn itself into Charlie's vision.

Then, Fiona began to collapse as though she had been made of pressed sand the entire time, her limbs falling apart and slamming to the ground with incredible force, before the whole of her split apart into a three-foot tall pile of strange, heavy crystals that split the light into dim, melancholy colors.

Charlie, Angel Dust and Vaggie were all silent for a moment. Then Charlie reached down, and picked up a palm-full of the crystals, which dragged down with terrible gravity. A palm-full heap of the crystal stuff had to weigh a fraction of a tonne, and only her Nephilim physiology allowed her to pick them up at all.

Wages.

Wages of Sin.

Charlie's head snapped up toward Heaven's Gate, then to the two who were with her. "You saw that too, didn't you?"

"What the fuck happened to the dragon?" Angel Dust asked, his cigarette falling from numbed fingers.

"Charlie... did she just...?" Vaggie asked.

Charlie's arms lifted into the air in a pose of shocked victory. "It happened again!" she declared.

"What the fuck just happened?" Angel Dust asked. He glanced around, several guns appearing in his numerous hands. "Did somebody get the drop on us?"

"She got out!" Charlie said, and then pulled Vaggie into a crushing hug while an ecstatically excited 'Eeeeeeeeee' escaped her throat.

"Wait... wait a fuckin' second there, dame," Angel Dust said, while scratching at his temple with a gunbarrel. "Are you seriously sayin' that that bolt a' whatever-the-fuck, that was our friendly neighborhood dragon fuckin' off to Heaven?"

"Yes!" Charlie exclaimed, and then she hugged him too. He tried to struggle free of her enthusiasm but there was no restraining it now, and thus no escape from restraint by Angel Dust. Not until she had delivered the full measure of her excited hug. "I mean we still don't have any idea why it happened but it happened again! It wasn't a big fluke! I can rehabilitate Sinners!" she pumped both fists into the air in a pose of utter victory.

"...Uh, boss? Question?" Angel Dust intruded on her moment. She turned to him with just a little bit of annoyance. "When, ah... Wendy fucked off, did she leave all'a this shit on the floors?"

"She... no, actually. Well, some of it, but not this... mound," Charlie said.

"Perhaps the amount of Wages left behind is proportional to the degree of sin that she had committed earning her Damnation," Alastor's voice appeared as usual before he did, drawing a start and a gunshot from Angel Dust at finding The Radio Demon leaning over his shoulder. The bullet hit Alastor directly in his grin. The bullet flattened and halted against his teeth. Alastor took a moment to pluck the bullet from its place against his teeth with his tongue, and then place it very delicately into the only one of Angel Dust's hands that wasn't carrying a gun. "Your reflexes are good, but your aim needs work, little spider."

"Did you see that?" Charlie asked, gesturing broadly to the entire event which had transpired directly in front of her.

"Of course I saw it. It happened right there on the page, clear as day. When dear Gwendolyn departed, it was lodged firmly into subtext and revealed only post-facto; There was no event for me to view," Alastor said, as he strode past Angel Dust and knelt before the massive pile of Wages on the ground. "What a spectacular occurrence!"

Charlie got into his path, physically standing over the Wages so that she could block his line of sight to them. "You know magic better than anybody left in this building. How did she do it?" Charlie demanded of him.

"First of all, it's constipated thinking believing that what we all just witnessed was a feat of magic," Alastor said, his grin growing patronizing as he returned to his feet. "After all, if you were to ask The Old Man up on Floor Two, he would no doubt agree with my assertion that there is no magical infliction upon this place, and even less than none on the remains of your crippled dragon. No, no no no; what happened her was not a defiance of the natural order requiring magical correction. This was nature taking its proper course, to its furthest extreme."

"There's no magic... Alastor, I just saw her grow a halo, then ascend to Heaven on some kind of lightning-bolt thing!" Charlie said.

"And I am telling you that doing so was exactly what she was always meant to do," Alastor said.

"Da'fuq?" Angel Dust asked.

"Wait... waaaaait," Charlie said as she started to turn the idea over in her head, and look at it from an angle she hadn't considered before. "Are you saying... that the human soul... or at least the Damned soul, anyway... was supposed to do this?" she gestured from Hell to Heaven as she asked.

"Precisely!" Alastor said with a broad grin. "What you two loathsome sinners have borne witness to has never been seen in all creation, not even by the eyes of God Himself: You have seen what God built humans to do in the first place."

"...why?" Charlie asked.

"The most fundamental thing that people believe about themselves," Alastor said, as he began to pace a circuit around the mound of Wages, "is that they understand their own natures. And it is often the most fundamental flaw in their world-view. To attempt to interface with the world in a way that runs contrary to reality only results in heart-ache and confusion. And many, many people do so, again and again in textbook example of the definition of insanity, for they never look at themselves and ask... am I starting this race at the correct starting line? Am I facing the right direction? Am I even racing the correct race? And the time they spend paralyzed by these questions, those who did start the correct race, on the correct line, facing the right direction... well, they've already won."

"I don't have time for your flowery prose on this, Alastor. Speak plainly for once in your Damnation, please!" Charlie said.

Alastor gave a chuckle, and scooped up a palm-full of Wages just as Charlie had, only he showed some small but visible amount of strain to do it. "I can't guarantee you'll be happy if I explain my mathematics to you. Are you willing to entertain that?"

"Let's say today that I am," Charlie said, her good mood curdled and her annoyance starting to ignite into anger at Alastor's antics.

"Then let us say for the sake of education that I perused our dearly departed dragon's state of mind earlier this chapter," Alastor said.

"You read her mind?" Vaggie asked. Since when could he do that?

"I read her story!" Alastor corrected, booping her nose while doing so. For once, the eye twitch that resulted was shared both by Vaggie and Charlie alike. "And if I were to draw any conclusions from what I saw there, and the nature of that which I see before me now... I would conclude thus: I don't have enough information to make a definitive answer as to the mechanics of Redemption, butchoiceis certainty a critical component of it."

Charlie blinked in surprise as the memory came back to her. Of her standing in front and barring the way toward her Father, as Samael the Poison of God almost split her face open with a scythe. "I wasn't the Demiurge until I chose to be," she quoted of the man now looking to murder God.

"Precisely the right thinking, my dear," Alastor said. "What choice it was to either Samuel or our departed dragon is now lost to history, but there was clearly a choice involved. And that choice, for what ever its worth, seemed to have been more relevant by far than the mere weight of her guilt and the tides of her sins. I shall have to do some proper thinking on this," Alastor said, pouring the Wages from his hand back into the pile. He took two long strides away from them all, back into the Hotel, before turning crisply on his heel and pointing at the mound which once had been Fiona O'Daire. "And send some of that up to my studio when you can. Now that I have a bit more of the stuff, I'm going to perform some more... destructive... experiments."

"Alastor..." Charlie said, glaring up under her brow.

"Destructive to the Wages! The Wages my dear; now that they aren't nearly so dear a substance, I can afford to lose some of it," Alastor said with placating tone and gesture. "You really do need to come up with some sort of hobby. All this pique will be ruinous to your complexion."

And with that the Radio Demon returned with leisurely stride into the Happy Hotel, humming ragtime tunes under his breath as he went.

"I don't care. This," Charlie pointed at the pile which had once been Fiona, "is a victory, just like Wendy was."

"Yeah. Sure," Angel Dust said, only now throwing away the bullet which had until now rested in his palm. "Look, I'm gonna be out near the Wall for a bit. Couple a days, maybe."

"Whhhhyyyyyy?" Charlie asked.

"What, I can't have friends in far-flung places? Fuck all ya's!" Angel Dust looked a bit insulted.

"Is... you're not going to go..." she made a walking motion with her fingers and a worried look on her face.

"Fuck no. I'm just goin' out there to see how a pal 'a mine's doin'. She gets about as many days off as you do, toots," he said, snapping several finger guns at her as he started into the building and away from the site of Charlie's (or more accurately, the Happy Hotel's) second ever total victory.

That left Charlie and Vaggie standing over what was, in Charlie's best understanding, the exact opposite of a Purified cadaver. And Charlie felt the excitement brew up in her again, regardless of Angle Dust being shifty and Alastor being... Alastor. The 'eeeee' returned, and she danced in the spot for a moment, before pulling Vaggie in close and kissing her for all she was worth.

Once she got that little bubble of joy properly out of her system – which left Vaggie looking like she just got hit by a bus – she practically skipped back into her Hotel, her Magnum Opus, her Little Purgatory in Hell.

The explosion that ripped through the laboratory would have ordinarily pulped the unfortunate soul who was standing as close to its center as Purson was, having sent shockwaves that deeply cracked the reinforced 'glass' that his onlookers would view the project through. Purson, though, was not beholden to many of the frailties of having such things as internal organs. Percussive force was about as toothless against him as bullets were to a black-hole. Still it shattered the tools in his hands, before blowing them into his flesh, which did hurt, and disrupt the entire laboratory to the point that the lights within the glass shell all died, leaving the scene before him, of a smoking crater where a device should have been, lit only by the tinted orange light that came from without.

Purson sighed, and with a tense of his body, forced those painful shards that had been jammed into him by explosion back out and onto the floor. He flapped his hands, then looked up at the two women who were overseeing this most recent activation. One of them was Stella Goetia, who just rolled her eyes and stormed away, whatever words she no doubt said lost to inches of protective glass-like substance. The other was Penemue, and she was leaning forward with her brow against her side of the 'glass', eyes pressed shut with an expression of frustration.

She too likely had things to say, but with the intercom currently in bits, and the door out likely jammed, the two of them were for this moment separated. Purson lifted a shattered chunk of table and used it as a stool, so that he could sit and scrutinize the door and how he could fix it from the inside. He had no intention of spending all night in this little glass prison, though oozing through it was at the moment beneath his dignity. Surely there was a less embarrassing way out of here.

A part of him could rationalize the frustration away. The creation of Paradox Engines was less science than it was art, in that no two of them were ever exactly alike. As far as Purson was aware, there were only a half dozen of them currently active in all of Hell... unless whatever the fuck the Delirium Engine was counted as one as well. Each of them had been created in something of a manic haze by its maker, putting pieces together less by design and more by the subtle tugging of an elusive genius that settled only briefly onto its maker before departing once the Engine was running.

Purson would ordinarily have dismissed that sort of talk as pointlessly flowery poetics. But that was, indeed, exactly what it felt like, when he made the Paradox Engine that Lucifer used to sunder the entire Ring of Betrayal from the rest of Hell, before he in his full muster of might cast that Ring into the Abyss. Now, though, Purson was trying to repeat in cold blood what had come to him last time in desperate, agonized mania.

"Not having a lot of luck, I take it?" a woman's voice snapped Purson's mind back to the here and now, and he darted off of his stool, taking his full height at and glaring at the intruder who had somehow gotten inside the protective shell of the laboratory. A flicked glance showed that Penemue was now pounding on the glass on her end, thin spiderwebs of slow shattering spreading minutely from her blows as she tried to pound her way in.

Given the state of the intruder, she was perhaps prudent in her panic.

The intruder was, to the first and most superficial blush, a human looking woman, albeit with a circular pane of white light framing her head and an extra eye in the middle of her forehead just above her eyebrows. The way she moved caused strange and uncanny ripples with every breath she took, as though reality was fighting especially hard to bear the weight of her atop it, and would rather gladly buck her into nothingness than suffer her presence. And there was something alike to, but not exactly, heat that radiated away from her, a signal of truly immense Angelic power, despite her obviously not being an Angel.

"What insanity is this?" Purson asked, looking her up and down.

"Oh, right, this place is technically quarantined, isn't it? Hold on a moment. That lady up there is starting to get a little bit frenzied," the stranger said, giving him a calming gesture, whereupon she burst into colored smoke, which passed thorough the intact blast-proof glass as though it weren't there. Silent for his confinement, she reformed herself a short distance away from Penemue. Penemue lashed out with a hand casting Heavenly Artillery at the stranger, but the beam of brilliant ruin went straight through the stranger as though she were, as she appeared to be, made of living smoke. The stranger looked down for a moment at her utterly unblemished self, dusting away her blouse and saying something to Penemue. Penemue, love her dearly, looked utterly poleaxed by whatever it was that the stranger said. It was not like the Scriptor to be so expressive, nor so off-balance. She had weathered the unkind attentions of Lucifer with far more aplomb than she was showing now. But now, unlike as then, she had extenuating circumstances.

The stranger finished talking, pointing at a spot somewhere out of sight, allowing Penemue to say something which was obviously and prudently distrusting, before she vanished from the slim slice of the rest of the Palace of Iron that Purson could see at this moment. The stranger tweezed her eyes for a moment, a display of fatigue, before shaking her head, and breaking apart to drift back into Purson's bunker.

"Sorry about that. I had to head off the angel up there before she blew a blood-vessel," she said as she reformed herself. Purson stared at her for a moment, then gently lobbed a mechanical pencil at her. It bounced off of her. "...I'm not a ghost, Purson."

"And yet you behave as one," Purson said. "What are you?"

"I am Gloria Mundi," she said.

"Even I can tell that's a name, not a descriptor," Purson said.

"As for what I am... I'm what happens when a human gets their shit all the way together. But that's irrelevant to the conversation we should be having," Gloria said.

"What did you say to my wife?" Purson asked.

"Where the broken fuse was in the backup intercomm. She'll have it fired up in a minute," Gloria said.

"And how do you know where all of this," he gestured to the destroyed mobile lab around him, "is connected to Princess Stella's power grid?"

"Stachybotrys chartarum," Gloria said. He scowled at her. "She's neglecting weatherproofing her inner walls. That's going to cause a black-mold bloom the next time it rains. I can see anything where life is. And I saw a section of black-mold that got fried by an electrical surge melting a fuse. Clever piece of technology, that thing you're making. One day, somebody will have to explain what it does to me," she gave her head a shake, as though she'd allowed herself to be led off topic. "Anyway. You'll be sprung from this cage shortly."

So she knew living things but not technology. Useful information to have. She didn't know how the 'grounding' lines that had apparently burst were intended to take the vast and terrible forces used to start a Paradox Engine and keep them from bursting in a starburst alike to nuclear detonation. What this woman didn't know gave Purson advantage. As off-balance as both he and Penemue were, any advantage was to be cherished.

"And why exactly have you wafted down into my place of work?"

"Obviously to have this conversation with you," she said, hopping up to sit on the impromptu stool that Purson had abandoned. "I should have guessed you'd be at the last place in Pride that I looked; right next to the fucking front door."

"Who sent you?" Purson demanded.

"I did," she said.

"And why do I sense a terrible Angelic force with you? Have you stolen the heart of a Seraphim?" Purson asked.

"Not a Seraphim," she admitted. Oh, so she had taken something worse... "Don't look at me like that. He gave me his heart of his own volition. See? Still beating," she said, extracting an angel's heart from a pocket, and noting that despite its thoroughly disembodied nature, it was still indeed beating, and glowed with golden light. She tucked the near-impossible thing away again. "I am here in front of you, right now, because I need to use one of those," she cast a thumb over her shoulder at the scrap and ruin of his latest attempt to get a Paradox Engine working.

"...why? As a creature from Outside, it should be ruinous to you," Purson pointed out the obvious. There was a crackle as the intercomm fritzed back to life. Then Purson turned to it, and spoke his wife's name.

"Yes, I'm here. The safety locks are disengaged but the door is physically jammed. I can't move it," she said, sounding as though she were pulling on it even at this moment.

"If the Outsider aids you, it might..." Purson began.

"That thing isn't an Outsider," Penemue's voice said, before letting out a sigh and breathing deep a few times. "It's like a normal human, but deeper."

"I will trust your eyes on this more than my own," Purson said. Even amongst Hexbreakers, not all of those who were the kings of Magic in Hell had the gift of Magesight. Purson was one of the unlucky ones who had to refine other senses into that role. While he could not see raw magic the way that Birah the Spellbinder or even to her lesser degree Penemue could, he could... feel it.

"Look, have you gotten your 'stranger danger' out of your system? Because I can easily move him out there with you if you're not going to try to attack me again," Gloria said.

"...Excuse me?" Penemue said.

"This place is getting boring anyway," she said. Then she hopped down from the stool, took two strides up to Purson, grabbed him, and then Purson felt an extremely strange sensation, as though every atom of his being were being separated not by distance, but by vast swathes of improbability, so that though blinded he could sense all things within a hundred miles of the Palace of Iron, and even smell the subtle shift of the Pride Wall, and lingering traces of Old Purgatory that clung to Pride Ring. It was the strangest sensation he'd ever felt in his life, as outside his reckoning as the pain of having his wings ripped off was agonizing.

And then without so much as a discrete pop, he was standing just outside of the lab bunker, next to Gloria, and in front of Penemue. Penemue nevertheless ran to him and hugged him tightly. Her pregnancy was continuing apace, and she was only now starting to bulge for it. It was a most pleasant feeling, knowing that entangled in this moment of embrace were two long-separated lovers, and the child that they had wanted for so long, all as one.

"Touching. Now, can we talk about Paradox Engines?" Gloria said.

"Why are you so interested in Hellish technology, hyperhuman?" Penemue asked. Well, that was one thing to call her, Purson supposed.

"I coined the term 'Redemptor'," Gloria said with a degree of flippancy.

"Hyperhuman is more apt," Penemue said from Purson's arms.

"And also more misleading," Gloria countered.

Purson finally released his wife, and turned to the Redemptor. "What was it you just did to me?"

"I... you know what? Explaining exactly what I just did would take the better part of a day, and I'm on a bit of a time-crunch here, so just accept that I've got some movement abilities that you don't, and leave it at that," she gave her head a shake. "Paradox Engines. I'm not budging until we have this conversation."

"Why would something like you want to use a Paradox Engine?" Penemue asked.

"In thirty years, the Earth will die, choking on carbon emissions, poisoned by plastic, and burnt to ash. I have a unique ability to prevent that from happening, changing the fates of billions of people, and potentially cancelling the end of the world. I intend to take that chance," Gloria said.

"Attempting to interfere with The Prophecy on such a degree would ordinarily be doomed to failure. But given what we have learned of it," Purson said, recalling how Penemue's 'pen-pals' had related the destruction of God's Testament of History, The Prophecy had changed the calculus of things, "such a feat could in fact be possible. If initiated with proper inertia."

"Good man, thinking on my wavelength," Gloria said. "I know that you're doing this first for Lucifer and second for the bird out there who's beating on things to get her aggression out. I'm simply asking that you allow me to use a fraction of its start-up energy to save billions of human lives and prevent a climate apocalypse on Earth."

"If there were any doubt as to your nature, Redemptor, that would have put it to rest," Penemue said. "Only humans really care about what happens to humans, these days."

"And that's a problem with the entire system, as I see it," Gloria said.

"So far, you've offered me little but an ultimatum," Purson said, still holding Penemue close at his side, regardless of the size difference between they two. "What benefit is it to us? Why should we not simply hand you over to Lucifer?"

"As if you even could," Gloria said. She stared flatly at them, and they stared flatly at her. Her brows lifted for a moment. "Oh! You actually think you have a means to stop me if I wish to leave? That's adorable. You don't. And as for 'ultimatum', I'm not here to bend you over a barrel and make demands. You allow me the Paradox Engine's power, and I'll aid you in its construction."

"...You mentioned a 'time crunch'?" Penemue said, and good catch on her for it.

"I know that Paradox Engines take a fair bit of time to get running, and I can't have a decades-long Sisyphean struggle against the metal; that'd blow past my window. I need a working Paradox Engine that isn't already attuned-to-task before the end of 2025."

"And what happens at the end of 2025?" Penemue asked.

"That, Angels current and former, is my business. Although you'll probably figure it out in a couple of decades," she dismissed the notion. Penemue and Purson shared a glance. Her flip attitude was making it very hard to determine where the pressure points a more skilled negotiator could use would be located. She was just so utterly strange to Purson's eyes. And in that glance he shared with his wife, he could tell she found this human-qua-human every bit as odd as Purson did.

"The energies of a Paradox Engine are not lightly touched. They have been the ruin of Sinners before," Purson began.

"I'm not a Sinner," she said.

"...and I presume that such ruin is a result of the human in them, not the Damnation of them," Purson finished.

Gloria tilted her head for a moment as though she saw something which had surprised her. "You actually give a damn, don't you? You give more than zero fucks what will happen when I use the Paradox Engine to save Earth. Well, color me shocked," Gloria laughed. She turned to Penemue. "You picked a good one. Hold onto him."

"I intend to. Now answer his question," Penemue said. And as Gloria chuckled, the bucking of reality grew from being unsettled shifting to outright rebellion of What Is Real against the presence of the Redemptor, who clasped first one set, then three, then eight sets of hands with fingers laced in front of her, the edges of her fractaling out into somewhere beyond infinity. He could smell the teeming Abyss as though it were right under his nostrils. He could feel the uncanny airs of the Plaza Beyond as though he were standing in them. And all of it swirled around Gloria like an aura of the utterly impossible.

"The Paradox Engine will not hurt me for the same reason the Abyss could not kill God. I am that-which-cannot-be-contained. I am that-which-cannot-be-predicted," Gloria said. "I, Penemue the Scriptor, my Grigori friend... am Paradox Incarnate."

And then the impossible began to pull back, and reality settled, as Gloria no longer leveraged her impossible nature in display, and simply smiled with lips pressed thin at the two Angels, current and former, with a degree of patronization that Purson knew, in this moment, they were deserving of, for nothing of this nature had ever come to Hell before in all Purson's time.

"And I will help you fight your pissing match against God, so long as you help me save my world. Does that sound like a fair deal? Because it's the fairest one either of us are going to get," Gloria finished. And she may have even been right to say so.

"Well... that happened," Husk said.

Rachel, despite her usual unflappability, chose this moment to look modestly mortified.

"I have no idea why I did that," she said, her skin somewhat redder than her hair.

"The crying?"

"Oh, no, I know exactly why that happened. Orgasm can unstopper a lot of repressed emotional goings on," she said.

"And you've been repressing a lot of... crying, I'm guessing," Husk said. He lit a cigar, then after a moment, offered it to Rachel, who was sitting at the edge of the bed, sweaty, beet red and naked.

"You know where I come from," she said, waving the cigar away. More for Husk, then.

"So if it weren't the crying, what's got you all frustrated and embarrassed?" Husk asked.

"You heard what I said," she muttered.

Husk had indeed. 'Don't leave me'. Which was a bit of a strange thing to whisper, considering that the only way the two of them could have been closer in that moment was if you put both in a blender and then fed them into a sausage casing.

He gave that a moment's thought, taking in another puff from his cigar, and gave some thought as to the implications of it. He wasn't an idiot. Idiots didn't last as long as he had in Hell. Well, some idiots did, but Husk liked to think of himself as something of a better breed than them. Until today, Rachel had essentially been bulletproof, unassailable by any emotional means. Never cracking an iron-hard composure to allow something under her skin. But then... well, the last couple of hours had been telling.

And what they told Husk was that she was afraid he'd seen something of her she didn't want seen.

He nodded, pulling himself to sit next to her, idly throwing a blanket 'round their shoulders as they did. Not because it was in any way cold; Summer was continuing to win in the war of seasons, and they likely would have ended up sweaty with a window open even had they not frolicked as they had. Just to give her some feeling of embrasure. Unless you were Husk and utterly out of fucks to give, you always felt most vulnerable when you were naked.

"You think," he said, choosing his words carefully, "that I saw something under your masks."

"Heh," she offered. "You should know better by now. Under my mask, there's just another mask. And under that another one. It's masks, all the way down."

Husk shook his head, looking out the window at the glorious visage of another fucking building across the street. "Y'see? I don't think so. Anybody who's ever claimed that they've got nothin' inside a' them is usually that way 'cause it got pounded into their heads that what was on the outside was the only part a' them that mattered."

"It is the only part that mattered," Rachel countered.

"So why is it when I mention Sam and Phil Junior you get that little smile on your face?" Husk asked, watching how her lips twitched almost despite her at the mere mention of her children. "Face the facts, Rach; you ain't as empty as them fuckwits wanted you to think you were. You got layers and layers of 'masks', that you cling to like a sailor on flotsam, 'cause you think they're all you got. But underneath all a' that shit, there's some part a' you that you've been quietly barricadin' since you were a kid."

"Maybe I should stab you and make sure you're not the Glimpse, talking like that," she chuckled.

"I spend too fuckin' much time around you. You're rubbing off on me," Husk admitted. "Fact is... Rach, you got into Heaven. Whatever's under them masks of yours, it was good enough that when you got put in front of Saint Peter, he decided you get to pass the velvet rope."

"You don't need to butter me up anymore. We just had sex, and I fully intend to have it again," she pointed out.

"Fuckin'..." he said, making a grasping motion with his hands but stopping before anything came of it. "Rachel; you, on some level you ain't wanna talk about, are a good person. Otherwise you'd'a landed down here without a stopover up top."

She made a movement of dismissal, opened her mouth to contradict him, but even she had to admit that his logic wasn't entirely flawed.

"So... what am I then?"

"You," he said, taking a puff on his cigar, "are a social worker."

She gave a snorting laugh at that, as though it'd managed to hit her right where she hadn't been expecting it. She nodded, rubbing at her eyes for a moment.

"Thank you," she said. "For being a good man."

"I ain't a good man. I'm just better than I was before," Husk admitted. Then he paused, realizing just how true what he'd just said was. "Well. Fuck me. I guess I am better than I was before. Maybe that's why I got my dick back, eh?"

"If being a good person was a prerequisite for men having penises, then rapists wouldn't exist," Rachel pointed out.

"You know what I fuckin' mean, goddamn it," Husk said.

"I do," she said, and then leaned into him. "...And I also know that you're trying to get me to accept that what applies to you applies to me. You subtle fiend, you."

"Yeah, well, gotta use what I've got, and I ain't the strongest fuck down here in Hell," Husk admitted.

"What was your name? Before?" she asked.

"...why?" he asked.

"There was a time before you were Husk, the empty shell of the man who landed in Hell. Who was he?"

Husk was caught askew by that, off of his balance. His instinct to lie failed him. And given his current company, his following reflex to deflect seemed... paltry. So he took in another long puff of smoke, and looked back, back to Vegas. Back to Clarksburg. Back to Verdun.

"William," Husk said his own name for the first time in half a century. "That man was named William."

"Impossible was a word that was thrown around rather a lot in the days of my infancy and adolescence. People, be they Angel, Demon, or Human, they all thought that there were limits to reality, and to our ability to interface with it. And maybe, just maybe, in the days before my birth those strictures were real. But my own truncated childhood is proof positive that holding to the belief that some limitations are fundamental to reality is part of why Lucifer fought for a Throne he never had a chance to sit in, why The Second Heresiarch declared himself God, and why Hell fell into Anarchy after not long after Lucifer's obvious, predictable, and inevitable death.

People treating Hell as a Zero Sum Game doomed a lot of people. Some good people, even. But the fact is, the cosmos is broader now than it was in the age of the Demiurge. Just look at what Heaven did to Earth during the Second Heresiarchy; unilaterally and without provocation wiping a city from the face of their world for the sin of having a few Helltech devices providing electricity for them. They were so fixated in the idiotic notion of 'All who are not my allies are my enemies' that they went out and manufactured an enemy which would have been entirely content to be left alone.

Our world was built, by and large, in the Fourth Dynastic Period, by immensely short-sighted individuals. The only time frame which was worse for Hell was the end of the Rotten Kings Period, a period in which some Rings like Wrath were practically unraveled. And The Rotten Kings Period was at least capstoned by the Ascendance of the Paradox Kings. It took Satan thousands of Eons to rebuild what was left of Wrath when he ejected his Predecessor and became the King of Wrath. We are only now entering the Fifth Dynastic Period of Hell, and I don't know what it will become. Some of the old Luciferian Kings are still around. But I have to hope, with all my youthful naivety, that the Fifth will be better than the Fourth. Because from what I recall of seeing it in my infancy and youth... Well, you'd be hard pressed to do worse.

...

That's a rather personal question. Why don't you ask my wife herself? Oh wait, you can't because she abhors you. Ha!

-Tabris, the Song of Freedom