A bit more than a year had passed since Lucifer declared war on Heaven.

In a way, it was something of a miracle that in so small a time compared to the scale of the First War For Heaven, which ended an eon ago, that Octavia would be sitting, secure and without worry, in a military installation that was well underway of spreading throughout Cloud One. Gone were the days where the walls would shudder from time to time as the artillery struck them. Gone were the days, even, when the dread silence would be punctuated by some piece of Hellish machinery being blown up by saboteurs. Now, things were just… steady.

With the harvests out and the planting done, the humans that she'd recruited to do the work of the at-the-moment absent hands belonging to Hell were waiting for another task. It'd be a few months before the Lust and Sloth crops went in. That meant that she had time to work on other possible solutions to the only-seemingly intractable problem that she'd been saddled with.

Handing over food that would have been wasted and left to rot to the Innocent had quieted them down substantially. But it was putting up Viewing Halls that actually made them shut up entirely. It was a strange cross-breed between a movie theatre and TV broadcaster, those things. She'd actually woken up with the idea lingering from a dream, and to her great shock, the notion of building a big fucking room with a projector in it and streaming non-stop old Hellish movies and television actually was a big hit up here.

It wasn't costing much of anything, and was in fact reducing the overhead lost due to rebellion. Every Soul she didn't have to spend was one Soul closer to breaking even, and success in the eyes of the incredibly fickle King of All Hell. But frankly, at this juncture, even if Lucifer hadn't covertly promised a very grim fate for her if she didn't achieve that seemingly impossible goal, she would have worked toward it anyway.

Just because it was a problem she could solve, and nobody would stop her from doing it.

"I trust you do intend to sleep this night?" Ambrosius asked, upon entering the room and taking a look at her.

"Yeah, I will. Just let me get a few more things ready," Octavia said, trying to wave him away. But Ambrosius was not the kind to simply be waved off by the kind of person who'd seen her when she was still all fluffy down and covered in egg-shell. "I'm serious. I've just got a bit more to do."

"A 'bit more' like you claimed when completely rewriting the patrol schedules in District A8?" Ambrosius asked without much emotion, but a clear impugning look in his eyes.

"That had to get done! People were getting dragged off and murdered and every murdered soldier costs money to replace!" She said, stabbing her tabletop with a fingertip.

"Only one of them was your own. While your diligence is a commendable trait to have, it, like your resolve, is something you've somehow turned to sin. Let the others living in Fort Abandon replace their manpower at their cost," Ambrosius said.

"That kind of thinking is why we're still only growing building-by-building" Octavia muttered. Ambrosius had a lofty title, and there were only about twenty six other individuals in all Creation who had the authority to countermand his battlefield orders, but those twenty six others were – with perhaps one or two exceptions – every bit as hard headed as Octavia was doomed. While they were all skilled in the leadership of armies, they had certain ways of thinking. Backwards ways. "If only we had one person who could make everybody just fall in line and follow orders, we'd have over half this Ring by now."

"Cloud, my Domina," Ambrosius said.

"What did I say?" Octavia asked. And Agrippa, seeing her weakness, released a put-upon sigh. Damn you, Ambrosius, and your damnably subtle wiles. "Fiiiine. I'm stopping," she said, but then made a liar of herself by quickly scrawling a few more signatures onto orders before getting up out of her chair. As she did, her vertibrae all popped in chorus as she stood upright for the first time in quite a few hours.

"Splendid," Agrippa said flatly. "And for the record, I believe if there were such an authority as you wish, we would have had this Cloud entirely by now."

"And then we'd be suffering The Victor's Disease dramatically instead of only a little bit," she pointed out, and walked with her Sinner tutor out of the bunker that was her office. Months had made the place homey, but it still was no Palace of Flowers. The distance between her and her parents, be they still in that Palace, or just on the other side of the Hell Portal, grated at her, and threatened to percolate an existential dread. After all, she wasn't even twenty years out of the egg, yet. And here she was, trying to administer an area containing four billion humans.

"That is true. Consolidation is a tricky thing, and doubly so when one's increases are dramatic," Ambrosius said with a nod of his head. "You know what I will say next."

"I know. 'I'm pushing myself to hard', 'I'm not the only one working up here', and 'You haven't talked to another person in weeks'. Well, I just don't have time for that right now!" Octavia complained.

"If you push yourself to a breaking point, then all you've built may crumble in the time it takes for you to recover," Ambrosius coached. "And as to the latter statement you're putting into my mouth, I remind you that you are a politician. You are allowing a vital part of your repertoire to atrophy in favor of other aspects which are already over-developed near-to-the-point of collapse."

"But…" she began.

"And at the same time, I cannot say you ill on this. You've been handed a dreadful task, with ruinous punishment should you fail. Against such deadlines, atrophy, while unpleasant, is allowable." Ambrosius said.

"Is this just going to be the way of things from now on? Constantly be run right to the edge of dissolution because I don't have any other options?" Octavia asked as she stepped aside so a column of Blasphemers could move past the two of them and toward the maintenance area. Even with her eyes merely skimming the machines as they moved, she could see that the column had soaked a level of incoming fire which would have rendered unarmored fighters into mulch. Consistent damage to the left shoulder and left side of the helm, present in many of the armors.

Right, they were having to fight-hand-to-hand against Cherubs and Angels. And those archaic shits still used swords.

Which got Octavia wondering why so few Angels were left-handed, like she was.

"My Domina?" Ambrosius asked.

"Sorry. Got distracted," she said. The fact that the column came back at all was testament that they were using her design properly, and that the damage was spread so uniformly amongst them told her that whoever it was who's symbol was the wheel of legs was actually learning how to use them correctly instead of just handing the things out as status symbols to their favored lieutenants. "Whose were those?"

"Buer, My Domina."

"Wait, Uncle Buer?" Octavia asked.

"Indeed. That was his symbol on their machines," Agrippa said.

"Well that's unexpected," she said. Ambrosius shrugged. "People who aren't either me or you are making smart decisions."

"I shall mark the calendar, my Domina," Ambrosius said. Octavia rolled her eyes, but followed as the path opened up once more with the armored fighters gone back to get those armors repaired. It was getting to the point where Octavia only knew the time of year by the clock on her Hellphone. There didn't seem to be seasons at all up here; Heaven seemed trapped in a perpetual spring, and though today was threatening rain, the rains that fell were never driving or inundating. Always the sort that, in a more ideal Creation, one would be bundled up with a book in front of a fireplace, as the droplets pelted at your window-glass.

Another illusion. A false hope given to a hollow realm.

She still had a hundred things to do today. And not enough hours to do them in. If this was what rulership as a mere Duchess was really supposed to be like, she could not for the life of her understand why Lucifer was so desperate to become the King Of All Creation.

It seemed like just exchanging leisure for frustration on an industrial scale.

But such thoughts didn't do her any good. Nobody cared if she complained, so there was no catharsis in complaint. And the bastards out there would still demand that she do what they wanted her to do, so the time wasted in complaint was exactly that: wasted.

"Alright. Let's see what new disaster I can head off before the sun sets," Octavia said grimly. And Ambrosius followed after her, a crutch against the all-but-inevitable fall to come.


Chapter 40

Rulership


Being the King was great.

It meant that you could tell anybody to do anything, and by the statutes of power and the structure of society itself, they had to fucking go and do it. And it meant that by definition everything you were doing was right, both morally and legally. So if Lucifer decided that he was going to just kill somebody who he didn't like the look of as they crossed his path on the street, then fuck it, it was that dick-head's fault for crossing Lucifer's path.

Such authority was the due right of kings, after all, and Lucifer was a King Above Kings, the Hobbsian-Leviathan brought to life, his body-politic comprised and superior to seven kings of Seven Rings of Hell, and rightfully the heir to the only throne in all Creation that mattered: the throne of God Himself.

"Sick?" Lucifer repeated himself, and Gadreel, who was sitting in this very informal 'interrogation' in clothing more befitting his wife in a kinky mood than a self-respecting Angel. It was universally tight, compressing her, yet open at her back both to allow her wing-spars out and to reveal the Mark of Death tattooed in luminescent inks on her back. Although, to be fair, Gadreel was a Grigori. She was a master of slumming; you had to be to consent to accepting the dick of a human, of all disgusting creatures.

No, Lilith didn't count, and it was different when the cock in question was Lucifer's.

"Extremely," Gadreel said with a nod, shifting her place in the heavily stuffed chair that was one of eight arranged in a circle in this room. Two of them were outsized, built for beings of titanic body-scale. Of those two, one had never been sat in. Of course, this room which shimmered in gemstones that were set covering every wall surface in a multicolored mosaic of precious stones depicting on each of the walls a scene of Lucifer's victory over the Paradox Kings of Hell. Most of them were strongly exaggerated. Lucifer didn't mind.

Maybe the scenery was why Satan never bothered to come here? After all, that old fuck would have to sit across from the image of himself bending the knee to Lucifer. That would likely rankle. Which was why Lucifer arranged the room this way, but still, it annoyed that he never managed to get that barb to land home. At the moment, Gadreel was sitting in the chair that usually was intended for Baphomet, the puppet Monarch of Pride.

"Explain," Lucifer demanded.

"I don't know how much I can explain it," Gadreel admitted. She seemed to avoid looking him directly in the eye, or when she did, to not do so for very long. Lucifer chalked it up to her being properly intimidated by him, not grasping that this was in fact simply a fact of her being. "Only that Michael entered into battle against the Demiurge in a weakened state, and was so depleted in his defeat that he was Sent Vigil. And when he emerged, he actually seemed worse."

"Michael is unraveling? I must be haunting his every waking hour," Lucifer said with a grin.

"You are a topic of frequent discussion," Gadreel said with a nod. "Often using very unflattering terms."

Lucifer let out a laugh in schadenfreude at that. Michael, oh how low you were yet to go. Lucifer knew that even with Destiny apparently thrown out – which had been a surprising thing to hear confirmed from the Mistress of Deathblows – fate would still conspire to put Lucifer across a dueling circle from Michael before o're long. And this time, he would extract every inch of revenge over Michael that the dick-sucking pissant had earned, and repay every insult that had ever been handed to Lucifer a thousand times over in blood.

"If I didn't know better," Gadreel continued, leaning against the arm of the chair and stacking her chin onto the back of her hand, "I would believe that this was some sort of slow-play by Gabriel. To poison Michael in an attempt to weaken him both physically and politically, and to swoop into the void he leaves when he finally dies."

"Michael isn't allowed to die until I say he is," Lucifer said.

"I didn't mean to imply…" Gadreel said, leaning away.

"I know what you meant. But the fact is, the both of us do know better," Lucifer said. "Gabriel has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and all of the charisma of one as well. The only reason that he has any clout up there in that nest of vermin is that he's got the strongest jaws and hardest shell. He's of no significant threat to me, or to Hell. Michael is the real danger. And if his body is degrading, then he might be growing more desperate."

"I wouldn't have seen Michael of a year ago allowing the press into Hell that Gabriel spearheaded. He is changing. And his decision making is changing with him," Gadreel said.

"So it is, Gadreel," Lucifer said. He found that he rather liked Gadreel. Few were those who had the audacity to tell Heaven to go fuck itself as an institution. The first one of those people he'd found, he actually bothered marrying. And more importantly than that, Gadreel hadn't fucked around and snuck in like a rat thinking she could evade Lucifer's eyes like Penemue had. No, Gadreel just showed up, asked for asylum, and then started vomiting up information to justify giving that asylum.

In a way, it was like having a new 'Old Follower', those who saw that he was the right horse to back in the metaphorical race of Heaven's Leadership back before the first War For Heaven went hot. She was like Stella in a lot of ways, her femininity the least relevant of them. They both had been badly done by the institution of Heaven, and decided that it was better to stand by the Devil Himself than stand one more day under the sickly light of an insensate God.

"Was there anything else you needed?" Gadreel asked. "Because, and I realize that this is shooting my own foot, but there's only so much insight I can give you about Heaven, now that it's doors are slammed shut in my face. Politics might move with glacial slowness up there, but it does move."

"There is," Lucifer said, getting to his feet and dusting off the tails of his jacket when he did. Not that there would be any dust here. The Staff were intended to keep this place spotless, and they obeyed on price of pain. He offered her a hand, to rise. She took it, a suspicious look on her face, and rose to stand also. Gadreel was short, for an Angel, somewhat shorter than he was, all told. "I've got a job for you. A test, if you would."

"What kind of test?" Gadreel asked.

"The kind of test to see what kind of judgement you have, what kind of mettle," he said. She gave a querulous glance upward, and Lucifer shook his head. "Don't be absurd. No, I'm not sending you back up there where you have a chance to run if you actually are as untrustworthy as some people are saying you are," Lucifer didn't put much faith in those people though; they were just afraid that if she was brought into their number, the slice of the pie of Hell's power granted to them would be rendered smaller as she reaped some section of it for herself. "No, I have something I want to figure out more locally. Something to see if you have the intellect to be of use to me, as well as the technique. Because anybody can have technique. I need more from my Ars Goetia."

"I didn't think that the Ars Goetia could even gain new members at this point," Gadreel said with a confused look.

"They can be whatever the fuck I want them to be," Lucifer said. After all, apparently they could have kids now. That was weird, them being angels and all. He leaned in on her a bit. "I've got a little situation I need you to solve. There's an aristocratic family down in Envy that's getting a bit up-jumped. Making claims to be on a level with my illustrious kind. Now, ordinarily, the answer to that is simple; give them a slap and tell them that I decide who's powerful. But today? I think I'm going to do something a little unconventional."

Lucifer snapped his fingers. There was a long pause. He then turned and glared at the door. "Come in," he ordered. Then and only then did the doors open, revealing the heavily scarred imp that served as his voice in Hell, entering as he hung up a call to someone who didn't matter in the grand scheme of Hell. The Proxy then turned to Gadreel, who looked upon the imp with confusion and a bit of disdain, as was appropriate when dealing with imps. "So you are going to Envy, and you're going to take a good look at them. You're going to see if this 'phantom legion' that I've heard whispers about is real. And if it is, I want you to report everything there is to know about it. Manpower. Training. Veterancy. Logistical train."

"You want me to wipe 'em out when we're done?" the odious imp asked, making a throat-slashing gesture.

"Oh, quite the contrary. I want you to spill as little blood as possible today. Information, not extermination," Lucifer said. He left it unsaid that he was testing not only Gadreel's ability to solve problems without killing fools, but whether he could trust the fetid aristocracy of this place to raise more forces than were asked of them and have those forces be worth a damn. "And to that end, you're going to have a four foot tall, scarlet shadow. You'd best hope that your numbers match up with his. Proxy," Lucifer turned to the imp. "Don't get her killed with your eager ways."

"I promise nothing," the imp offered.

"And lovely Gadreel, if you come back and he doesn't, I assure you your time in Hell will be very short-lived. Am I making my self exceptionally clear?"

"Yes," Gadreel said.

"Yes what?" Lucifer prompted.

"Yes King Lucifer?" Gadreel said, obviously still tentative.

"Close enough for a newcomer," Lucifer waved it away, deciding that he was in too good a mood for other reasons to bother having even a brief tantrum. He pointed to the imp. "Do I need to tell you my expected timeframe?"

"Nope. Come on, tin-top. We've got a buncha fuckin' mooks to snoop," the imp said, and pulled the book that was given to him from his jacket, only to have Lucifer tut loudly and make the portal himself. It wasn't that he didn't trust the imp not to fuck up a simple portal but… frankly he didn't trust the imp not to fuck up a simple portal.

"Wait, we're leaving now?" Gadreel asked.

"Yuh-huh. What, did you think I like fuckin' around while working for him?" The Proxy gave a head jerk in Lucifer's direction. "The sooner we start, the sooner we're done, and the sooner we can get back to the shit we actually wanna do."

Gadreel turned a confused look at Lucifer, no doubt asking without words how Lucifer could countenance such a strange and unorthodox minion to serve as his Voice throughout the Rings of Hell. The truth of that was remarkably simple; the sheer utility of somebody who did what you told them to do without more than quiet bitching and with remarkable speed more than made up for any peccadilloes of crude behavior or lack of etiquette. Frankly, to some extent, Lucifer found him amusing.

"I'll expect you back not longer than two days from now," Lucifer demanded, as the Proxy moved behind Gadreel and began to shove her toward the portal to the salt-sprayed shores of the isles of Envy. She just stared with confusion and alarm.

"Yup, be back in eight hours. Got it," The Proxy said, as he finally got the angel up to the threshold, pausing before crossing it. "Oh, and we're gonna need this to go to Sloth, not Envy; they moved that shit during the whole 'Angels in Hell' bullshit."

"How would you even know that?" Lucifer demanded.

"You tell me to know things, so I know things," Blitz sounded mildly annoyed saying that, as though his aptitude were being impugned. And strangely enough, it kind of was. Not that Lucifer could care. That must have been what that call was about, doing some research while waiting in that hallway. Well, whatever. Lucifer puffed out a chuckle and switched the destination, no longer showing the salt-sprayed cliffs of Envy but instead the rolling pink hills of Sloth. "Fantastic. Let's go lick some ass!" he declared, to which Gadreel turned a helpless look at Lucifer. He just shooed her away. They passed through the aperture and Lucifer closed it so close behind them it almost clipped the imp's tail.

With anybody else, Lucifer would have claimed the Proxy demanding a sixth of the time offered to him as a flex and as an attempt at overpromising. But with this particular Proxy, Lucifer just shrugged and made a note to be ready for the two of them to show up, possibly covered in blood despite his instructions, some time between sunset and midnight with the job done and a bunch of idiots dead. That was the utility of that imp as Proxy. His path always reduced the net number of idiots in Hell.

Well, with that out of the way, his schedule was wide open. He pondered, then pulled out his Hellphone. "Lily, my succulent candy-drop?"

"Yes Lucy?" Lilith answered on a single ring, which was appropriate.

"I'm bored," Lucifer said.

"Oh, that's terrible," she cooed.

"Yeah, I know. Do you want to drink a gallon of LSD and watch movies until a field of squares make a circle?" Lucifer asked.

"A gallon?" Lilith confirmed.

"Yup. I keep it in a milk jug for situations like this," Lucifer said.

"Well, I think I know exactly the picture to watch," she said. "I'll be home soon."

"I expect you to look ravishing when you do," Lucifer demanded.

"When do I not?" Lilith asked smokily. And she was right to. In fact, the only time she hadn't been the stereotypical bombshell was a three week period toward the end of her pregnancy for Charlotte. By that point, the strain of her body's changing and the sheer hormonal effects had made it so she barely had the energy to get up and dressed each morning. While she was still Lilith, she was a Lilith with broken-out skin, bags under her eyes, and her hair hung lank.

Lucifer had expected to be disgusted to see the human he'd chosen for himself like that. For some reason he hadn't been. He still didn't understand that.

Well, enough following the mad rabbit of his random thought processes. He tucked his Hellphone away, and went to the Fun Room to grab his jug of LSD. Never let it be said that a King ever had to suffer boredom with grace.


"For once, I have to disagree," Shrapnel said with a slow shake of his head. "For all I appreciate the gesture you've offered to me and those like me, if you keep spending money on emancipating them without a plan on how to uplift them in the aftermath, you've not actually done much to help them."

"They're not property any longer. That's an improvement," Loona pointed out, seated as she was in the back booth of Dennys. Unlike IMP who had a palace as their temporary headquarters, or the teenaged wizard imp who ran her business out of an RV, Loona was well situated juggling her cavalcade of various enterprises without any fixed location to do the grunt-work from. She'd started Last Chance out of a van. And while warehouses were useful, they weren't meeting places. Not like The Hound Booth of Dennys had become.

"Slave owners have a financial incentive to keep their slaves to at least a floor level of health and wellbeing. A dead slave is a financial loss. A dead free Hound costs a slave owner nothing," Shrapnel pointed out. She glared at him. "I realize you don't like reducing our kind to numbers. The fact that you so hate it is what makes you unusual. But in this case, it's the wrong tactic, and the enemy is immune to it. It's like using a petro-flamethrower against imps; a waste of perfectly good napalm."

"I can't just leave them in chains," she muttered.

"And I'm not asking you to. I'm asking you to ensure that once those chains are broken, they have somewhere to go, and a living to make which doesn't benefit the slave-holding Hellish elite," Shrapnel said.

"What kinds of jobs can they even do?" Maelstrom asked, as he was at her side during these meetings pretty regularly. And doubly so today, because Dad was stuck doing Lucifer's bitch-work, so there could be no IMP clients dealt with.

"That varies by the Hound," Shrapnel admitted. "But there is one way to ensure that a large number of even minimally educated workers can earn legitimate money outside of bondage," Loona gave a 'get on with it' gesture. "Assembly lines."

"You want me to open a factory?" Loona asked.

"Making what?" Maelstrom asked a valid question.

"What is the most important expendable good being depleted in the modern day?" Shrapnel asked.

"Probably something made of plastic," Loona pointed out.

"Weapons, girl," Shrapnel said with a tone of dismay. "There are hundreds of legions, comprising millions of soldiers, who are still using fucking spears. If our people were to set up infrastructure and provide even a mediocre firearm at decent price, we would become an economy unto ourselves for years as the Legions switch over."

"And what's to stop Lucifer from just 'nationalizing' us in the name of Hell's Defense?" Cookie piped up, which surprised Loona, because she'd been sitting there silently and almost beneath notice this entire time.

"Because the first time he tries it, we steal the machinery and then burn the factory down," Shrapnel said.

"That won't save us from his punishment," Cookie pointed out from her spot at the edge of the booth.

"We have to do something, or we become nothing. There is no time for hedging bets anymore," Shrapnel said.

"I think Mordecai is right," Maelstrom said, with a somewhat begrudging tone. He even seemed to wilt a bit when Loona turned a glance to his corner of the booth the were all sitting at, but he didn't lose all of his backbone, not quite. "It's hard to lose money making weapons during a war. And if we can make any useful amount of money doing it, then it'll just go back into freeing more of our people, giving them homes and ensuring they have jobs."

"A virtuous cycle," Cookie said with a nod.

"Why do I get the feeling that you've all been putting this in motion behind my back when I wasn't paying attention?" Loona asked, narrowing her eyes at Shrapnel. The grey-muzzled Hound gave a shrug.

"Because I have been. At least, with the preliminaries," he said. He pulled out his Hellphone and leaned over the discarded Bacon Bucket that they had opened the meeting by decimating, to show her a section of Imp City with old factory buildings which hadn't been damaged to the point of deconstruction. "There's a few old structures that are being sold for pennies on the Soul because of the amount of work it'll take to tear them down to build something new. And this one," he pointed at one in particular, "is asking even less, because that building," he pointed to the factory next to it in the picture, "is actually a Church of Satan which won't sell for any amount of wealth under the sun."

"Why would I want to invest in a building I can barely repair and can't expand?"

"Because it's asking for forty Souls, and its utility-pile is intact, for five thousand square feet of workshop space," Shrapnel said. "I could buy this property out of what I have in my pocket. But that'd be impetuous and putting the cart a few miles ahead of the horse."

Loona gave it thought, and turned to Maelstrom and Cookie, who were both seated on the same side of her. Cookie was something of a success story of the Emancipated Hounds. No longer a trembling wreck, she quickly adopted something of an office-core look and happily started doing accounting for Last Chance, which freed Loona from doing yet another boring, annoying, and frustrating aspect of the job she was heading. And Maelstrom? Well, that was an as yet unexplained miracle of itself, one that apparently the Radio Demon was going to come back for one day. She still found herself considering ways to be able to kick that Sinner in the dick if he ever tried it, but the fact was, she may have been in his league, but in a fight, she was far from being on his level.

"I'm guessing one of you has an idea of what we're actually gonna build there, and how we're gonna get that all sorted?" Loona asked, as this whole thing was quickly becoming a foregone conclusion.

"As for what? Yes, of course," Shrapnel said. He reached into the satchel he'd brought with him and unfolded a paper schematic, laying it over greasy platters and hold down one corner of it with an abandoned bucket atop the table, not seeming to care that it was becoming translucent in places as the grease infiltrated the paper. And the gun on the schematic, both its finished and broken down aspects, was… simple. Wooden stock and grip, every part of it pressed from steel instead of milled, it looked ugly and ancient, a tool from a previous century, which it absolutely was. The thing was simple, and from the math scribbled down one side, it could be made for about 17 Souls worth of materials. It wasn't like the steel had to be high-quality or a rare alloy, nor that the wood needed to be anything better than Qliphoth scrap.

"Who would even want this?" Loona asked. The guns that some legions had would be able to vomit forth a hundred rounds just in the time it took this damned thing to reload its magazine of eight.

"People who are upgrading from spears and swords," Maelstrom said, in realization. He gave a laugh and a smile. "We don't need to actually be good. We just need to be better than awful, and better than nothing."

"Exactly, boy," Shrapnel said, thumping his fingertips on the rifle he was offering. "And this isn't going to be our only product. Just the one that gets us established. After all, there are by my estimating about eight million Legionaries who need to enter the current millennium of weaponry. And that puts a cap on how many of these guns we can reasonably sell before we need to make a better product so that they'll buy that, to replace these," he stabbed the schematic with his fingernail one last time.

"And the entire time we're doing that, we're providing weaponry for our people first," Maelstrom said.

Loona was half going to ask 'what?' and have him explain, but she started to see his reasoning. A factory that made weaponry was a factory that had a bunch of guns just sitting around. If anybody came to fuck with them, they would not find the factory a sitting duck, but instead a bunker covered on all angles with guns that they could fire forever from within.

"How much is this going to cost to set up?" she asked, because it rankled that she divert money from emancipation to other projects even temporarily.

"I've looked over his numbers, and they won't cripple us," Cookie said. "Can I presume the first guns will be made by hand and without the expensive machines?"

"If they have to," Shrapnel said.

"Then we could have that place open by next Sunday, and have the first guns ready by the Sunday after," Cookie said.

"The machines will cost a pretty penny, and nobody's gonna extend a loan to a Hound," Maelstrom noted.

But that was the thing. She wasn't just 'a hound'. She was the daughter – adoptive or not – of the Proxy of Lucifer. And more than that, she was the daughter of a Proxy whose own financial enterprises were already proven to produce a lot of money. Last Chance Pharmaceuticals was already outstripping its parent Immediate Murder Professionals Inc in the amount of money that she could squeeze out of it at the end of each financial quarter, which itself was utterly dwarfed and eclipsed by the monumental scale of the money which was constantly in motion as products were bought, sold, rebought, repackaged, and resold in Hell, before being transferred into gold, which was being restamped, repackaged, and resold to the Human World to start the process all over again.

IMP had a cash-flow, barring special injections like the money to kill Birch or the ridiculous double-bounty for that Angel that the ex-Innocent had given them, that vanished without making a ripple into the churn of Last Chance. And since Dad wasn't exactly financially astute, and was so incredibly soft-handed with the money her company was making under the umbrella of the Immediate Murder Professionals Group that he didn't actually seem to realize he could extract any of her money for his own benefit. Whether that made him a bad businessman, or just a doting father, she couldn't decide. And it didn't matter, because it all worked to her favor. Her money, in the eyes of the books of Hell's Finances, was the Proxy's money.

"They'll extend one to me," Loona realized. "Especially if I remind them who my father is."

Shrapnel barked a laugh at that. "I'm not used to nepotism being used to my favor. I could get used to it," the old Hound said.

Loona stood up, and raised her cup of Fuck You This Is Rootbeer in a toast. "Then let's pull the trigger on this bitch. All in favor of branching out into Last Chance Armaments and Munitions?"

"To a well armed Hellhound society," Shrapnel said, raising up a hip-flask to match her toast, and Cookie and Maelstrom likewise raised their cups.

This, like emancipating the slaves at the auction house, would cause waves that Loona would regret later, and would lead to her second grisly death.


The jobs that were coming through in this wet and cool winter of Pride Ring were mostly bitch-work, not requiring even Uller's level of mastery to complete. And ordinarily that would have meant that, as shit always rolled down hill, the responsibility would slough off of Krieg and leave Uller doing something beneath his capacity. But time had revealed another option, in her step-father.

Bart was a decent man. He'd made Mother quite happy for many years, and even now was stepping up to the metaphorical plate to raise not only his own children, but his step children, his newborn son, and the silently adopted Prideling get orphaned by war taken in by Des. Most days that took up all of Bart's time, just looking after tiny imp children. It wasn't like there was a handy daycare to dump them anymore, and even if there were, the trauma of having to dig Desdemona, Deia, Vee, and Epp out of the basement of IMP's old building had awakened a protective streak in him.

It seemed that trauma was the only constant to be expected for an imp in Hell. Well fuck you, to whatever authority declared that so. Krieg would build a Hell where trauma would be spread equally to all, not clustered unfairly onto the narrow shoulders of the impish race.

And no, she was not being pessimistic in believing that fairly apportioning of the inevitable trauma of existence was the best that all could hope for. Fuck you too.

Needless to say, on such days as Mother wasn't here at the RV/Office, Bart filled in the gaps. August and Victoria were already enrolled in a Killgrave School. In that alone, they had more structure and hope for advancement than the fools of Nuckelavee had declared fit for the likes of Krieg. When Vee aged up, she'd join them. It was becoming essentially A Known Thing that if an imp with the Surname Miller who's descended from Tilla of Cruac wants a spot for a kid, they fucking get it. It had only taken perfunctory intimidation on Uncle Blitz's part to see his nibblings into that school. It seemed to please him that he now had weight he could throw around. One day, he would even learn how much weight it was, and how far he could throw it.

"Steady, Bart," Krieg said, watching the weave of thaumaturgy that he was manipulating over the squat Succubus with impish red skin and a fuzzy cloud of black hair that her horns barely made it out of. Somebody had cursed her with fertility, so that any time she had sex with one of her kind she'd get impregnated. Considering that was usually considered a blessing, it spoke to the oddity of the Concubus Fiend-Clade.

"I am keeping steady," Bart said, his snake-like eyes narrowed as he did his work unraveling the 'blessing' and allowing the Succubus to fuck freely once more. As far as 'curses' go, this one was fairly benign, more annoying than ruinous. Thus why it was left in the hands of her stepfather. And though he was taking about thrice as long as Krieg to do it, he was getting it done. Finally there was an inaudible snap, as one of the most important twists of the magic finally gave way, and the entire curse faltered and dissolved.

"Huzzah," Krieg said flatly. She turned to the lust-fiend who shared the 'office' of the RV with them, sitting on the edge of the table because even for a fiend this particular Succubus wasn't much taller than Mother was. "Now the standard warnings apply; reproductive blockers for the first week while the curse finishes fading, layered as possible to prevent undesired quickening. After the week, you should be back to your usual self, and may fuck as you please."

"Really? That didn't feel like nothin'," The Succubus said.

"I assure you, it was in fact, not 'nothin', but something, and likely the reason you had to have your last three abortions. It had been on there for more than a year, after all," Krieg said.

"Solomon you shithead," the Succubus said. She pulled a credit card out of her substantial cleavage, and slapped it against the device Krieg held up. She still knew she was going to have to wash the thing once this woman left. "Do you do revenge shit?"

"Considering your card was... declined, not on your budget. Cash, or I put the curse back onto you," Krieg said, staring unhappily at the woman. The Succubus bitched and growled, but considering Bart, for all his retiring nature, at least looked the part of a threatening figure, she rummaged through her pockets until she pulled out the several hundred Souls that the procedure cost. And exactly as Krieg had feared, they were all in ones and fives, and most of them were wet and stank of ejaculate. "Great. Next time you come back, ensure you're not living with an empty bank account. I shan't accept spunk-money twice in a row from the same client."

"You really need to get laid, woman. It'd loosen up that ass of yours," the Succubus groused as she left the RV and went out into the rain.

"Is it wise to make enemies out of your clients?" Bart asked.

"I am not going to leaf through money that is stuck together by dry spunk. I have more dignity than that," she said, shifting the Whore Bowl with the money that the Succubus had put into it under the faucet and turned it on cold. "And lessons need to be taught. This humiliation will be on her mind the next time this 'Solomon' curses her, and next time I can simply accept her at-that-point functioning card."

"...I'm going to have to count that money, aren't I?" Bart asked.

"You understand your place! How lovely," Krieg said.

"That's a lot of cheek to the man who raised you and taught you all the magic you know," Bart said.

"You half-raised me," Krieg pointed out. "And I know far more magic than that which you taught me, now. While I appreciate what you'd done for my mother in her most vulnerable years, you are the low rung on my corporate totem pole, so spunk-money you must abide."

Bart grumbled, but rose and got to work. Most would have been agog at the dynamic between them, that the stepfather would be obeying the under-aged stepdaughter, but the fact was, Bart was Cruac to his bones. Matriarchy was a fundamental aspect of his world view. And more than that, despite the fact that he was her stepfather, he had only been slightly older than Krieg was now when he was paired off with Mother. He was more a contemporary of Moxxie and Millie Rough, than he was of Mother or Blitz, and for him, it was obvious that any man would answer to any woman Stationed in Thaumaturgy.

"Is there a reason you've been foisting such miserable work onto me for the last while?" Bart asked, as he started to unstick the bills from each other and let the effluvium wash away.

"I treat you as I've always treated you," Krieg said.

"No, before you treated me with a least a bit of… well, not respect, but camaraderie. That we were all stuck in the same shit-pile together," Bart said. He turned that snake eye to her again, not angry, but saddened. "But ever since I got back up here… it's different. You're different. Stronger, yes, but… angrier. Crueler, even."

"The price of living in Pride, I'm afraid," Krieg said.

"I didn't choose to get paired with your mother," Bart said, a shocking swerve in the conversational direction. "And I didn't choose to get paired with Des after they took me away from our children. I just did what I had to. Just like anybody would, in those circumstances."

"I am aware of the injustice and foulness of Nuckelavee's paradigm," Krieg said.

"So why are you blaming me for your mother's unhappiness?" Bart asked. Krieg blinked at him, and only at that point realized where he was coming from. She had been, hadn't she? Not on a strictly conscious level, but the anger was there, at seeing Mother, with whom Krieg was even still exceptionally close, so bitter and unhappy despite the object of her desires being in the same room as her.

And when she realized that failure of thinking on her own part, she then understood the failure of thinking happening everywhere else. "Mother thinks that you have put her aside for a 'better imp'," Krieg said. "And that hurt her dearly, as you were one of the very few happy things that happened to her in a very unhappy time."

"I didn't have a choice…" Bart began.

"I know that. And consciously, she knows that also," Krieg cut him off. She faced the only somewhat older man. "But in her heart, she still wants you in her bed as well as in her life more generally. Mother may have a stoic face the likes of which usually graces old and weathered slaves, but I'm not blind to her desires. And as a man, you should not be either."

"I can't believe I'm getting this talk from you, of all people," Bart muttered under his breath.

"Did we or did we not work together to raise all of Mother's young children in your time living in our barracks?" Krieg demanded.

"You weren't even six!"

"I was nearer six than you are to thirty," Krieg pointed out, and the Betrayal Imp gave a sigh at that. "That is how imp families work everywhere that isn't that shithole in Lust. Or also not in the vast grasslands of Wrath, but they are mutations that stretch my mind to the edge of insanity," Krieg allowed. She drew Bart's eyes back to her own. "Imps throughout all of Hell are communal. We raise our families as a tribe, protect our own. And monogamy is a laughable concept in the face of tribe, family, and clan."

"The Roughs manage to make it look easy," Bart said with a shake of his head, and a glance-ceremonial toward Pentagram City, to the imps in question.

"Well, the Roughs are lunatics who have such power within themselves that they are a tribe unto themselves, and can raise their children however they please," Krieg said. And Krieg could respect that, even if she did envy it. "Outside of the Sietches, a cluster of spawn is raised by however many imps injected into that cluster, and whoever bothers to care to look to them. Polygamy isn't illegal for imps, Stepfather!"

Of course, the laws on polygamy existed to simplify inheritance, and according to the laws, imps could never naturally possess anything worth passing down to a new generation. They were, now and everywhere, a loophole in an otherwise matrimonially singular Hell. Other powerful Devourers, Consumers and Mutants could flout the law, but for imps, there was no law to flout.

"Are you seriously asking me to seduce your mother?"

"For the good of her heart and for the good of my sanity, yes!" Krieg said. "It's obvious you still fancy her. And Mother would likely ride you to death if something didn't stop her. So go to her and end this fog of juvenile eyelash-batting that has gathered in my proxima!"

Bart leaned back, getting a thoughtful look on his face. Krieg slapped her hands together like a gunshot, startling him.

"Now, you procrastinating dolt! Pursue my mother romantically this minute!" Krieg said.

"You were always such a weird kid," Bart said, a smile pulling at his mouth.

"Weird children become glorious adults. And if I recall, you were a very normal child," Krieg said. Bart stared at her flatly.

"Well if you're going to insult me, then I'm going to leave," he said, but his tone was far less snippy than the words implied. Krieg followed, dangling out of the door in the after him as he quickly jogged toward the building Mother still lived in, using a broad hand to try to shield some part of his head from the rain.

"You'd better be going straight to Tilla! Or the next conversation we have will be even more horrifying!" Krieg promised loudly. Bart missed a step, but then continued forward without glancing back.

"...horrifying how?" a Sinner with an angler-fish Aspect asked.

"Do you really want an in-depth exploration of a middle-aged she-imp's sex life?" Krieg asked the Sinner waiting for her professional attention.

"...not really?" the retiring looking fish-human offered.

"Then kindly shut the fuck up about it. Next in line!" she said, looking with some pleasure at the decently long line of people standing in the rain waiting for her attention with them. The sinner tried to go in, but a muscle-bound lizard-Sinner flattened the fish-man against the side of her office/domicile, and strutted past. Krieg just shrugged. It didn't matter who was next, as long as somebody was. She had enough things on her mind, considering the state of Mother's pining, that she didn't want to add 'financial destitution' to the issues that she was going to have to deal with. And a steady flow of work ensured a steady flow of money. She pulled out her Hellphone and sent a text for Uller to finish up whatever he was working on in the trailer and join her. With the lowest rung on the ladder kicked out, she would have to replace it with the next lowest rung.

By the Black Blood, it was nice to have rungs below her.


"In terms of criminality, there's plenty to go around," Delicious said, sitting forward at the table and the map of the local neighborhoods that was stretched across it. True to Angel Dust's proclamation, the gaunt Succubus did in fact need to get very drunk and have some group-sex in order to pull herself off of death's door. And in the weeks since her arrival at the Hotel, she had been careful not to allow herself so close to Carnal Starvation. Today, she managed to be neither drunk nor hungry, so she was doing her job with uncommon clarity.

Of course, Charlie had to hand it to this former-Bordertown-Reeve. Even drunk she did her job as well as some Peacekeepers did sober. And when she was both sober and fed, that just showed how good at her job she had the potential to be.

"I thought I was serving as a good example to people," Charlie bemoaned, looking at the marks that Truly was making on the building map, each one denoting a different criminal element that was tucked up under her protective umbrella.

"The problem is one of perverse incentives," Rachel said, seated next to Truly. Whereas the Succubus seemed immune to the cold, still wearing a microbikini with a Spellwoven duster-coat over it, Rachel had bundled up against even the marginal chill of a typical Pride Winter under a thick sweater and a jacket over it. Vaggie, also present, wore her typical dress of red blouse and grey skirt that hung to below the knee. Despite the fact that even an implication of a word would see Charlie buy half of Greed for Vaggie's pleasure, she refused to update her wardrobe, even after three years here at the Hotel. Maybe it was a Sinner thing, to want to stick to your old clothes.

Or maybe it was just a Vaggie thing.

"It's what I've been telling you for a while, Hon," Vaggie said, pointing at the street on the edge of New Purgatory which, despite having none of the outward trappings, according to Truly Delicious had become something akin to a red-light district. "There's a bunch of soldiers who we're keeping to a pretty strict level of professionalism; soldiers either blow off steam through sex, or through violence, and I am doing all I can to tamp down on one of those, while Cain does the other."

"So are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Rachel asked. Truly looked across the table inside the dining area of Pascal's Mugging – which was easily the fastest business to get its feet back under it. With the denizens of the building next door now also dead, the business bloated into its bones, expanding the dining area to a room that could be hired for 'private affairs', such as the strategy meeting that Charlie was running. It was certainly less claustrophobic than trying to cluster them all in front of her desk in the tiny office within the Hotel itself, and the Mugging had really good coffee. For Hell, anyway. Truly said that the Human World had coffee that could put even this to shame, to which Rachel and Vaggie agreed without prevarication.

"Are you thinking about making it An Official?" Truly asked.

"I was thinking that, this, being Hell, likely has some mechanism by which one can legalize and commercialize the running of sex-workers. Brothel-making, basically," Rachel said.

"Yeah, of course," Truly said as though it were the simplest thing in the world.

"Recall that Heaven has no commerce, and that Earth is still shackled to several millennia of sexual hang-ups," Rachel said flatly. "On Earth, the thought of running a brothel as an above-board business is utterly beyond the pale in most nations."

"Well, I'm proud to say that Hell is a bit more progressive," Charlie said with a slightly smug smile. Just slightly. It was nice knowing that Hell managed to get something right that the Human World hadn't.

"I know. It's ridiculous, but I can work with ridiculous," Rachel said. She pointed at the clustering of sex-workers Truly had marked out. "If we can get them to incorporate under a protective commercial structure, it'll reduce the knock-on crime of unregulated prostitution – the drug-addiction, violence, and trafficking – and serve to serve as both an outlet to the soldiers holding the neighborhood together, and an excuse to close up the grey-market in the region."

"The what?" Charlie asked.

"Oh, there's a lot of shit running around this neighborhood," Delicious said, leaning over – exposing copious bare cleavage – to note out a number of buildings. "I'm pretty sure that there's a H8 transport center in that building there. That shit isn't a puppy-dog drug like krokodil; H8 ruins people. We should get it out of here before it starts to poison the whole district."

"You're not going to get any disagreement out of me," Vaggie said, and then all three women turned toward Charlie.

"What?" she asked.

"Do you have anything to add?" Rachel prompted.

"No, this all makes sense. I don't want new drug habits forming where I'm trying to get rid of existing ones," Charlie said. Truly gave a nod.

"So how loud am I allowed go get in evicting them?" she asked.

"Excuse me?" Charlie asked.

"H8 traffickers tend to get high on their own supply; its why it's not useful to arrest them. They tend to die of withdrawals and get replaced by new traffickers on the quick," Delicious said. "I'm asking how much noise you're authorizing in me kicking their asses out."

"...how loud do you think it's going to get?" Charlie asked, dread creeping into her voice.

"That would depend on who you send," Rachel said. Truly turned to her. "I might be able to convince Husk to help you. Between the two of you, it'd just be a call to the Meat Wagons once you're done dropping bodies."

"Wait, I didn't say anything about massacring people!" Charlie said waving her arms broadly.

"How else do you intend to oust a nest of drug-pushers who have their fight-flight reflex chemically locked to 'fight'?" Delicious asked. She stared for a moment. "I'm serious. Do you have a better way of dealing with punch-drunk lunatics on stimulants? Because I'd love to fucking hear it."

"It's just… this feels like enacting a purge," Charlie said, trying to calm things down before they went too far.

"It is," Rachel said. Charlie's eye twitched as she shot a look at the former human.

"Some people need to be purged," Vaggie said with a weary tone. At least she wasn't being enthusiastic about the concept of signing death-warrants to the people in the community. That might have outright broken Charlie's heart. And despite herself, Charlie found herself nodding. Because this was exactly what Sam had said about his place in Creation. For somebody like Charlie to build up something good, wholesome, and resilient, there has to be somebody like Sam, or as instantiated by this meeting, Sam's mother, who pushed for the burning out and scouring of the rotten, the corrupted, and the intractably compromised.

"No collateral damage," Charlie finally decided on the order that she could at least stomach. Delicious was nodding, but Charlie pushed herself to her feet and loomed over the map. "I'm serious. If so much as one bullet nicks one homeless guy a block away because of this, I swear to Dad…"

"Charlie… it's okay," Vaggie said, rounding the table and taking Charlie's hand. And having Vaggie did calm her frustrated anger, but not as much as she would have liked. She still found herself seething in outrage. But the outrage wasn't at any of the women here. It was at the situation itself. At a Hell which took every moment's inattention to grow worse as she was trying actively to make it better.

"Trust me, I know how to root-out termites," Delicious said. "And believe me when I say I like the idea of 'no collateral damage' every bit as much as you do. I didn't become the Reeve of Black Tooth out of a desire to see my neighbors turned into art-installations by junkies with shotguns."

"Then do it. Do it and do it right," Charlie said. She finally sat down, and Vaggie returned to her own chair, which she nevertheless scooted closer to Charlie's. "Alright. One problem to be handled. What else is going wrong?"

"War materiel is being stolen from the stockpile," Delicious said, making a note on the back-yard area of the Hotel where the soldiers kept their stuff.

"Fuck," Vaggie muttered. "That's a me-problem, isn't it?"

"How is Roth doing?" Rachel asked, pausing from dialing somebody on her Hellphone. Likely Husk, all things considered.

"Still getting used to his replacement bits," Vaggie said. "Frankly it's a miracle that he survived all that at all. Furies are tough bastards, but they've got limits, and being torn in half is pretty close to that limit."

"It's good we didn't lose him," Rachel said, sitting back in her seat and finishing placing the call. "Replacing him would have taken time and resources that now we won't have to."

"Does she always talk about people in terms of money?" Delicious asked with a slightly worried look and a low-pitched tone so that Charlie would hear it but Rachel wouldn't.

"Usually?" Charlie answered. There were some things about Rachel which would likely outlast Hell itself, and her ability to do the calculus of war on living people was likely going to be one of them.

"Beyond that, we've got a bunch of squatters in… these buildings," Delicious said, marking numerous buildings, some of which already had other marks on them relating to other problems. "They're not causing any troubles yet, but squatters don't stay quiet out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it so that you can't see what illegal shit they're up to."

"Or maybe they're desperate people looking for any standing roof after what we've just been through, against the winter rains?" Charlie said flatly.

"Ma'am, you don't pay me to be an optimist with the situations I find," Truly finally sat back in her own chair, essentially opposite Charlie, and opened another can of cold coffee which joined its emptied brothers in a line next to her. "A lot of Reeve work is running off little problems before they can become big problems. And this borough has got a lot of little problems already, along with some of them which are already big. In my experience, squatters are bad news. But I'm used to dealing with Black Tooth, when it's an hour and a half down the highway to even get there, so you only come to Black Tooth if you're actively running from something."

"New Purgatory is a different environment, prone to different problems," Rachel agreed. Then she tilted her head down sharply. "Husk? There's a bunch of people pushing Hell-drugs inside the borough. H8. I didn't ask and I don't see how that's important. Alright I'll ask."

Rachel looked up, then gestured toward the most pressing of the problems that was facing New Purgatory today.

"Husk wants to know if they've got a Marque Letter before he's willing to do anything," Rachel said.

"A what?" Vaggie asked, but both Charlie and Truly groaned and slumped in their chairs as they realized the problem that that introduced into this whole misadventure.

"A document that declares that they're working on behalf of a Deadly Sin – Mammon in this case – that would prevent us from being able to legally oust or kill them," Delicious said.

"You know what? I'm not going to stand for that even if it is the case," Charlie decided, sitting forward. "I'm the Princess of All Hell. My word in my community is stronger than his when he's not even in the same Ring!"

"Charlie says she's going to throw her weight around and shield you if there is and Mammon gets pissy," Rachel said through the phone. There was a long pause from her.

"Is that wise, Charlie?" Vaggie asked.

"I don't care anymore. I'm tired of people thinking they can push me around without consequence! Now I'm going to push back!" she said. Vaggie just tilted her head at Charlie, not saying a word while still managing to question that whole statement of defiance. "Alright, I'll push back a little bit. It's better than not pushing back at all!"

"You're not wrong," Vaggie said.

"Husk is complaining, but he's doing it in the way he does before he does something he'd prefer not to have to," Rachel said. She gave Delicious a nod. "You'll have your hatchetman."

"Do you think Jun-Ho would get in on this?" Delicious asked.

"Likely. He strikes me as someone almost as bored as Cain with how this winter is going," Vaggie said.

"How is Cain, anyway? I haven't seen him in a while," Charlie said.

"He went down to Sloth to retrieve another of his stolen things. I think some sort of Aristocrat carried one with him into a False World," Rachel said, squinting as though she were actively recalling details. There was a clatter as the imps running Pascal's Mugging finally set out a tray of finger-foods, one on the corner between Charlie and Vaggie, and the other rounding the table and placing down on the corner between Rachel and Truly. Charlie gave them a sincere 'thank you', which very clearly confused the imps, before they darted back to the rest of the restaurant. She didn't notice how Vaggie's eye widened first in recognition of something, and then in restraint, which failed and gave way to mischief.

"Isn't it insanely difficult to go into a False World and come back out sane? Or at all?" Truly asked, prodding the finger foods next to her with a degree of suspicion. A socialite, Truly surely was not.

"Usually. Unless you have a somebody outside and a bit of rope," Charlie said with an off-hand gesture. She then paused. "Cain would use a rope, wouldn't he?"

"He's a daring man, not a stupid one," Rachel said.

"Is it supposed to be this… wet?" Truly asked, turning one of the hors d'oeuvres round on the plate with her fingernail.

"That means the oven's disinfected it," Vaggie said gamefully. Rachel leaned in on her own platter.

"I think that means the outside air has infected it," Rachel said, giving the thing a dubious look. Charlie paused, leaning down to sniff at the ones next to her. They were pungent, but these things were supposed to be.

Right?

"I think you should eat one," Vaggie said with an off-hand tone.

"No, don't eat the wet egg," Rachel coached, but Truly, possessed of an intrusive impulse, picked up the egg-based confection. "I wouldn't eat a random smelly egg."

"Why would they give us a plate of them in the building that they only have because of us if we weren't supposed to eat them?" Vaggie asked, a twist of a smirk coming to her face. Charlie just stared, baffled, at the scene unfolding before her.

"You don't know how long it's been since he made it. Imps don't tend to listen to best before dates – why? Why are you smelling the egg?" Rachel asked, disappointment lacing her words as Truly took a sniff of it. She blinked and made a face at it.

"If it is going bad, then the safest thing is to eat it now, before it gets worse," Vaggie said. Was she fucking with Truly? Why?

"No, don't eat the stinky egg. You are smarter than this, Delicious. You've managed to last this long despite a debilitating oh dear god you ate the egg," Rachel turned away in frustration when Truly bit into the egg.

And then immediately she wretched and turned, spewing the contents of her mouth and at least one can's worth of coffee back onto the floor.

"Oh wow, you lost that really fast," Vaggie said with undisguised laughter, one of the first times Charlie had heard it in all the years Vaggie had been stuck down here in Hell.

"Vaggie? Whyyyyy?" Charlie asked.

"Have you ever eaten these things? They're foul! Only imps can stomach them!" Vaggie said.

"Vaggie…"

"I just… I know! I know, it's juvenile, but I saw a chance to have somebody else bite into one of those culinary hand-grenades and I just had to," Vaggie said.

"You've bitten into the stinky egg before, haven't you?" Rachel asked.

"Oddly enough, once you get used to them, they're not actually that bad," Vaggie said, and true to her words, she picked one of the wet eggs off of the platter and swallowed it without bothering to chew. She made a mildly uncomfortable face, but held the vile thing down, and breathed out a faintly grey miasma that stank of garlic and brimstone. "They remind me of the day I met you, Charlie," she said. Charlie rubbed at her brow as Vaggie puffed out a breath, then turned to where Truly was shooting her a death-glare from her end of the table, wiping the upchuck off of her lips with her coat's sleeve. "You should eat another egg."

"I will fucking shoot you!" Truly promised.

There was only so much productivity that Charlie could reasonably expect of a meeting when that meeting was being held in Hell.


"Lucifer is going to murder me," Gadreel said, sitting in a pool of blood next to an imp who, likewise, was sitting in that pool of blood. But unlike her, he actually was quite pleased with himself, as though there weren't a care in Hell.

"Nah, he'll probably just chew you out over this. It's not like we went in there looking for a fight," Blitz said. For all Gadreel was an angel, she knew how to kill, and that put her in the good books with Blitz on a lot of things. She wasn't uppity or haughty like a lot of Stolas' companions, either. Pragmatic. That was the word he was looking for to describe her.

"I was tasked with finding out information about these 'ghost legions' not to wipe them out," Gadreel said. The pile of bodies was pretty extensive, but perhaps a bit hyperbolic. Legions had tens of thousands of idiots in them. The best they'd done today was maybe two hundred. Now, not to say that killing two hundred idiots was a walk in the park; they'd been well trained and decently armed, but adequacy fell well short of an Angel who had been given recognition by the Horseman Death, and the baddest Imp in Hell.

"Well, you've found out plenty about 'em. Call it 'pressure testing' or some shit," Blitz offered, and pulled a can of beer out of his jacket. He cracked it open and began to drink from it. He knew that drinking too much of this shit would take him down a path that Barb had already explored to her peril, but he was middle aged now. If he didn't have the luxury of cracking open a cold one after cracking open a bunch of warm ones, then what was even the fucking point?

"He's not going to accept that. He'll just classify me as a rabid animal and have me put down. God Damn It! Why can't anything go smoothly?" Gadreel said, stabbing one of the bodies nearby with a bayonet she'd picked up at some point and leaving the implement impaled through the victim's head, regardless of the helmet that should have protected it.

"Exactly! The Big Man loves having rabid animals he can let loose on fuckers," Blitz said, not even understanding why she was alarmed. He didn't have a concept that she was still operating under a Heaven-based paradigm when she was clearly kicking ass by Hellish standards. Might making right was entrenched as virtue down here. That was how Blitz won so many arguments these days. "Face it, if he doesn't appreciate the amount of damage you can do down here, just give me a call! I got an ongoing thing that I don't hire Sinners, on account 'a they burn, but you sure-as-shit ain't a Sinner. Plus I think it'd be a fuckin' feather in my cap to have the first Angel in the private sector. You know what? I should get a cap. I think I'd rock a hat."

The confused look that Gadreel turned to him was lost as he looked over the corpses piled as they were down here in Sloth right on the border where pink became gray. Soon those corpses that weren't separated from the dirt by concrete would be dragged under the ground and consumed, biomass for the Qliphoth and all that shit, while the rest would linger and rot. The compound itself wasn't much to look at, a couple of buildings that had been dropped off of trailers in a random spot of Sloth and had a training field cut into the dirt near it. It'd taken Blitz a couple of hours to find the exact spot in this blighted Ring, and most of that had been dangling from Gadreel as she fuckin' flew around, and smelling for diesel fumes.

The generator continued to let out a constant drone, feeding the now useless training buildings with electricity that nobody was alive to use. One of the four long, straight buildings was just starting to catch fire, no doubt because of the internal damage that Gadreel and Blitz had caused when they'd had to take cover from the initial barrage of gunfire. Gadreel had some crazy shit she could do, but enough lead would take her down just as much as it would take down Blitz.

"You're being serious," Gadreel said after a moment's reflection. Blitz nodded, allowing his gaze to pan out across the fields, along the gradient where the pinks of a Sloth free of the Qliphoth fell and was subsumed by the greys of the Sloth that was not. And there, in the impossible distance, more a vague shape against the haze, was the impossibly massive trunk of the impossibly massive tree, extending upward seeming infinitely.

"Fuck yeah. IMP can afford to hire on whatever crazy fuckin' yahoos I see fit. We already managed to hire the Young King of the Pits, or some shit. Kid's actually really good at killing things. You'd like him," Blitz said.

"Pits? All of Hell is a pit," Gadreel said.

"The Bleeding Pits, dumbass," Blitz said, reaching into his jacket again and now extracting his half-eaten burrito. It was starting to get a bit ripe, so he should probably finish it today before it went dangerously off. He noticed it had a bullet hole in it and some blood on it. Gadreel frowned at him.

"Ah," she finally said. "You hired a champion killer of the Things From Outside. That must have been quite the coup."

"Eh, not really. He just happened to walk in when it turned out we needed more hands to take on newer and better jobs," Blitz said, once more failing to realize just how miraculous a get that Maelstrom ended up being for IMP in general. "All I care about is, he kills good, he does what I tell him to do, and he doesn't stiff me on the jobs he drums up on his own."

"Everything serving the mighty Dinar," Gadreel said. She chuckled. "Did you know there was talk about beginning a currency in Heaven? Back before the Starvation."

"Get outta town," Blitz said.

"I'm serious. As much as the Angels proudly claim that they've never fallen prey to capitalism unlike the cess-pit which is Hell, they were about to outright enact it themselves," Gadreel said, leaning back to rest her back against her wings, and her wings against the corpses behind her. "Yet another reason I'm glad I'm free of Heaven. No more having to be subject to the 'provisional acts' of a crumbling system. No more having to sell inches of myself for the good of the foot."

"Why? Is there something wrong with your feet?" Blitz asked, glancing down at Gadreel's lower extremities and completely missing the point of her analogy. Considering they were half-concealed in the pool of blood they were sitting in, he didn't see what her presumed problem would be.

"I meant… are you being serious right now?" Gadreel began.

"If it's something you're born with, you're pretty fucked, but if it happened recently, my boy Moxx can fix you right up. He's got that crazy magic shit these days. Although I don't think you'd like him, much. He's got way too much brains and 'culture' and 'restraint'," he threw the appropriate air-quotes that such a sentence required, "for his own good."

"How exactly did you become Lucifer's chosen envoy, again?" Gadreel asked, eyes narrowed at him.

"Oh, I killed the last guy who was doing it. It was a whole big thing. There was a bunch of wizard shit involved, M&M got turned into super-imps, and my daughter finally admitted that we're family."

"That sounds utterly non-sequitur," Gadreel said.

"I'll give you the long version of it some day. I'm proud as shit at how I managed to pull that off. I had to blow out my own ears to kill that mind-controlling fuck, y'see?" he pointed at the metal augmetics bolted to his skull.

"I was wondering about those," Gadreel said.

"So if I'm gonna be telling stories about my proudest moments – like how I managed to seduce Stolas, that was a fuckin' adventure too! – I figure we better get our stories straight," Blitz said, standing up and rolling his neck. He felt it crunch in a couple of places as he did so and a tugging pain in his side. Gadreel also rose, overtopping him as she was an Angel and not a particularly short one at that, but looking at him with a lack of understanding. "So that when Lucifer asks us what happened here we both say the same shit."

"Wait, you're going to cover for me?" Gadreel asked.

"Yup," Blitz said happily.

"Cover for me to Lucifer," Gadreel prompted.

"Uh, yeah!" Blitz said.

"You're going to lie to the Devil Himself," Gadreel pressed again.

"Why are you being such a little bitch about this? Ain't none of his magical bullshit eyes out here, or he wouldn't have needed you, and even if he did send you anyway, he wouldn't 'a sent me," Blitz pointed out the very simple mathematic that even a sub-stellar student like him could figure out about this whole 'test'. "So, natch, he didn't know where to look or wasn't able to look there, and needed us to do his bitch-work for him. So we get to say what happened here. Might as well make it nice and fuckin' rosy."

"I can't say that I expected this kind of camaraderie from an imp," Gadreel noted.

"Bitch you don't know a half of what we're capable of," Blitz said. "So how's this: these dumb-fucks had piss-poor gear, piss poor training and piss-poor discipline and Lucifer wouldn't 'a wanted them fighting for him anyway, 'cause they'd be an embarrassment to him."

"You're bleeding," Gadreel pointed out, cutting him off. Blitz looked at his jacket, and saw that there was indeed a bit of black blood oozing down onto his pants. He quickly prodded himself until he found the wound. The bullet had gone through him and was lodged in his skin at the back. He sliced that bitch out, which stung a bit, and flicked it away. It was perhaps a sad story as to the state of his life that he barely noticed a gunshot wound, nor cared enough to more than jam a stopper in it and letting it clot.

"Yeah, that's just proof that they're poorly fuckin' armed if they can't put a middle-aged imp onto the ground!"

"They shot you," she said.

"I've been shot worse," he said. That was how his Remit worked. It protected him from the things he didn't see coming, and Blitz was actually very good at getting out of the way of things he did see coming. Very good, but not perfect.

"They were also fairly well trained, and decently disciplined," Gadreel pointed out, looking to the most destroyed of the buildings where the battle had begun. Its facing wall was mostly bullet holes, and its back corner was already gamefully catching fire from destroyed electrical wires cozying up to naked wood. "They did manage to almost kill you, and the only reason we flanked them at all after that barrage is because I can still Transit."

"You can what now?" Blitz asked.

"Move without moving," Gadreel said flatly.

"Oh your teleporting bullshit, yeah that was handy," Blitz said. He then gave his head a shake. "The fact is, those chucklefucks were piss-poor trained, because a fucking imp could kill them, and they were poorly armed, because they couldn't even kill a fucking imp."

"I somehow doubt that you're at all representative of the average imp," Gadreel said with a chuckle and an upward curling of her lips.

"Don't you start riding my dick, I've already got one Angel eager for it," Blitz said with a dismissing wave. "We tell the Big Hoss what he's willing to hear, which frankly is kinda the truth, and then whether he decides to chew you out or not, my office is still open. I'm serious, bitch; I like what I saw here today. You're cold blooded, fast, ruthless, and really fucking good at cutting throats."

"Noted," Gadreel said. She then stretched as well, and Blitz could hear pops coming specifically from her shoulders as she hyperextended them, before returning to her ready stance. "So the targets were failures and fraud-soldiers wasting the aristocrat's money and Lucifer's attention is better spent on upgrading his actual, Noble-led Legions. Is that the sum of what you're offering?"

"Sure, you go the high-road, high-faluting and muckity-muck shit, I'll just call them idiots and fuck-ups. He'll buy it for sure," Blitz said.

"Who exactly do you kill, with that business of yours?" she asked as he shook off some of the blood from his coat and started to walk away from the rings of corpses that described the battleground. The furthest forward was the firing line, now farthest behind them. Blitz had taken care of them by gunning them down from enfillade, while Gadreel then zipped around, offing rings of soldiers in one-hit-kills. The bodies formed craters around the places she'd bothered to appear. And now they were moving away from it, as the wind began to pick up, blowing toward the Qliphoth, and dragging the flames consuming one trailer-barracks into the air and letting them fall on the next one in the line. Soon they'd all burn, and Blitz hadn't even needed to strike a match.

"Anybody we get paid to. Used to be just living humans who fucked over the dead, but we do actually tough jobs now. Fuck-up aristocrats down here in Hell, those weird fucking Outside things. We've even got an open contract to kill an Angel up Heavenside. Just can't find a good time to actually do it. The bitch at the gate don't like me too much, considering I fucked her husband," Blitz said.

"Kill an Angel? Which one?" Gadreel asked.

"You don't want me killin' one of your buddies, do ya?" Blitz asked.

"Would you complain if I went and killed a random imp of the billions down here, or would you not care so long as it wasn't related to you somehow?" Gadreel pointed out.

"Eh, good point," Blitz admitted. "You got any beef with a guy named Atheed?"

"I have no shortage of 'beef' with Gabriel's cronies," Gadreel said. She gave her head a shake. "You're not going to be able to kill him."

"Bitch, I killed Nathan Birch. Impossible is nothing," he said.

"First of all, he's in Vigil, which is where Angels go to heal when they get critically injured. Even if he has come out since I got here," she paused, and stared at the cab that they were apparently approaching. "Is that…?"

"Yeah, I put in a call during the firefight that we'd need a pick up," he said, giving a cheery wave to the beefy Sloth Imp who was shoving against the engine-block of his taxi-van with his the backs of his shoulders.

"Of course you did," Gadreel rolled her eyes. "Second, even if Atheed was out, I've sparred with him. He's very good. They modeled the Type 4 Exorcist after him. If you try to shoot him, he'll just catch your bullets."

"Oh he does that wind-up-toy bullshit? It'll be fun to off him."

"Just… when you want him dead, let me know. I have my own score to settle with him and I'd like to stand in his blood when he dies," Gadreel said.

"I like your style, bitch," Blitz said.

"Enough to stop calling me a bitch?" Gadreel asked.

"Don't push your luck, whore," he said. Gadreel stared at him, but then muttering under her breath caught up and boarded the taxi that would take them first to the Hellevator, and then back to Lucifer to report their 'successful mission'.


Michael winced, peeling the dead skin off of his finger. It was quickly becoming skeletal, the tendons laying flat against the bones and having only a paper thin layer of dermis keeping them from being naked to the air. In the hand of the angel, like that of the human, there were no muscles in the fingers, which leant his degradation a particular cadaverous quality. He barely noticed how when he finished pulling the strip off of his ring-finger that it oozed just a trace of nearly-brown blood. He couldn't feel it.

He could barely feel that hand at all.

He had to stop Lucifer. That was all there was to it. He had to find a way to separate Lucifer from the rest of Hell and snuff him out, once and for all. Death wouldn't aid him in this; Michael would have called him a traitor for his disobedience had it not been for Michael's fundamental understanding that the only person in all of Creation that Death even treated as a near-peer was God the Father. For Michael to try ordering him around would be akin to a paramecia trying to make demands of Michael himself; laughable, foolish, and doomed to failure, although admittedly a little odd.

There was a flutter, and the room grew brighter, Michael's diminished Halo being overtaken by another who joined him in this cluttered room at the back of the Taxiopolis. He half turned from his mostly-rebuilt armor, expecting Sandalphon or perhaps Giyriel. He did not expect to have to look well up, and into the eyes of Raguel.

"I thought you said you would never again darken my door, Brother," Michael said, his voice now having fully embraced its raspiness.

"I have come to see for myself," Raguel said, but his words were not brash nor impugning. They were soft, almost even sad. He stared at Michael, and the Taxiarch felt himself being weighed and measured by Raguel's penetrating gaze. Raguel sighed, with a single motion pulling off his faceplate and tilting off of his helm, before sitting down in the chair which had been set for him during Michael's long friendship with the Justice of God. Bare-headed to Heaven, Raguel was visibly chewing his words, trying to crush them between his molars until they entered a form he was willing to release them.

Finally, Raguel, the Godfriend, released a sigh which was laced with not disgust or dismay, but with defeat.

"You are dying, Brother," Raguel said, raising his blazing white eyes to Michael.

"I can die when Heaven is safe, and not before," Michael waved the notion of his own demise away.

"You won't have that chance," Raguel said. "I have seen what you are trying to hide. That you are weaker than a sickly kitten. That you can barely lift your nameless sword," he sat forward. "If it were possible for me to pin you to a wall and tear Khalera from your possession and hurl it into the Abyss, I would do so, in a heartbeat. It has poisoned you. It is killing you. Its like was not meant for the Cold Flame Soul to carry. I dare say it was not meant to be carried in any hand at all, but its venom seems especially quick against our kind."

"I will not give up what saves us," Michael stated flatly.

"It will be hard pressed to 'save us' when it is lingering on your corpse, left collapsed wherever your health finally fails you," Raguel said. "I cannot do what is needed to save you. So let me help bear your burden. We are still brothers. We have fought Lucifer before. Let us fight him together now, before it is too late for you."

"This isn't your place," Michael said.

"Why not? Is Heaven not my home?" Raguel asked, pressing his palms down on the arm-rests of his massive chair and leaning forward at Michael. "Am I somehow immune to the rapacity of Lucifer? Have I not lost the comfort and Grace of our Father? Tell me, Michael; how is it that it is not my place to protect the ambitions of Creation from a grasping madman?"

"Father left me in charge of the protection of the realm," Michael said.

"Father gave that order an eon ago!" Raguel said, storming up from his chair. He paced the small distance that the room had to offer, one of his stature eating distance with his strides almost ravenously. He stopped, and pointed at the wall, which displayed a tablet from the original SEFIROT, one that belonged to Jeremiel, whose job it had been intended to serve as adjunct to the judgement of souls at the Gates. "Father did not order you to take Jeremiel's place judging souls, and yet you did it anyway. Why flexibility in one aspect and not another?"

"Because Jeremiel is dead!" Michael got to his feet, glaring up at Raguel. "I had to do it. I had to add Jeremiel's purview to my own because the job needed doing!"

"And yet when you did, you nevertheless offered the duty to me. And even extended an olive-branch to Gabriel to ease the burden, and to placate him with a task of moderate importance and more importantly more-than-moderate distraction," Raguel said. He paused, looking at the stone which described, from Creation to Demise at the hands of Lucifer, one of the few Archangels to ever reach their mortal ends. Raguel breathed hard, puffing out a breath through his bent-askew nose, while staring at the stone, enshrined on Michael's wall, amongst such other memorabilia as iron-caged shards from Lucifer's halo, and a strand of feathers, plucked from the wings of rebels, one for each of Lucifer's rebels cast into the pit. There were five missing from that strand, though. Stolas, Stella, Paimon, and… and…? Michael realized he didn't remember who the other two of Lucifer's first five rebels were.

He decided it didn't matter.

Raguel turned to him again. "There was a time when your decisions embodied the Wisdom of God, as though Jeremiel's boots had been crafted for your feet. When your choices were the most obviously right, both structurally and morally," Raguel said, tones even placating. Raguel scratched at one cheek, which had white stubble roughening it where the scars hadn't interrupted its ability to grow. "I think that was the beginning of it, Brother. Heaven was meant to have more Archangels than it has. Certainly more than it has now. The Wisdom of God and the Ingenuity of God, both lost because of madmen."

"It was Gabriel that saw Sahaquiel cast down," Michael waved off.

"And I fear Gabriel is developing much the same madness that Lucifer now embodies from his broken halo to the soles of his feet. And frankly, Michael… I'm afraid," Raguel said, his blazing eyes finally softening. "I'm afraid that the same has begun to creep into you. And it will murder you. Unless we stop it."

"I will…" Michael began.

"You will die without aid," Raguel said, cutting him off as though that were what he was about to say. "And you will die having failed. So please; in the name of the good we have done together, both in this Silent misery and in the bountiful years before it, USE ME!" He clapped his gauntletted hands against his chest to a resounding tone of metal against armor plate. "Don't die for the sake of your pride!"

"Don't speak to me of pride!" Michael said turning away, heedless of how doing so pulled his skin apart at his shoulder and caused mud-colored blood to drip down his arm. "I am not Lucifer. I am the one which will finally bring his madness to an end."

"How?" Raguel asked. Michael glared at him. "Go ahead and tell me how you intend, in your nearly-dead state, to best the Heresiarch who is according to Gabriel at the very height of his power. If you have a plan that has even a shadow's chance under the noon-sun, I will break all barriers between you and its completion. But I demand that you tell me how."

Michael finally wilted.

He had no plan.

Seeing Michael wilt, Raguel nodded, and laid a massive hand on Raguel's shoulder, staring him in the eye. "You are not wrong in that Lucifer must die for this war to end. The half-measures of allowing him to reign in Hell was an obvious failure of planning on Father's part."

"You can't say that about Father's design."

"What is my name, Brother?" Raguel asked, his eyes disapproving. Raguel, the Godfriend.

The one Archangel in all of Heaven who knew Father's mind and wishes best.

"How could the Father be wrong?" Michael asked.

"He hoped. And He put His hope on the wrong person," Raguel said. "It is known that Father favored Lucifer. I will tell you he favored Lucifer because he hoped that Lucifer would shed his frivolous and wretched ways, to become a Servant of Creation once more. And that faith, obviously, was misplaced."

"The Prophecy, though," Michael said.

"Considering the Prophecy is lost," Raguel began.

"His words are what He wanted reality to be. So why would He create Lucifer to rebel and fall?" Michael asked, coming perilously close to asking a question that might break his own world view.

"God was never constrained by His own foresight. He always had the freedom to change the course of reality as He saw fit," Raguel sighed and leaned against the bench holding Michael's battered armor. "After Father's transit of the Abyss, he came back… changed. Changed to the point where he deigned to split off Joshua to try to bring forth a change in the humans of his creation. Changed enough to send Gabriel as his voice to Muhammad – though why send such contradictions of His own word of peace and voluntary poverty in one generation and of militancy in another, I do not know. He has always been free in a way that we are not."

"I think none of His sons truly knew Him," Michael admitted.

"Some of us knew Him better, but in that, you are right, brother," Raguel said.

Raguel stood from his lean and pulled Michael to his feet.

"It is time for you to heal, brother," Raguel said. "You should return to Vigilance. And there you must remain."

"But the war…"

"Do you believe I would betray Heaven to Lucifer?" Raguel cut him off.

"I think Lucifer would sooner quietly accept exile and obedience," Michael laughed at a rasp.

"And do you believe that I can countenance even for a moment the excesses and unthinking cruelties of Gabriel, as descended as he has become in the last three hundred years of spiraling madness?" Raguel asked.

"Not even a moment," Michael admitted.

"Then allow me, for a period of time, mandated by your will, that I take up provisionally your birthright, until such time as you have finished healing, and can return mighty enough to actually undertake your duties. You have held Khalera for nearly ten years, am I wrong?" Michael tried to hem and haw, but his guess was close enough for poetry. "So if you Vigil and restore yourself, you will be whole again for a long period before this contingency is required a second time."

"If Lucifer attacks Heaven directly when I'm down…" Michael tried to complain.

"Then he will have the combined might of all of us concentrated against him," Raguel reassured. "In the name of our past association, in the name of our old friendship, allow me to take this burden up for you, until you are strong enough to shoulder it again. Three years, not less, in Vigilance. I will curb the excesses of Gabriel such that he is a ball of frustrated impotence when you emerge. I will ward the Thrones of Heaven so that Lucifer's foetor cannot infest them. And you will become strong again."

Michael wanted to say no. His pride demanded it. But he was tired. He was so incredibly tired, and he didn't have the will to make that head-shake stick. The numbness of his limbs was worse in many ways than pain, because pain he could endure as long as their was strength still coupled to it. But this numbness was sibling to pathetic weakness. And Raguel, clear-eyed as he always tended to be, had laid things out such that there was no easy denying them without descending wholly into an almost Gabrielite insanity and rejection of reality.

If Michael tried to fight Lucifer right now, there was no amount of surety in his purpose that would overcome the realities of his degraded flesh and dissonant Song. He would lose. And it would be his fault. He finally gave the mute nod, not trusting his voice to give the words without twisting them with bitter venom.

"I swear to you, Michael. Heaven will still be standing and still be fighting when you return," Raguel promised.

Even as Raguel gave Michael's shoulder a gentle pat, Michael found his mind wandering. In his distraction, he considered a Heaven faltering to Hell, of not just being invaded but accepting Hell as liberators. He imagined a Hell where every assault against it made it stronger, as though hammering a bronze blade until its edge could split a falling leaf under the leaf's own weight. If he had been more cogent, less damaged, less distracted, he might have called it a grim vision. But in the state he was, he could only view it as pessimistic ponderings. Michael put the vision-that-could-have-been out of his mind, and began to limp unsteadily to the exit doors to the Taxiopolis, not even trusting his wings anymore to Transit him to Vigilance. And Raguel, his friend, his brother, the left hand to Michael's right, Raguel was there to guide him to his rest.

It didn't occur to him that he never asked what Raguel planned to do about the Demiurge.


"Old Berty Russell once said something to the effect of 'War doesn't determine who's right, merely who's left'. And frankly he wasn't wrong about that. If there's one thing that War pretty reliably produces – actually no, there's a lot of things that war reliably produces. Gender equality, manufacturing-efficiencies, generational leaps in weapons technology, shifts in battlefield paradigm, war profiteers, mercenaries, cowards, traitors, collaborators, orphans, and cheap real-estate are some of the big ones. But one of the major things that wars reliably produce are personnel vacuums.

When the first war, the one between Lucifer and God was going on, all of the Luciferean Sins were old-names. Not a one of them was less than ten thousand years old. They'd been sucking the big guy's dick for ten millennia, with some exceptions – yeah I'm talking about Satan, that guy bottoms for nobody – and had gotten really comfortable in their niches. So when the artillery shells started to fall and they were knocked out of those niches, they suddenly found that they, at some point in the intervening period, didn't quite remember how to crawl back into them before the next shell hit.

And don't get me wrong; a Deadly Sin can survive an artillery shell or two to the face. But every time they do, it fucks them up a little bit more. None of the old guard died during the Second War For Heaven, but it was a close thing, and some of them, my predecessor as a prime example, were so disrupted and put-out-of-place that when the war ground down and ended, he just went from problem to problem until he found one that killed him.

That dumbass clown should have used the relative calm of the Interbellum Period to get his shit together. Instead, he throws hands against the Hellhounds, dumps Hell into a bloody insurgency, fumbles the fact that when Lucifer kicked it Sinners like us could now work for him and frankly gives us plenty of reason to work with his enemies, and finally makes a gives-no-shits enemy so angry that the old cunt got gunned down in front of a live fucking audience.

Mammon was a fucking idiot who couldn't make money running a fucking casino. Me? I'm just very good at turning messes into profits."

– Rebecca Ravenous, The Walton Dragon and Deadly Sin of Greed