The room was warm, comfortable, the bed was soft, the chest he was sleeping atop was layered with muscle, and the room reeked of sex. It was fantastic.

Of course, the half-considered thoughts somewhere between steam-of-consciousness and outright dream fled when a clock announced itself loudly, the cock crowing and reintroducing Fizzarolli to the waking world.

With sheer manic energy ignited by his reintroduction to that waking world, limbs began to fly across the room. Ordinarily, a grisly affair, but in this case those limbs were cybernetic, so when a boot crushed the offending clock, and two arms raced down a hallway to grab a carafe of coffee, they did nothing but send a mostly naked succubus maid spinning as they swept hast her. The kitchen area was entirely out of sight, but Fizz had memorized where everything was long ago, so he was able go grab the carafe, pour a cup, then leave the cup behind and drag the carafe back to his body, all over the course of about five seconds.

He began dumping coffee down his throat, thankful for what remained of his impish biology that heat couldn't burn him, as the bitter but highly caffinated brew dragged him the rest of the way to consciousness. Pointedly, he didn't look at the mirrors that lined the walls and ceiling above the bed he'd awakened to, not willing to look at himself first thing in the morning. Not until he set the now emptied jug of coffee aside, and reached all the way to his vanity, grabbing his motley, and affixing it atop his head.

Ozzie grumbled something inarticulate, so Fizz grinned and grabbed the nearest air-horn (a distinction which was relevant, because there were many airhorns secreted throughout Asmodeus' palace), and blared it in the Deadly Sin's ear to pull the massive demon to wakefulness, whether his circadian rhythm wanted it or not.

"Rise and shine, Ozzie!" Fizz declared brightly. And Asmodeus blinked his way to consciousness, sitting up in the bed such that his massive frame now dwarfed and shadowed Fizzarolli utterly. Considering that Asmodeus was a transformed former-Angel, and Fizzarolli was a cyborg imp, that kind of size disparity was to be expected.

"Again with the horn?" Asmodeus asked, pushing himself to his feet and revealing his grand nudity to Hell once more.

"Blame it on how fuckin' fun they are!" Fizz said brightly and gave him another toot. Ozzie gave a chuckle and grabbed his lounging robe from the floor where he'd left it last night before The Dickening transpired. Fizz quickly zipped from the bed to the schedule that had been left on the table beside the doors at some point when they were in a post-coital coma. He quickly snapped on a pair of utterly useless spectacles and began to pompously read from the scroll of today's expected deeds. "So according to this, you've got a meeting today with R about the new v-v-v-vibrators that are coming down the pipe…"

"Phraa~sing," Ozzie said as he began to preen in one of the mirrors, getting his morning just-had-sex look locked into place. It differed wildly from his afternoon- or evening-just-had-sex looks. Fizz had become something of an authority on such things.

"Oh stop," Fizz said, in a tone that goaded him to go further. "Then you've got a meeting with the safety board about what happened to the old v-v-v-vibrators," he continued, strutting around as Ozzie scrutinized his own face closely, as though annoyed at something he found. Fizz saw nothing different, let along anything wrong. "And then there's a meeting with Dux Bellorim Adrues and the Legati of the Lovers' Legions at noon."

"The Glimpse scheduled me through lunch?" Ozzie asked, disappointment through his tone.

"It still leaves you wide open for a big ole' breakfast!" Fizzarolli said. Ozzie sighed, shaking his head, and finally cinching the robe shut so that he was no longer flapping gloriously in the breeze.

"Which I'm going to be handling myself?" Ozzie asked.

"I could take a crack at it if you want!" Fizz offered. Asmodeus gave a deep, belly laugh.

"No," his tone went dead and deadly serious, his expression shifting from mirth to trauma in an instant. "Never again."

"Ah, c'mon! Maybe I'll burn the milk this time?" Fizzarolli teased. Ozzie laughed again, telling him to knock it off in teasing tone. Fizz's face lit up, and he quickly bolted up to land himself on Asmodeus' broad, powerful shoulder. "Oh! You know what I have a hankering for? BURGERS!"

"It's too early for burgers you maniac," Asmodeus said around laughter.

"Burger time! BURGER TIME!" Fizz chanted. The two of them broke off into school-girl giggling, which was ridiculous because both of them were men and neither had anywhere near the chastity of a schoolgirl. Asmodeus passed them through the halls of his sprawling estate, past the portraits – some of them tasteful nudes, other ones utter filth – that displayed Asmodeus from all the eon he had ruled over Lust. Fizz didn't pay much attention to them. And he especially didn't pay attention to the fact that in every portrait, there was a different lover with Asmodeus.

Within minutes of Asmodeus manning the stove, there were eggs and bacon in the making. And Ozzie had to pause as a form not nearly as tall as he was, but far taller than it had any reason to be, passed down one of the halls. "What is she…" Asmodeus began, but Fizz, eager for breakfast, gently turned Lust Incarnate's eyes back to the task of breakfast, and away from Sinope The Immortal, the Succubus who could not age. That was an afternoon issue, if it was going to be an issue at all.

When Ozzie opened the fridge, he groaned. Fizz zipped down, his legs reaching the floor and dragging the rest of him down, to reveal that yes, they had no milk. "Don't worry! I'll grab some when I'm out!"

"You're still going to that rehearsal thing?" Ozzie asked, even as the bacon and the eggs finished cooking far faster than physics would allow, by the Deadly Sin's urging. While apparently Ozzie couldn't do his really fun shit with time-travel that he used to pull – having threesomes with himself as two of them members being a highlight for Fizzarolli – he could still bend time a bit even under the current… well, the current whatever the fuck was going on.

"Oh yeah. Just to keep my skills sharp and make sure those catty bitches at Carnivale remember my routines for the spring," Fizz said.

"But in the Greed ring, though?" Asmodeus asked, handing Fizz a plate that looked almost as enticing as Ozzie's sweet ass. "Babe, they have a city in that Ring literally called 'Ransom'."

"Ah c'mon! I'll be fine! I'm not going to stick around!"

"And if those lunatics up there get grabby? What then?" he asked

Fizz grinned wide. "Aren't I the slipperiest imp you know?" he asked, then began to fill his face.

Ozzie laughed. "Only after I…"

"What?" Fizz asked.

"Hrm?" Ozzie seemed dragged off of his thought. He gave his head a shake. "Look, Fizzi-frog, just let me arrange some protection for you. I can't have people hurtin' my little babe now can I?"

"Come on, Ozzie! I can be on my own for one day," Fizz pleaded, and Ozzie stared like he was wanting desperately to be stubborn about this.

"You're too visible, hon! Ever since Mammon put your face on those sex-bots, everybody – and I do mean everybody – wants a piece of you. And it's always the same piece," Ozzie said, reaching down to trace a finger from Fizz's chin down to his crotch, where it hooked for a moment. Oh stop it, you.

"I can handle it! I wanna go show Greed just how badass Lust Ring can get," Fizz said. Ozzie said his name with dwindling patience. "Pweeeeeeease?" he asked, breaking out his most cherubic of looks, extending himself upward on his telescoping limbs to beg directly in Ozzie's face. And that was enough to break the reproach and have the Deadly Sin laugh, and scoop the imp up in his arm.

"How can I say no to a face that cute?" Ozzie asked.

"That's why I use it," he said, as he reached a limb through the opening of Ozzie's robe and began to run his augmetic hand along a body that was like satin over marble. Even as he was reaching lower, to places less coy and more raunchy, the door to the kitchenette opened, and a different succubus entered. Both turned to her with annoyance in their face.

"Hey! Do you mind?" Ozzie asked.

"Tryin' to have an unemotional bang-sesh, here!" Fizz shouted.

"Yeah, because love is stupid," Ozzie added.

"That has me utterly convinced," the Succubus said, and by her tone alone, it drained all of the lust out of the room. Oh, Fizz couldn't stand this bitch. The thing pretending biologically to be a succubus glanced between the two of them. "I hope you're not planning on making that an hour-long 'sesh', because there's matters of war that will need looking to."

"He's gotta do the vibrator thing first!" Fizz pointed out. And the Glimpse, in her Lust-fiend form, gave a condescending smile.

"How about you let the adults talk, little one," the Glimpse said. She turned to Ozzie. "Although to be fair that is one of the issues that the Lovers' Legions are complaining about. They've started using the old sex-toys you sent them as munitions."

"Good for both kinds of 'bangs' then?" Ozzie asked with a laugh.

"This is serious. If we were confident they wouldn't go off inside an anus but would go off in a battlefield, I'd say 'not a problem'. But we don't. So we're going to have to sweet talk a lot of money men and sex-perverts," the Glimpse said. Ozzie sighed and put his back to Fizz.

"As if there were any difference between the two. What are my talking points?"

"The batteries came from Greed, so pin most of it on Mammon. Pledge to move your sourcing to Envy and Wrath," the Glimpse said, as Fizz tried to get Ozzie's attention, calling his various pet names at the Deadly Sin's back.

"Wrath? Why does it gotta be Wrath?" Ozzie bemoaned.

"Ozzie-wozzy? Does this mean I can go to my Greed thing?" Fizz asked.

Asmodeus was still for a moment, then turned a look over his shoulder with a warm smile. "Of course, Fizzie-Frog. Just keep your phone on ya'. Now I gotta do a bunch'a bullshit, so don't let me slow you down."

Fizz just grinned and departed his Fallen lover's presence and made ready to greet the day, heedless of how curtly he'd been dismissed.


Chapter 43

Oops


"So let me get this straight," Striker said, staring down at the much smaller imp of Greedling provenance that was across the desk from him. "You ask me to prove myself… to you."

"Yeah," the nasal, rasping voice of Crimson Knolastname crossed the desk as the suited mafia-kingpin steepled his fingers in front of him. "'Cause there's no shortage of bad help available for hire out there. How do I know that you ain't another fuckin' leech lookin' to suckle off my ass?"

Striker's patience was running distinctly slim with the whole affair that he found himself in. Sure, working with his fellow imps sounded good. On paper. But in practice, he found so many of them were so utterly below his level as to evoke no emotion from him save for pity. There were a few who were worthy of ascension, of becoming more than they were. But 'few' was the operative term. Of the tens of billions of imps that lived in Hell, Striker that he could count the ones worth more than the spit he used to shine his boots on his two hands and not reach the thumb.

That still beat this time five years back. Back then, he would've been able to do it even without his synthetic replacement arm.

He gave a look around, at the office that Crimson had used to run his operations in the city of Ransom. It looked very… slap-dash. Like he'd moved in only days before and hadn't quite gotten the atmosphere right. Sure, there were imps, mutants and Selachimorphs at various points of the room making themselves known and attempting to look intimidating, but the effect was higgledy-piggledy.

"Still," Crimson said, lighting a cigar that was as thick as his finger. Again, highlighting the difference in stature – and no doubt physical brawn – between the exceptional specimen that was Striker and the laughable one which was Knolastname. "The word is that you're good. That you gone and killed some blue-bloods, root and stem. That's not an easy task."

Striker smiled at the memory at least, remembering the halls that were stained with the blood of people who had thought themselves innately better than Striker by the accident of their birth. He showed every single one of them how wrong they were. From the studies, to the bedrooms, to the nurseries. When Striker left that house, he had exactly one cut on his arm from where somebody got lucky, and the entire royal house was fucking extinguished.

One less pustulent blight bulging against the skin of Hell.

"Spoken like somebody who doesn't kill for a living," Striker said. He made sure to lean slightly to one side, to let his new, false eye glare at the petty little imp in front of him. "Killin' Aristocrats is a gift done to all 'a Hell. And they at least offered me some challenge. But this?"

Striker waved around, to the various toughs failing to look as they were instructed to.

"This is just sad," he said. He pushed back from the desk, and got to his feet. "And I don't want to spend any amount 'a time pissing about with a feller so low that he has to lick snake-bellies for salt."

Crimson's expression darkened as he visibly started to lose his temper. "You better moderate your tone, hick-for-hire," Crimson demanded.

"How about I do you one better," Striker asked. "How about I put fifty Souls on every dipshit in this room getting killed by the end of the week?"

"I'm a patient man, hick, but my patience is runnin' really fuckin' thin with these swipes at me. If you want so bad to leave, then fuckin' leave," Crimson demanded.

But Striker wasn't about to just be dismissed from a pissant's presence like that. So he took what he knew about Crimson, and created one last slap in the face to depart with.

"Maybe I'll look up yer boy. I hear he's actually gettin' somewhere in Hell, these days," Striker taunted. And Crimson's face was practically black with rage. He raised his hand, likely to snap and demand these useless thugs try to do Striker harm. But in the fraction of a second between when that hand was up and when it could snap, Striker had Gentle Persuasion out of its holster and pointed at Crimson's head. The two stared at each other, the goons paralyzed with the prospect of their boss being shot in the face by the guy he'd failed to hire. And Striker let out a deeply mocking laugh. "I'll see you around, little man."

He then backed up, knowing without looking that he navigated between useless goons, until he threw the door open with his other hand and stepped out into the hall. When the door closed behind him, Striker, waited a few more seconds, and then heard something break and a string of deeply outraged profanity in the nearly impenetrable Greed Cant, that pidgin language that Greedlings, both imp and fiend, would pick up if they lived in this blighted shithole long enough. This whole Ring made Striker want to puke. It was everything he hated about the upper crust of Hell, expanded and transformed into an entire plane of being. At least Lust had whole enclaves of Imps doing their own shit. Up here, all they did was work as criminal nobodies and die in droves.

He should have guessed it'd be a waste of time to come to this shitty place. But his finances weren't bulletproof, and neither was he. He had grand ambitions, of standing where no imp ever had, or likely ever would again. And even he was cognizant of the fact that in the pursuit of such ambitions, training and practice were in order. And somebody as at-the-top-of-his-game as Striker was, he could only meaningfully learn from situations where his life was on the line somehow. Everything else? Including whatever nonsense Crimson had intended for him? All of that was lacking, in Strikers eyes.

Paltry.

He headed down the stairs that reeked of mildew and wood-rot, pulling out a cigarette and striking a match off of his fake eye to light it. The doors to the outside offered no new freshness, just a different sort of foul, as the acrid smell of acid-petrichor seeped up from the street under him. He sauntered across the street, which was unpeopled by cars, but not quite so by people. There were plenty enough Hellspawn on this street. And he wanted nothing to do with any of them.

Well, if nothing else, this waste of time was good for his cardio, as it was a long walk back to the Hellevator, and a strong heart would pay him dividends when he went back to Heaven.

Still, he lingered there, across the street and down the way a bit from that building, smoking and thinking. He looked at the smoke in his hand, how his hand was all but perfectly still when he wished it to be. The Yips were gone. He accepted that. But there was more to be done. He hadn't earned back his manhood. Not entirely. To do that, it was Heaven or bust. And when he had that manhood, that pride back? What then?

Honestly, Striker didn't know. But he'd be a stronger imp than he had been before all of this shit began. And that was, to some degree, a reward of itself.

"Well maybe you should find somebody who knows how to make coffee THAT DOESN'T TASTE LIKE PISS!" a familiar voice drew Striker's attention back. And fair enough, there was Blitz, staggering back from a run-down coffee shop. And Blitz looked like shit. His face was covered in bruises, and the way he stood made Striker pretty sure he had a busted rib. Blitz did nothing though, as a cup of coffee was hurled at him, bursting over his face and letting the shitty, hell-specific brew drench the front of him. Blitz didn't seem to notice Striker, which suited him just fine. Staying out of that tenderfoot's circus of a life was another reward-of-itself.

Of course, no sooner had he given the situation a shake of his head, that he spotted motion coming up the street at notable speed given it was on the sidewalk. And true to his perceptions, there came a gaggle of Devil Dogs, those Greedling animals with a weird mixture of Hellhound and insect, as though putting a funny puppy face on a house-fly. And tethered and dragged behind the swarm of them (including one which was albino and in a wheel-harness), there came an imp that Striker could scarcely hold in lower esteem.

Fizzarolli.

The imp who made himself a royal's little purse-dog. A more pathetic fate for an imp, Striker could scarcely imagine. And yet there the little cretin was, laughing as his Devil Dogs dragged him in a collision course with one of the few imps in Hell that Striker could, to some degree, respect. The clown (or at least, the one famous for being one) quickly dug his heels in, grinding ruts into the sidewalk and only just barely managing to halt his swarm of puppy-flies before they mobbed Blitz and tried eating him. Not that it'd likely work on 'Blitzie'.

"Oh you've gotta be fucking me!" the purse-dog in imp form said, extending his fake limbs a little bit so that he physically overtopped the Proxy of Lucifer. "Well lookie who it is…"

"Oh. Great. Just what I needed today. Bad coffee, a bunch 'a bitchwork, and now you," Blitz gestured toward Fizzarolli, and winced as though it pulled at wounded innards. What exactly had Blitz been doing to fuck him up this badly? While Striker didn't actually care that much, his curiosity was piqued.

"First that drunken phone-call, and now this? Are you stalking me now, Blitzø?" the purse-dog asked.

Blitz rubbed a hand down his face in poorly restrained anger. "Oh for the love of Christ's dick-cheese, it's been two years since I shared a room with you!" Blitz snapped back. He threw an arm back, which again pulled a wince out of him. "I got my own shit I'm doing now! Important shit! Shit that doesn't involve you!"

"Really? 'Cause that phone call was seven different kinds of pathetic," the purse-dog rallied. "Almost like you were trying desperately to get ahold of something that would get you out of a bunch of bullshit the likes of which you always land yourself in. Who'd you drag down with you this time?"

"You don't know what the fuck you're talkin' about," Blitz yelled.

"Maybe I should leave before you drag me down with you?" the purse-dog gestured back the way he came.

"What, do you think I can ruin your fuckin' life in five minutes?" Blitz asked, cocking a fist on his hip.

"You've done it before," the purse-dog actually showed some teeth for a moment, a tone of legitimate anger in his raspy voice.

"That was thir– seventeen fuckin' years ago! And we've been in each other's presence exactly thrice in all that time! If I'm a stalker, I've got to be the shittiest stalker in all of FUCKIN' HISTORY!" Blitz shouted at the purse-dog's face. A part of Striker was enjoying this. Watching somebody lambast an imp who made himself something lesser through subservience. If nothing else, the show was amusing to him. Lust's little bitch jabbed Blitz in his chest with a finger.

"Thrice in seventeen years is already way too much," the purse dog said with derision and dismissal. He gave a click of his tongue, and the Devil Dogs began to bank around Blitz and continue down the street, and Fizzarolli moved with them.

"At least I still actually earn all the shit I've got," Blitz said to the purse-dog's egressing back, "and not get everything handed to me like a pampered little ATTENTION WHORE!"

That rooted Fizzarolli in place for a moment, indicating that Blitz had managed to score a clean hit on the purse-dog's ego. But instead of break down crying like the bitch he was, or snapping back like the dog Striker imagined Fizzarolli wished he could be, he simply looked at something, then chuckled. He lifted the shades from his face and turned a condescending smile back at Blitz.

"I get everything that my talent has owing to me," he said, and the struck-stupid look on Blitz's face told that Fizzarolli had landed a clean hit back. Well, now this fight was interesting. Striker just wished he had some popcorn. And he started counting down. Trying to see if he understood the situation right. The cruelty on Fizzarolli's face mounted as he leaned toward Blitz, extending his limbs to cross the distance somewhat, to encroach on the injured imp's personal space. "And my horns were always bigger than yoursweren't they?"

Laughing to himself, the class-traitor returned to walking his puppy things, and left Blitz stewing in anger. And Striker was a bit ashamed that he missed his count, actually making it down to negative four before Blitz finally lost his temper entirely, and with the terrible velocity of a freight-train, charged the jester and started to brawl in the street. Oh, this was fuckin' delightful.

Of course, Blitz wasn't giving the best showing for himself. He was obviously badly hurt from wherever he'd been, and the jester had pricey augmetic limbs attached to every part of him. That seemed to be making even what should have been an entirely one-sided 'fight'. But the brawling and shouted recriminations didn't last long before a bunch of goons emerged from the same building that Striker had left. He paused, looking back, and spotting Crimson sticking his head out of a window and pointing. The goons followed the one-bit gangster's unspoken order, bull-rushing the crowd which tended to form around any brawl anywhere in Hell, and then launching themselves on-mass at the two fighters. Blitz, who had been target-fixated on the jester – a mistake a lot of even the best made – didn't realize that he was about to be mobbed before two of them grabbed his arms. He managed to somehow get a knife in his teeth and stab one of them in the forearm, but before he could do anything more adventurous, a third goon came and brought a bludgeon down onto his head, hard.

Head trauma was a bitch of a thing. And the jester folded fast when mobbed. The two of them were dragged back into the building which Striker had abandoned.

"You dumb fuck," Striker said, finally finishing his cigarette and grinding the butt out on the pavement next to him. "I should'a placed that bet for real. They'll all be dead by the end of the fuckin' day."

Well, whatever. This was a Blitz problem, not a Striker problem. Since he had no money on this, strictly speaking, he had no part to play in it.

There were other places to hone his killing craft. He just had to find them. And hope they weren't staffed with pissants like Crimson Knolastname.


Consciousness returned unevenly, with Blitz first aware of the fact that somebody was interrupting his fight. Then that he probably shouldn't have been fighting in the first place. Then he realized that his head hurt. And only thereafter did the image from his eyes resolve, and reveal that he was bound with nylon cordage with his limbs tight to his body and his legs bound together to prevent striding.

Of course, all of that was somewhat rendered redundant by the fact that Blitz was clearly in a slave-cage, which by the look of things, was dangling an unhealthy drop's distance from the floor.

Oh, and there was somebody else in the cage with him.

He had a headache. He wanted to just drink some coffee, shoot a guy, and then spend the rest of the day sleeping on one of Stolas' comfy fuckin' beds. Or maybe on Stolas. Oddly enough, that thought didn't involve the process of dicking-down that he usually associated with it. Maybe it was because he'd taken serious head-trauma. Maybe it was that he was getting old. Or maybe it was because he'd taken serious head-trauma. Well, whatever the case, he had to mutter to himself for a while before he pulled the strength of his core-muscles back to order and force himself to a painful sit. He coughed a couple of times, and spat out of the cage. The wad of phlegm wasn't black, so that was good.

Fizzarolli was here, wrapped almost to the point of mummification in duct-tape. Right. 'Cause of his limbs. Whatever the case, he was laying face-down on the floor of the cage, whimpering like a puss.

"Oh, chill out, jester. Christ on a stick, it's like you've never been tied up before," Blitz said, making his return to consciousness all of Hell's problem. Fizz turned to him, and whatever mockery that Blitz was going to follow up with was muted.

Fizz's horns were shattered and stunted, right next to the base. They'd taken his motley, and revealed what most imps would find more shameful than walking around with their dick out; broken horns.

"Well I've never been tied up by a bunch of psychos or a piece of shit before!" Fizz snapped at him, but it was clear that he was on the ragged edge of just starting to cry. Blitz scowled for a second.

"Wait a second, am I the psycho or the piece of shit?" Blitz needed clarification.

"Both!" Fizz contended. Blitz shrugged.

"Yeah, that tracks," he said, trying to ignore his pounding head.

"How is this happening?" Fizz asked, his voice hitching with almost-sobs. "I was just supposed to pick up a bottle of milk and practice some juggling!"

Blitz rolled his eyes. "Oh come on. Don't be such a puss. Everybody knows your royal chicken-fucker won't let anything happen to his arm-candy, at least before he gets bored of ya'," Blitz said.

Fizz's despair turned to stubborn anger, which was good by Blitz's reckoning, and he wormed his way around so that he could actually look directly at Blitz instead of facing mostly away. "Oh, you're gonna play that card are ya?" Fizz asked. "'Cause it seems to me that your tastes have gotten pretty fucking regal, haven't they?"

Blitz scoffed. "Well yeah; I fuck who I want, when I want. If I wanna fuck a blue-blooded royal, Imma fuck him. If I want to fuck a human? Imma fuck her too! I'll fuck anyone, anywhere for any reason!"

"So why were you all lovey-dovey with Stolas at that garden-party?" Fizz demanded.

"Oh don't start with that. He wanted to do harmful amounts of cocaine and drugs and get dicked down by the Lower Classes. It's just typical rich-asshole thinking," Blitz said. But even then, saying it actually felt wrong and bad. Like it was betraying something he held dear. What a weird sensation. Fizz gave him a look, that if Blitz were a smarter imp, would have been instantly pegged as a 'you're full of shit' look, but Blitz was not that smarter imp. "Besides. I outrank him now. He has to do what I tell him to."

"And still you go back to him," Fizz chided.

"Well, yeah. Guy can take dick like a fuckin' champion. And I've fucked my share of Succubitches and Incubutts before; I know podium-quality puss when I'm in it."

"So you're lording over him that you got to turn the tables on the guy who was fucking you over," Fizz said.

"Y...n...fuckin… it's complicated," Blitz admitted, his heart sinking. Even Blitz's fragmented psyche was starting to cotton to the fact that yes, Stolas did actually appear to care as he claimed to for the wellbeing of Blitz Miller. And no, he wasn't going to sabotage it, because he had both Stolas and his Mother to keep dope-slapping him any time that The Stupid began to rear its ugly head. "I mean, I'm getting old. I can't afford to be a dumb bitch about this shit anymore."

"Old? Blitz, I'm a month older than you are!" Fizz sounded insulted by the implication. "I am not old."

"Yeah, well, you didn't get put through a decade of time-travel bullshit," Blitz said. He looked out of the cage for a moment, taking in the army of goons below. Most of them were imps and Selachimorphs. He spotted a few mutants for variety, but they all, be they shooting pool, drinking heavily, or building a delicate house of cards, had the look of people that even Blitz could beat in the areas of general intelligence, etiquette, and reading comprehension. "I'm still getting' used to the fact that when he answers my texts and laughs at my jokes that he's not being a petty bitch about something."

"Laughing at your jokes? That's gotta be bullshit," Fizz said.

"I know, right! I thought so too, but then he sits you down and gets all serious, looks you dead in the eye and… and he says things. Things you don't think you deserve to hear… and…" Blitz said. Fizz just stared at him. "Y'know what I think?"

"I literally don't care," Fizz answered him.

"I still think that most of those blue-blooded assholes ain't got souls. Might be one of the whole lot of 'em that is worth the spit on my dick so I don't go in dry."

"Satan's-Taint, asshole, is fucking that bird literally everything you're about now?" Fizz demanded of him.

"Hey fuck you! I was tryin' to be the bigger guy for once!"

"Would you two pricks shut the fuck up!" a voice called from the floor well below. Blitz flopped to one side and wormed to the bars so that he could see who exactly arranged his current bondage sesh. And he was mildly annoyed and deeply disappointed in himself that the face that greeted him down there was Crimson.

If it'd been Striker, then Blitz could have faced it without a loss of ego. Striker was a hard motherfucker. But this guy? Not only was he dumb, but he was also just kinda sad. In every way that Blitz was able to compare, he was a worse, paltrier, and shittier version of Moxxie.

"How 'bout you come up and lick my taint to make me?" Blitz shouted back down. "What the fuck were you thinking, shit-sandwich? I WAS WORKING!"

Bad enough that he had to abort going to a hospital – which was a thing he was now allowed and even expected to do, because of his Proxihood – to get a bunch of shit fixed, but no, it got sidelined because Lucifer got a bug up his ass about somebody who he just learned fucked him over in Greed Ring, and wanted Blitz to make a very dead example of him. Thus he was limping around with busted ribs in this piss-hole of a Ring.

Mother fucker, he just wanted to sit on a bed and watch bad TV while his bones and guts were kneaded back into place by sexy nurses. Was that too much to fucking ask?

"Like I give a shit about your pathetic little top-side job," Crimson said. Crimson managed to be shorter than his son, Moxxie, and his one of his teeth had been replaced with a gold one, one that gleamed when he grinned as he did now in a cruel manner that frankly Blitz had never seen out of this cum-stain's kid. "The only reason you're there too is 'cause I might be able to get a couple bucks outta you from your side-chick."

"My side chick?" Blitz asked. He turned to Fizz. "Remind me, who was I fucking besides Stolas right now?"

"I'm not your fucking orgy planner, you creep!" Fizz snapped at him.

"Not that it'll amount to much. You was a sad, pathetic worm when I saw you last, and you'll be a sad, pathetic worm when you get pitched outta a helicopta' today," Crimson pulled a cigar from his coat pocket and lit it off of Hadene lighter, which drew a wince and a groan from Blitz. While he wasn't big on smoking, even he knew that you don't light cigars with Hadene. Wood fire, like a match or shit. Butane if you could get it. Not a Hadene-lighter. It fouls the entire first inch! "Besides. That one," he pointed with the now burning (not smoldering) cigar at the space near Blitz, likely intending Fizzarolli, "is gonna be worth ten times his weight in gold. Not that it'll be that hard. Squeezing the weakest and most pathetic of the Deadly Sins by usin' the worst kept secret in all 'a Hell against him should get things right as rain for me and mine. You, Blitzø? I'll probably be able to afford coffee for my boys on what you're worth."

Blitz took a look around, at the frankly sad arrangement of goons, toughs, thugs, and morons that Crimson had accumulated since the last massacre that Millie had visited upon the sad little man. Blitz was pretty sure he'd be able to kill most of them without even freeing his arms.

"Now you two just stay there till the big man answers," Crimson took a deep suck on his cigar. "'Course he's already ignored me once. If he does that again, I'm gonna send pieces of that pretty thing up there to him until he makes wise," Crimson's grin grew again, and he laughed. "And for him, it'll be usin' a screwdriver to pop 'em off, instead of a knife. Ain't that gonna be a novelty?"

Laughing to himself at his own asinine plan, Blitz sat back with a disgusted noise.

"Ignored?" Fizz wormed his way over. "Ozzie wouldn't ignore me…"

"Don't let it get under your skin," Blitz said. "He probably just wants you scared as fuck so you won't try running away. Guy's already stupid enough to put me in a cage. Come to think of it, why haven't you gotten outta your shit yet?"

"You think I haven't been trying?" Fizz snapped at him, arching his back and straining against the duct-tape, flopping around a few times, then activating something in his cyber-limbs which catapulted him face-first into the bars. He landed with a sad thud, and now actually started sobbing. He curled up, his partially bound tail doing its best to loop around him. "I hate this! I just wanted to go perform! I'm not an action hero, I'm a FUCKING JESTER! I wanna go home!"

"Huh. Maybe his stupidity ain't as complete as I thought?"

"Stop trying to make me feel better!" Fizz demanded.

"Why the fuck would you think I was doing that? I was pointing out that he's a moron!" Blitz didn't understand Fizz's point.

"He managed to capture us in no time!"

"Yeah, because I was already beat to shit when I jumped you, I was distracted, and they knocked my ass out before I could more than shank one of 'em," Blitz said. He shifted over and using his own, now unbound tail, hoisted Fizz up so that the jester was sitting, rather than lying fetal on the floor of the cage. "Look, Fizz. This is gonna be fine. The guy is dumber than his kid is smart, and that's a fucking feat to achieve."

"Why do you keep saying that about him?" Fizz asked, still sniffling.

"'Cause he called Asmodeus 'the weakest' Deadly Sin. Leviathan's Balls, man, everybody with a pair of eyes knows that's fuckin' Baphomet! I mean, Christ, man, didn't Asmodeus wipe out dozens of Angels by his own hand a couple months ago? Dude's a beast," Blitz laid out the very clear rationale there. Fizzarolli found himself smiling for a moment.

"Yeah. He is a big, strong man," Fizz said.

"Feeling better, Fizz?"

"Fuck you," Fizz said.

"Does that fuck you mean you don't want me to break us out?"

"What?" Fizz asked.

"Do. You. Want Me. To break. Us out?" Blitz stressed. Fizz struggled with his binds for a few moments, but then sheepishly turned those bright red eyes back to him.

With a defeated, and still a bit fear-laced voice, he said. "Y-yes."

Blitz just grinned, then tensioned his foot inside his boot in a very particular way, hearing more than seeing a shard of razor sharp metal being extended from its place in his footwear. He tried to contort, to cut his own bonds, but his body didn't obey him.

"You had a knife this whole time?" Fizz hissed with frustrated exasperation.

"I kill people for a living, bitch! And I got a fuckin' concussion! Gimme a minute to sort my shit!" Blitz answered, then tilted his knife toward Fizz. "Now put this in your mouth like you do with the big guy's dick and cut me free."

"Fuck you!" Fizz said.

"Maybe later, we'll see how randy I'm feeling when we're out of this!" Blitz answered the jester. Fizz grumbled but flopped forward and wormed to where he could pull the knife out of Blitz's boot with his teeth, and then very slowly began to saw at Blitz's binds. As soon as the loop snapped, Blitz was able to flex his arm enough to pull the blade out of Fizz's gob and cut the rest of his bindings in short order. Then with an expert swipe, parted the seas of duct-tape that were holding Fizzarolli in bondage. "Better?"

"Why do you gotta keep insulting me while we do this? That call was all apology, and now this?" Fizz said, rolling his augmetic arms and legs, now that he had a touch of freedom with them.

"Weren't an insult. Fizz, I remember that mouth 'a yours. You could knit a fuckin' sweater with that tongue."

"That was seventeen years ago!" Fizz sputtered.

"Yuh-huh. And I remember it yet," Blitz said. He turned and looked at the gathering of goons below him. "Now hold onto that knife and gimme a second to figure out how to play this."

With the state he was in, seeing as he had two overlapping concussions, only had about 70% of the blood in his body that he was supposed to, and had several bone-fractures and other injuries coming into this bullshit situation, he knew he could still probably kill them all using just his hands and whatever guns he could salvage off of them as he killed them, but what would be the fun in that?

Even as he looked to the various pockets of goon activity – the drinking, the house-of-cards, the pool table, the forklift, it dawned on Blitz that just calling Lucifer would have solved this, because Crimson had the bone-headed audacity to kidnap Lucifer's Proxy… while the Proxy was doing Lucifer's bidding. That would have brought ruin on an apocalyptic scale onto the sad little imp. But Blitz's level of spite was more geared to the personal and the petty. While he could press the Lucifer button and end this guy's entire career… it'd be more satisfying if Blitz did it personally.

And looking around, he quickly clued in that these people all hated each other. While Blitz was far from the authority on mafia-boss hiring best-practices, he could spot floor-of-the-barrel goons when he saw them. And some of these assholes were so low that they were technically the floor under that fucking barrel. These were the bottom-dollar thugs that you hired when nobody worth more was willing to work with you. They tended to be a lot like Blitz, in that they were stupid, greedy, impulsive, and recklessly violent.

Well, like Blitz used to be, he told himself, ignorant of the fact that he was still all four of those things, but in smaller quantities.

So he started to crowd-play. The house of cards was getting teased and mocked, despite the fact that the mutant was built like a tank and armed with an LMG. The drinkers were so pissed-up that they likely wouldn't even realize the fight had happened until half the table was dead. The pool players were target fixated like fools. The forklift guy obviously wasn't certified. He then glanced up, at a beam supporting not only this cage, but a good section of the roof.

Oh, he could play this. There was a remote just over there, the one that controlled this crane that the cage was hoisted on. And its positioning could only be more perfect if it were in Blitz's lap. "D'ya see that remote over there?" Blitz asked.

"I… I don't think my arms can stretch that far," Fizz admitted. Which was a fair cop, because that shit was far away.

"No no," Blitz said, prideful grin growing on his face as he looked over to the precariously stacked boxes that cast a shadow over the drinkers. "I have a better idea."

Blitz hurled his weight toward, then away, then toward the boxes again. The second swing of the cage was enough to cross the foot or so to the nearest box. And the instant that any impact jostled that stack of boxes, the whole tower of them offered up a crackling splinter, and they began to crumble and fall.

One of the boxes landed on the edge of the table, catapulting a stein of beer through the air, even as the collapse of boxes crushed some of the others under their weight.

The stein slammed through the just-barely completed house of cards and shattered on the big Mutant's face. The tower collapsed, and the people around him began to laugh with derision. With a look of utmost fury, the Mutant pulled his gun, and screamed, opening fire on all of them.

The gunfire may have done a lot of Blitz's work, but it wasn't until the sweep of the guy's gun caught the non-forklift-certified fiend in the middle of asking 'what's goin on here', killing him with his foot on the accelerator, causing the tines of the forklift to first impact and then impale a pair of thugs as it raced toward the pool table.

At the pool table, the pool-sharks were so fixated on their game, that they ignored not only a few of their number being gunned down but also the sound of an approaching forklift. The fucking thing caught actual air over a flap of box that had landed atop a barrel, and landed on one side of the side of the pool table, crushing one of the pool-sharks under its weight, and launching the eight-ball up and causing it to deflect off of the cord that the crane used to hold the cage off of the warehouse floor. The ball then marched, spinning wildly, in the vague direction of the remote, veering off of patches of rust and crust, until finally it reached the edge, slipped, and fell off.

It landed on the button with a beep lost to the mayhem below.

If Moxxie had pulled that, it would have been calculated. For Blitz, it was just reality playing along because it was funny. He'd take being a joke if it let him get his shit done today.

"Well that didn't do–" Fizz began.

Then the cage came crashing down and broke apart upon impact with the floor.

It hurt, but Blitz had waited until the last second to jump as hard as his legs would let him, and thus negated at least some of the harm. Fizz, unprepared for such feat, was splayed out in an unraveled pile of pale skin and noodle limbs. That got Blitz to pause, ignoring for a moment that there was a Mutant over there beating a corpse into paste with an empty light machine gun. How had he not noticed that before?

That wasn't makeup.

Blitz leaned down to Fizz, actually looking at his face and the skin of his chest. There was a spot, just before his heart, that formed something of a wedge down the front of him where his skin was still impish red. But everywhere else – everywhere that Blitz could see, at least – was scar. And though it didn't have the rough and puckered texture of scar tissue, that was likely down to Asmodeus not wanting his boy-toy to be a canker of keloid tissue. Though smooth, it was still discolored, uniformly, across his entire face and upper body.

All except for his nose.

All except for where he used to wear that honker of his. Just his nose, and his chest, where he'd been lying.

"The fuck was that?" Fizz asked, having shaken some of his incoherence out. Blitz reached down and grabbed one of the noodle arms and pulled Fizz to his feet. Then he reached over to a table nearby and grabbed the imp's pale motley. Fizzarolli's eye twitched as he spotted it, and he snatched it from Blitz's hand to cover the shamefully stunted horns that injury had given him. "...fuck you anyway."

"What, no props for that circus of an escape?" Blitz asked.

"Where even are we?"

"A warehouse outside 'a Ransom," Blitz said. "That fuck-face ain't exactly competent at hiding his operation."

"So how do we…" Fizz began, then offered a very mouse-like peep of fear, ducking behind Blitz. Blitz turned to what Fizz spotted.

"Hey asshole! Your cage sucks!" Blitz shouted at Crimson, who was standing with a new knot of his goons at the entrance of the building. With a look of frustration that his son had inherited essentially one-for-one, he threw his glass of whatever liquor he was drinking to shatter on the floor and pointed at the now-escaped imps.

"Don't just stand there you reta'ds! GET THEM!" Crimson demanded.

And while Blitz had depopulated this section of the warehouse, it apparently wasn't the whole structure. Now that the boss had returned to the floor and was calling the shots, the at-odds goons now put aside their reasonable enmities and focused on Blitz and Fizz. Now, Blitz had a lot of things going wrong with him today. He was getting old. He didn't get a lot of sleep last night. He had two, overlapping concussions. Oh yeah, and he had a bunch of broken bones in his body. So instead of immediately launching onto the offense and liquidating the entire building of mafiosos, he shoved Fizz to get him moving and dove onto a table, using his momentum and weight to tip it onto its side. He grabbed a gun, but snarled at finding it empty, before grabbing another, both from the hands of dead mobsters.

He glanced through a bullet-hole, aiming more with muscle memory than with good form, and managed to kill the Caprican right beside Crimson with his first shot, and wing the Selachimorph on Crimson's other side with the next. It was a shame. He was hoping that he'd nail the little shit. Much as Moxxie had the patent on comeuppance with this dumbass, it didn't stop from Blitz from enjoying shooting him. Just a little. Not enough to kill him. But enough to hurt him.

"Hand me another gun, I…" Blitz shouted to Fizz, and turned to see the spectacle that the jester was currently making of himself.

Having been headed off by a hulking shark-fiend, Fizz gave a shriek of fear and tried to bolt away, turning and hurling a juggling-pin at the shark's face. If it'd been a throwing knife, it still would have been only marginally effective, in that the aim was good, but it was obvious that Fizz lacked all technique and any reasonable strength. The… yeah, that was an Piscean Consumer, not a Selachimorph. Well, the Piscean tried to wrangle Fizz with his thick, clawed arms, only to have the jester duck aside and blare an air-horn in his face. That only served to piss the Piscean off, and back Fizz against a box and finally get ahold of him. Fizz was panicking, obviously, because he threw away a perfectly good source of fire that he could have used to flare the guy's face in order to get his hands on a banana peel, which he hurled under the Piscean's feet. The Consumer didn't even seem to notice it, stepping away from the trap both heedless and unimpeded.

"Damn it! This usually works!" Fizz screamed.

And Blitz sighed. It seemed Blitz's saving of Fizzarolli today had certainly come to a middle.

As another mobster, this one some kind of Mutant-Litigator hybrid (don't think about that one too hard) raced in to bash Fizz with a pool cue, Fizz finally did the first 'right' thing he'd done all fight, letting his limbs grow noodley so he could force his head down and out of the way so that the blow hit the fishy Consumer instead. The Consumer then immediately haymakered the hybrid in the face for the sin of hitting him instead of the clown.

Blitz gave his head a shake, and then fired one last bullet straight through his cover, unsure if he killed the guy he was shooting at, but now certain if he didn't save the Jester's ass, it was going to be fried in a matter of goddamned seconds.

So with a growl in his throat and disappointment in his heart, he dove at the snake-fiend that was crawling up Fizz's legs as he tried to claw his way away, smashing his empty gun four times into the guy's skull until he felt it crunch. He quickly swapped an empty gun for the Ophiuchan's half-full one. "How in the FUCK can somebody as flexible as you be so useless in a fight?" Blitz demanded of Fizz.

"I'm a performer!" Fizz shouted back, pulling both himself and Blitz to their feet, so Blitz could point his stolen pistol past Fizz's shoulder and fire at another mobster running at them with shock-knuckles on his fists; the goon fell and skidded to a halt, leaving a trail of his own blood and brains behind him a couple yards out. Fizz winced at having a gun go off next to his ear, but did for once a smart thing and used his agility to get out of Blitz's way as he turned and fired an uncomfortable amount of bullets into a Minotaur that charged them, leaving him again with an empty gun. "I sing, I dance, and I promote products I don't actually use! I don't do danger!"

Blitz groaned and ducked under a haymaker by the bit guy who'd grappled Fizz a bit ago, then used his tail to sweep around and mount him, using his legs and a firm grip on the shelves to break the guy's neck. Blitz fell, and immediately coughed and spat out a wad that was blacker than he'd like to have been, the room swimming as his head pounded all the harder. Oh great. Now all of his shit was acting up again. Still, he grabbed the big guy's gun, and even bothered to check its mag; well Christ on a stick things were finally looking his way. A full gun. "Nice to know you're still a wimpy circus-puss."

Blitz spotted a ladder, and verticality would probably buy them some breathing room. So he started to clamber, ignoring how every second reach upward seared his chest as the scab inside his lung split open and blood began to leak into it again. Fizz was almost as quick in following, adding "I'd give you a comeback if I actually gave a shit what you think."

Blitz, though, having reached the top of the ladder, turned and saw that there was a Selachimorph inches from grabbing Fizz's legs. Blitz dragged fizz off of the ladder and atop the shelves, and then lined up his aim so that he managed to head-shot both the Selachimorph near the top of the ladder and the Piscean Consumer behind him, causing both to fall to to the floor, before kicking the ladder over. "You always cared what I thought!" Blitz contended, pulling Fizz by his arm through the precariously stacked boxes here at the top of the shelving unit. That, finally, got Fizz to tear his arm out of Blitz's grasp.

"Are you serious? After what YOU DID TO ME?" Fizz sounded legitimately furious, which hurt Blitz in a way he hadn't expected it would. Derisive? Sure. People have been talking down to him his whole life. Disgusted? Fine. People were prudes who didn't know what they were missing. But to be angry at him for reasons which he wholly understood and agreed with? Yeah, that hurt.

"That," Blitz said, stressing his words very carefully so he didn't do the usual thing of fucking up and saying the wrong thing, "was an accident."

"An ACCIDENT?" Fizz demanded, storming into Blitz's space and glaring him in the eye from well within kissing range. "Are you KIDDING ME? You always had it out for me because I was a better performer than you were! YOU WANTED ME GONE so you'd have the spotlight all to yourself!"

And at that, the fighting kind of… fell away, as Blitz, despite his better judgement, found himself thinking of that horrible fucking day. Fizz and Blitz, the phenom and the fuck-up, the Bohta and the Nuckelavee. The priceless and the worthless. How no matter how the gulf in their talents widened, they were always there for each other. It had been Blitz's most 'chaste' relationship. The one that hurt him most, because he had hurt Fizz the most.

He remembered Fizzarolli's sixteenth birthday. Of him getting a contract that would see him performing for aristocrats instead of idiots. The first step toward working for Mammon himself. And he remembered feeling so utterly useless, with nothing to give Fizz for a birthday gift except for a wilting flower and a sappy love-note, while everybody else of note in the troupe feted and celebrated Fizzaroli's success. The shame he felt was stronger than it'd ever been, and would be a near-lifelong companion to Blitz. A feeling that no amount of happiness, no matter how small, was deserved by the like of him.

Without thinking, he'd shoved aside the guy approaching the party with Fizz's already lit cake.

And the ground of Greed that they'd set up was saturated with Hadene. The canvass of the tents had soaked it up like a wick. The instant that flame touched it, it erupted into sticky, lethal-even-to-imps green flame.

Less than half a minute later, the flames reached the fireworks that had been gathered for Fizz's party.

"You were my best friend," Fizz snarled at him. "I did everything I could for you, and you just… you left me to FUCKING DIE! You didn't even look back! You just fucking ran off like you never cared about me at all!"

Oh, now that wasn't going to stand. Even with his eyes welling up out of the shame and despair, he managed to answer that charge with his own. "I did care!"

At this point, a few goons had managed to climb the stacks, so Blitz quickly shot them, before spotting some clambered up to the rafters. Blitz looped his tail around the rail of the shelves, then shoved both he and Fizz off of the top of the stacks and swung them into the protective lee of the boxes a level down.

"I did care," Blitz said, letting Fizz back away from him. "It was an accident! It was!"

He remembered that instant that his childhood ended and the broken adulthood he slogged through began. He remembered seeing Fizzarolli, the Phenom of Bohta, laying face-down in the smoldering dirt. His legs were stumped not far from the hips. His arms were being consumed by Hadene fire. His horns snapped off and cauterized, part of his head still actively burning.

In that instant, that instant where all of the bitter lessons that everybody but Tilla had been pounding into his skull with mallets finally sank in, he knew that he was exactly what everybody said about him. He was a leech. A failure from the moment he was born. And the only thing he would ever bring to anyone, ever, was ruin. In that moment, he thought that his idiot shove had killed his best friend.

He pressed his fingers to his face, at the edge of the scar which, lacking a Deadly Sin's beautician-budget, was still ripply and uneven, the white scar that took up almost half of Blitz's face, where the blast had nearly peeled him down to the skull.

He sat down on the shelf stacks, his eyes dribbling. "You were right," Blitz said. "It was all my fault. I know that. I've known it for thirty years. Everything that happens to me is my fault."

Fizz seemed taken aback by that admission, as though Blitz was that particular brand of stupid that would deny reality to its face (well, he was, but not in this instance).

"I should'a done more to help you but… but…" Blitz blubbered for a second. "There was so much going on. It… was still my fault."

"Finally you actually admit it. Great. Want a medal?" Fizz asked, but his tone wasn't nearly as accusatory as it had been. Blitz could hear the goons trying to get to a place where they could shoot him. Right now, he didn't care.

"I'm sorry you got so hurt," Blitz said, abandoning denial for sincerity. "But… you weren't the only one. Tilla… Mom… she died. In my arms. I watched the light leave her eyes, while Barb stood there, knowing that this was my fault."

"...I heard about that," Fizz said. "Tilla was… a better person than most."

"Even when she came back, I still felt shame every time I looked at her. 'Cause I got her killed."

"Wait, what?" Fizz asked, obviously confused.

"Oh right; 'member my stories about Gramma-ma? How she was this big fuckin' witch and shit?" Blitz asked, wiping his eyes and forcing the shame and sorrow down. "She brought Mom back to life so that Mom could have more kids who weren't complete failures."

"Tilla's alive?" Fizz asked.

"Yeah. Was prisoner in Lust for 16 years. Turns out she wasn't dead long," Blitz said. He looked at Fizz. "I get it. I'd hate me too, considering all I managed to get back and all you lost. Frankly, I do ha–"

At this point the goons that Blitz had been ignoring actually managed to reach them, and Blitz found himself grabbed and put into a choke-hold. But Blitz had a lot of experience with breath-play, and knew that this was a breath-choke and not a blood-choke. So he had plenty of time to pull his stolen gun into his left hand, worm it underneath the muscle-bound piss-baby's jaw, and fire one straight up and through his brainpan.

Blitz looked past the now falling corpse, and saw two more buff guys crawling along the outside of the stacks toward Blitz and Fizz. They were actually a bit smart, in that the one in front had a big ole' plate of metal he was using as a shield to complicate headshots or heart-shots. But the plate didn't protect the hand that he was using to hold onto the stack, so Blitz shot that, causing him to loose his grip, and fall head-first to the concrete below; the panel he used for protection landing on his smashed-in face was likely just a bee-sting after a beheading. The second guy, with no such protection, got two in the face to send him plummeting down. Eleven bullets left. He turned to start down the row of boxes, but found himself being physically picked up and hauled. He almost shot the one who did it, but the limbs which did so were cybernetic; he was dragged across a gap it would have sucked to fall through, and deposited next to Fizz, who had clued in to start running and not stop.

"Is that what that second weird part of the call was all about?" Fizz demanded.

"I was so drunk I can't even remember what I said in that call!" Blitz said.

"Obviously! You were so drunk I couldn't understand anything you fuckin' said for almost a minute!" Fizz said. Blitz ducked as a bullet shattered the corner of a box near them. So Crim was getting more stupid than greedy, and was okaying guns, now? Typical. He leaned out and almost fired back, but realized that his shot was likely to miss because his vision was a little bit swimmy right now and he didn't have so many bullets that he could afford to hurl them at vision-doubles. Still, by now Blitz had established his reputation with these punk-asses that when he was visible, somebody on their side was dying. They all hit the deck or scattered. "So why didn't you come to see me?" Fizz asked as Blitz pulled himself back into the stacks.

"I wanted to, but they said you refused to see me," Blitz countered. "I tried to break in anyway, but they threw my ass out into the trash…"

"What? No you didn't," Fizz said, turning a confused look back at him. "They said you never even bothered to show up!"

"Yeah, according to who? Cash Nuckelavee?" Blitz snapped.

Then there was a moment of silence between the two of them, as they stopped running and hit a realization two decades in the making, realizing the common denominator of their shared woe.

Fizz was aghast at the thought, then looked Blitz in the eye. "Your dad is an asshole," Fizz said.

"Yup. I'm glad my sister killed him."

"Barb did what?" Fizz asked. A ladder slammed against the stacks next to them, with a Selachimorph already most of the way up its length to pounce on them. Blitz planted his boot on the ladder's frame, firing an increasingly precious bullet into the face of the approaching goon, then kicking the ladder sideways so it'd tilt over and collapse the least convenient way possible. "Do you fuckin' mind, you assholes? We're trying to have an emotional moment here!"

At this point, the fleeing imps were running out of shelf, and the goons were starting to reach their level of verticality. So Fizz actually took initiative, and did so correctly, dragging both he and Blitz to the top of the stacks to the whirring of cybernetic extending limbs. Blitz wasted no time picking off the three guys up in the rafters, meaning they wouldn't get shot.

"Look, your dad being a shit-ass or not, it's hard to just put this in the past," Fizz said.

"It's been seventeen years," Blitz admitted.

"And that's so much time," he said, then Blitz found himself manhandled and pointed toward an approaching Mutant. Blitz immediately shot him, sending him tumbling down. "But… I guess… you didn't really ruin my life."

"I set the fire that burned off all your limbs! And most of your skin!" Blitz countered, not able to accept a heart-felt apology without digging at himself at least a little.

"And now I've got something better. C'mon, Blitz! I was always gonna go 'Borg."

"But I took the choice from you," Blitz said. Fizz freaked, and Blitz found himself shoved at a pair of more goons. One Blitz shot, but the other he finally took that knife that Fizz was clutching even now and buried it into the mafia-imp's face. Oddly, it wasn't the knife that killed the imp, but the impact with the floor when the mobster fell off of the stacks. "That shit shoulda' been…"

"Don't you fuckin' 'shoulda' at me," Fizz said, as they now ran back whence they'd come, because their entire odyssey in this direction had been leading them to a dead-end. "Getting blown up sucked. But it forced Mom to let me Aug up, and let me become… well… me!"

Blitz then found himself being used as a bludgeon, as Fizz finally, for once in this entire misadventure, used a weapon of significant density to knock a goon off of the stacks to a gravity-related death. That weapon was Blitz's skull, but still, kudos on Fizz finally offing a guy of his own volition.

"It was challenging, and fuckin' lonely for a while, but it's not like I'm broken," Fizz continued, as Blitz spotted and pointed out a sloppily-patched hole in the roof, which, notably, didn't have a swarm of mobsters guarding it. "And now I've got a good thing going for me. I mean… my life has turned out pretty great."

Was he fucking blushing? That triggered an alarm in Blitz that he didn't know he had. Not of impending physical ruin, or even anything that would fuck him over, but that somebody else was in for a shitshow.

"Look… are you sure you should be this invested in that shit?" Blitz said. "Not all Royals are big on that ridiculous 'monogamy' thing."

"Oh fuck you. I'm just in it 'cause he's got, like, the biggest cock. Enormous. Like a kaiju, but it's a cock," Fizz said, but even Blitz, who was not gifted with even a quarter share of impish good thinking, could see that Fizz was bullshitting.

"I'm happy for you. Just… be careful, alright," Blitz said.

"What are you fuckin' goons doin? Grab those shits!" Crimson's voice cut in on their moment, and the stack they were running atop began to shudder and shake as the thugs began to clamber up it en masse. And that would either resolve in more goons than Blitz had bullets, or them knocking the shelf down, which would have sucked in its own, entirely different way.

Fizz needed no prompting, extending his limbs and essentially being a living grapple-gun, pulling the pair of them to the wound in the building. There was a plate of metal just barely making the gap un-squeezable, so Blitz reached into his coat and pulled out the industrial stapler that they hadn't taken from him – a mistake that he wished he could have imparted onto them, but reality dictated that mobsters didn't know the damage Blitz could do with a stapler, and fucked up. Now, a device used to bind things together might not seem like it'd be useful in tearing things apart, and in fact might seem counterproductive. But the thing was, this stapler was fuckin' meaty. So when he wedged the thing into the gap of the bind, he was able to heave down on it and use it as a pry-bar to pop the shitty-weld that held the plate in place, and then see the gap open. Fizz, he urged through first, because it was a long drop on the other side, and Blitz was, for all his performance here today, still injured to shit.

He heard a gunshot, and turned to fire at the one who shot at him (actually having shot him in the back of the head, but Blitz's blithe ignorance of his Remit in most situations did legwork in keeping him alive) and put him down, then knocked down a few more who had their guns trained on him. That got the hens to scatter long enough for Blitz to awkwardly squirm his way through the breach, and upon falling out of the window, get caught by Fizzarolli's extendable limbs.

Blitz held up a finger, then coughed and spat a wad of blood out. It hurt like a bitch to breathe, but he was still standing, and the world was only swimming a little bit in his vision. "Holy shit! We actually got outta that!" Fizz exclaimed.

"Yeah. I was afraid we were gonna have to do 'Look At This'," Blitz said.

"I'm not a whore, Blitz," Fizz said flatly at him.

"Weren't a whore when you did it to steal Cash's booze," Blitz offered a painful laugh. "Now where the fuck are we?"

"I thought you said you knew!" Fizz said.

"I said that to calm you down," Blitz explained. The area outside the warehouse was chock-a-block with ruined vehicles, trash, rusty, leaking barrels of dangerous compounds, and essentially everything that Greed Ring had become synonymous for in the age of Lucifer. So lacking a plan, Blitz just picked a direction, and started running as fast as his battered body would allow.

"I can't believe we got outta there in one piece!" Fizz said.

"We ain't out yet," Blitz said, then snarled as the path he'd run down turned out to be a dead end, one too precariously stacked for even an imp to clamber up. He turned back and picked a different direction. "So you'd best shut your clown-whore mouth before you get fate to shit on us!"

"I was trying to be congratulatory!" Fizz said.

"Congratulations come when we're cruising at 80 down the highway, not when we're FUCKING GOD DAMN DID THEY BUILD THIS PLACE AS A FUCKING MAZE?" Blitz shouted as his next choice ended up descending into a lagoon of battery-acid surrounded by the bones of wildlife stupid or desperate enough to try drinking it. He turned back again, and picked a new direction to try to exit this stupid fucking yard.

It didn't occur to either imp that Fizz's limbs were extendable. That he could just pop up and look for the right way to go. But then, both of the imps involved in the daring escape from the mafia were best known for things other than their combined shining intellect.

So they ended up finding another technical-dead-end, in that the path continued, but there were feral Hellhounds gnawing on rotting bones that the imps didn't want to fuck around with. Blitz only had two bullets left in this gun. Unless he could get three of those Hounds to share, that wasn't enough to go around.

Finally, he found a path which didn't stymie him, opening to an actual, intact car. And a fancy one, at that. Blitz could see the ruts in the muck that it cut to park here. Was this… oh, this had to be Crimson's ride.

"Finally, a piece of good fuckin' luck," Blitz said. He laughed, then turned toward Fizz, just for a fraction of a second spotting that Crimson himself was behind the jester, a gun pointed at Blitz.

And the gunshot that resulted sounded loud, and the tearing in Blitz's gut pushed him back two steps and down to one knee, as the bullet that he saw coming bypassed the Remit of Lucifer and dug a hole into his abdomen.

"Yeah. A piece 'a luck for me," Crimson said. Fizz tried to grab a piece of car-scrap and whack Crimson with it, but for all Crimson was an amateur at violence, Fizzarolli was an absolute dunce. Crimson not only ducked the strike, but grabbed the arms right behind the hand, and when Fizz panicked and wound his limbs back in, it dragged Crimson right in to the place where he could put his gun against Fizz's shoulder and fire a bullet directly into the mechanism; the thing emitted a blast of sparks and a yank by the mobster pulled the arm off, leaving it to coil in the muck. Blitz lifted his gun, and forced himself back to his feet, heedless of the pain of his gut-wound.

"You get your whore hands off'a him, shit-stain," Blitz said.

Crimson, though, offered a grin. "And let my biggest payday of this decade walk off? I don't don't think so, faggot," the mobster said. "Had I known you was actually good at killin', I might have just had 'em plug ya in the street. Where was this back at the wedding?"

Blitz snarled at that. "You ain't ever seen me fighting at 100%. 'Cause if you did, you'd be more scared 'a me then you are of Mills! I got a bitch of a concussion and that's the only reason you ain't five-minutes dead right now!" Blitz pointed out. It seemed a lifetime ago, before all the Birch bullshit and everything that came after it, that Blitz had been drugged to within an inch of a coma and still managed to be useful in the fight against Crimson's laughable cronies… even if he was most useful as a blunt object for Millie to swing at people. Blitz wondered if that Selachimorph he fucked was still around, or if Crimson had offed him. Either way, no great loss. He was a lousy fuck, in both senses of the phrase.

"I ain't scared a nobody," Crimson said. "And least of all the unfunniest clown in the soycus. A worthless hitman people hire to do shit work nobody cares about."

"What the fuck are you talking about? Don't you know who Blitz is?" Fizz asked despite the gun against his head.

"A two bit killer 'a the living on behalf of the dead. A useless piece of a broken machine," Crimson said. "Not even worth the effort to ransom."

"Yeah, remember how I said he was an idiot?" Blitz said, slowly keeping pace with Crimson as he backed toward the warehouse, which was barely visible through the piles of trash. "I don't think he's read any newspapers in, like, the last five years."

"Blitz is Lucifer's Proxy, you dumb-fuck!" Fizz shouted at his hostage-taker.

"Yeah, and I'm Pride Incarnate," Crimson said. He swung his gun from pointing at the clown to pointing at Blitz. "How 'bout you stop limpin' after me and just bleed to death over there."

"How 'bout you let go of my oldest friend before I turn your head into a FUCKING CANOE?" Blitz shouted back. This time, Blitz saw the trigger pull coming. And that meant he had a fraction of a second to get out of the way. A fraction of a second he tried to use well, but his injuries fucked him. The next gunshot clipped his ribs, and he was pretty sure it undid all of the healing that Moxxie had done to keep him from dying under that rich asshole's house. Blitz staggered, but didn't fall. Crimson was ducking back now, so that even Blitz at his best would be hard-pressed to nail that shot without winging Fizz.

So Blitz looked for something else that could solve this little problem.

And he found a stack of barrels of Hadene, so rusted that they were emitting a faintly brown haze of volatile gas around them. "I got plenty a bullets dick-bag. And you ain't lookin' so hot," Crimson taunted as he cowered behind Fizz's body, using the jester as a shield.

Blitz didn't bother justifying that with a response. He snapped his aim over to the Hadene barrels and fired. Now, Hadene was nasty stuff. Considering it was explosive enough to run a car, it also had some particular traits that made it unsuitable for being around. It was corrosive. It gelled when it touched iron colder than sizzling, which was a stumbling block for early hellish automotive manufacturers. And it burned hot enough that it could injure even things made out of living flame.

But it blew up, real nice.

The blast struck Crimson, and because of his position behind Fizz it mostly sheltered the Jester from the blastwave. Still, the explosion was bad enough that it hurled Blitz rather agonizingly to his back, and lifted the other two imps and hurled them away. Blitz refused to lose consciousness. Not now. He sat up, which hurt so incredibly much, and found a slightly smoldering motley near him. No. No not again. He forced himself to stand, to look through the hostile green flames of the Hadene fire. He just had to…

Where was Fizz? Blitz looked at the blast zone, then spotted Crimson, laying face-down in the muck, his back on fire and his tail burning to the bone. Fuck him. He earned that. No, Blitz needed to find… Fizz. There he was, crawling with shattered cybernetic limbs, away from a wall of encroaching, roiling green flame. Blitz screamed Fizz's name in sheer panic. He couldn't let this happen again. Never again.

There had to be a way to get to him, past all that fire.

There, a barrel. He'd just roll it over to the cars, and then launch from there. So he jumped onto the barrel, but the ripping of his guts immediately spasmed his muscles just wrong and he face-planted off of it. Okay. The acrobatics weren't going to work. What did he still have?

He had an aging, shitty, wounded body.

And a friend who he already burned mostly to death once before.

"Oh fuck me this is gonna suck," Blitz rasped as he pushed himself to a stand.

There would be no elegance for Blitz today. Just running as fast as he could, through hellfire.

He managed to get to an actual run before he reached the burning slime. But the instant his boot hit it, he felt his boot and pants catch fire. One hand, he cupped over his nuts, because he was pretty sure if those got singed, he wasn't gonna make this. Forward he went. He held his breath, because while the heat wouldn't have seared his lungs the way it would for a human or shit, the gasses resulting from burning, rancid Hadene were still incredibly poisonous, and a sure way to dope himself and fall down into the burning slurry.

He kept running, and the pain went from bad, to torturous. But Fizz was getting closer. And Blitz was getting closer to Fizz faster than the tide of burning green fire. He just needed to go a bit further.

He had to press his eyes shut for the last extent, because he didn't trust that the heat wouldn't dry 'em to a raisin if he didn't, but he had a direction, and pain giving him clarity. Just a bit further. Then, his foot landed on something that wasn't muck and slurry. He took two more strides, before daring to open his eyes.

He was through. He sucked in a desperate, if overheated breath, and grabbed Fizz under his remaining armpit and dragged him up, then out of the reach of the fire, hearing only a weird, buzzing tone from his fake ears. When he finally got him out of the way, he stopped, and tore off his burning pants at the knees. His legs were now weeping ooze from the burns that bleached them white practically up to the knee. Well shit. There goes his beach-body. Now if he lays out he's gonna look like a complete tool.

Blitz found himself grabbed by an arm that gave him a rather unpleasant jolt from its exposed and damaged wiring, turned to face Fizz, who was still puffy-eyed from his terrified weeping. "You blew me up again, you ASSHOLE!"

"And this time I pulled you out of it," Blitz said. "Fuckin' aooowww by the way."

Fizz looked like he wanted to say a lot of things. But Blitz just pulled his oldest friend into the hug that the two of them frankly needed years ago, and only got today, under far-less than ideal circumstances.

"...is it weird I'm getting hard right now?" Fizz finally asked.

"Ha!" Blitz offered. "I knew you were always a creepy weirdo. Time hasn't changed that much."

"So… what do we do now?" Fizz asked, as he tried to walk only to find his leg almost as in bad-of-shape as his arm was. So Blitz ignored the agony that was his legs and gave Fizz a shoulder and walked them along the edge of the garbage pile that he'd pulled them up to get them out of the fire, around the sea of burning Hadene, and back to where Crimson was face-down in the muck.

"Well… I figure fuckface probably's got a set of keys on him. Let's juuuuust…" Blitz said, flopping the mafia imp onto his back. Well holy shit. The guy was still breathing. Guess Moxx wasn't genetically a little puss after all. Still, Crim was clearly in shock, and Blitz didn't feel any compunction to help the fucker, so he pulled the guy's jacket off, beat off the last cinders where it was smoldering, and then rummaged through its pockets. He first found Fizz's phone, then his own, which he offered a 'Hey, bonus!' for, because frankly he was starting to get a bit attached to this one. He used to go through phones like popcorn. Weird how that changed. He found his own Luger riding this fuck-face's inner holster, so he recovered that bitch. Then, finally, he found the keys.

"Um, Blitz… should we, y'know?" Fizz asked, looking back at the smoldering body of Crimson laying in the muck without his jacket and slowly drawing his thumb along his neck.

"Ordinarily, I'd say fuck yeah, fill your boots," Blitz said. "But this guy? Moxxie's got dibs. And I'm a man who respects dibs."

"No you fuckin' aren't," Fizz pointed out.

"Well, I'm trying to be one now! Men can change!"

"I'll believe that when I see it," Fizzarolli said as he pulled himself into the passenger seat of the car, and Blitz started that bitch up.


It felt good, getting back to Lust and the Royal Palace. Blitz was just gonna drop him off and split, but Fizz wasn't about to let that shit slide; no, he'd just saved the lover of the Deadly Sin of Lust. That kinda behavior got rewards. And frankly, the amount of background that Blitz filled him in on was shocking. For example, he knew that Blitz was involved with Cruac, but he had no idea that Blitz was one of the couple hundred Direct Descendants of Ruut. Or that Blitz had gone back and actually disemboweled Ruut Nuckelavee in her own tower. Or frankly any of the horrifying truths about his mother.

"So Tilla Buckszo is…" Fizz began.

"Technically my half-sister," Blitz said. "And it's Miller now."

"Wow. I figured your Dad was an asshole after the shit he pulled with us, but..." Fizz admitted.

"Oh, he was actually a fuck-tonne worse than that," Blitz said. "You remember how Barb hated people touching on her?"

"Yeah, she was like the opposite of you," Fizzarolli said. Blitz nodded, but as he spoke, he didn't actually look at Fizzarolli, instead looking at all the old portraits of Asmodeus that had been painted throughout the years.

"Yeah, turns out the same shit that he did to his daughter Tilla, he started doin' to Barb when she was fourteen fuckin' years old."

"What a piece of shit. Do you want me to put a death-mark on him? 'Cause I can swing that with Ozzie, especially after…" Fizz began, having forgotten Blitz's aside during the escape. But Blitz paused, staring at a portrait, then gave his head a shake.

"Don't worry about it," Blitz said. "Barb offed his ass a few years back. Good fuckin' riddance to the worst kind of rubbish."

"Yeah, I was gonna say… have you talked to your sister? 'Cause she and you had that big blow-out right before… well… the fire."

"We're figuring things out," Blitz admitted. Even getting Tilla back, intact, into Blitz' life, there was still shrapnel from her loss that was spread throughout Hell, clearly. "I mean… She's got a lifetime of resentment toward me, and a lot of that shit I earned fair and square. But we're talking again. And that's worth more than you could ever know."

"I'm glad. I'm glad we made it out," Fizz said. "Maybe not intact, but we got out of there."

"Yeah. Not intact, but close enough," Blitz said. He paused before the doors to Fizz's office, turning a look that Fizz recognized as naked worry on his face as he looked along the wall of Asmodeus' old memories. If Fizz had been clearer of thought, he would have understood that Blitz was seeing the clear proof that Asmodeus kept innumerable lovers, and always falling out with them before taking up with the new, hottest thing. But Fizz was wearing those proverbial rose-colored glasses. And through those lenses, all the red flags just looked like flags. "Just… don't let another fifteen years go by without talkin' to me again. And take care of yourself."

"Please. I've always taken care of myself," Fizz said, trying to wave the thought away, but that arm was currently sitting in the mud, a couple Rings away right now. Blitz turned and stood, placing his hand on Fizz's shoulder.

"I'm serious," Blitz said, a truly rare look of solemnity on his face. "It's not just your body you need to take care of. If anything else goes wrong – anything… you got my number now. I'm willing to talk."

"Heh. Look at you finally fuckin' grown up," Fizz said. He knew about the Arrow Breaking thing now, too. Which made the whole misadventure that they'd been through today all the more ridiculous. Who the fuck did that Crimson guy think he was, if he though the could just tie up the Proxy of Lucifer, who had survived Breaking The Arrow and then asked for a job from the guy who's job it was to enforce it? But even with Blitz's recent forthrightness, and willingness to put his cards on the table, there were still gaps in Fizz's knowledge. Gaps that Blitz didn't realize he left, because lacking all other things, Blitz was not the smartest of imps. Fizz paused, looking at Blitz's gut again with a wince.

"Are you sure you're not… y'know… dying? He did plug ya good," Fizz pointed out. But Blitz waved the point away.

"Oh, please. I get worse falling out of bed. I'm serious. Stolas' beds are way fuckin' up there and I often forget sharp shit on the floor," Blitz said.

Fizz gave him a flat look, but Blitz just laughed, then said 'ow' as though remembering he'd gotten shot.

"Ow, ow, yeah. Now that you're younger than me I get to order you around; I was bein' serious, Fizz," Blitz said.

"Fiii~ine I promise I'll keep your number in case some shit goes wrong. Not that it will. This was a unique circumstance!"

"You literally were walking devil-dogs in a city called Ransom," Blitz said, and then he pushed the door open ahead of him. Within, there were three at Ozzie's desk. The man himself, of course, and at his right elbow was a golden and glorious angel, who just had to be The Glimpse, 'cause otherwise Ozzie would be wrecking shit; across from them was a Mutant with distinctly Selachimorph features.

"Ozzie!" Fizz said brightly, as he limped into the room. Ozzie brightened visibly, the faces hidden in the shadow of his down beaming as the Deadly Sin turned to regard his impish lover.

"Fiiiizz!" Asmodeus said, leaving the mutant and the Glimpse in the lurch. "What happened to you? Where's your arm?"

"Oh, don't worry about that. I lost it settin' the dumbfuck who thought he could blackmail you on fire," Fizzarolli said, as Ozzie swept him up and held him close. It felt incredible to be home again – safe again. "And I learned that Blitzø isn't a complete fuck-stick after all!"

"I was wonderin' what that was about," Ozzie said, giving a glance to Blitz. But Blitz was ignoring the pair of them, and was now digging out his Hellphone with a look of confusion and focus on his face. "Didn't you tell me you hated that guy? Wanted him to die impaled anally on a cactus?"

"Turns out things weren't what I thought they were. His dad was a total piece of shit, though," Fizz said. "Hey Blitz! I gotta think you've earned a reward for saving me, am I right, Ozzie?"

"Let's not get too ahead of ourselves," Ozzie began, but Blitz was now glancing between what was on his Hellphone and the mutant who was hurriedly packing files back into his briefcase.

"Well fuck me sideways, my luck is good after all," Blitz said.

Then he pulled out his pistol and fired five shots into the head and chest of the mutant that didn't have even a chance to scream in fear. Asmodeus tensed, but Fizz tutted and soothed him. The Glimpse looked disgusted that she now had mutant blood on her.

"What the fuck was that?" The Glimpse demanded. Blitz ignored her, though, and dialed on his Hellphone. As he began to pace, Fizz, and more importantly Ozzie, could see that he'd put his call to Lucifer himself.

"Hey boss? Yeah, I finally found that guy you told me to. Oh, it's worse than that. He was tryin' to blackmail Asmodeus with some bullshit... I know, right!" Blitz offered a loud laugh. "Naw, I gunned his ass down. You want a pic? Nah? Well fine. Anything else? Nah? Great, I'll leave you back to eatin' your woman out. Of course I know what that sounds like, what d'ya think I am? A virgin?"

He then hung up, and without asking for a single bent dime, limped his way out of Ozzie's office. He paused at the doors, though, turning to look back at Fizz. There was a look of strangely cogent concern on his face. Like he had something that he wished that he either had the willpower or the intellect to enunciate, but failing both, let it be unsaid. And then he walked out, past all of the other portraits of Asmodeus, and the many lovers he'd had before Fizzarolli.

Nobody mentioned that there was still plenty of wall-space for more portraits. And Asmodeus only ever had one portrait per lover.

It was easy to miss the implications of things when you were actively trying not to see them. As far as Fizzarolli was concerned, all was well. "Now I don't know about you, but this brush with crime has given me a whole lotta new kinks that I wanna work out," Fizz stage-whispered into Asmodeus laughed and turned to the Glimpse.

"Clear my afternoon. I gotta remind my Fizzie-frog what's what," he said with dulcet and gleeful tone. The Glimpse sighed, but nodded, turning and leaving the carcass in his chair and the room entirely. She halted before the door, though, and looked back.

"I'll have the artificers bring him a new arm," the Glimpse said. "Can't have your high-profile lover looking banged up, now can we?"

Turns out, if you're tough enough for long enough, Hell can become pretty sweet.

They found Blitz collapsed in the hallway ten minutes later from his many, many injuries.


"The past is a different country, and its language a foreign tongue. There's many things that many people wish could have been different. Not just because of the War, but because of the lives that they'd lived leading up to it. I still contend to this day that it is that very tension, of the past versus the present, that created so many of the current batch of living legends in the age of peace between Hell and Heaven. I could speak to myself, but if I were to start listing out my many, many failures, and my many, many mistakes, this interview would be mostly about me. And I know that this whole thing is intended to be some kind of anthology, a 'life and times of the Second Heresiarchy'. So I won't bore you with my personal details.

The problem with the past is that changing it doesn't change you in return. You might feel as though you've averted a disaster that has been looming over your entire existence, but… really… you haven't. The disaster is still in your mind, poisoning your every thought and dream and desire. You have saved a stranger from an approximation of it, but the wound is still there, still raw, even still bleeding. Our pasts are never gone. They can't be erased, even with time-travel now only forbidden by taboo rather than by pain-of-death. We either come to reckon with the past that brought us to where we are, or we become shackled by it, swept off of our feet by a current of our own stubbornness and our own inability to grow beyond our scars.

That is the power of growth, Killjoy. That is why despite everything I've done, all of the violence, all of the savagery, I am here and you are still there. Because I dared to grow. The past, and the traumas contained in it, they don't actually soften, nor shrink with age. It's that we become stronger and grow beyond them. And the jagged edges of our path-taken don't cut as deeply once we accept, deep in the root of our being, that there is no undoing what is done, and that what is cannot be unmade. If I can offer a single piece of advice to you, and to anybody like you who still wonders if redemption is even possible, it is this: dare to grow, and you will shock yourself to the extent that you expand beyond the blinkered notion of yourself that you hold in your mind.

I certainly did."

Trista Saint George the Red Knight, Redemptor