Chapter 28

"Long Island Iced Tea, right?"

Chay wiped her hands across her face in exhaustion. "Yeah, something sweet so I can drink it without choking."

Husk shrugged. "You got it."

She leaned her arm on the bar, propping herself up with her elbow, using the other to run her hand through soft black cat fur. For whatever reason, Kee-Kee had deigned it appropriate to hop up on her lap and use it as her temporary pillow.

Chay wasn't going to complain. She was already used to doing this with Fat Nuggets after all.

Husk returned with her drink. "You look wiped out. You doing OK?"

She sighed. "I don't know, it's just...everything." She leaned down and sipped from the red straw in the glass. "It's odd; I've done multiple cases at the same time before and never felt so...fuck."

"Eh, pressure gets to all of us eventually.", Husk remarked as he wiped down the bar.

"Honestly? I just feel kind of...numb. Compared to Imp City this place is so fucking unpredictable that I think I've just come to accept it. I mean, I met the fucking King of Hell himself this morning and I thought that would be the end of it. Then I come back to the Hotel and find a bunch of broken Heaven drones and Pentious's goddamn blimp hovering outside...and you know what I thought? I thought 'Huh, well that's something.' Is that bad? Should I be worried?"

"Naw.", Husk answered. "That's what we all go through here. You get used to the craziness."

"Mmm.", Chay answered as she took another sip. "Well, I guess I'll just talk to Charlie about it later. She'll probably get what I mean."

"...Yeah.", Husk said somewhat hesitantly. "Yeah, about that…"

Chay looked over at the Feline-Sinner. "What?"

"It's just…"

Husk let out a long sigh.

"Look, I like Charlie just fine. We all do. We all like living here and we all believe in her and what she wants to accomplish…"

"There's a big 'but' coming. I can sense it."

"No, not really like that...just understand: Charlie's a great girl, but she ain't perfect. She has her own issues she's been having to work out herself."

"...Yeah." Chay sipped some more. "Yeah, I've kind of picked up on that as well. She is kind of...scatterbrained? Is that the word?"

"Not quite, but you're close. Charlie's feelings are real: she really does care about all of us and she'll do whatever she needs to help us...but the problem is that she does that because she's worried about confronting her own issues. Like, you met Lucifer this morning, right?"

Chay rolled her eyes. "That's one way to put it."

Kee-Kee stirred in her lap and hopped off onto the floor.

"Yeah...well, that's only the second time in eight years that she's actually seen him in person. They pretty much didn't speak to each other until last year's extermination. It took an absolute catastrophe for her to finally work up enough courage to do that, and that was only because Vaggie was there to prod her into action."

"Well, he is kind of-"

"Extra. Yeah, he can be. But that's not it. When she first started running this place, it was an absolute shit show. She had no idea what she was doing, and it was only because we'd all grown to actually tolerate each other that we didn't leave."

"Could of fooled me.", Chay answered. "She seems incredibly competent from what I've witnessed."

"Yeah, she is. It was amazing when we all saw it, to. She disappeared for like a week and when she came back it was like she's done a crash course is Psychology 101. She was like a completely different person."

Husk slung his rag over his shoulder. "Look, all I'm saying is: lean on Charlie when you need to, but realize she's as flawed as the rest of us, alright? She's done a lot for us, but she's just one woman."

"The way Carmine made it out…", Chay said as she stirred the straw around in her glass, "Everyone seems to think she's some sort of coward."

"Eh, Carmine isn't entirely wrong. She doesn't really think that herself, but...you know, it's a long story. Charlie would tell it better, so I'll say this: Power is everything down here, and she only recently came to understand that."

Chay wiped her hair from her forehead. "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

"Yeah...that's from Chairman Mao, right?"

"Yep. Had that shit drilled into my head when I joined up."

"That's what I heard when I was alive back then. A lot of young kids like you joined up because you had nothing to lose."

"I was actually 16 when I joined up. I was among the older ones, could you believe it? A lot of my comrades were 14 or 15. All of us were hungry, angry...we had nothing but rage to feed us."

"Lot of orphans, to."

"Yeah, and I was one of them. I never knew my parents. My grandparents raised me, and after my grandmother died I basically had nothing."

"Join the club. Lot of us never had good relationships with our folks."

"Yes, but we ended up falling in with a group of people who made us do...me me do horrible things. We all had nothing, and we come across this group of people who claimed that they had it all figured out, that they were going to change things…"

"Yeah, that's power for you. Put it in the hands of awful people and they get worse."

"...But political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

"That's right. Ain't that some shit?"

Chay reached back down, feeling soft cat fur under her hands.

"Yeah, no kidding. I'm starting to realize that more than I wanted to believe. Lucius has been telling me the same shit for decades now and I won't fuckin' listen."

"Well...he's only part right. Guns are power, but down here they're only a small part of the equation."

"Well what's the other part? Where do I learn that shit?"

Husk looked at the increasingly tipsy Sinner with curious eyes. He took off his hat and wiped his hand through his slicked back, graying hair.

"You can't. Not from a regular Sinner, anyway."

She groaned. "Fuuuuckk, I figured you say that."

"Yeah, but you don't really need to rely on something like that if you've got friends, right?"

"...Yeah, and I'm probably gonna need them tonight."

But hey, at least she did have friends who cared about her. That was one thing this Hotel really did seem to provide. Not to mention the animal companionship...

...Wait, when did Kee-Kee's fur turn white?

Chay looked down at the cat laying in her lap as she pulled her hand back.

Why was it wearing a tophat?

"Awww, why'd you stop?", Lucifer asked lazily.


"Hmmm...intriguing, but highly disssturbing…"

Pentious observed the shard under Baxter's microscope, watching the nearly microscopic tendrils wriggle and wiggle about in search of a host.

"That was my reaction, to.", the Fish-Sinner answered. "But there's still some things about it that don't make any sense. Especially if it's meant to be a mind-control device."

"Mind control?", Pentious asked curiously as he pulled away from the microscope's lens. "What made you consssider that hypothesisss?"

"Valentino, that's what.", he responded as he sipped his coffee. "He said as such when he tried to destroy the Hotel some time ago. He'd gotten it into his head that we'd stolen the original prototype."

"Prototype?"

"That's right. That shard you see is a bootleg copy of the original. I had to show him myself before they all backed off."

Pentious's eye-covered hood flaired out. "Backed off? You actually put yourself in harm's way to sssave this place?"

Baxter rolled his eyes. "Yes, Pentious. It's called loyalty. You should look into it sometime."

"Whatever. Back to the sssubject at hand: you sssaid this is supposed to be a mind control device?"

"That's what Valentino said, but he's an idiot. Functionally speaking, if this was supposed to alter and control minds, it wouldn't be stuck on the outside of their heads. It would be planted inside of their skulls so that the tendrils could interact with the brain."

Pentious carefully palmed the shard and eyed it suspiciously. "That does raissse a solid point. Ssso if that is the case, what are you thinking?"

"Well, consider this: what if we have the process backwards? We've been assuming that the shard is simply a machine that is meant to affect a person who is conscious so that said consciousness could be altered at a whim...but remember how the creeches looked like walking corpses?"

Pentious raised a scaly eyebrow. "Creeches?"

"Yes, those walking Imp corpses. Cherri Bomb came up with the term."

He sniffed haughtily. "Well, she would come up with something so vulgar...but get to the point."

"Well, once the shards were knocked out of their bodies, they stopped moving. They became corpses again. So maybe we've had it backwards: the subjects aren't the conscious ones, the shards are."

Pentious looked down at the shard in his hand. "This...thisss thing is sentient? But how? The only other thing like that isss my egg minions and they aren't terribly intelligent to begin with. The only thing that could grant such a thing sentience is…"

Pentious's eyes slowly widened.

"...I don't believe it."

Baxter nodded.

"That's right. A soul."


At 5:45, Chay was comfortably splayed out on the couch in the Hotel lobby. The drink had relaxed her to a certain extent, but it didn't stop the storm of thoughts that assailed her mind.

She now knew who had stolen the moonrock. She also knew where Ella was.

She also knew that both were connected. She just wasn't sure how.

First things first: she was going to have to notify Octavia that her own mother had assisted in, if not outright instigated, the theft of her moon rock. For what purpose, she still didn't know...but all of the facts lined up. It explained why the security system had been cut off on that particular area, while somehow still being active in the rest of the house (and that included the broken wiring from Sawney's crude entrance/exit). It explained how none of the alarms had gone off even though evidence clearly showed that Sawney had rummaged around in that place like a bone pile. She also knew that Stella and Stolas's divorce had not been amicable in the slightest (they were Goetians, after all). Stella also seemed to be incredibly vain and narcissistic, if not particularly bright.

She had also seen how Octavia had acted around her mother. She did not want to subject herto it again. That girl had already been through enough.

- Come to think of, didn't Stella have a brother?

Then there was Ella.

This one, more than anything else, filled her with dread. She knew she was somewhere in the Vee Tower, but she didn't know where. If Sawney was to be trusted (and he didn't seem to be lying), it had something to do with the shards.

"Ella went in, and the Shard came out."

He said 'Shard', in the singular. Baxter had mentioned something about the shards in the creeches being bootlegs. Could Sawney have been referring to a prototype?

Was Ella somehow involved with that prototype? How?

Wackford and his people had talked about the subject of 'Uploaded Intelligence' during their discussion. The Vees had recently invested money into it. But how did that involve Ella?

- ...Wait.

She had a thought...and it was an insane one…

"Ah, there you are!"

Chay's thoughts were interrupted by Charlie's cheery voice as she strolled into the lobby, with Vaggie behind her. Viola and a grumbling Lucius followed behind her.

"Where's Fye?", Chay asked.

"He's with our PC division friends.", Viola answered as she hopped up on the sofa next to Chay. "He wanted to take them out on a night on the town before we go on lockdown." Charlie and Vaggie sat down across from them. Lucius pouted in a nearby chair.

"We gave him some money for his efforts.", Vaggie said. "He decided to spend it on them."

Chay looked over at Lucius. "What's wrong with him?"

Charlie looked down at the floor, blushing. "My...dad happened."

Lucius grumbled in response.

Chay looked between the two.

"Charlie...you knew he was coming this morning, right?"

Charlie's pressed her two index fingers together. "Yeah, I did."

"And you were planning on telling me this...when, exactly?"

"He was coming whether you guys were here or not.", Vaggie answered. "He was with us during the last Extermination. He wanted to make sure he could help keep us safe this year as well."

Chay looked around the Hotel. "Where is His Highness, anyway? He was just here an hour ago."

"Oh, he's with Niffty and Coi!", Charlie piped in. "Making sure we have enough food if, you know, we end up being under siege during the Extermination. Just making sure, you know."

It was Viola's turn to look around. "And everybody else? This place is eerie when its this quiet."

"Out enjoying themselves.", Vaggie answered. "But more to the point: how are you guys holding up?"

Lucius grumbled again.

"The Fussy Baby over there is fine.", Viola answered. "I'm alright as well. We've dealt with Exterminations ourselves before, so we're not terribly worried."

Charlie's eyes were cast down, but this time not in embarassment.

"Yeah...you see, that puzzles me a great deal.", she said.

Lucius sniffed in annoyance. "Why? Your dad was the one who signed his name on it."

"I know...but that's my point.", Charlie answered. "Hellborn like you are not supposed to be targets. The agreement explicitly gave your people a pardon. My father specifically fought for that."

"Yeah, well...your father says a lot of things."

Charlie sighed, nodded solemnly. "I know. Something has gone terribly wrong somewhere…"

She lifted up her head and looked at the three. "...And a lot of it is partly my fault. But I'll get to that."

She shifted her focus over to Chay, who was now sitting upright and brushing out the kinks in her hair.

"Chay, I wanted to ask you: are you doing OK? I know this isn't your regular surroundings so I wanted to make sure you weren't overly stressed about...you know."

Chay brushed her hair behind her neck. "I'm...getting along, I suppose. Honestly, I'm more concerned with what I'm going to do with these two cases going forward. It's going to involve the Vees, and there's no avoiding that."

Charlie nodded. "Well, I'm glad to hear that at least. But to get to my point…"

Charlie took a deep breath and leaned back in her seat.

"The reason I wanted all of you here was because I wanted to discuss something important. It has to do with the Extermination specifically."

Chay sat up. "I'm listening."

"Yeah, so...because you are going to be a guest here, Chay, I thought it was important to relay some information with you. None of what I'm about to tell you is a major secret or anything, because all of the other guests and staff know what I'm about to tell you. But since you're more than likely going to be staying with us for the foreseeable future, I thought it was important that you all knew."

It was Vaggie's turn to join in. "How familiar are you guys with the events of last year?"

"You mean regarding to the Hotel", Viola asked. "Well, over in Imp City we got bits and pieces. We know you guys challenged them directly and managed to survive a long siege with Exterminators until the following morning. We also know the building was damaged to an extent, though we didn't really know how drastic it was."

"I've been able to get a bit more out of Alastor and others.", Chay said. "I know you guys had to do some extensive repairs afterwards. I also know that because you guys managed to hold out, you received an influx of new guests."

Charlie nodded. "Well, you have the gist of it. But…"

The Princess sighed again, this time deeper.

"But there's a lot more to it than that. You see...I'm kind of the reason we were targeted in the first place."

Chay looked between her and Vaggie suspiciously.

"...Charlie, I think you need to tell us the whole story.", she said.

"That's what I'm getting to. It's...a lot, but you deserve to know it. Not just Chay, but especially you two…"

She turned to the two Imps sitting near her. "I don't blame you two for any animosity against me or my family. But there's some important details you're also missing. That's why I wanted you to be here. I know little Fyewackett is out doing his thing and Gishram is...somewhere."

Viola shook her head, raising her hand to stop her. "We'll relay whatever information you have, Your Highness. Just tell us."

Charlie looked over at Vaggie, who placed her hand on Charlie's thigh and squeezed gently.

"...OK, here we go."

Charlie took another deep breath and began.

"Last year, about a week after the Extermination, I was still in the midst of getting the Hotel up and running. We were in the process of coming up with promotions...you know, commercials and stuff. While we were doing that, my father called me and informed me that he had managed to pull some strings with Heaven to arrange a meeting."

"He still has some clout up there, believe it or not.", Vaggie inserted.

"Yeah, but that's beside the point.", Charlie said. "Anyway, my dad had managed to land a meeting with the head of the Extermination...you know, so I could pitch my idea for the Hotel for dealing with Hell's overpopulation crisis. It had to be that afternoon, and it had to be at the Heaven embassy."

"The embassy?", Viola asked. "Isn't that located near that huge clocktower?"

"It is the clocktower.", Vaggie answered. "That was the problem. You've seen how that things looks from a distance, right?"

"In hindsight, I probably should have known something was wrong.", Charlie said.

"What exactly what wrong?", Chay asked.

Charlie sighed, again.

"I should have realized they had no intention of meeting me, because there was nobody there to meet me. Heaven had abandoned that clocktower over thirty years ago..."

CHAPTER 28 END