Chapter Text
If we thought to wait a few days and restock our essence for another escape attempt, we’re forced to think again before the next sunrise. We hear the disturbance of a vessel being shed and a feel sudden shift to the environment around us. While we have no sense of Light and Dark or Warmth and Chill, we do still have a sense of place disconnected from any other input. The closest corporeal analogue might be air pressure perhaps, in that some aged or injured bodies warn of incoming rain by an ache in the bones.
Just replace bones with Forces, ache with vibration, and rain with Hell.
Splashing surrounds us. A stifled shriek follows. It’s probably Mariah, never mind that her voice sounds different here from how it did back in her vessel. About the same pitch, but a little less saccharine in timbre. Our presumed Mariah yells out something rude-sounding in—we assume—Helltongue. Whatever it is sounds like the Angelic language sung backwards and accompanied by microphone feedback and chalkboard nails. Some kind of ritual greeting, perhaps?
Another person—deeper voice, slower cadence—responds in that same language. The tone seems more grudging than actively angry. The traditional response to complete the ritual?
Or perhaps Mariah dropped into Hell, fell into something wet but probably not water, yelled out some infernal string of curses, and was then rebuffed by whoever was closest to the commotion. For the noise, and disrespect, if not for any actual foul language. (Do demons even care about foul language? Maybe some do while other’s don’t, much like it is for humans. Or angels for that matter.)
Footsteps shuffle, slosh, stomp off. That’s followed by the sound of more liquid, a spray rather than a splash or a slosh. We presume that’s water Mariah is being rinsed off with, which is perhaps more of a safety precaution in a Vapulan lab than anyone on our side would have imagined. So maybe not water? But we can’t think of what else it could be, or whether that detail would even matter if we had more senses to work with and could actually see what’s going on.
(A minor problem with sensory deprivation, there. We’ll hang on to any information we can get, regardless of its relevance, just because it’s available.)
Droplets hit a metallic surface. Fabric rubs up against something. Mariah and someone else exchange more unfriendly-sounding lines in that ear-searing language. And we start moving again with that same shuffle-slosh-stomp sound. Mocking laughter sounds out behind us. Because Mariah is probably still dripping wet and going through what is probably a walk of shame.
Not to be all judgmental, but that’s NOT how we do it upstairs.
(If we seem calm, it’s simply because the minds that are preoccupied with screaming panic are being kept away from the metaphorical microphone.)
Sounds pass by us. We hear an undefinable cacophony of footsteps. Claws hit concrete like dogs walking on pavement. Undertones of what must be congealed slime stick and peel along like those are acceptable verbs to describe motion. Engines roar by, mostly a bit in the distance but once way too close to us. (Or maybe too far if a collision with a motorized vehicle could somehow improve our situation.) We hear plenty of screaming and yelling, but most of the presumed chatter on this presumed street is just…chatter, albeit in a language we don’t comprehend. There’s coughing too, which is odd for the celestial plane where breathing is optional.
(Coughing is a sign of what? Smog? Pollution? Do you really get pollution in Hell? If so, Tartarus would be the place for that.)
We stop and wait, and wooshes of wind pass by us. Then, the sounds change. Chimes ring out. We hear fewer footsteps, more chatter. Or less chatter, but louder, and moving with us. The actual motion goes faster, except when everything stops and the chimes ring out. A train? Another kind of public transit? And not just a novelty, but in actual use to get from point Terrible to point Grim? Is flight in celestial form not a given down here? Or does Hell just take longer to traverse? Things we are quickly learning not to take for granted along with a visual sense, and the ability to gain Essence: easy passage to other places. Anyway, not that it matters if we have don’t any chance for mobility, nor would we really want to go sightseeing Hell if we did. Freedom of movement right now would only be good for one thing: getting the hell out. Or perhaps helping others get out of Hell.
We think there are others with us. We can’t be alone here, right? Right?
We’ve counted seven chimes exactly when our motion changes. The chatter starts to pass us by again, vertically, and then horizontally. Then the ambient sounds shift. The difference between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, perhaps? There’s fewer motors, but conversation and footsteps bounce off walls to produce an undifferentiated sea of noise. More chatter of the literally infernal kind occasionally breaks through, some of which prompts terse responses from the Punisher carrying us.
We’re moved upwards again with dings ringing out occasionally. The final ding opens us up to a place with more office-like sounds. Appendages (not necessarily fingers) hit keys—most likely on a computer keyboard, but we’re not ruling out electric typewriters either. We hear the sinister screech of a (maybe?) printer. We’ve never encountered a non-evil one of those the corporeal, and we don’t imagine the infernal version is any more cooperative. A coffee machine gurgles, exactly how it does on another plane. The occasional screams that ring out perhaps aren’t typical office chatter, but hearing them serves as a helpful reminder that we aren’t in a usual kind of office. More of of the conversation here does seem directed at our captor. She keeps her responses short and quiet, nothing at all like we’ve heard from her before. This isn’t her happy place.
(We’ve been here maybe five minutes and we can already relate.)
Then all the noise retreats into the background except for the sound of a door opening and slamming shut behind us and then footsteps stomping up the stairs. Our journey ends in a mostly silent room. Our captor is no longer moving, just us. All the noise aside from footsteps is distant and comes from the other side of walls.
We wonder if Mariah plans on speaking to us now that we’re in a quiet location, but she remains silent. Perhaps she’s distracted by whatever Habbalah think about while carting around real angels in Hell. We hear something unzipping and one less layer between us and muffled sounds outside. Above us and to the distance we hear claws against thin metal. Closer in, there are three taps in succession. Tap. Tap. Tap. One is us, so the other two are probably catchers as well. Three catchers, three celestials, three of us in this untenable situation, and it’s unlikely that we’ll have any time to say ‘Hi’ outside the earshot of the Habbie. We don’t speak up, and neither do the others. Shame that. Fabric rustles. Maybe she’s changing clothes if she didn’t earlier. That’s what we would do in a host after walking home in the rain and getting wet. (That and laundry, but we don’t know how Vapulans deal with laundry. We’re not sure we want to know.)
We’re moved again. It’s a mostly silent slide against fabric as we’re maybe put into a pocket. This time, two more of the same action don’t follow. Instead, it’s two brief scrapes of stone against a hard surface, and the sound of shoes against a tile floor. We leave the quiet room. But it takes maybe ten seconds of walking, before we reach Mariah’s destination.
The awful noise this time sounds less like chatter and more like a formal report being given. There’s two voices: Mariah’s and one so lacking in affect it could only belong to a Djinn. The other two force catchers clack against each other. We can’t follow the conversation, and don’t really care to try. Mariah could be giving the Djinn a plot synopsis for an opera she saw back on the corporeal. We mean, probably not—doesn’t seem like something a Vapulan would be into—but she could be. It’s less unpleasant to think of it that way, since the conversation itself doesn’t matter. We can’t do anything about it.
What matters is that when Mariah walks away, only we move with her.
Another ten seconds and a set of beeps finds us back in the quiet room, just us and the Habbalite. We’re moved again and finally set down, the sound of our crystal gently hitting a hard service. At last, Mariah deigns to speak.
“Be strong, stay quiet, and listen up.”
We’re surprised to hear English down here after the buzzing drone of Helltongue everywhere else, never mind that it’s the one language we [Mariah and I] have in common. Just because Helltongue is the common language of Hell doesn’t mean that Corporeal Languages can’t also be spoken in Hell, at least for the natives.
Another pause follows. We hear Mariah spending Essence, and realize a bit belatedly that she’s resonating us. We could resist. Possibly should, as some uptight Super-Holy angel type might tell us when this is over, assuming this ends in something other than messy soul death. But our Essence is pretty much depleted from our previous escape attempts, and nothing new will come in so long as we’re in Hell. So we let her emotion, in the flavor she chooses, happen to us.
She chooses Dread. It’s a terrible, artificial amplification of our entirely rational fear at being brought to this plane of existence. The feeling is like a bird just made aware of a hungry, prowling cat lurking in the hedges. Fight, flight, or flee, there’s no good guaranteed option. Everything in Hell is consequences and none of them will be pleasant if we choose not to follow instructions. Regular soul death is the best prospect. A slow soul death via infernal experiment is more likely, and that’s only if we’re not offered the even worse option of Falling.
We know the feeling isn’t True even if it’s real. Her application of the Habbalite resonance is like a synthetic dye. It’s meant to enhance and overwhelm the natural color of our actual emotions. That knowledge doesn’t stop all our forces from freezing in their conversations. No portion of us screams, although about four of them would like to. We turn our full attention to Mariah.
“Good. Answer the questions you are asked. Speak quietly.” Mariah says.
Angelic does not have the allowances for hiding that corporeal language does. The “understood” that comes out carries all the heft and tone of that songbird attempting negotiations with its predator.
“You introduced yourself as Kira. Is that your name?”
She speaks English, which allows for lies, but we only have celestial language on this plane of existence and must speak in Angelic. We are not Kira specifically, but we have a multitude of nicknames, of which Kira is one, and we have zero desire to share any of our better names. “You may call me Kira.” That is True.
“Are you a Kyriotate?”
“Yes.” We’ve answered this before.
“Are you currently Outcast?”
“No.” That’s another of those questions we’ve answered for her. A little bit of annoyance emerges through the Dread. Or perhaps it’s simply wearing off. Nothing is permanent, and the strongest emotions even less so.
“Are you currently Dissonant or Discordant?”
We sigh internally. Could we have a novel question already? Like: Do we prefer cats or dogs? (Cats, usually.) What’s our favorite bird? (Crow.) When was the last time we heard from our Boss? (January, 1973, via a postcard from Malta.) Who is she to care about our Dissonance or Discord, if we had any? A Judge? “I answered this on the corporeal. No, I’m not.”
“You could have been lying then. Now you can’t. It’s the only good thing about having to hear that syrupy Heaven-angel language of yours.” She pauses. “Next question, are you a Servitor of Lightning?”
That little annoyance part of us scoffs at her interview skills. We’ve watched our mother nudge information and answers out of some of Heaven’s shyest and most reluctant storytellers. Questions like this never get to the heart of the Truth. But maybe that’s not what Mariah is after with this. All of her questions so far have been about what we are, not who we are. Kyriotate or not. Dissonant or not. Lightning or Not. Technology does have that obsession about Lightning. And the bit that isn’t cowering right now wonders if Mariah’s little plan would end badly for her if we could claim to be a Sparky with any form of sincerity. Or even just Sparky adjacent, the way some of our siblings are in service to Lightning. We can’t. The majority of us think that’s probably for the best. “No.”
“Are you willing to keep quiet unless I give the signal that it’s safe to speak?”
This is not a situation where calling for help is going to do anything. “Yes.”
The mood in the catcher lightens considerably. We are Relieved. It’s not natural relief. That would come with no longer being trapped in a force catcher. Instead it’s a Relief as intense and artificial as the earlier Dread that overtook us. We’re as giddy as the first time we took flight on the Corporeal, like being trapped in Hell with an insane Habbalite (Is there any other kind?) is a Good Thing, and we should be glad we’re here and not anywhere else in the Symphony. On an intellectual level, all of us know this is wrong. We feel it anyway.
“Oh, Kira, we are going to have so much fun together!”
Mariah’s no Balseraph to convince us this is actually true. It’s clearly not. We doubt Mariah’s even thinking about ‘fun’ in a sense that takes our [my] opinions into account. Our applicable ideas of fun don’t overlap here. What does a Vapulan do for fun with the Kyriotate she’s trapped in a force catcher? Nothing the Kyriotate is going to like. But the giddiness of that artificial Relief is still bouncing its way through our forces. We have those little voices in the perpetual internal discussion saying: ‘We could make this fun.’ or ‘We could take this situation and find something good in it.’ Not many voices take the optimistic view—most of us are well aware this isn’t a True emotion—but a couple do.
“Well, maybe not so much for you.” Mariah concedes to our unspoken objection. “But you’ll do well to remember this: The project I have in mind for you will be less painful than the ones I hand over eventually go to. There might not be any pain at all. All you need to do is choose to work with me, and keep yourself from getting discovered by someone else.”
“What happens to you if someone else does discover us?” We don’t mean to sound so chipper. It just comes out that way.
Mariah stays silent. That’s not an entirely comfortable question for her. (We should keep a closer watch on our behavior while resonated. It’s easy to make mistakes like this.) Yes, things will be very bad for us if we are discovered (or she stops having ‘fun’ with us, as it were), but someone’s discovery of us won’t make her life better one bit. If drawing outside attention to our presence were merely inconvenient, there would be no need for her to ply for our cooperation. Similarly, if our current chance of escape were any more likely than near-impossible (This is our first time in Hell. Does divine intervention even reach here? It must. Maybe.), we would not be so pliable for cooperation.
(We don’t like our current situation, but we’re pretty sure we’ll like any other plausibility even less.)
“Don’t act carelessly, and you won’t have to worry about that.” Mariah says at last. There’s the sound of something being set down and fiddled with. “You’ll be in disguise, and no one needs to find out so long as you don’t do anything stupid. All you need to do is stay quiet. Are you strong enough for that at least?” More essence pings, and another round of that force-freezing Dread washes right over our Relief. No, this won’t be fun at all.
(The Dread feels worse, but also more correct. In a way, that makes the emotion easier to bear.)
We say nothing.
“Good.” Mariah sounds satisfied. “Let’s begin.”