Chapter Text
Mariah had set up the cage long before she found the specimen to fill it.
It started with the divine whim, the pure certainty that she needed a Kyriotate of her own. The voice called to her loud and clear.
Mariah had just came back from her fourth trip to the Corporeal. It had been her second after Tizzy’s rudimentary training, and it had been a successful trip, enough that Mariah still felt a little high from the competency rush. She was over quota—two filled crystals in her hand, instead of one—for the second quota in a row. Even better, one of her new specimens wasn’t even Outcast—the first such Domination she’d ever held in her hand and more useful for having that trait.
Another test passed. She practically swaggered into her supervisor’s office, and waited for Tizzy to look up from her latest crossword puzzle.
“You’re back.”
“Yes, ma’am. Two specimens this time, and one not Outcast.” Mariah set the crystals down at the edge of Tizzy’s desk. The surface was almost pathologically neat, if covered with stack after stack of papers and books, none of which Mariah was allowed to place her catchers on. Tizzy kept only one small corner of her desk empty for Mariah’s work, and didn’t that just sum up the quality of her supervisor’s attention?
Tizzy blinked two bulging black eyes at her; her neck moved forward and rotated, as though evaluating Mariah from multiple angles. It felt like being at the business end of an electron microscope, and she couldn’t tell if that meant she had passed or failed her latest test.
Tizzy’s beak clicked a few times. “Next time, you’ll have a higher quota.”
Mariah counted that as a pass and a fail. A pass because she had performed a job above expectations, never mind the rumors about her already circulating amongst the other Horrors in this building. A fail because her spectacular performance had not brought her any closer to the better assignment God told her was her due.
No, not a failure, Mariah corrected herself, merely a lesson and a continuation of the current test.
She walked back to her office—more of a half-converted supply closet, really—and tapped her nails on the Formica table while she pondered. Mariah liked the sound of her metal claws on the table. The staccato rhythm helped her think. That wasn’t a primary consideration when she made that most recent modification to her celestial form, but it did serve as an added benefit.
The problem, her divine whim told her, had been the non-Outcast. Pulling in one of those and getting away clean as opposed to taking the low-risk path and sticking with Outcasts had changed Tizzy’s expectations of her. The rest was just that Djinn being…herself.
But what else could Mariah have done? Kept it?
She tilted her head—almost an echo of Tizzy there—and pondered the logistics of keeping that particular specimen for herself. No, it wouldn’t have worked, not that time, not without advance preparation. The filled catcher would have been noticed eventually and commented upon, even if the annoying heaven-angel had agreed to stay quiet. There was no guarantee of that last bit.
The idea did stick with her though. The more she thought about keeping a heaven-angel for herself, the more convinced she was that this was what God willed of her.
Still, it would take time—years—to prepare.
The actual specimen acquisition would be easy. Her Catchers were tracked loosely and looked enough like ordinary quartz crystals on chains to avoid the kind of close scrutiny that would reveal it as Technological to the unaware. The complication there came from finding the right kind of specimen—one who was neither Outcast and thus a Fall risk nor heavily entwined in their community and thus immediately noticeable to other heaven-angels in its absence. If it could also show enough civility to make cooperation a plausible option, that would be even better.
It could take time—years, most likely—to find such a specimen.
Mariah had faith in her divinity and would not worry about the capture until it was time. God would tell her when she had found the right one to keep.
But Mariah couldn’t keep one for herself until she had a place to hold it safely. Safe from from Tizzy’s inconvenient eyes, safe from her nosy coworkers, and most of all, safe from the specimen’s escape attempts.
She unrolled some paper and set to work laying out the functional requirements, and sketching out the solution.
The immediate need was a place to hold the specimen. The easiest solution, assuming a cooperative subject, would be to simply hide the catcher on her celestial form and disguise it as another body modification in the same line as her metal nails and the diodes along her eyebrows. Only her Choirmates ever paid attention to those, and them mostly as a personal assessment of holiness and aesthetic sensibility. Assuming a cooperative subject and a good enough disguise, none of her coworkers would look twice.
Upon consideration, the costs outweighed the features. First, it would hurt. Body enhancements always did. The pain of the decorations proved and displayed one’s strength, which is why her whole Choir did them, the aesthetics aside. The claws still felt new and sore on her fingertips. Mariah wasn’t ready yet to make another one.
Second, and more practically, the specimen couldn’t be on her all the time, not when Mariah had to make regular trips up to the corporeal to reach her quotas. If her kept specimen traveled with her, and never left her side, it would eventually start regenerating Essence and escape. No, the specimen would need somewhere to hold it while it remained in Hell.
Mariah set aside that idea as a last resort.
The better choice would be an external container. Of course, that carried its own set of challenges, the details of which Mariah pondered while she clicked her nails. Mostly she focused on the repair of artifacts, not their construction. Certainly, she’d never made such a complicated artifact before, mostly just replications of Tizzy’s Force Catcher design. It couldn’t be too difficult though.
Take it one step at a time. Solve one problem at a time. What did she need?
Mariah needed to keep this project secret from her supervisor. Tizzy would experiment-slash-kill-slash-dispose of her—or worse, attune to her again—if she found Mariah keeping something for herself. That is, if Tizzy decided to care. No, Tizzy always cared about the inconvenient things. That Djinn wasn’t one to let apathy be a perk of working for her.
She needed to keep any equipment away from her coworkers. They weren’t so dangerous as Tizzy, but any one of them would simply attempt to salvage her equipment if they saw she held something too obviously useful. The Genius Archangel was not an Archangel of Theft, but Mariah couldn’t remember the last time she returned to her office and hadn’t find a good amount of her personal equipment missing or her papers disturbed. It hadn’t happened.
The end failure states for both cases were different, but the problems of Tizzy and of her coworkers were practically identical after Mariah broke them down to their core components. The cage couldn’t look like a cage. It had to look like equipment, but not exciting equipment. A generic piece of electronics, a hard plastic shell housing a speaker, microphone, and tape deck. Any number of scientists recorded their notes and transcribed the important bits later; no one would look twice at Mariah’s having such a device. Anyone looking for research notes or blackmail material would focus on the media, not the machine.
Overall, the device she sketched out looked useful enough to keep without looking special enough to take, which would made it a good disguise, at least from afar. Still, someone would inevitably try to investigate up close, and more than likely someone would still try to take it.
Binding the artifact to her specifically would be a start. An observer might find it a little odd for such a mundane seeming device, but it would be easy enough to explain. The supply room raids were well known. Mariah couldn’t keep useful items unless they were particularly heavy (like the computer) or useful only to her.
Her design as is was solid, but she needed more assurance. She set electrodes along the outside of the case, and hooked those up to a security system that would keep anyone ‘not her’ from touching her case for too long. Those measures would make her device a little more suspicious, but not outside the range of reasonable security features Mariah had seen on other people’s projects.
Of course Mariah went on salvage operations of her own, but only when the Voice of God told her to do so.
The other distinct problem was keeping the specimen locked-in and undetected for an indefinite period of time. Part of the solution would depend on Mariah’s ability to imprint on her hypothetical specimen that any escape attempts would be a bad idea and alerting anyone else to its presence would be an even worse one. Resonance would do some of the work. Use Fear to convince the little heaven-angel to that any escape attempts would fail and getting caught by Tizzy would be worse than staying quiet and cooperating with Mariah. With enough essence, she shouldn’t have any problems being convincing on that last point. Not when it was true. But it was absurd to rely solely on resonance to keep a heaven-angel in its place. Technology existed to perform the job more consistently and without the requirement of constant supervision, and Mariah would take advantage of it.
It took time and salvaged materials to come up with her solutions.
From the scrap pile, she found used casings for Spirit Batteries—the kind meant to trap stray demonlings as a cheap source of essence—to build a wall around the space in her device where a catcher would eventually sit. Refurbished and chained together, they could theoretically hold a full-sized Kyriotate. Even if not, it would still be an effective threat. “See, even if you tried to escape, you’d still be trapped and I could tap into any essence you haven’t spent.”
The batteries would also drive away suspicion if an Impudite happened to notice any essence in the device. No one would care about the Spirit batteries; everyone who couldn’t afford an actual reliquary knew they were the next best option.
The last bit had come—ironically or pleasingly enough—from a salvage operation at her old workplace, the one she had been assigned to when she had been promising young angel and on track to a receive corporeal work and a cushy scientist Role once she reached nine Forces. She no longer had the access codes required to get to the really good equipment in the truly classified areas, but her old lab coat and employee ID, a four pack of coffee from a nearby stand, and a touch of confidence was enough to get Mariah into where she needed to go.
Her salvaged materials fit easily into a pocket, tiny mass-produced blades with one very special feature. Damage done to a celestial’s native form would pass on to their corporeal body next time they took to a vessel or a host. Mariah had used them before, and they made a particularly effective threat for any Hive. Those were always bound by threat of Dissonance to keep their hosts safe, and a well-chosen specimen would stay put rather than risk injuring or possibly killing their next one.
Mariah then focused on the setting where the actual specimen itself would stay. That proved simple enough. There were variances in the crystals she carried, and any one could be the one to make its home here, but Mariah had no difficulties in figuring out a way to make the setting adjustable and secure. What took more mechanical skill and care was creating a dial with her salvaged blades and making sure they could engage and retract smoothly. She managed. And without even cutting herself too badly in the process.
The final feature she added was both aesthetic and functional: a wire running from the inner case with the crystal to an indicator on the outside shell. It glowed red when she set her test catcher in place and went dark when it was removed. If someone managed to take the catcher without triggering any of the other mechanical traps, Mariah could catch the problem quickly without making it obvious to anyone else how she knew.
The detail with the light pleased her, reminding her of the LED diodes along her browline. Her divine whim told her to set a few more in for decoration’s sake, like a signature or a mark of ownership, so she did. Property of Mariah, Habbalite of Technology.
All said, it took over half a decade before the final screw was locked into place. Mariah stepped back and beheld her solution. The diodes aside, it looked plain enough, and after enough time set at the corner of the table, no one would pay it any serious attention. Her divine whim told her it was perfect.
The work itself done, all that was left for Mariah to do was get rid of her schematics and coded notes. Those were already risky to have on hand while she was actively working on her project. With their primary utility exhausted, Mariah needed to dispose of that vector of discovery, so she slipped those papers into a cardboard box holding other forms—incident reports, reimbursement requests, other kinds of paperwork that might imply that the lab was not operating at 100% compliance to either to the standards her Archangel set or to the completely different set of standards recommended by the Game auditors who did spot checks on this facility every year. Mariah then took the whole box to Tizzy’s own personal supply closet—the one Mariah and her coworkers never raided—and had the Paper Shredder take care of the whole mess of documents. For good measure she vacuumed up all the scraps and incinerated those as well.
And once that was done, Mariah headed out to a different plane of existence and pulled her vessel around her. There was always another quota to fill, if not now, then soon, and with the cage ready, she could focus her efforts on finding the one to keep.