Chapter Text
Mariah ends her description of our cage with the conclusion she wishes us to reach. “So that’s why it’s a bad idea to try to escape.”
Do we think she told us the full truth about our cage and the efforts she went through to build it? Not at all. This is Hell, and here, the full truth may be rarer than sunlight. There’s a very adventurous bit where she sneaks into a—we think it’s a psychology lab, or maybe neurology lab or something in that realm, Mariah doesn’t explain in detail—and manages to bluff her way in past the security system. That sounds more like the kind of comic book caper we would read in Yves’ library in the “Stories imagined by elementary-schoolers who just saw their very first spy movie” section.
(Nothing against those stories! They’re great! We’re just saying that particular bit of Mariah’s story hits that level of realism.)
There’s also some very obvious eliding going on. Little details that Mariah almost let slip out before she caught them. Points of vanity, mostly, particularly anywhere that she might have seemed weaker or subordinate. Mariah told us this story because wants us too scared to make an escape attempt, but she also wants us to be impressed with her strength and ingenuity.
(Honestly, the whole concept is pretty impressive. Horrible. Massively unfun to be caught in. But impressive. Very creative.)
What we are willing to accept as truth is that the actual security measures she describes are in place. While it’s a near certainty that at least one component won’t function as intended—it is a Vapulan device after all—it’s far less certain that any failures will be actually useful (or safe) for us. That is, we can’t count on anything malfunctioning in our favor.
It should be discouraging. It is discouraging. The heroic fantasy a few of us have of forcing our way out of the catcher that’s stored here in the depths of Tartarus and rescuing our choirmates has dissolved like sugar in water, the way that our prison (being actual rock and not rock candy) absolutely will not.
But it’s also information we didn’t know before. We’ve had an unconfirmed feeling that trying to escape before knowing the details would be a bad idea. Now that Mariah’s confirmed those feelings (the natural way, not via resonance), the bits of us we’ve allocated to planning a potential brute force escape are free to ponder in other directions. Knowing which approaches won’t work gives us the ability to focus on the ones that just might.
—
“You could Fall.” Mariah says, while she works on something that rattles a bit when she moves. What that sound translates to in tangible reality, we can only speculate. We let a few idle minds do so, for the slight mystery. “Haven’t you thought about it?”
She brings the topic up like we’re having a casual conversation and not like she’s asking us to ponder one of the worst things that could ever happen. That’s not entirely unusual. When celestials from different sides meet and violence can’t immediately ensue, there’s always that little obligatory exchange that happens before more on topic exchanges can occur. (“Why don’t you join us in Hell?” “Well, why don’t you join us in Heaven?”)
Does it actually work as a recruitment measure? No. Do we [celestials] keep doing it anyway? Of course. Really, it’s more a declaration of allegiance to our respective sides than an actual attempt to get the other party to change.
The reason the casual speeches tend to fail is that most celestials like being what we are, and for those who don’t—there’s little incentive to just switch sides casually.
For angels, Falling is a long and continuous chain of Not Doing Things Right. One action against our [angels’] Choir or Word (for those who don’t serve Creation) nature is one note of dissonance. Get one or two, and we can repent and cleanse ourselves. If we get too many at once and can't easily get rid of them, we can wrap them up in Discord. Better to accept a stable hard-to-remove blemish than to let the dissonance accumulate and risk going Outcast, or Falling.
And even if we [again, angels in general] are fine with consistently going against our nature and feeling that itchy buzz of dissonance, Judgment sure isn’t. Working to prevent Angels from going Outcast and Falling and bringing home those who have strayed too far is probably their one useful service to the rest of us.
For us [me, specifically], how can we get dissonance? Why would we choose to do so? (Dissonance is always a choice at some level.)
We have that one note from learning Helltongue. It’s a bothersome little speck on our awareness and an acceptable price for our ability to follow the majority of conversations that take place here. Sure, it brings us a little closer to a potential Fall, but it’s not enough to tip us over on its own. But after that? Our Archangel doesn’t have anything that specifically violates his Word, and there aren’t any hosts here for us to possess and then leave worse off than before.
We could lie. But we’re getting more skilled with the language. It’s no longer stilettos on black ice to put together a sufficiently true statement.
“I’ve thought about it. Rejected it unanimously.”
“What? Do little Kyriotates in Force Catchers run a democracy now?” Mariah snickers a bit.
We consider her question and try to form words around an experience we take for granted. “Not exactly a democracy. But we’re not not a democracy either.” We say this in Angelic, where the complexity of what we actually mean can shine through in the nuances.
(Our mind is full of the constant conversations and debates, and usually it is the plurality voices that determine our final decision when sets of actions prove mutually exclusive, but we also have times when a single mind with a fundamentally important perspective can and does overrule the others.)
Mariah grumbles. “That fluffy heaven-language of yours sounds terrible. How do you even stand to speak it?”
“It doesn’t sound so terrible when you belong in Heaven.”
We know what we’re implying in regards to Mariah and her delusions, but in our defense, it’s an absolutely true implication.
That doesn’t stop the conversation from ending, nor does it stop us from temporarily being very, very sorry for questioning Mariah’s divinity.
Out loud.
—
“You don’t need to do that.” Mariah says, speaking loud enough to overtake our chorus. In the background, we hear her typing.
“We don’t mind.” We say, with a free voice.
A fun part about being multiple (one of the few applicable fun parts in this situation) is being able to sing Bohemian Rhapsody solo and hit every damn line while still having enough mouths free to imitate the instrumental noises. It doesn’t sound terrible. We’re not nearly so good a vocalist as Freddie Mercury, but we’re still decent.
(Despite what some celestials think, we’re not all better than all humans at all things.)
“Someone might hear.”
“You can just tell them it’s the radio playing. Or some obscure recording you managed to get a hold of from Media.”
Apparently, suggesting that people lie isn’t dissonant, so long as the suggestions themselves are honest.
“It’s annoying.”
Well, then. We’re not sure if that’s actually going to stop us from singing, or not. Probably not as much as Mariah prefers. Not that we sing all that much anyway. There’s a fine line between keeping ourself sane in here and maintaining the fine, fine balance between gratifyingly irritating our captor and annoying her to the extent that she decides to hand her pet lab rat to the Damp Mop Djinn.
“Do you have another request, then? How about disco?”
The keyboard sounds get more adamant. “How about the sound of silence.”
We don’t know all the lyrics to that one, but we can certainly put forth the effort.
Yes, we are fully aware Mariah didn’t mean the song.
—
“Why not become a Shedite?” Mariah asks in that casual recruitment speech voice again. “You can’t Kyriotate very well from in there.”
There’s a simple and True answer to this question. We love being a Kyriotate. Unlike a lot of relievers who usually choose their future Choirs when they’re six or seven Forces—adolescent for a celestial, but still larger than most humans—we chose ours young, when we had no more Forces than a human child.
It was our first experience falling in love with anything long before we ever fell in love with anyone. We were captivated by the idea of seeing the world through a billion different sets of eyes, of never being stuck in just one place (Hah!), of borrowing bodies from almost everywhere in the animal kingdom (excepting insects) and maybe eventually from plants or inanimate objects if we ever end up doing enough favors for Flowers and Lightning, of learning about the infinite variety of viewpoints and using that information to make our hosts’ life better. The more we talked to our future Choirmates, the more excited we were to finally become one.
And when we fledged? And after that, when we went down to the Corporeal? It was everything we imagined it would be as a reliever. Better than that, even, until our little mistake.
These past several months (It’s been months, at least, right? Time is even more of an illusion here, and we can’t know for sure.) haven’t been fun, but we still love being what we are.
Why would we want to trade everything we fell in love with to become a Shedite?
If we ever Fell, we would trade our millions of beautiful experiences for a few sets of stale, limited actions. We’d never be a crow or a cat again, and we’d definitely never get the chance to try out an alligator. We’d be stuck in one place (only one place) at any given time. We’d only ever get to ride in human hosts. (Now, we like humans as hosts. They’re fun and very handy for interacting with the corporeal. But to only have that option? No thanks.) Worst of all, every single day we would spend on Earth as a member of that Band, we’d have to corrupt the person we possessed and coax them into doing something they would otherwise object to, thereby making some unfortunate human a bit worse, both for themselves and for the Symphony as a whole.
Maybe being able to read the minds of the bodies we ride, instead of having to use context or (gasp!) actually talking to people might be a potential upside, but honestly, we like the mystery. It keeps us humble.
Sure, we’re stuck in a Force Catcher right now. We don’t get to have those experiences we fledged for. Most likely, we’re not even making it out of Hell alive. But Falling? That would be like giving up on who we are, permanently.
“Probably for the same reasons you don’t just become an Elohite.” We say, making sure we’re using the tone for speculation. If Mariah is anything like any other Habbie we’ve met in passing, she looks down on Elohim. Every celestial seems to have a natural distaste for their opposite counterpart, but Habbalah are perhaps the worst for it. As a Band, they already consider themselves angels. No one can tell them differently. And Elohim by nature are more susceptible to the Habbalite resonance than most. Which means, if Mariah is typical of her Band, she looks down on Elohim at least as much as we look down on Shedim. That should help her understand our distaste.
Mariah sucks in her breath, an interesting bit of body language in a realm where breathing is optional, like we landed a punch we didn’t even know we were throwing. (Not that we’ve ever really thrown a punch. By the time a situation turns violent, it’s better for us—and our hosts—to just run.)
“It’s not the same thing at all!” she protests. “You’d just become a demon. Me becoming an Elohite would be like evolving backwards. I’m already one of God’s Chosen in Hell. Why would I want to give that up? Do humans long to become apes? Or little amoebas floating in primordial soup?”
We think about the humans we’ve been, and the humans we’ve talked to. It hasn’t even been a century since we’ve hit the corporeal yet, and we’re still amazed at the sheer variety of perspectives we’ve found in that time. “It wouldn’t surprise us. That bit about the humans, I mean. Some of them probably would rather be primordial soup, given the chance. On some days, at least.”
We consider that. It might be fun being primordial soup, if not especially useful. (Although, we’re not being useful right here and now anyway, so maybe we can just dispose of that criteria for the time being.) Have any one of our choirmates ever been an amoeba, and if so, whose attunement allowed them to possess it? Animals? Flowers? Some minor and obscure Archangel of Bacteria we’ve never even heard of?
Becoming a Shedite is right out, but we’re starting to get a bit jealous of creatures too small for any human eye to perceive.
—
Demonlings are always a little odd to hear scurrying about, and our feelings on them are…mixed. On one hand, they’re basically children, similar to how relievers are young angels (albeit with more classifications and subcategories than we can usefully wrap a mind around), and our Word does have a soft spot for children. On the other hand, demonlings are damned annoying. Relievers get underfoot sometimes, but when they do they’re at least trying to be helpful. Demonlings are just nuisances to the nth degree. On the other, other hand, listening to a few of them executing an elaborately yet poorly planned heist while Mariah is out is probably the most entertaining thing we’ve witnessed since we’ve been down here.
Somewhere between the grate falling down to the floor in a clatter no less than three separate times, someone literally bouncing off the wall, and another one humming the theme from a James Bond movie before landing on our prison and getting shocked, we almost laugh.
We don’t. Not out loud at least.
What happens next should be narrated on one of those radio plays that were popular about three or four decades back: Full on sound-effects as clawed feet run across various upper-level surfaces and screws, nuts and bolts (presumption via metallic sounds) spill across the floor. Some crude attempts of slap-slap kiss-kiss type flirting between two of the demonlings, while trying to pretend to some kind of stealth. One of the crew is apparently a Force too large to fly now, and so the others need to improvise a ladder of some sort to help the third escape back up to the vent.
Which, they manage, right before the door beeps open.
There’s a deep sigh when Mariah comes back in, just long enough that she has the chance to look around. “What a mess!” Her voice is shaky, like she’s had to compose herself before walking back in, and the poorly-timed demonling raid is the one minor inconvenience that’s going to crash everything. Our instinct, honed by being an angel and wanting to help people in distress, is to ask her about it. We don’t. Habbies don’t like being vulnerable. Surely they hate it even more when others are around to witness.
“They just left,” we say, choosing the other obvious topic of conversation. “Through the vents, if you’re wondering.”
Mariah sits down at her spot nearest us. “That’s obvious. No one gives them the door code. And they always make the biggest, stupidest messes for the dumbest reasons. I should probably report them for over-destructiveness. At least one of them needs more Fear of fledging Calabite instilled in them.”
The irritation makes her voice steadier. Is an angry Habbie better than a sad Habbie? Depends on which of us you ask.
Mariah stands up again and starts moving around. By our hearing, she’s cleaning up the wreckage left behind by the demonlings and their adventure. About halfway to the door, she sighs again. “Bless it! That was what they were after? They could have gotten those from anywhere else.”
“What did they end up taking?” We ask.
“A ruler. Asmodean and Vapumetric scales.”
“That’s it?”
“And a protractor. They sell these anywhere. There’s a vending machine in the lobby you can get them from, when its not on fire.”
“Are vending machines catching on fire a regular occurence?” We ask.
“No. It was just the one time. Oh, then there was that slime issue a couple years back. But still.”
“Perhaps the adventure is its own reward,” we say before we expand on the topic.
It’s harder to tell the story how we want to in Mariah’s preferred language. Angelic makes sure to mark every little exaggerated flourish exactly as it’s meant and clearly marks anything that’s fictional as fiction, whereas Helltongue defines truth very narrowly. Still, the overheard adventure makes a for decent story, even though we have to stick with the strict truth and only occasionally add in our opinionated observations and speculations. And by the end, as we describe the Demonlings’ eventful ascent into the air ducts, we think we’ve managed to successfully distract Mariah from either of her impending meltdowns.
—
The door slams behind the Damp Mop Djinn. She didn’t actually say anything this time, just came in, placed something down a little bit away from us, and thumped out.
“What did the Damp Mop Djinn want this time?”
“What? Who?”
“Damp Mop Djinn. Your supervisor.” We imitate the sound she makes, which is probably easier to accomplish with multiple mouths, and we wonder how we’d pull it off with just one. “Thump-schlorp. Thump-schlorp. Thump-schlorp.”
We swear we hear a snicker. “Oh! You’re talking about Tizzy. Just…another repair job. There’s a dud lot of control collars, and I need to get them working again.” A minor unobtrusive silence for a bit while Mariah does something that sounds fiddly. “Damp Mop Djinn, huh?”
At least Mariah sounds amused.
—
Another day, another something being repaired (something awkward and heavy, Mariah seems barely able to lift it). We really should start learning about what kind of devices they keep here, just for the sake of mental inventory. But then, do we really want to know what they keep here that requires so many repairs?
The clicking of her nails on the table is the only sign that Mariah’s about to start a conversation. The parts of us that manage interactions with her perk up.
“I could push you,” she says at last.
Some of us have started considering why this topic in particular means something to her. This is the third time she’s mentioned it since she came back to Hell, which isn’t typical of mixed-side relations. Casual recruitment attempts tend to trickle off after the second or third meeting as there’s better small-talk to make if anyone is still bothering to talk at all. Actual recruitment attempts start taking a different tenor—either more seductive or more threatening.
(That is to say, if Mariah were trying to push us, she’d either do more to sell us on the concept of Hell, Shedim, and her Prince or she’d break out the more aggressive interrogation techniques specifically designed to break people.)
Even if Mariah speaks lightly, her persistence in bringing up this subject gives away how much this topic means to her.
“But would you?” Possibly, it’s unwise to provoke the Habbie, yes, but too many of us feel talkative at the moment to stop the filter. We can’t even blame our carelessness on Mariah’s resonance. We’re taking a risk, and we’re all various levels of certain that the answer to our question is ‘no, she wouldn’t’.
Mariah freezes in her repair attempt. A tool hits the table with an uneven thud. (Maybe a screwdriver?) For better or worse (worse), we have her complete attention.
“Do you really think I’m that soft a touch? Maybe I would.” Her voice goes low and heavy, it reminds us a bit of the Damp Mop Djinn when she threatens Mariah—not that it’s a comparison we’d make out loud to our Habbie friend. “You have so much confidence in your own divinity. Wouldn’t it be interesting to determine where the limit to your Angelic nature lies?”
We shudder in what little room we have here.
A half-dozen outstretched fingers draw pictures in the closed and hypothetical air—the thoughts and reasonings from the half-dozen minds who’ve all paid various types of attention to our captor these past several months. The questions she asked us about dissonance and Outcast status when we were first captured? Those could fit into a Fall narrative involving a Habbalite of Vapula. Establish a baseline, then test the subject (us) to a failure point, at which point any subsequent punishment inflicted is well-deserved. Repeat until Fallen, dead, or a Discord-filled mess.
But she hasn’t pushed us in that direction yet, not even tentatively. We remember her reactions when she’s discovered that one of our captured Choirmates Fell.
(And what becomes of those Shedim? Do they get the opportunity to join up with Tech? Or are there Shedite specific experiments they become part of? Never mind. We don’t want to know.)
Sure the reaction could be a performance, but what reason would Mariah have to fake vulnerability? This isn’t like the corporeal, where a demon can fake vulnerability to get of a trap. Nothing in the current dynamic calls for it.
Not that we want to tell her that line of reasoning. “You put a lot of work into this whole set up. You spent a better part of a decade building this cage to hold us. Then you put in the effort to teach a Hive Helltongue so we could speak your language. Shedim are everywhere here, but a Kyriotate, in Hell? That’s rare. And, lucky you, you get to keep an angel with more forces than you locked up in the corner and attending to your every move.”
We’re not sure what that subverbal noise Mariah makes actually means, but we’re on a roll and not enough of us care to stop.
(There is a mind that is figuratively watching through its fingers as we say these things. Also, we’re slipping into the plural out loud, another sign we’re not totally in control of ourselves.)
“Maybe in a century or so, you’d get bored of us and put some effort into it. But we’re not a prize your Prince—”
“Archangel!” Mariah hisses the correction.
“We’re not a prize your Superior will commend you for breaking. We’ve never worked for Lightning, nor were we very involved with sciences in general. Whatever reward you get for recruiting us won’t make up for the fact that you didn’t hand us over in the first place.”
We take one of those figurative breaths before we get too loud.
“Plus, I like being a Kyriotate. I’d resent becoming otherwise. If you did somehow manage to push me over the edge, I’m pretty sure I’d go out of my way to make your life miserable. Do you really need another larger demon bullying you?”
The nails are ominous, slow clicks on a table. We’ll probably regret this conversation later.
“So the best guess I have right now is that you’ll keep me around until you get bored with having a pet Kyriotate. Then you’ll dispose of me in a way that gets you closer to a quota if you can manage that without anyone finding out. Which, I highly doubt, since I’d have no reason not to tell on you. Or maybe you’ll just abandon us for the next novelty that comes around.”
We pause just long enough to let a few forces consider that.
“Oh Kira, you better hope I never get bored of you.”
We go silent at that. Perhaps that explains why we’re trying so hard to engage with her. None of us know what to do with this situation, what options are available to us, or if we can find a way out that doesn’t lead to an experimental death scene. What we do know is that encouraging this little Habbalite to interact with us buys us a little more time. “Do you even like Shedim enough to try and give Hell a new one?” We finally ask.
The sound of the repair work pauses. Her nails hit the table. “They’re gross and slimy. They’re not nearly so pretty as Kyriotates.”
(Huh. ‘Pretty’ is not a word we often hear in regards to our Choir’s celestial forms.)
“So you probably wouldn’t make any efforts to push me.” It’s only half a question.
“Probably not.”
—
Mariah is being weird. Well. Let’s rephrase that. Mariah is being weird in a way that’s unusual for her. Of course, we can’t actually see in this place. We’re still in the same gray-blankness of the Force Catcher, after all. But one of our mental images is the impression of our adolescent Habbie drawing hearts in her math notebook filled in with lines like ‘Mariah + Kira 4 evah!’
Of course, that’s a ridiculous image. A Vapulan would be more likely to have a high-powered laser and carve their declaration of love into the some underutilized landscape. Nothing says ‘undying love’ or at least ‘heavy infatuation’ like a forest fire.
In retrospect, maybe it would have been a better idea to just accept the emotion she threw at us. It couldn’t feel any weirder than this from the inside.
“I don’t get why you would bounce that, Kira.” Mariah says that name with a bit of a dreamy sigh, like we’re her first crush. “It wasn’t even—” She cuts off there, her head still apparently not fucked up enough to say what’s really on her mind. “It wouldn’t have hurt you.” She finishes.
It’s vulgar. It feels like a betrayal to accept the Love without even trying to bounce it, even as it might have felt wonderful in the moment.
We’re not trying to fall in love with this Punisher, or any demon, not of our own will, and certainly not artificially. We’re definitely not going to allow ourselves to love the one who keeps us here trapped in this one spot with nothing useful to do.
“Not that.” The voice that surfaces is the one that can be gentle about things like this. It reminds us of how our mother used to speak to us when we made a mistake that needed correction. “We know it won’t last. Isn’t true. At least the emotions that hurt are plausible.”
“Don’t say that.” She’s practically pleading.
She’s being vulnerable around us again. One part wonders how angry she’ll be when the feeling wears off, and she realizes how much of herself she temporarily gave away.
—
Damp Mop Djinn—Mariah calls her Tizzy—leaves the room with barely a goodbye.
Mariah’s backlashed Love wore off a few weeks ago, and since then she hasn’t spoken to us at all, except to tell us when there were eavesdroppers coming. She hasn’t even tried to resonate us.
That is until we start hearing another set of noises. Drawers and cabinets locking. A computer being shut down. The sound of the buttons on our prison being engaged.
“I’ll be gone for a little while. There’s another quota.” She pauses. “Maybe someone better will come along.”
Most of us doubt it.
“Anyway, there’s also a Game audit coming up. So, you’ll need to stay extra quiet.”
“Game audits?”
“Yes, so stay quiet. And one more thing…” Mariah trails off and we hear the disturbance of several essence being sent. What hits is a full on dose of loneliness; our Forces soaked through and weighed down by the despair of having no Archangel, no Mother, no acquaintances or friends of any kind, not even the ones with an applicable sarcasm marker. Our only company is the Punisher who pushes this emotion into us, and even she’s at the far side of the room, ready to turn out the lights and walk out the door with barely a goodbye.
“Something for you to think about, while I’m away.” Mariah says cheerfully as opens the door and walks away for however long this next quota takes her.