Chapter Text
It’s a quiet spot in time—moment, few hours, a mid-afternoonish atmosphere—when we finally come to the conclusion that it’s time for some serious contemplation. Were we back on the corporeal, ducks would probably be involved (Ducks make amazing host bodies for pondering), but since we don’t have access to any hosts right now we settle for this rare, unfraught, unemotional moment.
Mariah is sitting at her spot at the computer and instead of at the worktable where she prefers to be when she talks to us. Bursts of fast typing come from her keyboard. Typetypetypetypetype. Pause. Typetypetype. Pause. Whatever she works on over there, it’s absorbing enough that she doesn’t make any attempts to push us into conversation. Not that either of us [Mariah or I] could follow a conversation over the sounds currently filling the room.
We [I] have relegated a voice to harmonizing along with the background noise. While it was allegedly intended to be music by its creators, what’s actually playing right now sounds like someone walked straight onto a Vapulan factory floor, recorded all the ambient sounds—screams included—and then mixed in about twenty conflicting drum machine beats. From context, we think this might be the Hardstyle Techsynth we asked Mariah about. We don’t have lyrics, made up or otherwise, to go along with the music, so the only thing we’re expressing in this performance is our very presence.
This is a calibrated response. When we’re too quiet, Mariah pushes us into conversations, and if we don’t talk, punishment happens. When we’re too loud and break her focus, the same thing happens but with the added risk of getting caught. An idle hum just loud enough to not be lost in the noise sits directly at the sweet spot in the middle of the spectrum.
The rest of our minds focus inward, towards reflection rather than reaction. A lot of new information has come in since Mariah’s last trip up, and it’s time to lay out the bits and pieces to see what we can collage together.
We wish we had more than just the auditory scraps to work with. We could work wonders with a visual feed, or even better, the ability to rummage through a few of these cabinets and drawers. (Or pockets! If Mariah let us get that close. Pockets are so educational!) But if we had the ability to do any of those we wouldn’t be caught in a force catcher in the first place. All of this would be a thought exercise with no consequences at all beyond an uncomfortable conversation with a Judgment Triad.
(At least a specifically uncomfortable conversation, with Judgment having an actual good reason for suspicion, rather the usual Word prejudices related to our Archangel’s current activities.)
(And no, despite what some Judges and Wordmates speculate, we’re as clueless as anyone else regarding what he’s up to. We just work for the guy.)
Anyway. Let’s focus on what we do have. We have regular essence coming in from our mother (four messages since the first), a semi-amicable relationship with our captor, and a whole heap of overheard conversations of dubious reliability. Maybe those on their own aren’t enough to break us out of here, but it’s enough that the multiple Forces are swirling around in this crystal now see the point in coming together to figure out how to make it enough.
We imagine a bunch of our forces sitting in a circle on the floor, cross-legged, while one of them (probably the Ethereal one Mother used to glue us into coherence) has a giant pad of paper and a marker ready to write down what the other forces shout out.
(In a situation this aggressively boring, we take our amusement where we get it.)
First question. Where are we?
We are here, in a crystal, in a box, in a room, somewhere in a building, somewhere in Tartarus, which is Vapula’s Principality in Hell. Security wise, this supply room (we think) is in a liminal space. There’s a more secured area beyond the office of the Damp Mop Djinn and less-secured floors beneath this one. This particular room seems to be a fairly well-known private location, under limited surveillance, if any. Would anyone have talked so freely if that weren’t the case?
(Probably, given a certain level of ignorance among staff and auditors. But if there was any observation focused in this direction…well we wouldn’t exactly have the time for any quiet contemplation, would we?)
The building itself seems to be more of a storage facility for test subjects (prisoners) than a place where actual scientific research gets conducted. Sure, everyone here seems to have a side project (even Mariah, if we qualify as a project), but the real work here seems to be in the procurement of specimens of all kinds for other facilities to use. Impudites talk about damned souls, and easy essence. Demons who attempt to intrude get added to the subject pool. No one talks about the angels directly, but we know the answer to that one too. No, not just us. The recent emergency lockdown was almost certainly caused by an angel.
(It spoke in Angelic, and judging by the crackly flame noises it made while it attempted to evade capture, it was either an Ofanite or one of Gabriel’s servitors.)
We’re mildly curious about the world outside the building we’re in. Where it is in Tartarus, what we might see were we able to get a crow’s eye view of the outside hellscape. We know there’s a certain amount of distance between wherever Mariah’s heart gets stored and this place, enough that she boarded a train to get here when she first brought us down. But our exact position within reality beyond the largest fact of “Hell” and the specifics of “secured floor in a building with possibly less secured floors” are largely irrelevant to the actual situation.
We’re in Hell. We need to get out.
Next question. How long are we going to stay in Hell?
The simplest answer is anywhere between five minutes after the end of our brainstorming session and—not forever exactly because nothing is permanent and endings are inevitable—an indefinite period of time. If we had to place a hard stop anywhere, let’s call it the not immediately forthcoming Final Battle. There we go. If Armageddon actually happens and we’re still stuck here in Hell, we will probably be released from this prison in some form or another. Maybe.
That’s a very wide range of possibilities. There’s many, many time points in between as soon as we’re done here and Armageddon. Also, when this ends matters less than how it ends.
So next question? How could our stint in Hell end?
We can break out.
We can get caught.
Mariah can let us out.
Those are the three basic answers our Forces come up with. Or starter answers, the original construction lines in the picture that we can work from to build a more complete composition. So, what are the ranges of final results?
We can die.
We can Fall.
We can escape.
This serves as a basic reminder. No matter how little we like it in here, indefinite imprisonment is not our worst scenario because we are safe, for given values of ‘safety’ available to an actual (heaven-aligned) angel in Hell. No one perceives us but Mariah, and she has as much reason as we do, to keep us hidden away from others. Two of the three endings are worse than the current status quo. Our situation only improves if it leads to an escape.
Yes, escape is the preferred action (obviously), but realistically, how long can we stand to stay here before we completely break? A quick and painless soul death could be better than staying here and finding out.
Possibly. What are the chances that any soul death on offer to us will be relatively painless?
None. There is no chance. It will be slow and gruesome, and the procedure will be more sadistic than scientifically valuable by the time our Forces unravel completely.
The only good that comes out of being dead is not becoming a Shedite.
(Although, thinking about it, whether that would apply depends on what happens to our forces afterwards. Vapulans probably do believe in that kind of recycling.)
(Anyway. We’re getting off-track. Focus.)
The conclusion the plurality of us come up with is this: Any action we take with the intent to escape is only worth taking if gives us a reasonable chance of escape.
(For certain values of reasonable.)
(Yes, we realize that escaping will bring with it a whole bunch of other complications and obligations. Worrying about those right now though is basically daydreaming. No offense to Blandine or her angels.)
So, lets look at those initial sketchy guidelines, the ones that mark how we’ll put the shapes together.
Break out. This is a Kyriotate versus object experience where we force our way out. This crystal may want to keep us in, but we’re getting essence funneled in from an outside source. So long as Mother continues to message us, we’ll be full up soon enough. Pool together all that essence and make ourselves enough good luck to let us break out. It might succeed.
Then what happens?
We have this box with its security measures. Mariah told us all about it, and while we don’t necessarily believe that she told us 100% the truth (She’s not under the same honesty restrictions we are. Mariah can lie exactly as much as she needs or wants to.) or that all of her measures are going to be 100% effective, we would be foolish to ignore the security measures she told us about.
(And remember just because a security measure is ineffective does not mean it will be ineffective in our favor.)
Do we want to be trapped in a spirit battery? Unable to communicate and used as an a very slowly charging energy source until our mother stops sending us essence? No. Do we want slice up our Celestial form with dozens of small cuts and pass that damage onto our hosts when we hit the corporeal again? Making someone or something else pay for this foolish mistake we’ve made? Again, no.
Imagine we could avoid the traps and get out of the box. This is a secured area. We overheard that last escape attempt. When that alarm goes on, no one can jump to the corporeal from here. We could end up like that probable Ofanite, cornered by the Damp Mop Djinn and a few others and being pulled to the secured area.
So we’d have to time the escape attempt perfectly, so as to have no one notice us before the emergency lockdown starts. We would have to hope at least some of the traps don’t work—in a way that lets us escape them, not in away that damages us permanently—and that other traps let us pass through with minimal harm.
Despite the all the risks, there’s a definite appeal to this break-out idea. It’s direct, it’s quick, and after more than a year of being stuck here, it would be nice to feel like something is within our direct control. We get one shot to try this. If we’re lucky and clever enough to succeed, we escape. If we fail…well, we at least got to choose the timing of our inevitable doom.
Would we rather be caught by choice or by accident? If we had to, that is.
Neither. The outcome is the same either way.
But we would at least get to choose when our end comes.
Imagine taking the risk, and getting caught when freedom is just so close—
Imagine not taking the risk. What if we do everything Mariah says and manage to get caught anyway—
It’s clear we’re not coming to an agreement. Let’s set that idea aside as a last resort and move on.
(We’re also still bothered enough by this facility enough to not want to brute force the escape attempt just quite yet. Hold on to that thought as an asterisk. We’ll come back to that later.)
The second ending: Get caught.
This is the worst end for our situation. Unfortunately for us, it’s also the most likely one, which means we have to consider it. How it could happen, and how to avoid it in our pursuit of other options.
We can think of too many ways to get caught:
We make a noise and someone other than Mariah or a demonling hears us (in retrospect, trying to learn how to echolocate last time Mariah was on the Corporeal was not our brightest move). That person identifies the box as holding a captive angel, and Mariah is forced to hand it over.
Some Impudite with those essence-sensing glasses notices that Mariah’s little device contains exactly nine essence and does some guessing based on basic mathematics. (Can we spend our Essence here? What would we spend it on, beyond escape attempts or resisting resonance?)
One of the other resident Habbies gets close enough to notice their mood ring lighting up. (Or does it only work if they’re aware of someone’s presence? Would the mood ring let them notice someone hiding out with Ethereal Form on the corporeal? Or someone observing them from a mouse-sized host?)
A Balseraph actually figures out the true function of this box. (Wait. Is that a threat? Or does that attunement only work on human-created items?)
(Note to selves: If we get out of here, do some research on what exactly Vapulans can do with their little artifacts and attunements.)
We make the wrong noise and the wrong time and a demonling actually figures something out about the shocky-box and tells someone who actually cares about what it has to say. (Not impossible, just very unlikely.)
Someone manages to bug the room stealthily enough that we [Mariah and I] give ourselves away the next time we speak. (Note. How would we warn Mariah if that were the case, if direct verbal communication was out. An S.O.S. maybe?)
We manage to stay as quiet as we need to but Mariah’s own behavior starts to raise enough suspicion that someone actually decides to look a little more closely at what our favorite Horror gets up to in her spare time. (We don’t know many Habbalah, and the bar for favorite is literally set in Hell.)
We could easily the rest of this session listing off all the dangerous possibilities. It’s almost fun, for a grim definition of fun. Semi-useful too, from a cautionary standpoint. Many of these scenarios might be out of our control, but not all of them. And those are worth considering because we can’t prevent a scenario we can’t imagine.
Mostly, though, it’s a sobering reminder that any provisional safety we get from being a good, quiet Kyriotate is finite. It’s an interim measure. Maintaining our safety takes luck and perfect behavior and not just ours but Mariah’s as well. Maybe we won’t get caught today, tomorrow or next year, but inevitably we will. One or the other of us will screw up. Or all the bad luck in Hell will align.
(And then what will happen? Any number of grisly experiments until we fall apart one way or another.)
The longer we wait, the more likely that scenario will come to pass. Therefore, we need to do something. It matters that we try.
Which leads us to our last ending: Mariah lets us go.
Yes. She lets us out of our Force Catcher and not in the pragmatic way that leads to our experimental doom but in the wildly fantastic way where we return with her to the corporeal. It sounds ridiculous.
Most of us do not believe this could ever happen. We would need to convince her, without the use of lies, that she should let us go.
This will not happen. Our improving relationship with Mariah is grounded in one thing: She believes we are hers (in an ownership sense), and we allow her to believe that insofar as the truth allows. Expressing any kind of interest in escape sets our relationship back to the first stage.
It sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous. The result is out of our control and entirely in Mariah’s hands. We might as well ask for an army of angels to storm Hell for us.
Except the result isn’t entirely outside of our influence. We can talk to Mariah. And more so, we can think of exactly one set of situations where taking us from Hell and to the corporeal would be her best move. If she were to sever her ties to this job and go Renegade, she would take us with her. Not as a favor to us, but because she owns us.
What would make her go Renegade?
A disastrous job situation.
Redemption. An intention to redeem.
What?
(Maybe we should just try to convince her we aren’t a flight risk. It would be more likely.)
(Yes, but that goes way past flirting with dissonance, and straight into an intimate pile up with it.)
Is it even worth trying? That is to say: Is she salvageable?
What do we even know about her?
She’s low-ranking with low peer-esteem. If she has any friends, they never visit her here. The only people who come into this room when she’s around are there only to scold her or hand her more work. Sure she’s under some level of protection, but she’s also a possible Game target.
(More than a few overheard voices think she should be handed over to the Game to get the scrutiny off of them.)
Her corporeal job is dangerous. No one expects Mariah to live much longer. It says something about her abilities that she’s lasted through this many trips, but her luck will run out eventually. Everyone knows this. They just want more specimens from her first.
She needs angelic (or “angelic”) approval. She actively seeks to impress us on occasion, and it’s one of the reasons she doesn’t want us to Fall. She needs us (an actual heaven-aligned angel) to accept her as a peer.
(We can’t give that to her. Not without dissonance. Not while she’s a Habbalite.)
That is odd. Because according to her Band’s philosophy, they’re all angels. Her Bandmates should be enough to fill that need in her. But they don’t seem to respect her at all. We’re pretty sure every time she leaves this room for a short trip, she returns with her soul overloaded with emotions. Mariah doesn’t get approval from her fellow “angels” in Hell.
We can feel the less-skeptical of us coming around once we consider this.
Her problems might be inter-Band drama, the way that two Kyriotates tend to either mesh well or clash hard. But the other Habbalah who talk in here seem—cliquish. They don’t have a habit of casually resonating each other. So what makes Mariah different? Why doesn’t she have their approval? What makes her weak to them?
She spends a LOT of Essence when she resonates us.
We’ve considered this before, and we’ve mostly accepted the conclusion that Mariah doesn’t focus on Celestial Forces. If she’s not quite nine Forces yet, and has to do hazardous corporeal work, it would make sense that she would focus more on her corporeal strength compared to others here who work in Hell full-time.
Are we satisfied with that conclusion now that we think about it deeper?
Not quite, no.
Mariah talks around a topic related to her resonance. She’s does a Djinn’s job, not work that depends on her own native resonance. When she told us the story about her device, she also said it was stupid to rely on resonance alone to keep us in place. She protested our rejection of her artificial Love because the emotion wouldn’t have hurt us. How would she know? More importantly, why would she care?
If we can figure that little secret out, maybe we have a way in.
No, Mariah isn’t a fluffy little redemption candidate who will jump at the chance to become an Elohite if we offer it to her directly, but perhaps we can guide her around to it eventually. Her life here objectively sucks. Her future prospects are dim. People expect her to die within a few years.
(What if she dies while she’s out on the Corporeal? No, that’s outside of our control, we can’t worry about that.)
Yes, we can work with this. We can be friendly, and we can guide her in the right direction within the confines of dissonance-enforced honesty. Maybe we can even protect her from her co-worker’s conspiracies long enough to give us both a chance. Can we guarantee success? Of course not. But we see the potential here that the other two endings don’t have. Unlike just waiting, we have something to do. Unlike an escape attempt, a single bad move won’t kills us; we can keep trying so long as Mariah remains alive.
(A side thought that none of us are entirely comfortable with: No matter what approach we choose, we need to protect Mariah. No matter how unpleasant our situation, no matter that she’s the one who brought us here, our position does not improve in the slightest if Mariah gets caught or dies. Or at least it only improves in the short-term way where we’re not having emotions thrown at us while we wait to get caught.)
Maybe she’ll even be happier as an Elohite. It’s possible. We’ve only observed her naturally happy twice: Our first meeting at the post office, and our first time speaking to her in Helltongue. If we let ourself have a little bit of sympathy for a demon, we can see how this could be a favor to her.
(C’mon Mariah, let’s get you to a place where your co-workers won’t try and throw you to the wolves for the slightest opportunity.)
(And this is an example of how plurality does not necessarily rule. Most of us are still skeptical, even as we see this approach as the one that. Just. Might. Work.)
Sure, we still can fail. With so many factors remain outside our control, we have to accept that possibility. It might still be the most likely outcome even, but if we do, then is it any more horrible than what happens with the other options? If we do succeed, then this is the approach that has the most potential, and not just in terms for our own escape.
Which leads us to the asterisk of a thought we had earlier: So far in our speculation, we’ve only focused on what these options can do for us [me]. Sure, this is probably one of those cases where a good argument could be made for self-preservation being the most angelic act we can take. Just run. Don’t risk our soul any more than we already have.
(We can almost hear whichever future Triad gets assigned to question us about our time down here lecturing us. How we should have been avoided capture in the first place, and how dare we learn Helltongue. Our mother sent us essence. Why did we not escape the moment we were full up enough on essence to try.)
(Can we avoid that scenario? Is that a topic for us to daydream about?)
Anyway. Back to that asterisk.
We are not the only one captured down here. We may not even be the most captured, when we consider that only Mariah knows about us. All the measures on this secured floor are only partly about keeping the Game auditors out. Their main objective is to keep celestials in. And by celestials, we mean angels. That last lockdown proved that.
We know Mariah has a quota for captive Kyriotates. Every time she leaves and comes back, we know that means she brought a few more into this mess to await their Technological fate (or Fate). And ours can’t be the only Choir kept captive. There wouldn’t be a need for a whole secured area if it were. Force Catchers make for compact storage. You could lock dozens of us in room even this size. So there’s only a need for more space if other Choirs were being held here as well.
None of those angels will escape without help. Alarms go off when they try.
No one from Heaven will come and rescue them, just like no one will come and rescue us.
But we’re already here.
If we can create a chance to get out—and we’re letting ourself think we can—then shouldn’t we make an effort to pass that chance on to the others trapped in here? And if we want to do that, then we need to find someone with sight, hands, and independent motion on our side. Thus, Mariah. If we do a good enough job, we’ll turn our captor into the key that will unlock these cages, both ours and our fellow angels’.
Sounds reasonable.
(For Creationer values of reasonable.)
(For “trapped in Hell” values of reasonable.)
That’s it. Approach decided. Next step, let’s find the key to our captor.