Chapter Text
The theoretical approach of pushing Mariah towards redemption is easier to discuss within ourself than it is to implement in reality.
Our theoretical approach, for example, can be based at least partially on logic. Creationer logic, but logic nonetheless.
However, our reality right now has Mariah sat in front of us, those nails tapping patterns onto the hard shell of our cage, and we are filled with a sense of sadness so overwhelming that it’s overriding our thoughtful minds. If we currently had a body capable of producing tears, there would be a serious risk of water damage to this device.
How can we even think that redemption is possible for demons? It’s just a fantasy, right? We find a big, bad demon with a secret heart of gold underneath and turn her towards the light side. It’s a silly little daydream the way that humans talk about winning the lottery or becoming famous. Harmless enough to play around with a bit, but full of hazards and way too easy to let get out of hand. Depending on it will only lead to ruin.
(We’ve taken at least one host who had a bad habit of spending all their rent money on lottery tickets. We…did not have a fun time on that job.)
And when it comes to redeeming demons, the hazards and the potential for ruin—those are very real. We had a brother who had spent years on a redemption project. Even thought he was getting somewhere. But he made the wrong choice of demon to work on and…well, the resulting ambush tore his soul to shreds. If he hadn’t been a Malakite, they might have made him Fall.
There’s a reason that most angels who focus the admirable goal of stopping demons (temporarily or permanently as the opportunity arises) tend to do so via violent measures. There’s a war going on. Not even the people like us [me], who primarily focus on Word support amongst mortals are allowed to forget that. Angels who can successfully influence even one demon towards a less hostile path are rare. We’ve never tried before Mariah. We’ve never needed to.
Hell is a terrible place. Floor to ceiling, it’s filled with people who enjoy causing misery to themselves and others on purpose. Demons shouldn’t even like being down here. The fact that most of them do, that some of them even thrive down here is proof they’re all terrible. How can we even we could pull our impossible scheme off?
“What are you thinking about right now?” Mariah asks. By that she means, what do we attribute our sadness to.
“Hell,” we say, because it’s true and as unrevealing a statement as we can make, and even through our non-existent tears—which are already passing because the hard-hitting resonances last the shortest—we have to keep at least one mind capable of controlling our statements. “And how terrible demons have to be just to thrive here.”
Mariah taps her nails quickly in succession, almost like a woodpecker. “Hell works just like anywhere else in reality, Kira. Survival of the fittest. The strong survive. The strongest rule. The weak either submit to the strong in exchange for protection, or they die. That’s how it works for everyone, angels, souls, and demons alike.”
(Not said, but very heavily implied: We’re weak, and she’s stronger than us.)
We don’t have a good answer right now for Mariah’s statement. If we did, maybe we would already be one of those vanishingly rare angels who help pull demons towards Heaven regularly enough to have something akin to a success rate.
We have another sibling who is currently in service to Destiny, specifically with those who identify salvageable demons or Hellsworn humans. And what have they told us? “Eighty percent of getting a demon to redeem is matching the right candidate with the right angel. Or angels.” Sometimes our sibling happened to be the right angel. How many have they helped redeem? A bit less than one per decade since we first came down to the corporeal. Maybe a bit over that rate if we count the one or two demons who didn’t survive the attempt.
(We want to be clear. This is considered good. Our sibling is one of those who could objectively claim a success rate.)
We don’t find that advice terribly helpful right now. The match is already made. The candidate chose us.
(Though we suppose if there were some softer, more redemption-ready demon here, and a way to convince Mariah to hand us off to….No. We’ve overheard enough conversations in here. If there were a better option available, that would be the name we would overhear bandied about as potential Game bait. We have to work with what we’ve been given.)
“Do you understand?” Mariah makes long, slow scratches. We’ve stayed quiet long enough for her to notice our silence.
“I understand your point of view.” The safest approach we’ve founded for these conversations is to acknowledge what parts of Mariah’s speech we can honestly half-agree with.
Mariah’s nails hit the case in unison. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Pretend like you agree with me, when clearly you don’t. You might think you understand my point of view but you disagree with whatever you think I’m saying. I’m not stupid. I can see when you’re trying not to say something.”
Well, so much for safe.
“I grew up in Heaven.” We address her earlier statement, and ignore talking further about our rhetorical evasiveness. Yes, we’ve gotten into that exact habit. Yes, it’s a terrible way to communicate, but do we have a better strategy?
“You think you know better than I do just because you’re an angel who lived in Heaven? Did you know, my supervisor Fell? She told me all about Heaven back when she trained me. There’s no more mercy up there than there is down here. The only difference between Heaven and Hell is the definition of ‘fittest’.”
The best response we have is the easy Kyriotate statement. It still sucks. We know that. “I know my experience. It’s not the same as yours.”
Everything goes quiet. Her nails suddenly still on the table. Mariah wants to punish us so badly right now, but she can’t. All of her accumulated essence went into that initial burst of fake and temporary grief.
Instead, she pushes her chair away from us, stands up, and walks out of the room.
—
When Mariah finally returns to this room (finally, as though she doesn’t regularly leave us for months at a time) she’s sobbing huge heaving sobs. Another Habbalah must have resonated that emotion into her. This happens often, and we realize how short the duration on the strongest emotions can be, it’s possible we only observe what she can’t avoid showing us.
We [she and I] don’t talk about this. Mariah doesn’t want to, and we [I] don’t know how to bring it up usefully.
Our observation: We may not be thriving in Hell, but neither is Mariah.
—
Every so often, Mariah tries to make us love her for a few hours at a time.
We keep saying ‘no’. Even when the warm, fuzzy feelings are more pleasant than drowning sadness or burning rage she usually inflicts on us, it’s still vulgar.
(The negative emotions at least seem honest.)
About half the time when we say no, nothing happens. There’s no bounce back at all. This time happens to fall into the other half of chance.
Mariah traces a circle on the table with one of her nails. We imagine it’s in the shape of a love heart.
“You should let yourself love me,” she says, a soft whine in her voice. Clearly, she’s soaked through with infatuation. Were we outside of this Force Catcher and she knew our Word, she would freely offer herself for that rite. (Completely irrelevant pet peeve: People who assume the sex rite is the only Creation rite that matters.) “You would feel nice for a little while, and I would like it. It would make things easier for you.”
This is a fair argument, though we take it in a different direction than the one Mariah surely intends for us to. We want to win Mariah over to our side [Heaven], and one way of doing so is what a reliever might naively call ‘the power of friendship’. More adult Creationers usually refer to this strategy as ‘seduction to the bright side’. (In our case, platonic seduction. Literal demon seduction is not exactly a smart idea for Kyriotates who don’t do vessels. Too much risk of collateral damage.) Either way, it would be easier—at least for a short while—to act genuinely affectionate towards Mariah if we did love her for a few hours. Eventually we might even get to the point where the little pseudo-angel (demon) comes to trust us.
The easiest answer then might be to agree with her that she would like it, and it would feel nice. Letting her have her way in this might make things easier. But Mariah has caught on to that particular evasive strategy of ours and is starting to hear what we wouldn’t say. (No we wont let her.) More importantly, Mariah cares that we use that strategy.
(Which isn’t to say that we’ll stop using it entirely, just that we have to be more careful about when we deploy it and what we actually communicate when we do.)
Neither does easy necessarily mean better. We might as well try a more honest answer.
“It’s a short-term fix,” we say. “Once it wore off, I would hate you a little more. That would happen every time you used it on me.
“And,” we continue, because we realize this is true enough to say without dissonance, “I would rather not hate you any more than I have to.”
(This is a true statement, and for multiple reasons too. Not just because it’ll help with our plan if we don’t have to entirely fake our friendliness, but also because if she’s our only safe-ish companion in Hell, we’d rather not completely hate her.)
A pause. The silence betrays Mariah’s contemplation. The problem is that she shouldn’t care about how we feel about her. We know that. She knows that. We are the prisoner. She is our captor. She is the one with the power in this situation, and our feelings about her should be beyond her concern. It’s like a Shedite caring what the poor humans it rides think of it. In Habbie vernacular, caring about the (unresonated) feelings of others beyond what’s necessary to punish them is a sign of weakness.
Of course, for the next few hours at least, Mariah does care. She’s drugged on her own artificial infatuation, and in her resonance-tinted mind, we are the best and most beautiful creature she’s never actually seen. Whether that concern lingers on after the effect wears off, we don’t know.
We hope it does, at least a little bit. Our half-baked plans depend on Mariah seeing us as a friend, or at least as some kind of trustworthy acquaintance. That’s why we have to play nice and why we can’t let ourself hate her too much, even if we also can’t allow ourselves to accept her Love.
It’s a fine balance. We need to get her to like us, but we also can’t be too accommodating. Mariah won’t have incentive to change if we give her everything she thinks she could want from us.
Friendship is necessary; it’s not sufficient.
“You can really be so awful sometimes. As bad as a demon, even.”
Sure it’s insulting, but we’re also a bit thrilled. She does care.
—
If we could see right now, our vision would be nothing but red.
“You’re not really an angel! Habbalah are just as much demons as any other resident of Hell!”
We’ve been good about containing ourselves to useful (or at least not obviously counterproductive) statements, but this time under the boiling hot Fury our favorite Habbie has inflicted upon us, no single mind is strong enough to prevent the rest of us from outright saying what we’ve previously only talked around.
Seraphim would say that refusing to let a lie stand is the most useful thing one can do when faced with someone as deeply caught in their delusions as your average Habbalite. The most naive Seraph (or Seraph-to-be, when considering relievers) might consider speaking the direct truth and making logical arguments to be a viable redemption strategy. Convince Mariah she’s really not an angel, and she’ll want to redeem.
“Kira! Why would you say such a thing! God made me the same way He made you! Just because He put me in Hell and not Heaven, doesn’t make me not an angel.”
We know this argument is useless. True, but useless. Habbalah as a Band hold dearly on to this delusion, ever since the First Fallen of the Elohim scrambled to explain why they abandoned their divine objectivity in pursuit of their own selfish motivations. Who else but a Habbalah could inflict so much suffering on the Symphony and convince themselves it’s holy? No matter how good it feels right now to say exactly what is on our minds (and it does feel good), we know it’s not useful.
We are also, for however long this Fury lasts—and we need to emphasize this—out of a single fuck to give.
“Of course it does. Habbalah can lie in Helltongue without getting dissonance. They serve Princes, not Archangels. They burn up in Angelic tethers like any other demon. Nothing about your Band is divine.”
We are fucking this up. We are fucking this up so badly and all because of this stupid emotion we let Mariah force into our Forces. Best case scenario, we are losing all the progress we’ve made so far with Mariah. Worst case scenario, Mariah decides to dispose of us.
But it feels so good to just call the delusion for what it is.
“God speaks to me.” Mariah says, her voice going deeper than we’ve ever heard it. “It’s the divine whims that tell me what He wants me to do. And I listen to Him.”
“What you consider a divine whim is only a justifi—”
We cut off our thought right there. Not because we’re done being Furious. No, we’re still bubbling over with rage and enjoying giving Mariah a piece of our minds, but because the mind always set to listen hears the familiar thump-schlorp of the Damp Mop Djinn making her approach.
We are furious. But we still want to survive this. Mariah might turn us in later, but her supervisor finding us out will turn that ‘might’ into a ‘definitely’.
And Mariah, noticing our sudden shift into silence, follows our cue.
The Damp Mop Djinn (by now we know she goes by Tizzy, but we like the epithet better) thump-schlorps in, slams a box of loose components on the table with a sullen thud, and pauses. We’re holding our metaphorical breath, and the lack of sounds from Mariah betrays her own freeze response.
The silence lingers on. All we hear is the soft woosh of air circulating through the vents.
“Did you want something, ma’am.” Mariah says at last.
“Repair these. Friday deadline.” The Damp Mop Djinn says before finally thump-schlorping her way back out.
It’s not a long encounter, but that and the short wait after to see if she’ll return is more than enough time for that artificial red-hot Fury to cool down.
“What were you saying, Kira?” Mariah says, when she deems it safe to speak again.
All our fight is gone and we’re just left with the post-rage burnout. If Mariah wants to hand us over to the Damp Mop Djinn because we dared speak our thoughts directly, she can do it. “What you call a divine whim is only a justification for whatever you needed or wanted to do anyway.”
Mariah’s nails click down. We can’t tell if that’s a serious warning or mere irritation at what she considers a stupid question. “I’m sure it looks that way on the outside, but God really does speak to us through our divine whims. That’s how we know who needs to be tested and who needs to be punished.”
At least for now, Anger doesn’t push us to lash out. We try to think about this calmly. What would that Destiny sibling do? Stubborn, emotional argument is useless, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t challenge Mariah. It might even be a necessary measure to open Mariah’s mind.
“What happens when two Habbalah disagree then?” We’ve never met two Seraphim or two Elohim together who always exactly agree on every subject, never mind that one Choir can see pure Truth on a Symphonic level and the other one is bound to act objectively.
Mariah snorts. “Then one of them has let go of their standards. That happens a lot. It’s why I can’t stand the Habbalah here. They work around demons all the time, and they’ve lowered their standards for their own gain or convenience. Even worse are the Habbalah who choose to work for Demon Princes, as though they weren’t any better than any ordinary band of demons.”
“And you do maintain your standards?”
“Of course I do. If I could lower my standards, my life would be easi—” Mariah cuts herself off, and when she speaks again her voice takes on a smile we do not like. “There’s a lot about reality you don’t understand Kira, but that’s why God chose you for me. I can teach you. And then you’ll know better.”
—
Of all the emotions Mariah has inflicted on us yet, there’s one she hasn’t tried: Emptiness.
It makes sense.
See we would have to at least try to bounce that. Not out of principle, the way that we bounce her attempts at Love, but out of that one-in-a-million chance that she gets the kind of resonance backlash that knocks the delusion straight out of her like an exhaled breath.
(It’s rare, but it happens. We know of an Elohite who became that way as a result of one of those backlashes.)
We probably could bounce the emptiness. That’s easy enough, but we’re not so bad at math as to think the probability is likely to work out in our favor. Mariah will probably maintain her delusion while also getting dissonant at the same time. And a Mariah who gets dissonant will be a Mariah who gets angry.
She probably knows that too, at some level.
So she doesn’t try. And we don’t provoke her, no matter how much several of us want to.
—
The next emotion she tries (several probable days later when she has the Essence to spend again) is one we would have never expected from a Technologist: nostalgia. We feel it as a bittersweet sensation that reminds us of the better times we can never return to. It’s a bittersweet knife in the metaphorical gut that’s more subtle than just plain sadness.
We think of our friend Cole, back when we [I] just fledged and right before our first corporeal assignment. It had finally settled into staying Creation, and the two of us together had been wandering through the courtyard gardens near where our mother used to keep her studio, two pairs of our hands clasped to its rim. We would be going downstairs soon for our first corporeal assignment, and we finally worked up the nerve to ask it a question we had wondered about since our first encounter.
“Why did you become an Ofanite anyway?”
We were newly fledged not even a decade before and hadn’t yet met an actual demon (only angels who used to be one), and we had naively expected an answer like: “I realized the error of my ways and decided I wanted to become one of the good guys.”
The answer it gave had been much more pragmatic.
“I was getting pushed in so many directions that Heaven seemed safer. Redemption was theoretically survivable. Letting myself get caught between the Game and Andre wasn’t.”
“So demons don’t just realize the errors of the way?”
“Not most of them.” The flame had flared up between our fingers. “Sure, I was tired of everything falling apart around me, but I didn’t really repent until after I had already come up; that’s why I chose Creation, so I could continue doing what I already liked to do. The constraint of circumstances came first. The rest came later.”
Or thereabouts.
The ache fills us. We want to go back to Heaven, but not the Heaven of today where our Archangel is more than two decades wandered off and most of our Wordmates have been scattered into the service of various archangels, but back to the Heaven of nearly a century ago, when our home Cathedral was filled to the brim with life and activity and we [Cole and I] kept our Hearts together side-by-side.
“What’s on your mind?” Mariah asks, back in the present. It’s unfair, that she asks us these questions while we’re struggling under the weight of her resonance. We suppose that’s a way of getting non-standard responses from us.
(We notice this time, she hasn’t been using her resonance so much as Punishment, but as information gathering.)
Various minds have various answers, some (Can we help constrain Mariah’s circumstances in a useful way?) more practical than others (Can we somehow build a time machine to go back to that day?). Thankfully, Mariah seems to prefer the emotional answers which are the safer ones to give. “A visit I had with a friend before I went to the corporeal for the first time.”
“Kira, I’m your friend now. You don’t need to think about anyone else.”
Friend is not exact word we would use to refer to Mariah, not without the appropriate nuance signifiers. (Not quite sarcasm anymore, but not entirely sincere either. Coerced companionship, maybe?) Who can really be friends with someone who ‘owns’ them the way Mariah is trying to own us?
Constraint of circumstances. We’re getting to know the concept intimately.
“It was a different time, and we were newly fledged,” we say. “Don’t you ever get nostalgic for an earlier time in your life?”
Mariah freezes up. “Nostalgia is for the weak. The strong carry forward.”
We aren’t the only one here who talks around what she means. In Habbie-speak, Mariah’s statement means yes. Nostalgia isn’t one of the basic primal emotions, not the way that Fury, Sadness, or Love are. Could she have even hit us with that emotion if she had never personally experienced how that longing could have a bite to it? Would it have even occurred to her to have tried it?
(Perhaps, if someone else had used it on her first. But nostalgia isn’t a typical Vapulan emotion.)
What, Mariah, do you want to get back to?
If we ask it like that, Mariah will never answer that question directly. She said it herself: Nostalgia is a weakness. The past is past.
(We disagree. We find the past very informative in figuring out how to go forward.)
So we focus on what indirect question might reveal that information, and there is one we’ve wanted to ask for while.
There’s an incongruity between Mariah’s band and the job assigned to her. Her job up on the corporeal involves locating her target and then tracking them down for capture and retrieval. Let’s assume this is a necessary job that needs to be done well and done quietly (We understand this is a bold assumption on our part.), what band would be the best fit? A Djinn. Maybe a well-controlled Shedite (if those exist). Something inclined to lurk in plain sight. Not a young Habbalite.
We wait until Mariah returns to the computer and starts the next round of data entry, her keystrokes going at their usual pace. Observing how her attention shifts when we speak to her there gives us another set of context clues to work with.
We mentally brace ourself.
“How does a Habbie get assigned to do a Djinn’s job?”
The typing at the computer slows. Right. Challenging question. Mariah takes time to think about her answer. “It’s a test,” she says with a tight and poisoned smile in her voice, “to see which little Kyriotates aren’t being careful enough when they take hosts. Survival of the fittest.”
That sounds like one of those divine whim justifications. Mariah has to do this work, so she’s going to frame the work in a way that could be pleasing to her, the way our more lighthearted minds might refer to our captivity as a deep-cover assignment. We’re not satisfied with her answer. “So, you requested this job then? Of all the job openings and research opportunities available in Technology, this is the one you signed up for. Despite the risk and shortened life-expectancy?”
“It’s a test, Kira.” Mariah repeats after a long silence. All typing has stopped. We get the sense that her focus is only on us. “Just like everything else in this existence. Tests are given to everyone whether they’re ask for or not. Only the weak complain.”
That’s the answer, isn’t it? No, Mariah didn’t choose her assignment, no more than we chose to be brought into Hell. We know from overheard conversations that no one expects her to live much longer. Sure, she’s competent at what she does, but her luck is just as finite as our own. One day she’ll get over-ambitious and catch someone who is too big for one of her artifacts. Or her luck will run out and she’ll catch someone with enough immediate support nearby to make a difference. No matter how pitiful and harmless Mariah tries to play, once someone from Heaven figures out what her job is, they won’t let her go. Vessel death would be a lucky outcome for her.
And for what? No promotion potential, a supervisor who clearly disregards her, and coworkers who would gladly throw her to the Game except they don’t want to risk being her successor. Her time in Hell must be like a vacation for her, and even that seems to mostly be menial repair jobs and meaningless data entry.
Mariah stands up and walks back over. Her hand hits a table with a blunter sound, knuckles, not nails.
“Pity.” Mariah spits the word out with more rancor than she ever demonstrated for the perpetual Habbalite insult of ‘weak’. “You’re the one trapped in the Force Catcher, and you dare pity me?”
We don’t know what to say to that. We’re not even sure ‘pity’ is how we’d describe our feelings towards her right now. It might be an accurate report from her mood ring, or it might be Mariah’s own projection.
“Do you really want to know why I do this job, Kira? This job, specifically.”
“Yes. Will you tell me?”
Her nails hit the hard case in unison. Then she speaks in a particularly bitter voice, like no tone that ever gets heard in Heaven, not where angels as young as we are ever got to hear, anyway. “Everyone used to think I was promising. I had coveted research position. The Genius Archangel himself was fast-tracking me to nine forces. I was lined up to get respected corporeal assignment within a couple years. But I fucked it up and got a Discord that made me useless for everything I had been trained to do. So now, I do this job and I’ll do it for as long as I need to until I can get finally get it removed.”
We don’t say anything. It’s enough for us to be here and listen.
“It’s a test. All I need to do is be strong, endure these obstacles in my way, and overcome. And one day, I’ll be promising again.”