Chapter Text
Our arrival back at the supply closet presents us with a bit of a conundrum. Our minds need some serious duck-level contemplation time. We have more pieces to arrange in our composition, and a few emergent problems we need to address, or at least navigate around. On the surface, everything seems as not-wrong as possible for a serious multi-mind think session. Mariah has turned on her preferred music, and she has just set down yet another box of components due for its turn in a seemingly endless series of repair jobs.
(The repairs might be actually endless. For definitions of ‘endless’ that don’t involve moving or otherwise getting rid of the hidden Destroyer. What are the chances that Mariah’s repair jobs are exclusively for the devices the Paper Shredder’s entropy field has made a mess of in a loop? Decently high.)
Our problem? Mariah hasn’t actually put us back in the box yet, not after the tour, not when doing her errands, and not even now that she’s back in her workroom and hunched over some small electronic device. We’re still here in her chest cavity.
(Still trying not to think too deeply about that.)
In theory, we know it shouldn’t matter if we’re here or if we’re in the box. In practice, we feel self-conscious and conspicuous here, like the lack of distance between us will let Mariah read all of our best and worst thoughts. It’s a silly hangup. Sure, we could try for deep contemplation anyway. Assuming Mariah doesn’t want to talk—
“So, tell me, Kira, what’s with the extra essence?” Mariah asks.
Fuck.
True to it’s name, the emergent problem (one of them) has emerged. The question itself doesn’t shock us; we’ve been expecting it since that encounter with that Impudite in the secured area. That is, Mariah now has proof that our essence reserves plus her own equals more than the maximum available to one eight-force Habbalite. That incident with the Paper Shredder probably didn’t help either. So, the question itself is fair and expected, if inconvenient. Our own internal response to the question, however? That sends us [most of our minds] reeling.
Initial instinct: We don’t want to answer this question. Unanimously.
There’s not a single mind here that considers a direct answer a good idea. Not personally, and definitely not strategically. We needed that contemplation time to think of an acceptable dodge. We are not getting that time. Our available options are what we can think of before Mariah decides to sic her Resonance on us.
(When that happens, our options will be further limited to those we can come up with while under massive amounts of emotional distress.)
The default option right now is to just not say anything and hope this is one of those cases where Mariah lets our non-answer go. She does do that sometimes, mostly when she realizes we won’t give her the answer she seeks. (For example, she eventually gave up on making us admit that Habbalah were angels.) If we stay quiet long enough, maybe we can make that apply here.
“I’m waiting.” Her nails tap the table. While it’s a slightly different effect hearing it from this angle instead of our usual one, the meaning stays the same. No, she won’t let this one go. We need to give her something more than silence.
So what options do we have? Assuming we can’t just tell her.
(A good number of us recognize how irrational we’re being to draw the line here of all places. Most of us just don’t care. We’re not Elohite. We deserve to have a little bit of irrationality.)
Option one: We lie and accept the Dissonance on this. (We already had the Essence on hand when we came down to Hell.) This option is frighteningly appealing. So far, we only have the one note of Dissonance from learning Helltongue. One more doesn’t put us in danger quite yet. Why not use Helltongue for its intended purpose, just this once? It could stay a single lie. Unless Mariah decides to press the issue. That’s the problem right there. If we lie and Mariah presses, we have to either keep lying and therefore run up our Dissonance to potentially soul-endangering levels, or we come clean and find ourselves in the same situation, only now we’re closer to either taking Discord or Falling.
It wouldn’t work anyway, not after we’ve paused for so long. It’s too casual an answer for the amount of observable thought we’re putting into it. We’d have to think of a better lie.
Option two: We use a lesser truth (Someone we knew before contacted us via Celestial Tongues in a bid for assistance.) to imply a false conclusion (Our extra Essence is a one-time fluke). That has slightly more chance of working. If nothing else, the statement stands up better even after visible hesitation. Mariah is more likely to believe it at face value than the outright lie of option one. But as we attempt to form the words in Helltongue, we can feel the slippery slide into deceit and looming Dissonance. Perhaps if we had started as a Shedite and had native-level fluency with Helltongue, we could navigate these half-truths more cleverly. Or even if any of our chosen forms of creativity had involved more linguistic cunning.
But we’re not, and they don’t. We were made and raised in Heaven, and we were always more into visual artistry. Furthermore, we were raised by a Seraph, and our mother would be—not mad, but disappointed, if we accumulated Dissonance by lying on her behalf.
(It’s not really on her behalf though, is it? When we imagine the improbable meet-up between our mother and Mariah, our mother is not the one in danger. Our desire to keep this secret is almost entirely self-focused.)
So we go with option three, which is as equally terrible as the other two, just in a non-dissonant direction. We tell a truth, just not the one she asked for. We sing it in Angelic, even, where the option to lie doesn’t exist. “Please don’t make me answer that. I might lie if you do.”
It’s a bad response. Strategically, it sets us back. It reveals a vulnerability. It’s the best response we have.
We can sense Mariah’s reaction from this position, almost like we’re actually in a corporeal host. Her breath quickens. Her nails scratch against the table as she flexes her fingers. Her whole posture tenses. She doesn’t like our lack of answer. (Let’s be honest, she wouldn’t have liked any answer we gave.) We can’t feel her resonate just yet (Would the act itself even have a feeling?), but we’re sure she wants to. We disobeyed her. We showed weakness. Her infernal instincts should be screaming at her to punish us.
She doesn’t actually resonate us. Or if she tries, it doesn’t reach us. Her hands slam down on the table instead. Metal pieces jump and rattle. Something falls to the floor. “Bless it, Kira! I thought we were making progress!”
Yes, that was a mistake. (We had no good options. We don’t know what we should have done instead.) She’ll turn us in. No, she’ll make us Fall. It’s less risky for her to try and get rid of us that way and she now knows at least one topic that we are willing to lie about. All she has to do is get insistent until we either chose to confess or take on dissonance.
Mariah doesn’t say anything else. Not to us. She picks up whatever’s been dropped on the floor, sits back down, and gets back to work. She pretends like she isn’t furious. She is. There’s a growl in the back of her throat. Her toes tap on the floor, while the upper half of her body hunches over and tries desperately to focus on her repairs. She makes it through two or three of her doohickeys before the sounds in her throat turn to an an actually audible growl of disgust. She stands up. What’s in her hands drops to the table in a clatter. She strides over to the other corner of the room, and picks up something completely different. Something large, bulky, and soft.
“Fuck this. I need to get laundry done.”
—
Laundry, like public transit, is not a concept we ever thought needed to exist on the Celestial plane. At least, not when our experience of the Celestial plane was limited to the Heavenly half of it.
Of course, messes can and do happen upstairs. We’re not sure any reliever of Creation has fully fledged without being involved in the creation of at least one. We certainly have. We inadvertently trashed our Archangel’s studio just minutes before we fledged, and had to miss most of our fledging party to clean it up. It was a good lesson in the importance of cleaning up our messes and also the importance of environmental awareness. It was also how we met our best friend and discovered our favorite nickname. So, no complaints there.
(Since we’re considering messes in Heaven, it’s important to note that no matter how rowdy we [Cole and I] were in that studio, none of the actual art got ruined, nothing irreplaceable broke, and none of the potato bits ever attracted any stray bugs over from the Savannah.)
It’s not that maintenance work doesn’t exist in Heaven. There’s always one task or another to get done in every corner of every Word: Gardens to tend, machines to fix, archives to organize, all those small works that make life better for others and let those who do it derive a small pleasure from their effort.
(For some souls, eternal happiness might look like a non-stop party. For others, it can really be as simple as meditative tasks and appreciable end results. Or a mix of the two.)
What we don’t see a lot of in Heaven are chores for chores’ sake, laundry among them. First of all, how many of us even wear clothes? About half the major Choirs, including our own, don’t conveniently fit into human-style clothing. Of the rest, one outfit tends to work just fine for most celestials. Elohim tend to pick out neutral clothing ‘appropriate’ to their Word and stick with it until the benefits of changing outweigh the effort involved. The Malakim who even bother with celestial clothing tend to go for utility and comfort over aesthetics. (Unless they feel honor bound to a specific aesthetic. But those are exceptions.) Generally, it’s only Mercurians who pay attention to fashion and change up their looks regularly. Souls can go any which way with their clothing depending on their interests, although surprisingly few go nude. (The nudity option is equally available for anyone regardless of celestial anatomy.)
Anyways, even for those in Heaven who wear clothing, laundry still isn’t strictly necessary. Clothes don’t get dirty just by being worn the way their corporeal counterparts do. Stray dust or mess can just be brushed off. Larger spots and spills will just plain disappear if left alone for a few days. Any mark that stays around longer than that tends to be...thematic. As much a part of the outfit as the clothing itself. Splatters of pigment on an oil painter’s shirt, streaks of wet clay on a potter’s apron, touches of dirt on the knees of a gardener’s overalls. The stains become a declaration of identity, an ‘is’ rather than a ‘looks like’.
(This also seems to be the case for non-clothing textiles as well. No place we’ve ever been in the Halls of Creation has ever been short on clean towels.)
If there’s laundry in Heaven, it’s not out of necessity. Nothing stays dirty long enough to need it.
Now, there may be laundry in Heaven as part of a corporeal preparation course. We picture a sort of Home Economics type class targeted towards young angels about to take their on first Role. If said class did exist, it was definitely an elective. We never took it. And neither did anyone we know. Most angels who do eventually learn how to do corporeal laundry probably just figure out the most common local method on the fly.
(Plus, electric washing machines weren’t even being sold back when we first arrived on the corporeal. So, anything we might have learned in Heaven would have been obsolete within a decade or two. At least for our specific location.)
The walk to the laundromat is remarkable, if only because it’s our first time outside that one building since our arrival in Hell. Automobiles streak by unmuffled on one side, while vendors shout at the passing pedestrians from another. Thanks to the lack of echoes, it’s quieter here on this street than it is on the first floor. Still everything is loud enough to overpower the subtle, interesting noises. Bits and pieces of barely-intelligible conversation float past us. The walk itself barely gets started before Mariah pushes a door open. An automated voice welcomes us to the Suds ‘n’ Sprockets laundromat, home to sector 12-G’s least lethal washing machines.
(We wonder about the driers.)
We almost expect to hear background music, maybe the Hellish equivalent of doo-wop standards or early rock an roll piped in through tinny speakers, but we don’t. Maybe it doesn’t make sense to play music here. The noises from the running machines render the footsteps in this place barely audible. The wet and watery percussion of the washer, the tumble thumps of dryers, and the buzz of the surely fluorescent lights above us make up their own soundtrack.
The weight of the dirty clothing aside, Mariah moves through this place fairly relaxed by her standards. Her posture is neither overly hunched-in and avoidant nor overly stiff and performative. That in itself reveals a lot about who else populates this place. Nobody’s opinion here matters to Mariah.
As she walks by, we catch the idle chatter of a few voices. Everyone speaks timidly enough that we realize that most, if not all, of the human-sounding footsteps here belong to actual human souls. Likewise, the claws that skitter about mostly belong to demonlings. There’s maybe one tell-tale Djinn shuffle in the mix. No, we imagine most full-sized demons find someone else to do their laundry for them.
Mariah taps out the signal. We can speak if we feel so inclined.
Still, we keep our voice soft, and our language completely in Helltongue. We trust Mariah to look out for her own interests and not trick us into revealing ourselves, but some precautions are just sensible, even for a Creationer. “Is it safe to speak here because no one can hear us or because you don’t care if anyone here does?”
“A little of both. Mostly the second. I’ll use the machines down at the far end, and no one here knows me well enough or is powerful enough to cause trouble. Just keep away from your native language, and we’ll be fine.”
‘Fine’ is not how we would describe anything in Hell, but we accept that speaking here will probably not get us caught even if someone overhears Mariah talking to no one. This is Technology. Mariah talking to someone else via an invisible walkie-talkie or whatnot probably isn’t unheard of, if she were the type to have access to those kinds of devices.
The relative social ease of this place must make up for a lot. Mariah doesn’t seem to mind the tedium of laundry and—okay—whatever that sudden, violent banging is. We hear a resigned sigh (not from Mariah), and then a sharp electric crackle. The banging stops.
“Did someone just shock a washing machine into submission?”
“It happens,” Mariah says, unfazed. “Washing machine goes berserk and the employee on duty has to go tase it before it fucks over their lethality stats. Someone probably triggered the anti-mod measures. The culprit will probably get kicked out if they’re even still here.”
Our minds boggle. So, we suppose anti-mod measures make sense. This laundromat is full of machinery to wash and dry clothing. This laundromat is in Tartarus, which is populated by Vapulans who, when given a choice, do not leave anything mechanical well-enough alone. We can picture the arms race between the demon (or demons) who run this place and set up defenses on their machines and their customers who can’t help but try and make modifications for fun or profit.
On cue, we hear a weaselly voice protest. There’s no audible signs of extra limbs, claws, or vestigial wings, so it’s probably a human soul getting blamed here. “No, my socks are still wet! You wouldn’t leave me with we—”
There’s a distant thump as the soul lands outside the door. Then another, softer thump as their laundry follows it.
“Must have been a first strike. If he’s smart, he won’t try that again anytime soon.” Mariah makes her own thump as she sets her laundry down. “Pass me over some of that essence.”
“For what?” We’re not sure about this. Unlike us, Mariah can use her apply her essence towards many ends, most of which we would prefer not to encourage her in.
“These machines aren’t free. Detergent costs, too.”
We sigh. “How much?”
“Three total. One for the washer, one for the dryer, and then an extra essence for a new detergent card. Mine seems to have gone missing.”
“Expensive laundry.”
(If Heaven did have laundry that needed done on a regular basis and therefore had laundromats, we imagine they would work similarly to how bars, coffee shops, or other services already do. Pay an essence in exchange for free use of the facilities until the job was done. That assumes there was even a need to pay in the first place. Trade would be the Word most likely to charge as well as the one most likely to provide extra services. (If laundry did exist in Heaven, would dry cleaning for all those fancy suits also exist?) Most other Words would probably have fully-stocked laundry facilities freely available for Servitors. As for Creation, we would probably spend most of our time coming up with Rube Goldbergesque laundry contraptions and repurpose any actual washing machines into dye vats.)
(Oh, and our washing machines would never attack anyone. Anti-mod measures or otherwise.)
“You’re telling me.” Mariah’s voice turns suddenly serious. “Consider the essence payback for what that Impudite stole from me. Or that you’re helping your host, if you really meant that arrangement honestly.”
Ahh, so that’s what she wants to talk about. We wonder if Mariah really does need to do laundry right now or if it’s merely an excuse to have this specific conversation and to have it away from possible Damp Mop Djinn interruptions.
(And if it’s the second, is our own wishful thinking to call that Elohite behavior? Or is it just Habbie-typical social maneuvering to let her avoid showing off her uncertainty? Not everything is a sign.)
“Well?” Mariah’s toe taps against a hard floor. (Same type of material as the supply closet, based on volume and pitch.)
Passing essence to Mariah through the crystal feels like trying to pass a cooling glass sphere off to someone else while fully mitted-up, but we manage. We give her three Essence in total, a third of our full capacity and just enough for Mariah to do a complete cycle. That’s our statement of intent, whatever Mariah makes of it.
(There’s really no point in hoarding it. Beyond difficult-to-time escape attempts, what is there to spend Essence on in Hell anyway?)
(Listening and laundry, apparently.)
The skittering of demonling claws up the nearby wall of machine cuts off further out loud observations we might make on the topic. Instead, we go neutral.
“What are you washing, anyway?”
“Clothes.”
If we had access to eyes right now, we would roll them. “Clearly. But what kind and why now?”
“You know, just normal clothes. Shirt, pants, jackets. Socks, although I’d probably be better off feeding them to the Paper Shredder and buying new ones, for as much as these machines have a tendency to lose them. Some towels. Stuff everybody—” Her sentence cuts off. “You don’t wear clothing in your celestial form, do you?”
“Not typically.” We haven’t been solid enough for actual fabric to reliably hang off of us since we were about five forces or so. “It’s mostly hand stuff, if anything. Bracelets or rarely gloves.”
“Huh. I guess you’re similar to Shedim that way.” Mariah moves her laundry from her bag to the machine. Some of it makes gentle metallic clangs when it hits the back wall of the washer. “Must be nice not to have to worry about that.”
“Strictly speaking, clothing is optional for anybody on the celestial.”
“You must have never had your Heart stored in a vat of acid.” Mariah says dryly.
(Our Heart is surely where we last left it, on a corner of a desk in our studio deep in the Halls of Creation. We used to keep it in the a large central Heartroom, right next to our friend Cole’s, but, after it moved its Heart over to the Groves and a couple of very unfortunately-timed visits from Judgment, we had to bring it somewhere less conspicuous.)
“Never,” we agree.
“Or had to deal with the aftermath of a printer explosion.”
“Not in Hea—” we catch ourself, if Mariah isn’t referring to us as a Kyriotate, we need to not directly reference our nature here. “not on the celestial plane, no.”
Mariah barks out a laugh. It’s a brief, sharp sound that dulls quickly into solemnity. “I don’t really care where the Essence came from. Just don’t think of using it to escape.” The door to the washing machine shuts with a hard slam. “I’m letting you get away with this. Don’t make a fool out of me.”
If only she would let us get away in a more literal sense. Hell is no place for an angel. “I won’t. So long as our arrangement lasts.”
Mariah cranks a dial, and then a loud disruptive beep sounds from the machine before we can continue. “So, forever, then?” she says, as though she hasn’t yet learned the temporary nature of everything except perhaps the Symphony itself.
Water fills up the machine. It almost drowns out our sigh. “Everything ends eventually.” We manage to keep the wistfulness out of our voice by reminding ourself that most of those eventual endings are bad ones. “Until someone else ends it, though. Or until you try to dispose of me. Including any attempts to corner me into taking dissonance. Fair enough?”
One of Mariah’s claws taps on a metallic surface in front of her. She makes a show of considering our offer. “Fair enough. So long as you answer me directly when I ask if you’ve made any escape attempts. If you want to lie about that, you deserve to deal with the dissonance. Deal?”
“Deal.”
We imagine more than a few Words in Heaven would dislike the so-called arrangement we’ve made with Mariah, from very fact that we’ve de facto agreed to be a demon’s prisoner (glad not to be a Malakite!) to the the number of loopholes Mariah could plow a Vapulan tank through in our sloppily made verbal contract. Luckily, we don’t belong to any of those Words. We’re Creation, the Word with (what we’re told are) the loosest standards in Heaven. All we have to do is make the best of what our circumstances (and Mariah) are willing to give us.
In the meantime, we can listen to Mariah monologue about the best way to tinker with the machines here without either triggering the anti-mod measures or getting herself kicked out before her clothes are dry.