Chapter Text
When Mariah finally puts us back in the case (Our case? Are we ready to apply the first-person possessive to that object? We might as well, considering that we essentially live there now.) we’re glad to have a bit of space to ourself at last. Being walked about by our Habbie captor-slash-host has undoubtedly been educational, but we’ve also found it too personally intimate for our own comfort. Like being crammed in too tightly on a crowded train with at least one fellow passenger who insists on starting up a conversation at random intervals.
(We do like interacting with potential or recurring Hosts sometimes…just not while we’re in them.)
Currently, that Habbalite prepares to leave us for the corporeal in pursuit of her next quota. This gives us an appropriately quiet moment (no conversation expected, no emotions currently running through us) to do a check-in before Mariah leaves us with her signature parting gift.
We hear her motions as she changes into a going-away outfit (freshly laundered courtesy of our essence). One of our minds marvels at those nuances we can pick out now. For example, we can tell that Mariah changes into different kinds of outfits when she leaves versus when she gets back. Her usual clothing in Hell involves button-up shirts. Now, she changes into a simpler shirt that can goes on over her head. Her going-out shoes hit with a duller thud compared to the sharper clip of the ones she usually wears.
Neither of us [Mariah nor myself] are human, but the information we’ve collected while we’ve ridden around with her has humanized her to most of our minds, and the plurality of us think that’s for the better. No, we can’t forget that Mariah’s our captor or that she’s about to set out to fill another quota—that is, to capture yet more of us [Kyriotates] to drag down into Hell to face a fate of pain and unethical experimentation. But we [me, collectively] already knew those facts about her. What we needed to learn was how to stay friendly towards her while keeping within the bounds of honesty. How to see her as a person, and not just an enemy.
As a person worth saving?
Wait, that’s not the right angle for us to take. We’re not a Malakite or a Judge to put a priority on ‘worth’ or ‘deserves’. We help the people we can usefully help. Most of the time, we clear a path our host wants to walk down. Other times, when the person isn’t the greatest, we focus on the kind of help that can also encourage a turnabout. Mariah is available. That’s what matters. That’s why we’re attempting to help her.
As a person we can save?
Maybe? We admit we have a bias here. Mariah is who we have with us. She’s who we can talk to without immediately signing up for a worse set of circumstances. So it makes sense that we want to assign meaning to any little gestures that might point to an Elohite waiting to come out. Not once this visit has Mariah Punished us with her resonance. She sublimated her urge to lash out at us over keeping a secret from her. She calmed us down when we freaked out about her self-mutilation.
(Counterpoint: She engaged in that very Habbalite practice of self-mutilation in the first place.)
What of those behaviors were done in consideration of us? What of it is her attempt to prove superiority over us? What of it is pragmatism? And of the latter category, is that pragmatism a sign of divine objectivity in development or merely an enlightened expression of self-interest?
We could spend whole ducks' worth of time in speculation, but in the end, we’ll only find out if and when Mariah chooses to make a Redemption attempt. We don’t save Mariah. We help Mariah save herself. That’s the joy and annoyance of Free Will right there.
“Kira, I’m heading out!”
One of our voices surfaces long enough to follow-up with a farewell. The radio is tuned back to the disco station. She must have remembered our preference from the last time. “Stay safe out there.”
Mariah scoffs. “Don’t worry about me.”
She says that, but after the door closes, we hear a few very brief, very faint celebratory sounds from Mariah, similar to when she first saw our catcher and again when we first spoke to her in her native language. The plurality of us take this as a sign of progress. Our (honest) expression of concern means more to Mariah than she cares to show us.
(A reflection of that thought: What kind of progress has Mariah made with us, and to what end?)
(Is that even the right frame to look through? So long as we don’t die or Fall, we’ll deal with anything else later.)
Her noises fade out into the hallway. How far does she go? Just away from the secured area, or does she go down to the first floor to disappear *poof* in the middle of that oceanic crowd? Or maybe she walks out of the office and takes a deep breath of that fresh (sarcasm) Tartarus air before heading back to her corporeal destination of North America.
(We presume that’s where she focuses her efforts, based on our own geographic posting prior to our Kyrio-napping and Mariah not having acquired that air of multicultural ease that celestials with wide-ranging Earth experience seem to accumulate.)
Wherever she leaves to go do her horrible thing, she’ll assuredly stay gone for a little bit. DJ Magic Mik is in the middle of its morning show and we figure there will be couple more before the first demonling flock is due for the inaugural storeroom scavenge. We keep a mind focused on the outside room for time-keeping and guard duty, and let other minds kick back and get comfortable on the Contemplation Couch, which is a concept we just made up. It sounds more fun than our literal situation.
(Some of our minds get comfortable. Others are in a more artistic mental space, sorting through new information scraps to and adding them to our collage in progress.)
What do we think about this host situation? Are we going to have that postponed freak-out now?
There’s a lot we dislike: What Mariah did to her celestial form. The lack of control. The way the combined sensation of movement from inside a body and the continued presence of a mind feels uncomfortably close to a Shedite experience. If Mariah could somehow kit together a parrot-looking (or better yet, a crow!) robot to perch on her shoulder and hold our crystal, that would be better. Or maybe not better, but more comfortable for us.
(We should consider whether asking for a different case would be a worthwhile expenditure of good will. Or does a request like that need to wait until some notable milestone? Should we suggest it to Mariah for a five-year anniversary gift, assuming we could actually tell when that would be?)
(Also, would said suggestion present more of a danger for us and Mariah than the current set up, given that a mechanical shoulder-bird would be objectively groovy and subject to Technological prodding.)
For all we dislike parts of the hosting arrangement, we admit there are upsides. Rough-start aside, Mariah trusts us more for our having defined our intended relationship to her. She wouldn’t carry us about and let us see what her life is like outside this room otherwise. And as uncomfortable and stifling as being walked around has been, it’s still less aggressively boring than our life stuck in here.
More importantly, we have context now. Beautiful, beautiful context. We’re not, by any means, happy, but we have a touch of elation at the opportunity to build an aural picture of a world bigger than the space inside these four (we presume) walls and the petty schemes of the demons who gossip here.
It reminds us of better times in our life. (Okay, any time before hitting Tartarus was a better time, so more specificity is needed.) Specifically, it reminds us of our first few days on the corporeal and our first time experiencing the Symphony through our hosts’ senses. We took over the bodies of a half-dozen birds and spread ourselves through the town. One bird flew high enough to see a larger picture—grids of streets laid out, the art college right in the middle, walking paths, the park, the shops, the railroad tracks that divided the town into the “good” and “bad” parts. Our other, smaller birds we scattered throughout several neighborhoods, the better to observe humans as individuals. Up until that point, our experiences of the corporeal world had been second-hand, collected from conversations we’d had with Angels and blessed souls. We had some context, but nothing before or since has compared to that rush of our first direct observations, our realization that the corporeal world around us could simultaneously be both immense and deeply personal. A shiver united our bodies as we realized each bird we were in, each creature on the ground or in the trees, each human we saw moving about the city had its own unique set of experiences. Yet, like two streets on the grid or two lines of a drawing, any of those perspectives could run parallel or go perpendicular or intersect with the others in some unexpected, but delightful way. Any two people we observed on opposite sides of town could be connected by some small granule of the same experience and never even be aware of it.
(We may be getting carried away with the nostalgia.)
Right. Where were we?
The connection is that after spending so much time in one spot, we finally have a sense of this facility and a world that’s bigger than just us and Mariah. Said world might be literal Hell—ugly, horrific, and we do not recommend it one bit, but getting that sense of more-than-us serves as a vital reminder of why we fledged as we did, and why we can’t accept a Fall.
It’s also what ultimately outweighs all the discomfort of being walked around. We can tolerate that sensation if it means we get to see more of the world Mariah lives in. It’s better for helping our makeshift host, and better for accomplishing our other objectives.
Okay, so what are those exactly? In order, please.
Getting out this Force Catcher alive and divine.
Getting Mariah on the road to redemption.
Getting our revenge on this place and its damned quotas.
We could burn this place to the ground.
We’ll we couldn’t, not in our current state at least. We could encourage Mariah to burn this place to the ground. It would be satisfying. Oops, no more prison to hold your future test subjects, sorry about that, Vapulans.
What good would that do?
This facility would no longer exist. That’s all the good it needs.
And then another one would open and fill the vacuum the hypothetical destruction of this one created. If there’d even be a vacuum in the first place. The test-subject industry in Tartarus can’t be a monopoly. Some of the demons here care too deeply about market share for that to be the case. Yes, witnessing this place turn into a giant pile of rubble would be satisfying. So too, would imagining the fallout that could come down on the demons who run this place, but in the bigger picture, attempting to take out the whole facility directly is too much risk for too little long-term reward.
We’re Creation. We take risks.
We take risks when we know that the result will be better for having done it. Or when we have enough room to play that failure won’t lead to disaster. Neither of those apply here.
Still. This place. A smoldering pile of rubble. Think about it.
If we burn this place down who do we actually help?
The damned souls? Probably not. Many of them chose to be here, and life seems to be pretty cushy here compared to other things the Vapulans would do with them. Destroying this place might leave them worse off. No matter what happens, none of them will escape. They’re damned souls after all. Nothing shy of setting Armageddon in motion will get them out of Hell.
(Kicking off Armageddon would probably be a disproportionate response to our situation.)
(You think?)
So, no, we’re not helping the damned souls.
The demons? Yeah, maybe. We bet most of those demons would be happy to see this place burn down. Unlike the human souls, they would have a chance to escape. And then what? How would that balance out in the sense of greater goods and lesser evils? Not very well. Most would certainly make it back to their Princes. Those without a Prince to serve would probably take to their vessel (or a Host) and go Renegade. There’s a small chance that a few might seek redemption, and that’s always a good thing, but overall we find the vision of freeing a few dozen otherwise contained demons onto the Symphony at large to be…uncomfortable. Like maybe we shouldn’t encourage that to happen.
(And that’s before we speculate on how we would explain that to Judgment.)
What about the angels, then? They’re the primary reason we chose not to make an escape attempt, even after we built up enough essence to try. Now we know exactly where and how locked down they are. Can we rescue the angels imprisoned here and still get out alive? If we can’t, then what? Should we give up on them and we prioritize ourself and Mariah? We don’t think so. Not yet, anyway. We’re the one chance they’ll have of a rescue. No one else is coming. The cavalry doesn’t stop in Hell.
What can we do for them?
The angels, more than anyone else here are tracked inventory; off-counts lead to facility lockdowns until the missing ones are accounted for. Any freedom of movement for the non-Kyriotate angels gets tempered hard. Artifacts bind them to obey their demonic handlers, and this facility—this floor especially—is covered in passive security measures, to keep the Game out, yes, but also to prevent all of us captives from just leaving for the corporeal the moment a leash slips.
That sounds discouraging.
(It is discouraging.)
But is it, though? All the Technology meant to keep us angels isolated and bolted down also leaves the demons here not nearly so wary of angels as they should be. The context makes them see us [captive angels] less as sentient beings and more as hazardous materials that need to be properly stored until it’s time for use. Incidents may happen from time to time, but nothing so serious as to actually require anyone to submit an actual incident report.
(Side objective: Mess up this place enough on the way out to require them to file an incident report.)
The demons on this floor are too sure of themselves around angels, and Mariah is no exception. No, she may just be the example. She’s the Reliever-sized Habbalite who wanted a Heaven-born angel as a pet and picked up the first friendly Kyriotate she caught like a stray off the street. Now, she mistakes one who currently behaves well and offers her help for one who is properly contained and controlled.
(Think of the difference between a well-trained domesticated dog and a theoretically tamed wolf, and that’s approximately the gap we’re speaking of.)
We can use that. We can take our limited resources—our ears, our knowledge of Helltongue, and the small situational differences that separate a pet from inventory and use that to make a cavalry.
We are isolated, but we are not alone, and we are not helpless.
And they are not prepared.