Chapter Text
Mariah gets to the other side of the stairwell door, and we try to process what just happened in the past few minutes.
The bad news: The Lilim now has a Geas-hook on Mariah. Presumably for that bit of ‘tell the bullies to let Mariah go’ back there in the break room, and we really can’t blame Mariah for her failure to avoid that one. Not when she could have gotten hooked for worse.
(Or at least, worse for us.)
The good news: Said Lilim has been rendered temporarily unable to invoke that hook. So long as the next few minutes go as planned, Mariah (and we) will be gone before she can try again.
The better news: Thanks to some trick Mariah did with her Resonance, said Lilim also appears to be temporarily paralyzed, which gives us a little bit of leeway in how ‘few’ the next few minutes need to be.
Back to the bad news: We’re pretty sure Mariah’s Essence is completely used up, and most of our own stockpiled Essence is gone as well. And Mariah…seems to be in the middle of an unidentifiable meltdown. We’ve seen a whole range of them brought about by her Bandmates. We know them intimately: Fits of rage. Wails of grief. Cringes of embarrassment. Wild swings between contrasting emotions. This is none of those. There’s almost no reaction to her at all. And there should be.
Everything about this situation screams urgency. Mariah should be racing up this flight of stairs, on to the secured floor, and towards the closet that holds the Paper Shredder. She needs to be out of here (this facility, Tartarus, Hell) now. Too much could go wrong to risk waiting. The Lilim could snap out of her stupor at any second and resume the chase. Backup could arrive to stall Mariah. The Damp Mop Djinn might decide to start playing with the Paper Shredder again. And yet Mariah takes this climb excruciatingly slowly. We’ve seen her walk to the cafeteria with more spunk than this.
Something very, very fucked must have happened to her head.
We hum and hope Mariah fills in the question.
Mariah’s voice remains without its usual affect. “Bandmate resonance. Maybe so I wouldn’t think fighting the Geas mattered. Or just because Zarielle knew I’d be a safe target to experiment with.”
(What? Hold up! Bandmate? Mariah actually used the term ‘Bandmate’?)
(What the fuck sort of emotion did Mariah get hit with to violate one of the core Habbalite principles?)
Mariah comes to a complete stop. Her shoulder hits the door with a soft thud. “Is this how Elohim feel all the time?”
“Feel what?”
Another voice chimes in: “We should keep moving.”
(Look at us getting down to business and providing emotional support. Multi-tasking all around.)
“Empty. Absent. Like there’s no ‘me’ in here at all. Or any divine whims. Just stimuli and corresponding reactions.”
The stimuli is a hostile working environment that is about to get even more hostile. The appropriate corresponding reaction is for Mariah to keep moving. Get to the room with the Paper Shredder. Do what she needs to do. But she’s not going to move until we can come up with a motivational answer, which we don’t have on hand. (Any of them.)
We think back to our time as a reliever, and we try to recall how our Elohim siblings had described their experiences to their incessantly nosy baby sister. It’s our non-Destiny sibling we take our answer from now. “I don’t think so. They have a ‘self’ as much as anyone else does; they’re just situated a bit differently in relation to it. One I know described its nature as seeing each action or emotion as a stitch in a larger tapestry, and understanding that even as it had threads too, it couldn’t let the inclinations of any single thread disrupt the harmony of the overall image.”
Mariah wastes precious seconds in still contemplation. “Habbalah really are demons, aren’t we?”
The continuing lack of affect unnerves us. A violent emotion now might be equally inconvenient, maybe even more so than her current numbness, but at least we could make sense of it in context. Maybe we could even hasten the emotional breakdown along; even red-hot rage calms down eventually after all, but how do we help Mariah push through a breakdown for an emotion that isn’t actually there?
(How long will this Resonance-trip last, anyway?)
(Too long to wait it out. We just have to pull through.)
“Yes. Habbalah are demons. Let’s get going.”
Way too slowly, Mariah shoves open the door and begins to move again.
—
At the molassal pace Mariah insists on moving at, we [she, specifically] don’t have time to stop in the old workroom. Guess what she does anyway?
“What are we here for?”
Mariah takes her time answering—enough time for her to set her box down, open a cabinet and dig around. “Supplies. Diversion. If you have any Essence left, pass it over.”
We pass our last two Essence over to her without protest.
She walks over to the radio and fiddles with the dial. The Techsynth station blasts out at what we might hope would be full-volume before Mariah turns it up further. She picks up the box again and walks out of the workroom at the exact same pace she walked in. The door slams shut behind her. Thumps and grinds from the current song follow us out virtually unmuffled.
“If she hears the radio, the Lilim will waste her time checking there first.”
We make a dubious noise—let’s not give ourself away at the last minute—and Mariah trudges towards the Damp Mop Djinn’s office. We take advantage of Mariah’s slowness to pause and listen for signs of commotion. Yesterday, we could hear all kinds of interesting and terrible noises coming through the other side of the door. Today, everything remains at a neutral level of near-silence. We make an affirmative hum.
Mariah bends down on something and pushes the office door open with her body. Nothing greets us except for the scratch of a sharp pen on paper and faint noises from a radio kept at the exact right volume to give the impression of conversation without letting the voices resolve to anything parse-able for anyone other than the Djinn herself. To our focused hearing, it sounds like a quiz show.
(Where is the oldest working waterwheel in Tartarus located? Hell if we have any more of an idea than the poor damned soul being asked this question.)
We turn our ears away from the radio. There’s no reason to pay attention to Hellside media now.
“Your ‘music’ is loud.” The Damp Mop Djinn uses audible scare quotes around the word music.
(From Mariah’s current location, the lingering bass line from her radio about equals the murmurs from the Djinn’s.)
“Sorry, ma’am.” We dip and sway with Mariah’s body as she tries to grab what she needs while keeping hold on the decoy box. “Just using the Paper Shredder for a bit. Audit season and all.”
The Damp Mop Djinn croaks out an audible shrug. Mariah might lack affect right now—and doing a mediocre job of acting as a result—but this Stalker refuses to be out-apathied by a mere Habbalite, nor will she be continuing this conversation. Whatever has her attention must be more interesting than her struggling assistant.
(We asked Mariah about it once, and the answer she gave back then was “Something really stupid.”)
At last, Mariah manages to successfully jingle the key and the control bracelet for the Will Shackles off their respective hooks. The Djinn has gone back to scratching her pen, and all Mariah has to do is maneuver herself and her awkward box of documents into this supply closet and act like some old financial statements are all that will disappear in the next few moments.
—
Mariah takes a deep and voluntary breath once the door latches shut behind us. We don’t blame her. She’s about to obliterate the one item that directly connects her soul to her Prince and to Hell, and once that’s done, there’s no going back. Even through deadened emotional responses, this is still a moment to make anyone nervous.
(Could we ever voluntarily damage our Heart?)
(Let’s not think about that.)
It’s safe in here, in a dangerous way. The Damp Mop Djinn will stall any unauthorized pursuit. We should speak up now. This is our last chance to implore Mariah do something to free the imprisoned angels—our Choirmates, the Ofanim, anyone who might have come in since our tour—before we leave them behind for good.
(Shouldn’t that be for evil?)
(For as permanently as anything gets.)
Yes we’ve asked before, to no avail, but her previous objections have always come from an emotional place. Maybe with her resonance-induced mindset, she’ll be more receptive.
“About our Choirmates…” We begin and trail off.
“What about them?” Mariah’s voice is without malice, just completely dead in a way that’s worse than a passionate refusal. This isn’t our punishment for denying Mariah her desire; this is her simply not seeing any point to their rescue.
“Can’t we do anything to help them?”
Mariah sets down the box she carries and snaps the control bracelet to her wrist. “If you’re that committed to saving them, I can leave you here to figure it out.”
None of us speak up. Some of us want to, but even they don’t.
(It can’t be wrong to want to survive. Can it?)
“Right. That’s what I thought.”
Mariah bends over, picks up the box she carried in, and turns her attention to the Paper Shredder. She gives a simple command. “Destroy this.” The decoy box falls apart mostly silently. We hear the usual soft tearing of paper and the resulting flutters as the scraps drift through and fall under the spell of gravity. This is the easy part.
All that’s left is the important bit.
Mariah drags another box out from behind various other stacks of objects that waver and clank as she looks to free it. There’s no audible sign of the box’s contents—no resonant hum or emanating static but we know what it holds. Mariah knows what it holds. Her slow pace turns truly solemn. Her voice wavers reverently as she gives her next command to the Paper Shredder. “And destroy this.”
(Hearts are durable. We wonder if the Paper Shredder can even—)
Crystal shatters with a sound like a deep screech that hits straight into our own Heart. A sympathetic reverberation goes through this force catcher, like this very stone might buckle at the shock-wave.
(Never mind.)
Around us Mariah inhales another sharp breath. The weight of what she just did must be settling around her even in this state. Or perhaps it’s only the new Discord making its way into her soul. Mariah may still be a Habbalite, but she’s no longer ‘of Technology’. Oblivious Djinn or not, there’s no going back to the life she had even thirty-seconds ago. No more stealth. No more hiding in plain sight. The only way open to her now is her vessel and the corporeal, and she better hope the alarm that prevents anyone from plane-jumping doesn’t trigger before she can get there.
She’s almost done here. The only thing she has left to do is set up the next step in this chain-reaction we [Mariah and I] agreed to.
If she deigns it worth doing in her current state. We have our doubts.
But we don’t feel Mariah’s pull towards the corporeal just yet.
Mariah takes out the supplies she gathered for this moment—the counter agent to whatever sedative keeps this Destroyer mostly placid and incoherent and the syringe and needle used to administer it. She prepares the dose like a once-skilled hand out of practice. She injects it.
Then, the Essence we loaned her—gave her, we don’t expect repayment—flows out into the Symphony.
“You are Angry about your situation. You want to destroy this whole facility.” Mariah speaks the intended effect out loud, as though the Will Shackle can solidify what her Resonance has trouble doing on its own. We don’t know how effective it’ll be, but then we don’t think the Calabite on the floor needs any encouragement to feel angry at its situation.
Mariah takes two large steps back and gives the Paper Shredder one final command.
“Remove the Will Shackle.”
A latch squeaks rustily as it falls open for the first time in what must be years. The metal ring thuds dully against a bed of paper scraps and crystalline shards.
Mariah doesn’t linger. Her work here is done. One diversion set into motion. One opportunity offered for one opportunity received. That’s all we were promised, and all we could hope for in the end. What happens down here next is out of our multitudinous hands.
We spare a thought for those left behind.
(For all the good that does them.)
And then we’re gone.