Snippet #1540440

((Believe it or not, I set out to write a short post. Please know that you are under no mandate to read this! I realize how ridiculously long it is. If you do happen to read it, also know that Thanesmith, The Fox, Angel, Amriel and the mailman with the baseball cap are all NPCs and you can use them for your roleplay scenes if you want/need to.))

Calliope:

Calliope took the letter from the mailman wearing the baseball cap. "Thank you," she said, sitting down at a bar stool in her tavern.

CALLIOPE, read the letter, in bold capital letters. REPORT TO THE OFFICE AT ONCE. MAJOR EMERGENCY.

FOR REAL THIS TIME.

HURRY.

And then, in dainty, flowing cursive: Colonel Thanesmith.

She sighed. Thanesmith was not a colonel. She did not currently work at the Bureau. She was quite confident that there was a real emergency, but only of the boring kind. Minions of The Fox were stealing human life energy in the human world, again. A giant robot had been let loose in the market district of Grand City. Again. Someone had misfiled the quarterly reports. Again! All of the latter scenarios were capable of sending Thanesmith into a panic, while boring Calliope to tears.

But, then again, he had written HURRY.

He never wrote HURRY.

Calliope did not hurry, but she went. She did not bother to put the closed sign up. Her tavern was never closed. Calliope had abandoned her tavern for decades, but her tavern was still never closed.

The streets outside were crowded. Confetti dotted the pavement. People danced by in outlandish masks. A huge banner stretched across two skyscrapers, reading: FESTIVAL. It was as if someone had been told that there was a festival, but they didn't remember which festival. Calliope was pretty sure that the majority of the people celebrating the festival did not know what the festival was about. Calliope knew. The Angel's Party had been started a thousand years ago, back when the angels had first abandoned Grand City for Heaven. Desperate citizens had decided to throw them a party so that they would come back, but the party just did. not. end. Now, for some reason, people threw the festival annually, even though the angels had made it clear that no amount of cake and streamers would bring them off their floating paradise. Angel's Party lasted for a month, and they were only two weeks into it. Calliope did not mind the festival much, except that she found it incredibly boring.

The Office was a familiar mess of people shouting from cubicles and slamming down their badges on desk afters being told not to pursue the matter any further, seriously, there has been pressure from above to just shut this thing down. For some reason, a chimpanzee was sitting on a fax machine tearing paper into shreds. Probably the shredder was broken. Calliope walked to Thanesmith's office, where she found the burly man sipping a cup of coffee behind his desk. There was a young girl, pretty, only fourteen or so, standing next to him. She stared blankly at Calliope as she approached. Most likely she was a soul stuck in Purgatory. There were a lot of young souls lost in Purgatory, but not many old souls.

"I wasn't sure you would come," grumped Thanesmith. He glared at Calliope over his in-box, which was quite sizable. There was nothing in his outbox. "When I say hurry, I don't mean take a long bath, watch your soaps, have dinner and then have a leisurely walk over here. What I mean is..." He paused and sipped his coffee before looking up at her dramatically. "Hurry."

Thanesmith was a strange case for Purgatory, in that he did not seem to be a creature of fable or a dead person. He wasn't an alien or a trans-dimensional traveler, either. He had shown up in the outskirts a few centuries ago, wandering around in a black suit without any memories at all.

"You should say that explicitly next time," said Calliope, although her current interest was not in exchanging barbs with Thanesmith. Her interest was in the girl.

The girl had not moved, spoken, or even looked at Calliope. There was something stiff about her, as if she was not made of muscles and flesh but of stone. Calliope waved her hand in front of the girl. No reaction.

"Is she an android? Is she turned off?"

Thanesmith shook his head. "No. She's the emergency."

Calliope looked at her from head to toe. "She looks fine to me." A little boring, maybe, she thought. But fine.

Thanesmith gave her a look that Calliope saw from him very rarely. It was a serious look. It was the look reserved for when The Fox had done something really really really terrible, but as far as she knew, The Fox was not involved now. "Look again," he said quietly.

Calliope looked. The girl was breathing. She wasn't stone. But there was something strange. Something missing. It was as if...

"Her soul is missing," reported Calliope in a matter-of-fact tone. She took the girl's face in her hands, meeting no resistance as she turned it around and around. She pulled the girl's ears. She poked her nose. She pinched her cheeks. No reaction.

"Stop doing that," said Thanesmith, after a while.

Calliope took a step back from the girl. "What's her name?"

"Angel," said Thanesmith. "She fell from a tree a few months ago. She never transitioned, of course." Meaning, she never disappeared. Most human souls disappeared within a week, having gone on to whatever was next. "Nice girl. We found her like this yesterday. Calliope..." He gave her the serious look again. "She's not the first."

"How many?"

"Fourteen, so far. That's all we've found. It started last week. It's not just human souls. Demons, gods, what have you. All walking around like zombies, except that they don't decay." He looked down at the desk. "It's terrible, truly terrible."

Calliope grinned. Over four thousand years, and she had never seen something like this.

This was going to make a really, really freaking epic poem.

Edward:

Edward walked down the street with his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his jeans, his posture slumped. He knew that he looked like a teenager raging after being cut off from his allowance, but he didn't care. He was annoyed. Angel's Party was annoying. A lot of people in weird masks dancing on the streets. It was just a glorified Mardi Gras, although he was sure that some smug person native to Purgatory would tell him that Mardi Gras was just a glorified Angel's Party.

Whatever. He had a job to do. Then he could go back to his apartment and go to sleep.

Sleep was the only time he had any peace and quiet these days.

I want some cotton candy, whined Kit in his head. Please, Ed. Let's get cotton candy. Please? And then in the background of his mind, Destroyer of Worlds murmuring, Destroy. Destroy. Destroy. Always the same thing. Edward had wondered what it would be like if Destroyer ever filled out a resume. Surname? Destroy. Contact information? Destroy. Previous jobs? Destroy. Ever been arrested? Destroy.

Someone bumped him in the crowd, nearly knocking him over. Edward looked up to see a mailman wearing a baseball cap pushing his way through the crowd. Typical mailman behavior: always rushing from place to place, not minding proper etiquette. Being small, Edward had nearly been knocked over seven times in the last hour already, but for some reason, Destroyer began to freak out. DESTROY, screamed Destroyer. DESTROY! DESTROY, DESTROY, DESTROY -

"Shut up!" yelled Edward, a little too loudly.

Everyone in the street turned to look at him. Someone somewhere stopped playing a banjo. Edward felt his face go red. He awkwardly contemplated his shoes. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the street returned to its chaotic normal. People had just realized that Edward was talking to himself, and people were used to Edward talking to himself.

Just meet with Amriel, get the contracts, take them to Fox. That's it.

Then I can go back to sleep.

Edward turned into a back alley. The alley may have connected to a raucous and bustling main street, but the alley swallowed noise. That was not descriptive - the alley actually swallowed noise. Everything was dark and quiet, the kind of place that you didn't want to be by yourself. Fortunately, Edward was never by himself.

Edward found Amriel standing in shadows at the end of the alley. "Let's get this over with quickly," said Edward, holding his hand out. "Give me the contracts and I'm out of here." All criminal demons allied with Fox were required to give Fox a human contract once a month. I was one of those contracts once, mused Edward sourly.

Suddenly, Amriel stepped out of the shadows and grabbed Edward by the shoulders. Amriel was a hulk of an angel, and Edward liked to think that Amriel had been disowned by the other angels because he just wasn't pretty and dainty enough. In reality, he had done something so horrible that even Fox didn't like to talk about it. Kit, in particular, hated Amriel. Amriel sold me out to Fox, he always griped. If Amriel had kept his mouth shut, then Fox would be dead, and you would still be alive, retired in Florida with all your millions. Edward wasn't convinced of that. He believed that Amriel had sold Kit out, but he also believed that Fox would have figured Kit out anyway.

No, the only person at fault for the way things played out was Kit. Edward liked to think that he would pay Kit back someday, but he wasn't holding his breath either.

In any case, Amriel was not the kind of person you wanted to grab you and shake you. Edward fluttered around like a rag doll in his hands.

"The mailman," said Amriel with wild eyes. "Stay away from the mailman -"

"I know, I know," said Edward. "I've been telling Fox, why do I have to pick up the contracts? And why do you have to be the middleman? Why can't he just hire a mailman to be the collector? But he won't do it. He won't do it, you know why? Because he's cheap, that's why -"

"No," hissed Amriel. "Shut up, shut up!"

"Okay," said Edward.

Amriel let go of Edward and took a step back. Edward got a funny feeling at the back of his neck. Something bad was happening. He wasn't sure what. But something bad.

"Mailman," whispered Amriel. His eyes went blank and his body went stiff and rigid, like a corpse.

"Um, okay?" Edward stepped closer. "You okay, Amriel? You sick or something?"

Amriel did not respond. Edward poked Amriel lightly in the chest. Still no response. Amriel was breathing, but not doing much else.

His soul is gone, said Kit, sounding scared. Kit rarely sounded scared.

"What, like, to heaven or something? Isn't that the idea?"

No, if his soul had transitioned, his body would be gone too. In Purgatory, the physical form was considered a by-product of the soul. In the human world, the opposite was true. The soul was the by-product of the physical form. Edward wasn't quite sure how it worked, but he knew that only demons could take human souls, and only in the human world, and only by killing the human. You couldn't take the soul of an angel, even a fallen angel, and you couldn't do it by leaving the body behind, and you definitely could not do it in Purgatory.

This broke all the rules.

"But that's impossible." Edward hesitated, swallowing. "Isn't it?"

Nothing is impossible.

Destroy.

"He was saying something about a mailman..."

We need to leave, Ed. Now.

Edward turned to leave. He got a few paces down the alley, before suddenly turning around and walking back to Amriel. In a single, swift movement, he shoved Amriel fiercely against the wall. A sharp crack echoed throughout the previously quiet alley. Amriel crumpled onto the ground. Blood stained the brick wall.

"Oops," said Edward, who was actually Kit.

Destroy, whispered Destroyer.

"Now," said Kit, running his hand through his hair. "Let's get some fucking cotton candy."