Unheard Cries
“If you know anything! Anything at all!” the girl wailed over the radiowaves, followed by a loud sound of someone blowing their nose. “Please, don’t hesitate to call! You might be the only one standing in the way of a reunion between two siblings!”
Alastor grinned as he switched the mic back to him. “And that was our message. Hope to have plenty of callers soon with relevant information. And it better be relevant and real because I will find out. And now: the weather.”
Gwen spun her chair around a little. “You think that’ll do it?”
“Don’t you worry, dear, the phone will be ringing off the hook in no time!” Alastor promised. “For now, why don’t you look around the Hotel a little more? The decor is very entertaining in its optimism.”
“Right…” Gwen agreed, looking at him with narrowed eyes as she backed out of the room. “Tell me when you get a lead, ‘kay?”
“Of course, of course,” he consoled, and once she had closed the door behind her, he melted into the shadows, reappearing a few stories down, where Husker had just gotten off his shift, and had decided to celebrate by fixing himself a cocktail.
Alastor took no small pleasure in creeping up behind him in his more demonic form, tall and arched and shadows rearing around him. “Hello.”
“Motherfucker-!” Husker spilled his drink over himself, and turned to Alastor with a glare. “The hell do you want?”
“Our new guest wants to find her brother,” Alastor explained succinctly, knowing the demon had already heard this through the little tech-y one that followed Gwen around. “I made a Deal to find her brother, so you have the honor of joining the search party to look for him. Chop chop, get to it.”
He could’ve pulled on the Contract to remind Husker of the bonds placed on him, but Husker didn’t seem to need that encouragement right now, simply giving a halfhearted sigh and nodding. “Figured you were going to lump that on me, anyway.”
“I’ll help,” said tech-y minion Sinner said, who had otherwise been standing quietly to the side.
“Brilliant! I’ve got Niffty fielding the incoming calls. The little, annoying ones will be handled by you, while the harder leads to chase down can be left to Gwen. That way we won’t tire her out, and she’ll still be making progress in the search,” Alastor explained, nudging them both to the door. “Get to it, then!”
He retreated back into his radio station, plotting and scheming. Delegating was such hard work.
Charlie watched Gwen skip through the corridors of her hotel, looking positively charmed by everything she saw. She didn’t look like she was capable of being the flow of time at her whim, but Charlie had seen it with her own two eyes.
“And you say she’s… human?” she asked for clarification.
“Looks that way, at least,” Lucifer confirmed, clinging to the wallpaper and shredding it slightly in his anxiety. “But honestly what accounts for human has been getting more and more absurd lately. I don’t know what she is, but she’s stayed on Earth this whole time, and she should go back there instead of meddling with our perfectly broken system.”
“But maybe we need someone like that,” Charlie rationalized. “Someone who’s not afraid to shake things up a little. She seems nice enough. A bit less openly homicidal than Alastor, even,” she made her mind up then, and tried to summon up the courage to follow through on the plan. “I’m going to go talk to her.”
“Honey, don’t!” Lucifer made a grab for her as she walked out into plain view of Gwen, but then decided he was better off continuing to hide.
Gwen looked towards her when she entered, eyeing her with interest. Charlie took a deep breath and tried to contain her excitement. “Hi. I’m Charlie Morningstar, and I’ve heard so much about you.”
“You have?” Gwen looked thrilled. “I’ve heard things about you, too. Not like, crazy good things, mind you. Guess that comes with the territory of being the Princess of Hell, though. And… whatever this place is supposed to be.”
Charlie laughed, fighting the urge to play with her hair, “Yeah, sort of. Alastor probably didn’t give it a fair pitch, because he doesn’t really agree with the sentiment of it. But I truly believe that we can get human souls to change for the better, even in Hell! They just need an environment away from the… Hell-ness of it all. Hence, this place.”
“Oh, I see!” Gwen looked very interested. Charlie had gotten used to people of a certain caliber dismissing her ideas out of hand. It was a relief to finally be taken seriously. And by one of the strongest people she was likely ever going to meet, too!
But the way she had proved that strength was what worried Charlie. Because she didn’t know much about what it took to get to Heaven, but she knew what sent people down to Hell. And Gwen’s quickness to murder was breaking at least some Commandments, if it didn’t quite make the cut for a Seven Deadly Sin.
“So, what do you think of it?” was how she breached the topic first.
Gwen shrugged. “I mean, it looks miserable, and you’re giving people a way out if they want to work for it. I think that’s admirable, even if way too compassionate for me. You’re a real People’s Princess, huh?”
And there it was. The thing about Gwen that worried her so.
Gwen acted like she was nice. But she wasn’t. She didn’t even care about the impact of her actions most times. She was nice because she felt like being so, but anytime it came at a personal expense to her that didn’t outweigh the entertainment value for her, she was always going to choose to kill.
She and Alastor were very alike in that regard.
“Do you have any proof that a soul can change down here, though?” Gwen asked. “That anything you can do will promote it up to – where? Purgatory? Heaven?”
“Purgatory got disbanded due to budget cuts,” Charlie said on autopilot, having had to explain this every time someone brought it up. “But, you’re right. We don’t have proof. But we’re working on faith. And- and that has to be enough.”
She believed it, too. Hell, she believed it. But that didn’t stop her from asking Gwen, “You’ve been here for a while. Is this really the sort of place you want to live forever? Don’t you think that- maybe you can do yourself a favor in the future and maybe make a couple changes? Ease back on the murder and the uh- honestly I just know that you murder a lot.”
“I’ve been cutting back,” Gwen said affronted. “Hell should have been the one place where I couldn’t get judged for it. It’s not like those demons can die or anything!”
“Some of them do die when you stab them,” Charlie told her delicately. “And it’s not so much the act, as it is your pleasure in committing it, because you shouldn’t want to kill something for the sake of killing it, you know?”
Gwen stared at her. And for a beat, Charlie almost thought she’d gotten through to her. Then she grinned, sly and sarcastic. “Assuming I’ll die.”
Charlie bit back a groan. There was really no helping her immortal soul. But she’ll still be here to offer help, in whatever way she could give it, if Gwen asked it of her.
The Deal Gwen had made with Alastor weighed on her mind. Did she even understand what she had agreed to? Soul-bargains only worked once the body was dead, so Gwen wouldn’t be under his control the second her little brother was free, but it was still a frightening prospect to consider.
Elsewhere, Husk and Cecil skulked their way through a maze of back-alleys and slums.
“A giant patch of anything in the afterlife,” Cecil muttered venomously, “and these guys just recreate capitalism.”
“It’s actually worse, because it somehow does both two layers of feudalism on top of all that, and there’s also a crazy amount of anarchy thrown in to fill the gaps,” Husk informed him.
Cecil groaned, batting away a tiny cyclops sinner that looked a little like Niffty who was trying to slash his pocket open to get his wallet, “You’re right, that’s worse.”
He craned his head up when he saw a streetsign hanging over them, covered in a muck he didn’t want to guess the origins of, and letters barely legible through them. “What’d she say the street was?”
“Belphway, but we’ve got twenty of those, so don’t stress too much about it,” Husk told him, walking down that street confidently. “The landmark the woman on the phone pointed out was the saloon over there. Some sort of rubber duck themeing going on.”
Their tip had said there was a weepy kid who stood next to it sometimes, taking refuge under the warmth of the lamppost (one of the few in the Pride Ring that still used actual fire), and looking gobsmacked whenever someone tried to get drugs or other services off him.
Kinda sounds like the girl on the radiowaves, the tip had explained, and not cause they’re crying. They both got that. Bounce thing to their voice. Reverb.
Husk knew what she meant. It was hard to describe, but once you heard it, you could just tell.
Which was why when he bumped into someone on the way to that saloon that had a giant yellow rubber duck nailed in place of a name, and that person muttered ‘watch it!’ under their breath, he immediately turned and grabbed the kid’s arm.
The kid flailed wildly, no idea how to get out of the grip. But then out of nowhere, a giant red PVC sheet in the shape of the word ‘THWAP’ appeared and clocked him in the chin. It was just weird enough that Husk let go, swearing as said PVC sheet appeared to fall and clip right through the ground.
What the fuck.
Cecil was not perturbed by this at all, already giving chase. “He got you with an action word!” he yelled back at Husk. “This is definitely Teddy!”
Husk followed after, and together they were able to pen the kid in on either side, with a wall behind him that he clutched onto as he fearfully watched the two of them approach.
“Hey, don’t worry,” Cecil tried to calm him down. “I’m with your sister. We’re going to get you out of this mess.”
If anything, that made the boy freak out more. “No! You can’t take me to her, do you even know the kind of person she is?”Teddy had tried to run away from what this world had turned her into, and yet even death couldn't be the impermeable boundary it was supposed to be.
“We all do shit we don’t like, and put up with people we can’t stand,” Husk said, not too enthusiastic about this either. “Just put up with it-”
And then the wall tore through where the kid had been pressed up against it, falling backwards into a glowing white void. When Husk peered into the gash, he could see things moving in it. Pages, somewhere far in the distance, separated in colorful panels to look like comics.
Cecil groaned, apparently used to this, and dove in, too.
Husk considered his options carefully. And then picked the void over a wrathful Alastor.