"What did you say?" I asked, concerned.

"Keir asked me to stall you as long as I could?" she said, unsure of the significance of what she said.

"Why?" I asked.

Why would Keir want us to be stalled? It didn't make any sense. I had Judas. He wasn't going to get away. God could just send us back to Hell when we made it to Heaven, right?

There had to be a reason Keir didn't want us to make it to Heaven, and it probably wasn't good.

"I don't know," she said. "He didn't say."

I gently pushed her aside and jumped onto the control panel. "Sorry for grabbing you so hard, but I would have liked not to get stabbed in the eyes."

"Yeah, sorry about that. Maybe I went a little too far," she said.

"Ya think?" I said, wiping a little bit of remaining blood from my eye. I looked at the control panel. Nothing made sense. The buttons were all in some weird language I didn't understand, and it wasn't demonic. "How does this thing work?"

"I can operate it if you tell me what you're looking for," she said.

"Thanks for finally cooperating. I have a really bad feeling something is going down on Earth. Show me celebrity deaths in the last three days," I said.

"Ok," she got on the control panel and typed away and used the touch screen to press a bunch of buttons and open several panels on the giant screen. She turned a dial a couple times and two more screens popped on the sides of the main one. They were holographic.

"Whoa," I said. "Nice. I like it."

"Thanks," she said, turning and smiling at me. Even her teeth had the black and white motif. One half of her teeth were white, and the others were black. You'd think it would look gross, but I just thought it was interesting. "Thanks."

She was replying to what I said in my head. I was never going to get used to that.

"Holy crap," she said.

I looked at what she was reacting to. It was an image of the earth in a flattened out globe shape. There were a bunch of red dots all across the world. There was text at the bottom of the image that said, "136 celebrity deaths." The list of normal deaths was much higher than that, but that wasn't what we were looking for.

"Yeah, I'd definitely say that's statistically significant," I said.

"So would I. Do you know what's causing it?" she asked.

"Nobody told you?" I asked. I figured Lucifer would have told Keir and God and they would have spread the news to everyone else about Cain.

"No one tells me anything. I'm just Purgatory. I don't matter. I'm just a temporary phase for souls. Not a destination," she said.

"Oh. I never thought about it like that," I said.

"It's ok. I'm used to it," she said, crossing her arms.

"So what's your name? I keep just calling you 'she' or 'woman' in my head and it's annoying me," I said.

"Purgatory. My name is Purgatory. I was created at the same time Purgatory was created and Purgatory is part of me in a sense," Purgatory said.

"Are you sure I can't call you Purgy? Purgatory is kind of long and would be genuinely confusing whether I'm referring to you or the place," I said.

"Fine. You can call me Purgy. I guess I don't hate it anymore. I guess I thought it sounded too much like I was purging things, but that's a different 'g' sound," she said.

"Exactly. I'm glad you see it my way now. I hate seeing other people be wrong," I laughed.

She laughed and laughed and laughed some more. Something weird happened. Her body changed. The white half of her body turned black. Including her clothes and hair.

"That's funny," she said, putting her hand on my arm.

I looked down at her hand and then her. "I'm flattered, but I have a girlfriend," I said.

"That's fine. She can watch," she said, leaning close to my face and puckering her lips slightly.

"That's not what I meant," I said, leaning away from her face.

"Why are you playing hard to get?" she asked, grabbing the back of my head. She pulled my head so our lips met and we sort of kissed. Well, it was less of a kiss and more like her attacking my lips with hers.

I pushed her away by putting my hand on her chest. "This feels very sudden. Are you ok? Why did you turn black?" I said.

This was weird. A few seconds ago, she was a normal, balanced person and now she was forcing herself on me.

She looked down at my hand on her chest, which just happened to be touching her breast. She looked back at me with a feisty expression. "Second base already? You move fast."

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She tried to get closer so she could kiss me again. I kept her at bay though with my super strength. She didn't seem to be blessed with that ability. Weird. Maybe it was intentional. If she was this unstable, who knows what kind of damage she could do with super strength?

"Can you please change back to normal? You're kind of freaking me out," I said.

"What do you mean? I'm fun now! Isn't this what all men want? A fun girl?" she said, smiling. She took off her jacket and ripped her shirt open, displaying her chest. "Oops."

"No. No oops," I said, grabbing her shirt and trying to cover her chest back up.

She let me cover her chest with her shirt, but then she unbuttoned her pants and let them drop to the floor. "Oops."

"Stop it! Stop oopsing!" I said, trying to pull her pants back up.

She kicked them off into a corner of the room. The inside of the room wasn't glowing white void like the outside was. It looked like a normal security office. The walls were white, but that was as strange as it got.

I ran over to grab her pants. I decided I was going to put her clothes back on and then tie her hands together with her belt. When I turned around after grabbing her pants, a pair of black panties hit me in the face and stuck.

"Oops."

I wiped the panties off my face and said, "Ok, this is getting ridiculous. Please put your clothes back on."

"We can't have sex with our clothes on silly!" she said.

"We're not having sex," I said.

"Why not? Don't you want to have sex with me?" she said, twirling her finger through her hair.

"No. I don't," I said.

"Is it because I'm ugly? Fine! I'm leaving!" she said.

Her expression went blank and a moment later, she turned pure white. Her expression changed to confusion. She looked down at her mostly naked form. "Did I do something bad again?"

She collapsed to the floor onto her butt and started crying. "I did a bad thing, didn't I? I'm sorry!"

"Uh, I don't know what to do here. Are you ok? What's going on?" I said, slowly walking toward her.

"It's Sin. She's always taking over and getting us in trouble. And I have to deal with the consequences," she said, hugging her legs close to her body.

I kneeled down and put her pants and underwear on the ground next to her. I figured she would put her clothes back on after she was out of this sadness phase. This version of her seemed more reasonable, if distraught.

I put my arms around her and hugged her. "Is this better?"

She hugged me back. "Yes. I like this."

"Not to ruin the moment, but this is a friend hug, ok?" I said.

"That's fine with me. I like friend hugs," she said, still squeezing me.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Virtue," she said. "What's yours?"

"That makes sense. I'm Dave," I said, still squeezing her.

It did feel nice to comfort someone for a change. I had been doing so much punishing, I had forgotten how it felt to do something nice for someone. At least, someone who wasn't my girlfriend. I did nice things for her all the time.

"Nice to meet you, Dave. How about we get me clothed again?" she said.

"That sounds like a great idea," I said.

It was at this moment that Keir decided to teleport into the room. He looked at us and cleared his throat.

"It's not what it looks like!" I yelled.

"What, you hugging a naked woman?" Keir asked.

"Oh, well, I guess it is what it looks like, but not for bad reasons. I'm comforting her," I said.

"Yes. He's comforting me," she said.

"I feel like he could comfort you perfectly well when you have clothes on," Keir said, scrunching up his face.

"Sin got out again," Virtue said.

"I see. Say no more. This makes perfect sense now," he said.

"Ok. Now, if both of you would look the other way for a moment, I would like to get dressed," she said.

"Yes, of course," I said, getting up, walking several feet away, and turning away from her.

"Yes, right," Keir said, turning away.

She presumably put her clothes back on—that had turned white—while we were looking the other way.

"Ok, you can look," she said.

We turned around and she was dressed again. Her shirt wasn't buttoned all the way because some of them tore off when Sin ripped her shirt open. I wondered how that got fixed, since it was seemingly a part of her and Purgatory itself.

And then I watched as the buttons reappeared and her shirt buttoned itself back up. Oh. I guessed that was how it was done.

"So, Keir, what brings you to this neck of the woods, and why did you imprison me here for three days?" I said. "I may have missed my child's first birthday because of you."

"I'm sorry about that," Keir said, tightening his lips, "but how have you had a child for a year without me knowing about it?"

"I haven't," I said. "I had a child a few days ago, before I got trapped in Purgatory by Purgatory."

"Then they're three days old. You haven't missed shit," he said matter-of-factly.

"No. Accelerated aging. Demon-human hybrid," I said.

"Oh! Yeah, you missed your child's first birthday, which makes you a terrible father," he said, grinning with his sharp teeth.

"Don't smile at me like that!" I said. "Your rudeness aside, what are you doing here?"

"I have news and orders," Keir said. "Cain is preparing to remove the mark. This cannot happen under any circumstances."

"Why? Aside from the many, many people he has killed to remove it, what harm is he doing?" I asked.

"If he removes the mark, God dies," Keir said.

"What?" I yelled.

"What?" Purgy yelled.

"What?" Keir yelled. "See, I can do it too."

"Very funny," I said, crossing my arms. "Explain."

"Ok, ok. God doesn't die. That was a joke. Something very bad does happen though. If Cain removes the mark, God's divine judgment is broken. When God makes a judgment, that's it. Nothing can change it. So if someone does change it, with a sufficient amount of demon magic, then God's judgment breaks and he ceases to be able to make judgments," Keir explained.

"Like, forever?" I asked, raising my eyebrows.

"Yes, forever. Once it's broken, it's broken," he said.

"Is there a way to fix it?" I asked.

"Yes, and no. If God's broken judgment were to be reinstated, then everything would return to normal and He would be able to judge again. So if Cain were to remove the mark, if you somehow put the mark back on him before he dies, then you would fix the problem, so to speak," he said.

"So if Cain dies, it's all over basically," I said.

"Yes," Keir said, nodding.

"I guess we better stop him then," I said, cracking my knuckles.

"Yes, you should," he said. "Wait. Where's Judas?"

"Oh, he's outside in Purgatory somewhere. He was only about twenty feet away when I left him," I said.

"You let him out of your sight?" Keir said, his eyes bugging out.

"Is that bad?" I asked.

"Yes, very bad!" Keir ran out of the room.

I ran after him. When I got outside I looked to where I left Judas and he was drawing a bunch of complicated symbols around a circle with black chalk. He was probably doing a magic. A bad magic. Probably.

"Where did you get that chalk from?" I asked. "You were stripped of everything on your body—besides your clothes, of course—when we got here!"

Judas looked at me with shameful expression. "You don't want to know."

I thought about it and then realized the implication. "Gross!"

"I said you didn't want to know!" he yelled. He wrote another symbol on the ground with the black chalk and the inside of the circle changed from white to black.

"Don't you do it!" I yelled.

I tried to teleport to him, but it didn't work. Apparently, Purgatory completely shut down my teleportation. Not just to leave Purgatory. I started to run, but I wasn't fast enough. I wouldn't make it in time.

"I'm going to do it," he said, grinning.

Then he jumped into the hole. The circle turned white again, and the hole disappeared. I slammed my fists against the ground when I got there. It did nothing.

"Shit!" I yelled. This was bad. Judas went to Heaven. I didn't know what he was going to do, but it would be bad. And it would be big. He was too resourceful. We were screwed.