To say that the conversation the following day between Angel and Lew had been terse would have been the equivalent of saying Angel’s target before going to Kra had died from a blow to the head. That is to say, it was technically correct but really missed the mark when it came to encapsulating the larger picture of just how ludicrous the situation got. More specific to the situation, Lew had sardonically suggested Angel’s competency would not fill a paper sack were it distilled into liquid form—it seemingly escaped the demon’s notice that no liquid could properly fill a paper sack, since it would invariably break down upon the introduction of the liquid—and Angel, in an ill-advised boast, had countered she would get the desired outcome in the upcoming case and subsequently failed to do precisely that.
But ah, the narrator seems to have gotten ahead of matters. Spoiling the ending before its due timing. Let’s jump back a bit.
“Congratulations, Mrs. Kirk!” the doctor said, holding up a baby Angel. “She’s a girl!”
Whoops, that’s a bit too far. Reverse course.
“You’re three fucking hours late, Lew! And in case you’ve forgotten,” Repugna said, jabbing her finger at the black book on the table next to him, “there’s a reason your appointments have times listed next to them in your Ledger!”
Well this is just getting ridiculous now, but at least we’re closer to the desired point in time. Somebody really ought to fire the narrator for being an incompetent twit.
[Gee, kid, I wonder how you’re going to fuck up this case,] Lew nastily taunted Angel. [Care to take any bets?]
“No, I wouldn’t,” she complained as she watched the delivery boy convey the bag of hot pizzas into the backseat of his car. The red glow of the locator spell tied into her Ledger’s list of targets glowed steadily around him. “Betting is sinful.”
Eh, close enough. All you missed was Angel inadvertently solving world hunger only to immediately sabotage herself right after—basic morning stuff, really quite forgettable. We’ll just stop playing God by tampering with things and just enjoy the story, hm?
[You say that like it’s a bad thing. How easily you forget you’re a demon! That’s what you’re supposed to do! Do sinful shit, enjoy it all, sow discord and anarchy into the world, corrupt the would-be holy, rinse and repeat!] The delivery boy walked around the car once, doing a full eyesight inspection of the car for any issues. [Bets are especially awesome, especially if you have to cheat to win!]
“It is a bad thing! When these people sin, they’re fixin’ to go to Hell!” she whispered as she watched him check the tire pressure for all four tires, just to be extra sure.
[The place you’re supposed to get them to go. Yup, mhm, that sounds about right,] Lew snarked as the target hopped in and verified that all of his mirrors were in the correct alignment. [No wonder you’re having such trouble comprehending it! It’s not like you’re a moronic, half-witted ignoramus with a proclivity for fucking up everything you do!]
Angel considered that for a moment as the target checked his glove box to verify his license and registration hadn’t sprouted legs and walked off. “What does ‘proclivity’ mean?”
[It means you should use some magic to swap the open bottle of water in that guy’s cup holder with vodka laced with Viagra,] he snarked as the driver turned the ignition, causing the car to sputter into a semblance of life. [He’ll go out drunk and ready for business—he’ll have a blast on his way to hell, I’m sure.]
“No it doesn’t!” she correctly deduced as the target looked all around to ensure nobody had gotten near the car while he was paying attention to turning the vehicle on. “You’re lying!”
[What are you, a dictionary? It absolutely means that.]
“You’re a lying liar who lies!”
[Well you’re a birdbrained retard who’s only managed to successfully corrupt people by complete accident!]
Angel lifted her foot and smashed it backwards into her other shin, hissing in pain. “I can succeed at any case I try! Just watch me!”
[Ha! If it were possible to take your competency and distill it into a liquid, you wouldn’t even have enough to fill a paper sack!]
“Jerk! I’ll, uh— I’ll totally get this delivery guy to do exactly what I want him to! It’ll be an incredible success!”
[Oh yeah?!]
“Yeah!”
“Hey, stop arguin’ with yahself in mah alley!” a voice behind her yelled. She whirled around to find an overweight man wearing a wife beater that showed off his bulky, incredibly hairy arms. He dropped a trash bag in the metal can next to the door he was sticking out of and shook a meaty fist at her, “If yah gonna be a psycho, then go do it somewheres else! I got payin’ customahs who don’ wanna hafta listen to yah!”
Angel stared at him for a moment, her jaw slack. “You have a really weird accent.”
“Whateva yah say, weirdie. Now get gone!”
[And on that note, Ms. Incredible Success, looks like your target drove away,] Lew smugly pointed out.
She whirled around and indignantly planted her hands on her hips. “Well shoot. How am I gonna find him now?”
“What, da pizza boy?”
Angel glanced over her shoulder and saw the man with the unplaceable accent was still there, scowling at her. “Oh, you’re still there?”
“Whadda I look like, some shmuck what trusts loonies to beat it? I’mma stand right heres ‘til yah skedaddle!”
“Oh. Well, I want to follow your delivery guy. Mind telling me where he’s going?”
The man considered this for a moment, his eyes squinting at her dubiously. “Yah gonna murder stab him or somethin’?”
[I’m gonna laugh so hard when you find this shit, and he’s already dead.]
“Nope! I mean, he’s definitely going to die—his name wouldn’t be in my Ledger if he wasn’t,” she replied, gesturing with her book, “but whatever it is that kills him definitely won’t be me, no sir!”
“Look, if it gets yah outta here, then he’s goin’ to the cryogenics lab. Big stone buildin’ with lotsa glass panes on the front. Stupid lookin’ shit, can’t miss it. Just make sure yah don’ not kill him ‘til he delivahs that pizza. I’s gotta reputation what needs up keepin’!”
“Thanks a billion!” she said as she drew a portal and hopped through, leaving the man with the unplaceable accent behind, his jaw agape.
[I’m pretty sure the saying is ‘thanks a million.’]
“Well he was very helpful. So maybe he deserved a billion?”
[Whatever you say, nitwit. And just so we’re clear, if you ask for advice on this one, then I’ll still be obligated to help, but we’ll both know that means you couldn’t cut it on your own. Got it?]
“Sure sure,” she said dismissively as she carefully eyed the building, which was tweaking the locator spell to check whether her target had arrived yet. He hadn’t despite her delay in leaving the alley behind the pizza place where his car had been parked, but then that’s what instantaneous travel gets you—eat your heart out, ‘as the crow flies’!
Angel flipped open her Ledger to reread the listing, hoping she might get some sort of hint for how to go about achieving her goal. “Philip C. Write of New York. A delivery driver and all-around loser, Philip plays video games and watches copious amounts of TV when not working and dreams of changing his life and becoming someone important.” Scanning his list of sins and virtues, it seemed he was primarily on the fence due to his slothful tendencies being balanced out by his never wasting food even if it had been lying in the trash—the narrator having been thus far very clear about what a crime it is to waste food, this should come as no surprise to the observant reader.
Lew, having also observed this list, noted an easy way to corrupt Philip would be to convince him to eat the pizza instead of delivering it. Slacking on the job, and eating the fruits of someone else’s labor—or in this case cheeses, meats, and maybe veggies of someone else’s labor, if the orderer was disillusioned enough to think putting vegetables on a pizza would make it healthy when all it would actually do is ruin a perfectly good, artery clogging meal. Needless to say, Lew did not point this out, since he wanted to win the bet with Angel. If there was one thing demons could be counted on to do, it was to take bets and do everything in their power to win them. If the reader desires an example, then look no further than the wager between God and Samael about that Job guy. Now granted, that bet didn’t precisely end in Samael’s favor, but nobody can argue the demon hadn’t done his damnedest to win. He killed off basically every living thing the guy had to his name that wasn’t his wife—somebody needed to be left behind to annoyingly bitch at him for being such a loser, after all—and when that failed covered him in sores everywhere on his body, including the one place at minimum he needed them to not be if he was going to get on top of making a bunch of new kids.
What? Satan? Well, it seems somebody hasn’t done their biblical research, dear reader! The Book of Job features ha-satan, not the Big Guy Downstairs. You honestly think Lucifer hauled his infernal ass up to the mortal realm to corrupt one guy, just ‘cause God flaunted how loyal and devout he was? Well if you read the preceding paragraph then you wouldn’t be wrong to believe he’d leap on that gamble in a human heartbeat, but if there’s one truth in this world, it’s that lazy people who can delegate will, and this was no less true for the Father of Sin who hasn’t left the ninth circle in so long the bastard could arguably be considered agoraphobic. He put his man Samael on the task, kicked back, and poured himself a strong cuppa to take care of his hangover after partying with Lilith all night. Needless to say, he was very pissed off about the end result of that little venture, but—
Oh look, Philip’s just pulled up in his car and very carefully parallel parked with nary a bump of bumpers. It seems the narrator will need to get back to narrating the actual plot.
As Philip shifted into park and turned off the car, Angel moved into place by the street corner—which the cryogenics lab was conveniently located next to—and readied herself to put into action the plan she had developed whilst the narrator blathered on about matters unrelated to the story.
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“Oh no, I need to cross this street but don’t feel confident enough to do it myself!” Angel loudly proclaimed in an exceedingly unconvincing tone as Philip stepped out of the car, having first checked that no cars, bikers, pedestrians, average sized or above dogs, or other animals of a height high enough to walk into the door had been about to pass by the door before opening it. “If only I had a kind gentleman to lend me his arm to cross!”
If Lew had eyes to blink in surprise, then this would have been the moment where he languidly blinked them in an exaggerated manner to express his disbelief. Having none, we may skip this paragraph and move on to the next one.
Philip proceeded with opening the door to the backseat where he had stashed the pizza to be delivered, but in his haste to deliver the pizza on time, he notably forgot to check for anything that might walk into the door. This meant a particularly tall cat that had been racing by ran headlong into his open door, causing it to do a half flip through the air before landing on its back due to the brevity of the whole running to collapsed on the ground transaction. This was definitely a sin, though not for Philip. That cat had violated the law of ‘cats always land on their feet,’ and would definitely need to rack up some virtues if it didn’t want to go to hell when it got assaulted by a teenaged hooligan wielding a baseball bat later today.
What? What now? The cat? Oh chill out, reader—it’s going to be an accident whilst playing a rousing game of street croquet. The hooligan is going to be so traumatized by the whole affair they clean up their act and never touch another baseball bat in their life, narrowly avoiding a future where they go on to become a pro baseball player who invests that money back into the poor neighborhood they grew up in. Entire place would’ve become super gentrified and gaudy with a new park and an electric car charger, and who the fuck wants to use those things? So see? You’re worrying for nothing, you ninny!
“Whoops. Sorry about that, Mr. Cat!” Philip called as the cat hissed at him before running off. He quickly retrieved the pizza bag and hustled towards the front door, summarily ignoring Angel’s inquiry for help with crossing the street.
“Oh shoot! Plan B then,” she remarked as she drew a portal to appear inside the lobby of the building as Philip approached the door. She stepped towards it just as he opened it, and said—again, far louder than the situation called for, “Oh my, would you mind holding the door for me and letting me pass through first?”
Alas, by the time she had finished this statement, Philip had already walked through and proceeded past her into the lobby towards the front desk, where a pimple-faced intern sat with his face buried in a monitor as he definitely wasn’t checking out porn—he was at work, after all, so saucy anime fanfiction would just have to do—and was thus completely oblivious to Angel having opened a portal into the middle of the lobby.
“Excuse me,” her target asked as he reached the slacking intern. “I’m looking for an…” He checked the note the pizza shop owner had given him and read off, “Hugh Jass?”
Lew burst into laughter. [Ah, that’s a classic!]
The intern apparently agreed, only just barely managed to suppress a snicker before looking up and replying, “Hugh Jass? Sixth floor, office sixteen.”
“Cool, thanks!”
Philip started towards the elevator, and Angel, who had been busy trying to piece together what was funny about somebody ordering a pizza, started at the realization he had nearly escaped her again and scurried forward to follow. With his head start he reached the elevator first, and when it opened immediately, he stepped inside.
In a flash of inspiration, she cried, “Please hold the elevator!”
Philip heard her as the door began to shut and, having nearly lost a foot once trying to block open an elevator door in his youth, did not stick his hand, foot, or any other body part into the closing door. Instead, he tried to find the ‘door open’ button. Fortunately for Angel, he found it in time. Less fortunately for Angel, said button had been disabled by the owner of the building, who had a hatred for people holding the elevator open after an incident involving a child prankster caused him to have to hoof it up fourteen flights of stairs, making him late for a meeting with a Hollywood’s Pauly Shore that resulted in the actor not investing in the company.
Accordingly, the door shut, leaving Angel pouting as the elevator began to ascend. Lew continued to laugh, this time at her misfortune, and she hurried to the nearby stairs. She looked up the gap in the spiral staircase, eyeballing where the sixth floor was, and hurriedly drew a portal to get up there. Being flustered by this point, Angel made a minor miscalculation when choosing what location her portal would direct her to. This was not to say she didn’t correctly identify the sixth floor—point in fact, her portal was correctly level with the door leading out onto the sixth floor. No, the issue was her portal was suspended in the middle of the aforementioned gap, which meant she promptly began to fall as soon as she jumped through. This compounded her fluster, as she drew a new portal to catch her, which caused her to overshoot the new departure site and instead end up on the seventh floor. To her credit, she did manage to come out directly onto the landing the second time, but being inordinately concerned with having arrived at the wrong location, she did not do the sensible thing of descending the stairs to the correct door onto the sixth floor and instead drew another portal, which incorrectly ejected her into the gap betwixt the stairs and thus restarted the whole process again.
[This is comedy gold,] Lew taunted while wishing he had popcorn to consume and the ability to engage in such consumption. [Keep this up, I’m having a blast, kid.]
Angel was not having a blast, as one might imagine, and instead of drawing a new portal the seventh floor landing and descending the stairs—which the narrator wishes to stress again was decidedly the simplest solution at this point, having already accomplished as much once already—decided to freehand the navigational matrices of the portal spell to an original, discrete location from the set of locations until now utilized. This is an unnecessarily fancy way of saying she tried to open a portal to a location sight unseen instead of sticking with what she knew. This being decidedly more difficult than opening a portal to a location she could see or a location locked in place relative to a desired location—vis-à-vis how she first journeyed to Britain, Japan, and Kra described in the preceding chapters—there was absolutely no reason why it should have worked whatsoever and every reason why she should have succeeded only in opening a portal directly into the middle of a wall at best.
Naturally, she popped out at a corner whereupon she proceeded to run directly into Philip, who had been passing by at that precise instant.
“Whoopsie daisy,” he said as the pizza box flew into the air while remaining completely parallel to the floor.
Despite being very agitated from the process of getting up to the sixth floor, Angel made a rare show of self-awareness scrambling out of the way instead of trying to catch the box. Had she tried to catch it, the result doubtlessly would have been pizza all over the place on account of demons being notably lacking in the dexterity department. Despite pizza catching very much so not being part of his job description, Philip somehow managed to catch the flying pie and breathed a sigh of relief after a brief inspection confirmed the cheese and ingredients hadn’t been smeared across the inside of the box.
“Please be more careful when rounding a corner, ma’am,” he gently chided. “Being a delivery boy is a career already fraught with peril! I don’t need more added to it!”
[Career? This guy realizes he delivers pizza for a living, right?]
“I am so sorry!” Angel exclaimed as she offered him her hand to help stand. “Can you see it in your heart to forgive me?”
It was about this time that Lew had a revelation. It had taken him some time to cotton on to the trend of what Angel was attempting to do, but he had realized she wasn’t trying to corrupt her target… She was trying to redeem him! Had she no self respect as a demon?! Well, a demon only in name by a technical possession, but still. She was a representative of demonkind—she couldn’t just go about trying to convince people to do good things! Her numbers would tank!
“Sorry, but I’ve no time to lose!” Philip said as he pushed himself to his feet and hurried down the hall towards office sixteen. “This pizza needs to be delivered!”
It was about this time that Lew had a derivative revelation from the previous revelation. If her numbers were far worse than his had been, surely Repugna would undo the possession early, giving him his body back. After all, the entire point of allowing a human to take over his body and position on the team had been because his numbers had been absolute horseshit. There was no reason to leave him possessed until the next annual review other than pure spite, and although Repugna was a spiteful bitch, he knew rituals weren’t something casually invoked. Look no further than the blessing of temporary eternity ritual he had used on Angel when he met her to prevent her death by infernal ichor ingestion, which would have cost him a hefty price indeed. If she went to the trouble of using a ritual, then that meant she cared about her team having good numbers too damn much to flush them down the toilet just to get back at him.
“Wait!” Angel cried as she rushed after him. “You need to do something good before you die!”
It was about this time that Lew had a derivative revelation from the previous derivative revelation which was itself derived from the first revelation. The angel Henry Godfrey must have foreseen this eventuality. The angel—not to be confused with Angel, an easy mistake to make—had known Angel, had demonstrated a clear history with her, and almost certainly predicted that she would eventually have a crisis of conscience about a career in corrupting those close to kicking the can. Why else would he have told Lew with absolute conviction that he would fail in corrupting Angel? But hold up, that begged the question of why Lew would want to corrupt her in the first place—a question the reader may recall the demon himself had posed to the assured angel. Why would Lew want to corrupt Angel at this stage of the game when her decision to defect from her demonic duties guaranteed his body’s recovery? There was one reason and one reason only: To taunt him… To mock him… To bet he, Lascivious E. Wormboil, couldn’t corrupt one measly human.
[Mother. Fucker.]
“Hey, I get enough of that from my parents, lady,” Philip said as he frowned at her over his shoulder. “You think I want to be a delivery boy for the rest of my life? I’ll work my way up the corporate ladder eventually, so just chill—”
[Oh it is on.]
A man stomped out of his office with a scowl on his face and bumped right into Philip, sending him stumbling into the large room filled with cryogenic tubes located directly across the hall. This set him on a direct collision course with a man in a lab coat, which sent them flying apart. The man in the lab coat only suffered a fall to the ground while his back was arched, resulting in instant, debilitating spine damage, and Philip smashed the back of his head against the cryogenic tube so badly that he fell to the floor twitching. And just to compound the tragedy, the still perfectly warm pizza landed in the base of the cryogenic tube, which Philip accidentally shut in the process of twitching, triggering the freezing process.
[I am going to corrupt her so hard that I’ll be stuck with her for ages— wait, that’s a terrible idea…]
“Quick, put him in one of the tubes!” Angel cried as she rushed into the room and saw the situation. “Maybe they’ll have a cure for spineitis in the future!”
[Okay, here we go: I’m going to corrupt her but also make sure her numbers are complete shit, so she’ll be hell-bound for sure when I kick her out like a tenant past due on rent!]
“Ma’am, spineitis isn’t a real thing,” the man in the lab coat on the floor very reasonably pointed out, “and he wouldn’t survive the freezing process.”
[You hear that, you dick?! I’m taking your bet! I’ll corrupt her if it’s the last thing I do!]
Philip kicked the man in the lab coat in the mouth, knocking in his teeth, then stopped twitching as he bit the dust.
“Ahso,” he remarked, the loss of his teeth making him difficult to understand as he tried to get up off the floor and failed, “ih sheemsh I can no wonger walk.”
Angel’s ledger spat out black smoke. “Aw crud,” she remarked, crossing her arms and sulking.
[Yeah, well, flash-freezing that pizza definitely ruined it, and you know wasting food is a huge sin,] Lew smugly pointed out. [Paralyzing that guy probably wasn’t good either.]
“But that means I lost our bet!”
While Lew knew she had been trying to redeem her target and therefore had indeed lost the bet with him, the demon had a bigger fish to fry now and needed to encourage bad behavior in her. And if that meant he needed to take a short term loss…
[What are you talking about, kid? You corrupted him, so good job—looks like I lost.]
“Why aw you ‘alking oo yourself?”
“Oh, uh, right. Yeah. Of course I totally intended to do all of that!” she replied in a tone that wasn’t at all convincing.
[I guess I can make a proper demon out of you yet! You’ll just have to work really, really hard at being bad, got it?]
“Hewo? Ma’am?”
“S-Sure, Lew, whatever you say!”
“Did somebody say my name?” a man said as he poked his head out of office sixteen, which had been the very next office after the one across the hall from the room with the cryogenic tubes. He glanced around before stepping out into the hall, a gleaming name tag on his chest indicating his name was ‘Hugh Jass.’ “I’m waiting on a pizza to be delivered…”