“Welcome to El Toltecito! Will it just be you today?” the hostess at the front remarked as Angel stepped into the restaurant. The lady gave her a strange look, but Angel was used to that and ignored it.
[Straight to hard questions it is, huh?] Lew drawled. [What do you think, crowd? Can she pull it off?]
“Hi! It’ll be two. Oh wait, uh… Hang on…” Angel replied as she glanced around the restaurant, searching for the red glow of her target.
[Ooo, that’ll be a no! What a shocking result, folks! The crowd is going wild out there!]
The restaurant hostess, misunderstanding why Angel was looking around, asked, “Oh, are you wondering if your party is already here?”
“Hm? Oh yes, I am looking for someone,” the distracted Angel replied. “May I have a look around for them? That would be awful helpful!”
“That’s fine. If you can’t find them, just—”
“Great, thank you so much!” Angel interjected cheerfully, as she wandered off deeper into the restaurant.
[Hey, jokes aside, that was only halfway painful in the end. You almost managed to not count me for once! Only took you seven decades, and you still failed. Kudos!]
“Thanks,” she distractedly muttered as her head twisted back and forth in search.
[Not exactly the greatest compliment in the world, kid.]
El Toltecito was a member of that race of restaurants known as ‘Tex-Mex.’ This meant several things that you, the reader, is probably already aware of, but the narrator will now painstakingly outline anyway because it just wouldn’t do for the scene to not be set. After all, there hasn’t been a proper corruption or redemption of a target the past two chapters! First there was the kid in the arcade who got off scot free—well, not poor Timothy, who instead had his hopes and dreams crushed early after his skee-ball mishap—and then there was that bull runner guy who got run through like a rapier jabbing through paper. At least there was one ridiculous death in that brief foray to Spain. Stranger danger in a food court, while certainly plenty dangerous and rife with potential for a brutal bout of death, just doesn’t carry with it the same visceral gut punch of someone’s viscera getting ejected violently from their body, right?
… where were we again? Oh right! The restaurant.
The speakers were playing a constant stream of mariachi bands and pop songs in Spanish, and the walls were absolutely littered with accoutrements and murals. There were black sombreros with shiny trimming, sarapes featuring all varieties of color combinations, old guitars and trumpets, and wooden crosses and skulls. The frescoes were just as varied with portraits of men and women dancing and celebrating in extravagant outfits, pyramids rising up to meet the sun hanging in the sky, faces of women with intricately done day of the dead paint adorning them, large, expansive vistas and beaches that were bright and full of life. The ceiling was less varied but no less full with single shade banners of all colors hanging down from the high ceiling that gently waved in the air conditioned space, and here and there piñatas intruded that slowly spun in a circle from their strings. There were so much of all of these things that each had no more than two to three feet of bare space between it and another, and everything followed a theme of Latin American culture, but that much was a given, since Angel was in a Tex-Mex restaurant.
None of that mattered, but it was important to the narrator that you know about all of it. Anyway, on with the show!
The extraordinarily decorated restaurant—you should honestly go back up and reread that paragraph again and bask in it just how over the top it is!—had an expansive dining room that was subdivided by walls jutting in from the side that created a wide pathway from one area to the next, and it was once Angel passed through this point that she spotted her target. Ms. Jessamine Dodson of Georgia was an exceedingly skinny woman, which likely had something to do with the lack of a plate in front of her, unlike her lady companion across the table. Where the woman on the other side was mid-way through eating a combo platter that had been partially worked through, Jessamine was talking.
She continued speaking as Angel approached the booth next to them, which was conveniently empty for the purposes of Angel’s subterfuge and the narrator’s laying out the story. As she quietly slipped into it, Jessamine finally took a quick break to scoop one of the free chips into a small bowl of equally free salsa before chasing the salsa laden chip with a quick sip of water.
Once her mouth was clear, Jessamine picked right back up, saying, “And the best part is Dynaflow is so laden with nutrients that drinking an eight ounce glass a day means you don’t need to to worry about getting a balanced diet anymore. Say goodbye, expensive multi-vitamins! I’m telling ya, Mads, this juice has changed my life!”
“Yeah…” the woman opposite her replied, her tone far more sedate and hesitant. “It sounds like it really has…”
“And get this!” Jessamine continued, the sound of something thunking against the table filling the brief pause. “How much do you think is worth?”
“Oh, I dunno, Jess…” Her companion picked at her food a bit more, looking awkward and like she didn’t want to meet Jessamine’s eyes. “I couldn’t say.”
“Only twelve dollars! Think about that, would you? This bottle is twenty ounces, so with two bottles, you’ve got enough for five days’ worth of meals. That means you can basically feed yourself for five days for less than five dollars a day!”
“That’s… that’s sure something…”
A server walked up to Angel’s table, and she blinked in mild surprise as they laid down a basket of chips, a bottle of salsa, some small bowls to serve it in for scooping, and a menu. “Hello! Welcome to El Toltecito. My name’s Carlos, and I’ll be your server today.”
“Oh, uh, hi Carlos,” Angel replied, having failed to foresee she might be mistaken for another restaurant patron. “Lovely weather we’re having?”
He gave her a strange look. “You, ah, like thunderstorms, huh?”
Lew cackled before remarking, [Excellent technique to make weather related smalltalk when you get everywhere via portal. Why don’t you ask him about the game last week while you’re at it?]
Angel chuckled nervously. “Yup! Definitely my favorite! I just can’t get enough of that kraka-thoom!”
“Oh, well that’s cool,” he diplomatically replied, demonstrating a great deal of tact. “Can I get you started with something to drink while you browse the menu?”
[Tequila! Tequila! C’mon, kid, give me some of that sweet nectar! Ooo, or get one of those huge glasses intend for a whole table and guzzle it down like a glutton!]
“Uh… a sweat tea with lemon?” she answered, studiously ignoring the demon in her head.
“I’ll be right back with that,” Carlos said as he scribbled a note down on his pad and tucked it away as he headed off in the direction of the kitchen.
[You are absolutely no fun,] Lew grouchily complained.
Angel leaned forward a bit to move her ears closer to the table with Jessamine and shushed him. “Quiet, Lew! I’m trying to hear them!”
This was very unnecessary, since Angel could have simply used the Eavesdrop Spell to better listen in on the conversation. As a matter of fact, there were all sorts of spells that Angel could have used, and in most cases should have used, given that her personal goal was now to help people avoid the gruesome accidental deaths they so often were headed towards. For example, there was the time a pole vaulter had snapped his neck by falling directly onto his head, where either a gust of wind spell or even a localized gravity reduction spell could have saved him. There was the time a lady had tripped over a black cat while holding salt, spilled that salt while falling forward under a ladder with a mirror atop it, and stepped directly on a crack moments before the mirror fell onto her and shattered. Not that any of that mattered, since it was the anvil and grand piano that fell on her that actually killed her, which a localized time delay spell would have allow Angel to get to her and move her out of the way in time. There was also the time that boy really wanted to go play video games but had been told by his mother he needed to eat everything on his plate first, and when he tried to swallow a singular Brussels sprouts whole to get it over with, he proceeded to choke to death. Yes, an instant bowl cleansing spell would have solved that in an instant, though the boy may have died of embarrassment the moment he evacuated everything in his digestive system instantaneously.
“You’re interested right?” Jessamine said, her tone secretive and intense. “This sort of thing is going to take the world by storm, and if you get in on it this early, then we can be rich together!”
“Jess, stop it!” the previously hesitant woman exclaimed, not so loudly that the whole restaurant heard, but certainly loudly enough that Angel was taken aback at the sudden change. “It’s bad enough you’ve gotten yourself roped into this mess, but don’t try to drag me down with you!”
“W-What are you talking about? I’m just trying to help—”
“No you’re not! It’s bad enough you began preying on our friends at all, but me? Jess, you’re my best friend. Don’t do this.”
“You’re making it sound like I’m peddling drugs or something!” Jessamine replied, but despite her dismissive words, her tone was wavering. “I’m not! This is real, Mads. This is the future! I’m trying to help you get in on the ground floor!”
“You’re trying to get me roped into a pyramid scheme! Don’t you understand how those work? No, I should say how they don’t work. They make it sound like you can just get five or six people to buy in then sit back and retire as they all do the same, but before long the entire population of the world would have to buy in, and that just isn’t feasible!”
“It is! You’re just not seeing—”
“No, you’re the one who’s not seeing,” ‘Mads’ interjected as she stood from the table while pulling a wallet from her purse. She dropped some money on the table, saying, “That’s for the food and tip. Don’t call me again if you’re going to talk about this. Just… Please don’t. I’m here for you, but not for this, okay?”
She strode off, her heels clicking on the floor as she passed by Carlos, who stopped by Angel’s table with her sweet tea in hand. “And here you are! Are you ready to order?”
Angel, having not even looked at the menu, was most certainly not ready to order. Fortunately, there were time-tested means to navigate choppy waters like these. The “what would you recommend?” technique. The classic “I’ll have what she’s having” technique. And no one can forget the 'calmly order the first thing your eyes land on when you look at the menu and play it off like you totally meant to order that the whole time, why would you doubt my ability to select a food item I like from a prepared list of available foods for purchase at your establishment' technique. All perfectly valid techniques that would result in saving face if not appeasing one’s tongue. And yet, Angel did not use any of these battle-tested methods. No, she invoked the lone technique that was guaranteed to provoke a reaction from not just her waiter but also everyone else in the restaurant.
“I’ll have one of everything,” she ordered in a panic.
Time itself seemed to slow down, such that it would not have been surprising to learn Angel had used the aforementioned localized time delay spell. The dreaded words reached Carlos’ visible ears, known to the world of science as the outer ear, via sound waves vibrating their way through the mariachi band saturated air. Those sound waves were funneled into his ear canals, where the waves were amplified. The waves oscillated back and forth between the earwax encrusted walls until they struck Carlos’ eardrums, which caused vibrations that triggered his malleus, incus, and stapes bones to dance the ‘make this sound more amplified’ dance that resulted in the stapes banging out a sick rhythm on the window separating the cavorting bones from their neighbor, the cochlea. The bones boogie having thus been concluded, Carlos’ cochlea got in on all the fuss, sashaying its internal fluids around its thousands of nerve endings in order to coax them to alert the brain that shit was about to go down. The brain got the message and in its disbelief prompted a double take that left Carlos staring at Angel intensely as though he could rehear what he had just heard, which was patently silly given that the sound waves of Angel’s words had long since dispersed leaving nothing for him to rehear. Sound waves are integral to the process—didn’t you see that at the beginning of the paragraph?
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
And so, having thus heard but not believed the words, Carlos prompted in disbelief, “Excuse me?”
[Oh geez.]
Now, this was Angel’s chance to back out with a modicum of grace. “What a funny joke I have made, no?” she could have said. Or perhaps, “Sorry, I had a temporary bout of insanity,” she could have gone with instead. Follow that up with one of the ordering techniques previously discussed, and life could have continued as usual for the staff and patrons of El Toltecito that day.
Instead, she doubled down on her previous statement, irrationally fearing judgment by Carlos. Not that he wouldn’t have judged her, but the likelihood that she would ever see the sap again was slim and nil, and slim skipped town to get out of a gambling debt he amassed after foolishly betting on Ol’ Lasty at the big horse race, and also she was a goddamn immortal being, so really why should she care what he thought of her. “I want one of everything.”
For a description of what happened to the new sound waves Angel had created, please refer back to the previous illustration of the auditory process—we only have time for one human anatomy lesson today. “You want one of everything,” Carlos repeated, having thus correctly heard what she said but still disbelieving.
Once again, Angel had an opportunity to retreat—”Oh, I seem to have forgotten my brain at home, silly me!”—and once again, she stuck to her guns. “Yes.”
[Like watching a train wreck you just can’t look away from.]
Carlos quite reasonably explained, “That would cost a significant amount of money, and I don’t know if the chefs can prepare all of that while keeping up with the orders of everyone else in the restaurant.”
Angel quite stubbornly and unreasonably persisted. “I have time.”
“I can… bring you out the first item, and we’ll go from there?” Carlos tried to negotiate, likely thinking the scrawny young woman with a worn backpack—the straps were about to go, so she really needed to buy a new one—couldn’t possibly afford to buy one of every item on El Toltecito’s not inconsiderably sized menu.
“First ten items,” Angel retorted, mistaking Carlos’ statement as haggling.
“What?”
“Five items,” she said, mistaking his disbelief as him not liking her offer.
[It just keeps getting better…]
“You’re certain you want me to bring you the first five items on the menu? That would be a costly meal…”
Angel reached into her backpack, opened her ziploc bag full of money, and flopped a stack of twenty dollar bills onto the table. “The first five meals, please.”
Carlos saw two possible explanations for this behavior. Either she had recently robbed a bank, or else she was one of those eccentric billionaires who wandered around doing absurd things like buying the entire menu at a local Tex-Mex restaurant after hiking through the mountains of northern Georgia. If it was the former, then she likely had a weapon on her, and if it was the latter… well, that might still be the case, but it might also mean dollar signs in Carlos’ future if he stopped putting up a fuss.
“Right away, ma’am.”
[Aw… Show’s over.]
Now, just as Angel had been able to listen in on the conversation between Jessamine and her friend without too much trouble due to proximity of their tables, it should come as no surprise to the thoughtful reader such as yourself that Jessamine had likewise been just as able to listen in to the conversation between Angel and Carlos. This being in fact the case, Jessamine quickly slipped out of her booth and crossed the short distance to Angel with her bag in hand.
“Hello! My friend had to leave me quite suddenly, and it seems I’m without anyone to eat lunch with. Would you mind if I joined you at your table so we can share lunch together instead?” An obvious lie to anyone who had heard the conversation with the aforesaid friend, but an otherwise not bad attempt at subterfuge.
“I don’t mind at all.”
And so Jessamine joined Angel at her table. It couldn’t have gone any better if Angel had planned it. Actually, it likely would have gone far worse if Angel had actually gone in with a plan, since her plans tended to be of the ‘if this works it will be a miracle’ variety whereas her luck was more of the ‘well that was a miracle’ variety.
“So what brings a big spender like you to our fair little town?” Jessamine asked, leading with a far too heavy-handed attempt at chitchat.
“You, actually,” Angel replied with a smile.
Jessamine smiled like the cat that got the canary, as the saying goes. Not that this saying made any sort of sense considering cats could not smile, but even setting that obvious irregularity aside, it would certainly be safe to say that any cat that managed to catch a canary would be far too busy toying with or else eating its corpse to bother with smiling. “Oh? You’ve heard of little old me?”
“Well yes,” Angel said as she pulled a legal pad that had her untidy scrawl adorning the entire first page. “I hope you don’t mind, but I took the time to write out this first bit, since I use it every time. Makes things easier.”
[And here we go again,] Lew sighed, very much so like a cat whose best years were behind it and had nothing more to live for other than puking on the carpet for the sheer fun of it. [This doesn’t get any easier to listen to as time goes on, just in case you were wondering.]
“Uh, sure?”
Angel cleared her throat, thumping the side of her closed fist against her chest a few times. “Hello! My name is Angel, and I am a good demon, not to be confused with an angel, which is a different thing altogether. I am here today because you are supposed to die soon, and I don’t want that to happen. If I should fail to help you avert dying, you will be assigned to Heaven or Hell based on how you’ve lived your life. You are,” Angel paused reading her notepad to grab her Ledger from where she had dropped it on the seat beside her and flip it open to consult it, “heaven-bound. If you were to die, it would be in about,” she stopped and glanced at her still open Ledger, “about ten minutes from now.”
Jessamine lightly scoffed. “That’s a bit of a hard sell—”
“Sorry, not quite done!” Angel interrupted with an awkward smile.
[Oh trust me, lady, it gets worse.]
Jessamine glanced at the stack of twenties still on the table and held her tongue.
Angel continued, “The demon in my head has been pretty insistent that Heaven is bad and Hell is ‘a really fucking awesome place full of the best drugs, porn, and good times you will ever have.’ I haven’t been there, so I can’t really say either way, but that’s his take on things. What matters is that as far as I’m concerned, you have a choice. If you want to live, then I’ll do my best to try and help you avoid whatever is supposed to kill you. If you’re ready to move on to different things, then that’s cool too. Just let me know which outcome you prefer, and we’ll do whatever is needed to tip the scales that direction.”
She tucked the notepad back into her backpack and added with a smile, “So! What do you want to do?”
“Well like I was saying earlier,” Jessamine said, “what you’re saying doesn’t really make sense. Angels, demons, heaven, and hell. And you’re saying I’m going to die in ten minutes.”
“It’s more like nine minutes now.”
“You can’t expect me to believe this. Nobody would believe this.”
[Ugh, I wish that were true. Maybe then I could talk her into stopping…]
Jessamine reached into her bag and pulled out as a dark, transparent bottle full of a liquid that sloshed a bit as she plopped it on the table. “But, uh, I know how that is. People not believing you, I mean. See, nobody believes me when I tell them about all the amazing properties of Dynaflow. It’s full of nutrients that completely supplant your daily dietary needs, and amino acids that rejuvenate your body, making you feel ten years younger while fighting the aging process!”
Angel considered that. “That does sound interesting, but I’m good, since I don’t age or need to eat.”
Jessamine blinked, her speech intended to strike down any doubts dying on her lips.
“Uh. You uh. You just ordered food?” This was not a bad point to bring up, since Angel had quite literally ordered one of everything on the menu. If anything, this might have suggested she needed significantly more food than a human did.
“Well it’s not like I need to eat. Or drink. Or sleep. I only do them because I still like to taste things and dream.” This was true, but not exactly convincing, if the disbelief in Jessamine’s eyes was anything to judge by. “Oh, and I’m… Lew, how old am I again?”
“Lew?”
[Uh. You were twenty something when we met, right…? Oh, yeah yeah! There was that whole thing about the bar—yeah, you weren’t quite twenty-one yet. So that puts you somewhere in your low sixties, I think.]
“Sorry, he’s the demon in my head. I mentioned him in my prepared speech earlier, remember? Though I didn’t name him, now that I think about it…” She tugged out her notepad and as well as a pen, and began to adjust the prompt she had written out.
Carlos chose that moment to show up with a long, temperature resistant glove on over his arm that was laden with five steaming hot meals. “Here you are, miss. The first five from the menu. Would you care for a refresh on your iced tea.”
“Oh, yes please!” Angel said with a smile as she slid the glass closer to him, so he wouldn’t have to reach across the table. After all, who knew what accidents could happen if he did.
“Sure thing. I’ll be right back.”
Once he had departed with the glass, Angel resumed scribbled notes on her page but did distractedly say, “Oh, and I’m sixty, give or take a few years.”
Jessamine’s hand clenched around her bottle. “That’s it then? You’re going to make fun of me, just like the rest of them did?”
[You lost her. Sucks to be you, kid.]
Angel looked up from her notepad, confusion writ on her face. She had gotten better at reading people over the years, and she agreed with Lew. Still, she had to try for her target’s sake. “I don’t know who you’re talking about, but I can definitely say I am not trying to make fun of you. That would be awful mean of me.”
“You know what? I don’t need your money. I’ll find people who see what a great product Dynaflow is, and soon, I’ll be even richer than you!”
“Rich? Angel was well and truly bewildered now.
“And I don’t need your help,” she bit out, tears beginning to crawl down her cheeks. It seemed having her friend’s rejection and this intervention right after was a bit too much for Ms. Jessamine Dodson of Georgia, which would have been bad with regard to the imminent end of her life span if Angel’s Ledger hadn’t begun to vibrate on the seat next to her. “I’ve made it this far, and I’ll make it to your level on my own!”
[Goddammit.]
Jessamine stormed out of the restaurant, and many of the people sitting at the nearby tables shot her and Angel ugly looks, but Angel had no eyes for them as she laid her open Ledger across her lap and began to dig into an enchilada with her knife and fork. Jessamine’s name was no longer in the front of her Ledger, but with a quick application of the spell that served as the underlying mechanism for this section of it, she found knowledge streaming into her mind.
Jessamine Dodson of Georgia. A die hard believer in the purported wonder properties of the juice she has been selling, her liver will go into acute failure in a week due to relying on a diet of Dynaflow and cheap bread from the grocery store around the corner. This occurs in front of her life long friend Madison Clemens, which greatly saddens her but also inspires her to become a legislator who ultimately bans the practice of pyramid schemes. A net gain for society because so much food will stop being wasted on being converted into shitty products like Dynaflow that will never be consumed, Jessamine Dodson will be admitted into Heaven.
[I cannot begin to tell you how utterly infuriating it is that you keep managing to pull this off.]
She shrugged as she popped a bite of enchilada into her mouth. “I’m just doing my best. It’s still their choice.”
[It’s not supposed to be!]
“Why?”
[Wha— No, fuck this, and fuck you,] Lew snapped, weeks worth of tension combined with the irritation of a shuffle playlist of mariachi music with the odd pop song in Spanish finally causing him to reach the limits of his patience for the day. “I’m not playing your stupid fucking game, you moronic piece of filth! You think this really changes anything? You save maybe half your targets from death, and for what? Most of them still go to Hell anyway! This one might not have, but it doesn’t matter! You’re only changing a handful of people in the end. What you’re doing is worthless, just like you, and I will get my body back!]
“That’s awful rude of you to say, Lew,” Angel said with a pout, though it was apparent his ruthless tirade didn’t affect her nearly as much as it once might have. Being belittled on a daily basis by an inescapable voice in one’s head might have been enough to erode the away at the self-confidence of anyone else, but Angel wasn’t like most people.
She pulled out a few more stacks of twenty dollar bills, grabbed the one on the table, and stood as she wiped her lips on a napkin. She pulled her backpack on as Carlos approached, once again bearing several hot meals on top of the long, temperature resistant glove pulled on over his arm.
“Sorry, work’s calling me. Keep the change,” she told him as she pressed the money into his free hand. “Oh, and you can, uh, give these folks here the extra meals.”
She gestured at the four people at the table the were standing next to, and Carlos awkwardly pointed out, “Uh, these are their meals…”
“Oh. Well, that’s good then.”
At least some things never changed.
Being a demon wasn’t a job most could get done, but Angel wasn’t like most people.