“We are here!” Ukka declared as its village came into view. “Welcome to Jakkaté!”
“Oh, wow!” Angel breathed out. “It’s so cool!”
The village was built upon one of the many, mighty trees of the forest and consisted of metal terraces evenly spaced from the uppermost portions of the trunk all the way down to the ground. Krae were scattered everywhere, both on the terraces and flying through the air, and they all varied in height, bulk, and feather patterns. Despite being in a forest and therefore literally surrounded by wood, all of the structures seemed to be constructed from the same metal as the terraces, and Angel noticed there were a few Krae approaching the village from a different direction who were seated upon a carriage loaded up with raw ore that was being pulled along by two large, leathery creatures with four eyes. Though the Krae could obviously fly, there were multiple large elevators interspersed among buildings and houses littering each level, likely for the transport of objects too heavy to be flown between levels, and it was towards one of these that Ukka led Angel.
[You act like I didn’t already describe this shit to you,] Lew gripe, still sour from Ukka complimenting Angel’s drawings. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have cared so much—he only cared about a hummie’s over-inflated ego unless he was trying to pop it for shits and giggles—but where Angel was involved, that topic reminded him of his confrontation with the angel Henry Godfrey. Whether it was intentional or not was debatable, but the angelic being’s words had come across to Lew as lording over him, and the blow to his pride still pissed him off.
“Cool?” Ukka replied, sounding confused, oblivious to Lew’s interjection. “I do not believe my village is any cooler than the ambient temperature. What has led you to this conclusion?”
“It’s a way of saying I like something,” Angel distractedly explained as she looked all around at the Krae above them. “So this is a village? What’s a city look like?”
“I have heard of this ‘city’ concept of which you speak from our interactions with other cultures, but it is not so here on Kra, no no! If our tree is not home enough to sustain us, then we are too large of a burden, yes?”
Angel giggled at what Ukka might think if she brought the Krae to visit the cities on Earth, especially Tokyo, where her last case had been. “Okay! Well, where do you live here in the village, Ukka?”
“Not too far up, but I must… introduce you to the village chief in the uppermost reaches of the village. You must be given the appropriate welcome,” Ukka replied as it led the way to one of the elevators.
The slain uldan securely hung from the ends of a metal bar the Krae had slung across its shoulders that made it almost three times as wide, but the elevators were quite a bit larger up close and also entirely empty. This didn’t mean boarding was without its issues, however, as Ukka—being somewhat distracted by a matter the narrator has hinted at somewhat ominously a few times in this chapter and the previous one—proceeded to turn too quickly once aboard the elevator. This speedy spin resulted in one of the beheaded bodies dangling from its rod to smack the unprepared Angel in the face, splattering blood all over her and knocking her to the floor.
“Oh no!” the Krae cried in dismay. “I am so sorry I struck you with my meat!”
“Naw, it’s okay!” Angel said with a smile as she climbed to her feet, accepting his offered hand of help. “A big ol’ long thing like that’s bound to cause some trouble.”
“Still, I should be careful to not whip it into people.”
[Okay, hold up, the innuendo is on purpose, right? You two have got to realize how all that sounded.]
As it happened, neither Angel nor Ukka had intended any insinuations or intimations in this instance or indeed had any inkling of the immediately indicated intercourse’s implied impious, impassioned implications, instead intending an immaculate interaction innocent of imputations. Having now instigated an investigation regarding Lew’s impish, immoderate inferences and impeachment of the incriminated individuals, his indictment of infernal influences is identified as invented. More importantly, this incoherent, incomprehensible illustration of an imagined issue is not informative, is incongruous, and upon the narrator’s involved inspection and introspection of the indicia, is an incorrectly integrated idea, ergo indubitably and incontrovertibly improper, inappropriate, and ineligible to include inside this text and ideally ignored.
Having thus been bamboozled into opening a dictionary at least once while reading the preceding paragraph, you ought to be unsurprised the narrator allowed the action of the story to progress unbeknownst to you whilst you desperately flipped through pages of reference material—or far more likely, consulted your search engine or perhaps an online dictionary. That will teach you to try and understand what the narrator is saying instead of blithely ignoring the blabber and pressing on like an immensely inept inchworm interested only in ignorance and its incapacity to be informed!
“Why do you bring this strange outsider here?” asked the guards outside the building Angel had been led to while silly readers studied their dictionaries.
“I thought it prudent to inform Chief Lokeen of our visitor’s presence here in the village,” Ukka responded with a bow that he carefully kept shallow to avoid a repeat experience of the earlier meat bashing.
The two guards looked to each other, a conversation passing silently between them. “It is not unheard of for visitors from other worlds to stay amongst us. Chief Lokeen is busy and cannot spare attention regarding such a matter.”
Ukka looked flustered for a moment before blurting, “Well yes, but you see, this visitor possesses the body of a demon. And well, I thought that would be interesting enough to warrant a visit.”
Lew had only been half paying attention to what was going on around Angel until that moment with the other half having been occupied with pondering how he would get revenge on Repugna when he got his body back. The demon had been debating the merits of pissing in her coffee and shitting in her wheaties—a plan complicated by his uncertainty regarding whether she was the sort of demon to partake in either of these items or even cared about a nutritious, balanced breakfast at all—when he noticed the stress Ukka had placed on these words and the stiffening posture of the chief’s guards. As has been previously established, Lew was a lazy, easy to bore, yadda yadda not dumb blah blah. Of course, he was not as smart as you, the reader, who undoubtedly noticed the change in Ukka’s behavior last chapter when Angel mentioned she was possessing a demon, but then, most fall short of this measure. Having sufficiently buttered you up, dear reader, the narrator shall proceed with the actual plot forthwith.
[Kid, get out of here! Portal to Ear-th now! Go!] Lew told Angel as one of the guards moved into the building.
“Lew, I told you it’s pronounced Earth, not Ear-th,” Angel replied, latching onto the wrong element in his statement.
[Who fucking cares what it’s called?! Something sketchy’s going on, and you need to get my body out of here pronto!]
“I’m the one driving, so that makes it my body,” she retorted, once again focusing on the only portion of his words irrelevant to Lew’s goal of warning her.
Lew correctly deduced this and tried to determine the simplest, way to unequivocally convey to her what actually mattered, but the demon was not well versed in talking to her so directly, which was likely a consequence of how most of his communication with her was either an insult in and of itself or else was a statement paired together with an insult likely related to said statement. This delayed Lew’s warning an amount of time exceeding or equal to the amount of time necessary for the trap to be sprung. More likely the latter, but this was overall irrelevant to the matter at hand, so the narrator shan’t bother with the effort oy clearing up which was the case.
Angel shrieked in pain—a sound definitely like two peregrine falcons quarreling over who got the better cuts of dinner and definitely not like two eagles doing the horizontal avian application—when ordinary water was splashed on her from above. But this was no ordinary water! It was laced with trace amounts of LSD—also, it had been sanctified, which in hindsight was more relevant to conveying why being exposed to water would hurt Angel. Her Ledger fell to the ground and hissed violently, but she was somewhat more preoccupied with the torturous agony, which was too bad really, since it was the only item that could have helped her out of her predicament. She collapsed to her knees as the guard who had stayed outside kicked her Ledger away, then her vision was filled with green light when it shot her in the head with its gun.
----------------------------------------
It is a little known fact that when regrowing one’s brain, the first sense to return is the sixth sense—namely, whether any clowns are in the area. The super majority of sentient life in the universe is unaware of this because most life has trouble with staying alive when its noodle has been reduced to the consistency of crushed tomatoes. Fortuitously, particularly where matters of avoiding the creepiest gender are concerned—yes, you read that right—the narrative focus of this story is centered upon a soul possessing a demon. Demons are rather unlike other forms of life and not just because their brains taste surprisingly good on a salad paired with a Cabernet Sauvignon. Or rather, it is more accurate to say demons are not alive at all—demons simply exist. This rule of existence means that obliterating any portion of a demon, for example one’s head via application of a laser bolt, will only result in the demon’s body giving non-existence the finger and regenerating until they once again fully exist in all their infernal ignominy. More specific to the main point, because the narrative is explored via a perspective hellbent on existing in spite of mortals trying very much so to end that existence, we have been afforded a very rare opportunity to see the recovery of senses in their correct order with the first being the sixth sense of whether clowns are afoot.
As it happened, there were no clowns in the immediate vicinity. This was good and precisely the environment under which the seventh sense of existing—a sense that strangely enough rarely shows up when mortals make lists of their various senses—could appropriately return second, seeing as it wouldn’t do one much good to become aware of the self when there is a clown nearby and nothing to be done about it. The eighth sense of proprioception returned third, making it a bit late to the party and responsible had any clowns meandered into the area betwixt the recovery of self awareness and the proprioception required to flee with any sort of alacrity had a clown been on the approach. This restoration of the sixth first, the seventh second, and the eighth third, it could be deduced the ninth would be fourth, but this is both incorrect and laughably so. There are only eight senses—touch, sight, hearing, smell, taste, clown detection, existing, and proprioception—and mortal media’s attempts to proliferate the misconception that others exist is balderdash. There is no such thing as ghost detection, imminent threat detection, depth detection, sexual orientation detection, fashionableness detection, or any other detection than the eight laid out herein.
No, it was her sense of touch that Angel regained fourth, which was accompanied by the realization her head was growing back into place around something cylindrical. Her sense of smell came back fifth, though her nose felt more than a little funny, which allowed her to conclude the cylindrical object intruding upon her head’s desire to reform in one piece smelled like a new car. The narrator would like to pause this countdown to Angel’s full recovery to clarify that the item in question in fact smelled very little like a new car. This misconception on our protagonist’s part stemmed from her having heard a great deal of brouhaha about ‘that new car smell,’ which prompted her curiosity. Bearing neither a license to drive nor enough money to purchase a new car even had the former not been at issue, she stopped by a car dealership one evening on her way home from her bagging job at the Piggly Wiggly to take a sniff, caught a whiff of the hood of a vehicle, and determined she did not care for ‘new car smell.’
Returning to the discussion of Angel’s repairing senses, Angel’s sense of taste decided to show up next, which led to her briefly considering whether a large penny was stuck in her face. This did not make sense for several reasons, among them being pennies are not cylindrical, pennies would not be on an alien world that had hitherto never been exposed to anything from Earth, and that any references to a man in a cave living a double life where he dresses in a costume to fight crime would be extremely copyright protected and therefore not of interest to the narrator to bring up except in this very roundabout manner of description. Bringing matters back into safely lawsuit free territory, Angel had foolishly considered a large penny because the item stuck in her face was perfectly positioned just over her upper lip, and being possessed with the amazing tongue capable of touching her nose—she’ll happily show you sometime if you ask nicely—she had pressed her tongue against the item and been put to mind of that time she ate a penny.
Hearing was the final sense returned to Angel, which was a mercy, truth be told. If one can hear the honk of a clown’s horn, then it is a nigh certainty that death is upon you. Unless you are a demon whose very existence flaunted death at every turn, in which case you would still be in for a bad time until the clown got tired of toying with your would-be corpse and left.
“It seems the iron did not line up with your mouth. A pity.”
Stolen novel; please report.
Angel’s eyes rolled to the side—she would have turned her head, but it was quite a bit occupied being impaled upon a thin iron pole stretching up to the ceiling in the room she was in—and could just barely see a group of Krae in the corner of her vision standing behind metal bars. Ukka stood just behind a Krae she didn’t recognize with several guards standing around them, and they were all looking right at her. There was a bunch of hissing steam coming from somewhere she couldn’t see, and there was a tube of metal running through the bars into the room and over to her with a receptacle attached on the end outside the bars.
“Attempt to corrupt any of my people with your words,” the Krae in front of Ukka spoke, “and the next batch of sanctified water will be poured directly down your throat.”
[Fuck.]
“Oh! It’s iron!” Angel replied, her words distorted by the iron, which best as she could tell, was jutting up through the bottom portion of her nose. “That makes far more sense than a penny!”
Ignoring her, the Krae who had spoken before continued, “For whom did you come, demon?”
“Sorry, not sure I understand. Are you asking who I came with?”
The Krae made an odd warbling screech for a moment. “Do you think me a fool, hellspawn?! For which of me people have you come?!”
[Kid, they think you’re here to corrupt someone,] Lew explained.
“Wha— I didn’t come to corrupt no one!” Angel attempted to summon her Ledger to show them, having completely forgotten that it would look like complete gibberish to anyone other than a demon, but it was a moot point, since her Ledger didn’t appear. This was a new sensation for Angel, who almost had her Ledger in hand—if she hadn’t been a demon, she would have had the callouses to prove it too—but she pushed aside her confusion for the moment in the interest of continuing to defend herself. “I finished my only case early, and Lew mentioned there was a planet of owl people who poo out their mouths, and that was so cool I wanted to come visit, then—”
“Silence!” The Krae shrieked, cutting Angel off. “I will not be hoodwinked by your lies! Your kind has one purpose, one drive—to deprive the righteous their justified place in the afterlife!”
“I ain’t lying, and you’re being awful rude. I thought y’all would be nice like Ukka, but if this is how y’all treat guests, then I’ll just go back to Earth.” Angel tried to sit up and was surprised to find the pole held steady instead of bending like she expected. She grabbed and tried to break it, but despite being quite slim, it was shockingly sturdy.
[Didn’t you hear them, kid? That thing’s cold iron, and the bars probably are too. Totally demon resistant. We are so boned.]
“Douse it,” the Krae tersely ordered.
One of the guards moved towards the steam then moved back towards the receptacle with a large bowl. It poured something that looked clear from the bowl into the system, and when the liquid hit her, Angel screamed in agony. If you were expecting the narrator to liken this to some sort of sound made by a peregrine falcon, dear reader, then it would seem you are a true sadist. You ought to be acting more like the turncoat Ukka, who was wincing in sympathy, the traitorous sack of feathers! Expecting humor in such a tense situation—honestly.
When Angel’s cries of pain simmered down into mere whimpers, the Krae resumed shouting at her. “I’ll ask you again: Who among my people did you come to corrupt?!”
“I didn’t!” Angel wailed. “I just wanted to see Krae shit out their mouths!”
“Douse it.”
“Wait, Chief Lokeen!” Ukka blurted. The rude Krae, who was apparently the chief of Ukka’s village, turned its head slightly to indicate it was listening but did not speak. The guard had already poured more of the liquid—holy water, undoubtedly, as no other clear liquid would have quite the same effect on a demon—into the pipe, and Angel howled in distress, clearly unnerving the backstabber, who cringed away and fell silent.
“Be quick with your words, Ukka,” Lokeen demanded, still not fully turning to face the other Krae. “We do not have time to waste, if we are to save our kin from damnation.”
Ukka cleared its throat at that and hesitantly supplied, its words difficult to hear over Angel’s wailing, “She, ah, did show a strange interest in my, ahem, pellet. It was rather quite embarrassing, but ah, she… may be telling… the truth?”
“The demon set up its own excuse, nothing more,” Lokeen answered with a scoff, bristling Ukka’s feathers. “I thank you for bringing this to our attention, but if you are squeamish and cannot handle what must be done, then leave.”
The Krae didn’t wait for an answer, having already returned its full attention to Angel, who was once more whimpering as the pain subsided. As Lokeen began interrogating Angel once more, the two-timing Ukka looked to her in dismay. Demons and what they did were not theological myths to the Krae, so the moment Angel had confessed she was a demon, Ukka had known what needed to be done, but the resulting consequences were beyond its expectation. It had only turned Angel in so the chief and guards could determine whether she was safe, not so they could torture her! Demon though she may be—and an odd one, claiming to be another species inhabiting a demon, as though such were possible—she had been rather nice if very strange.
“You can make this easy on yourself, demon,” Lokeen snapped, clearly irritated at what it perceived as Angel holding out. “Give us the name! Or did you want to be doused again?”
“I’m tellin’ the truth!” she bawled, desperately trying and failing to push away the iron pipe. “I swear to God, I’m tellin’ the truth!”
Ukka’s feathers flared as he stepped back in shock. A couple of the guards did the same, and it was no wonder. Angel was clearly hellspawn, else she would not react to iron and holy water as she did, but she had just sworn in the name of the Creator without being smote! Lew was also flabbergasted, having heard horror stories of what had happened to demons who had inadvertently done the same. She ought to have been burned to ash for the next hundred years at least, but other than the lingering pain from the holy water being poured over her, she hadn’t so much as flinched.
Even Lokeen seemed unnerved for a moment, words failing it. Eventually, it faintly replied, “What did you just say?”
“I s-said I swear that I—”
“No! Filth, repeat yourself now!”
“Wha— but, I…”
[You swore in the Big Guy Upstairs’ name,] Lew said, sounding disturbed. [Demons don’t do that!]
“But it’s true! I ain’t come here to do no wrong, swear to God!”
[For fuck’s sake, don’t keep doing it! He mighta missed the first one, but that don’t mean that’s gonna keep up!]
The guards looked to Lokeen for guidance, and eventually the chief shakily declared, “It’s a trick.”
Ukka’s already agitated feathers ruffled up even more at that. “Chief! Surely you see—”
Lokeen whirled on the betrayer and snarled, “I have already told you to leave if you have a problem! We do not have time to fall prey to this demon’s deceptions!” Ukka stumbled back and away, and Lokeen returned its attention to Angel. “Douse it.”
The guard with the holy water poured more into the receptacle, and as Angel’s screams began anew, Ukka’s feathers settled down. Had Angel been not so distracted by her distress, she might have noticed the orange outline that appeared around it. Though the narrator had been until now callously referring to Ukka with such uncomplimentary terms as turncoat, backstabber, and even a traitorous sack of feathers—there are other examples, but the narrator is far too lazy to find them all, so just reread this scene if you simply must find them all. Anyhow, despite these descriptors being entirely accurate, this didn’t mean Ukka was heartless. The Krae had honestly expected the chief to simply contain Angel until she was confirmed safe. Ukka might have even been able to justify the torture as a necessary evil, albeit a horrifying one, Lokeen enduring to ensure the safety of the village.
But then Angel had sworn an oath to the Creator that she was not lying.
Like the owls of Earth the Krae had no peripheral vision, instead relying on the fantastic flexibility of their necks to turn their heads when they needed to look at something. Ukka was already behind the guards and only a few short steps from the table where Angel’s Ledger laid submerged within another bowl of holy water. The sound of Angel’s screams easily drowned out the careful steps Ukka took towards the bowl while quietly drawing the gun it had only ever used to hunt uldan. It was all very discreet, except Ukka had forgotten the Ledger would stop hissing once removed from the holy water. Given the nature the narrator has chosen to write the preceding sentence, it should be relatively obvious what happened next: A guard turned around.
What? That wasn’t what you were expecting? Well, just goes to show what you know about telling a proper story. Ought leave such matters to your trusty narrator in the future, shouldn’t you?
Ukka had intended to find an angle where it could shoot the iron bar running through Angel and toss the Ledger in to her, relying on surprise and the necessity of unlocking the iron bars to delay anyone from intervening in Angel’s escape. It would have been quite the coup, facilitating the escape without hurting anyone, but alas, such was not to be. The guard hurried to bring its gun to bear, and in a moment of panic, Ukka pulled the trigger on its own gun. The green bolt flew true, and when it collided with the bolt fired from the guard’s gun, the room exploded in a blaze of green light. Krae went flying, the bowls of holy water fell to the ground, and the walls and ceiling collapsed. Worst of all, Ukka had left its pole with the slain uldan against the wall outside the room, and the meat was reduced to cinders
[Kid! Now’s your chance!]
Angel groaned, her body still shivering with lingering aches from repeated exposure to holy water. “Lew, I don’t feel so good…”
[No shit. Really? Well, perhaps you’d like to do something about all that, like—I dunno—getting the fuck out of here before they can trap again?!]
That did sound like a pretty good idea, and with a thought, the Ledger appeared in her hand after having been removed quite violently from the bowl of holy water by all the ruckus. The iron bar had mostly snapped into pieces, leaving her only impaled on a stub and being held down by chunks of ceiling, but those were easy enough to lift up and off, and she removed her head from the remnants of the iron pole with a wet squelch.
She started drawing a portal as her nose began to reform, but before she could finish, she abruptly gasped, “Wait, what happened to Ukka?!”
[Who cares what happened to that double-crossing bastard? Hopefully the fucker’s dead, the overgrown feather duster!]
“No, Ukka!” Angel immediately applied a locator spell and zeroed in on the patch of rubble covering the red hue produced by the spell. She hurled the large chunks away with a dismissive flick, and Lokeen, who had just begun to emerge from under a pile of rubble, was coincidentally smacked upside the head by some. Ukka coughed wetly as she uncovered it, and when she dismissed the locator spell, she finally noticed the orange light surrounding him and gasped.
“No… No…”
“Angel?” the Krae weakly replied. “Oh good. You’re free.”
[Oh hey, I guess he’s gonna die after all. Think you can corrupt him before he dies? The fucking shit waffle deserves to go to hell after that what he did to us!]
Words failed her—Angel’s mouth opened and closed without saying anything. Instead, Ukka broke the silence. “Not exactly how I intended that to go,” it remarked with a wet cough, “but I suppose I did manage what I set out to do.”
“I don’t want you to die,” she whispered. She abruptly flipped her Ledger open to the index and began frantically searching. “I can stop it, hang on! You don’t have to die!”
[What the fuck are you getting all huffy about, you moron?] Lew derided. [Either corrupt him, or let’s get a fucking move on!]
“Shut up, Lew!” Angel yelled as her eyes scoured the listings for anything that could help. There was nothing listed under ‘healing,’ and the only pages under ‘recovery’ were about retrieving lost or stolen items. Still, she kept searching. “I won’t corrupt him, I won’t! He’s my friend!”
[He’s a target, and that’s all there is to it! Or did you forget this is your job?!]
Tears were beginning to blur her vision and fall on the pages, and she curiously wiped them away. “Why ain’t there any healing spells?! There’s gotta be!”
[Because demons don’t need to heal! Our targets die, and we keep on existing! That’s how it fucking works, you dick for brains ass blaster!]
The Ledger slipped from her hands, and she gripped her hair in frustration, trying to wrack her brain for anything that could help. Her backpack, which had apparently been stored upstairs, suddenly fell from above onto her head, giving her inspiration. “Lew! The day we met, you tried to stop me from dying with a spell! What was that?!”
[Oh, you wanna know what spell I used? It’s called the fuck you and the horse you rode in on spell! That’s the goddamn spell that got me riding passenger in my own motherfucking body, so you can just burn in hell, you bitchsicle!]
“Tell me how to save him!” Angel yelled. Nothing—no response at all. “Tell me!”
“Angel,” Ukka faintly said, laying one of its talon hands on her arm. “You are… a good person…”
“Ukka, I—”
“I am glad to have met you,” he pressed on, gently squeezing her. “Flee while you… still can… friend…”
The orange glow around him vanished. Angel sobbed and almost succumbed to the urge to break down, but when the rubble over Lokeen shifted, her finger hastily drew a portal. She hadn’t had a destination in mind as she made it, and the darkness waiting on the other side was daunting, but she dove through after only a moment’s hesitation. She landed roughly on rocky ground and with one final look back at Ukka’s body, she let the portal close.