“Oh, this is unfortunate,” Angel remarked as she eyed the hole-in-the-wall pub her target was in.
[Do tell,] Lew drawled, already making private bets on how Angel would screw up this job. It had been a week since she had possessed him, and she had only successfully completed one job. That one she had only managed because the person was already very much so doomed to hell—being a mafia lawyer for thirty-five years would do that—and because she hadn’t actually gone to it in the first place, which neatly sidestepped any chance that she could screw up.
“I don’t have my ID.”
Lew silently counted to three, hoping in vain he wouldn’t have to remind her to use the Ledger to make a fake ID.
“Oh!” she abruptly said, and for the briefest of moments, the demon experienced a glimmer of hope before it was dashed to pieces. “I’m also not 21.”
[I’d ask if you were kidding, but there’s no point when I already know the answer,] he grumbled. [Just make a fake ID, and let’s get on with it!]
“But… that’s against the law!”
[Laws are for hummies,] he pointed out, doing his best to try and be patient—which as one might suspect, was quite an arduous task for a demon, [and as long as you’re in the pilot seat of my body, you’re a genuine, straight from eighth circle demon.]
“But…”
Regrettably, patience was not one of Lew’s finer points, as the narrator suggested just a few sentences ago in preparation for this very outburst. [Just fucking go in, goddammit!]
“I’m only twenty and three quarters, Lew!”
Fortunately for the exasperated demon and the worried Angel, this statement gave Lew an idea. [We’re in the UK, right?]
“Mhm! Mr. Rodger Abrams of London. Ledger said he’s been driving while drunk, and—”
[Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Just check the index for the legal drinking age here.]
Angel hummed thoughtfully as she flipped open her black book, located the right listing in the back, and jumped forward to the relevant page. “Oh! This says you only need to be eighteen!”
[So now can we get on with it?]
“Question!”
Lew’s growl of frustration closely matched the pitch and timbre of a bobcat having a rough time defecating after eating a half dozen granola bars, wrappers and all. It was a peculiar sound, and one Angel might not have encountered but for Linus forgetting to store their food on a joint camping trip once. [What?!]
“Why are the legal drinking ages listed in the Ledger?”
[Underage drinking is a sin, and a lot of you baby hummies are awfully tempted by it. Now go into the goddamn bar!]
“I think they call them ‘pubs’ here.”
If Lew had a physical body and a chair on hand, then he definitely would have broken off one of its legs, shoved it down her throat, and set it on fire. It was a particularly vivid fantasy by human standards but ordinary fare for demons. The infernal race was quite notorious for its members being imaginative, ranking second just behind dolphins, whereas humans came in sixth behind the elephant, the turtle, and the platypus in that order.
[Get. Into. The. Building!]
Angel didn’t much care for Lew’s pushiness—she had only been trying to ensure they were using the correct terminology, after all—but being the sweet, innocent human in a demon’s body that she was, she decided to overlook his behavior and approach the door. Sadly, she had forgotten something crucial to the process of entering a bar.
“ID?” the imposing man at the door droned, looking supremely bored.
“Oh, right,” Angel murmured with a frown. “I forgot I didn’t have it with me.”
[Can this night get any worse?]
This would have been an ideal opportunity for Angel to utilize a basic lie to weasel her way out of the situation. She could have claimed she left it in her car and gone around the corner before making an ID using her Ledger. She could have used her Ledger to mesmerize the bouncer into thinking he was a meerkat then walked right past him. She could have even pointed wildly in a random direction, declared, “What’s that over there?!” then ran into the pub in the hopes the man would lose sight of her in the crowds.
Instead, she settled for saying, “I… uh… know Jim?”
The essentially negligible chance of this plan succeeding was matched only in just how much sheer dumb luck Angel had. “Yeah, might’ve guessed as much. Jim can’t get enough of you foreign birds. Alright, in you get.”
[You did not deserve for that to work, I hope you know.]
Angel was confused by the bouncer lumping her in with such esteemed company as eagles and chickens, but in a rare moment of thoughtfulness, she chalked it up to a cultural difference and slipped into the pub. There were quite a lot of people inside watching the TV, and the lighting was very dim, but fortunately it is a well known fact that just as demons have better imaginations than humans, they likewise have superior eyesight. Even more conveniently for her—and the narrator wishes all readers to know that complaints of deus ex machina will be summarily ignored as pointless drivel—her target was outlined in red the moment he fell in her sights.
“Ah, there’s my target!” Angel exclaimed far, far too loudly.
[Keep it down! Are you trying to blow your cover right out of the gate?] Lew complained. [You’re gonna be mistaken for an Armenian assassin!]
She considered that as she began crossing the pub to where Mr. Rodger Abrams of London was chugging a beer and cheering at the sportsball game on the TV. “That seems statistically unlikely.”
[No, what’s statistically unlikely was you actually correctly using the word ‘statistically’ in a sentence. That Armenian assassin accusation comes up more often than you’d think.]
“I’ve learned something new today!” she happily declared as she dodged around three grown men arguing over who would win the game.
[Hooray,] Lew deadpanned. [Okay, let’s keep this simple. Think you could seduce him into having anonymous sex in a public bathroom?]
“Nope. Sex is icky.”
[If you say so? Your loss. Fine, how about getting him so drunk he starts masturbating in public? Boom, sex offender—totally hell-bound.]
“That also sounds yucky.”
[Not giving me a lot to work with here, kid. Okay, try this: Slip him some of that Viagra shit, then when he’s all rock hard, you—]
“These options are all sounding very penis-y.”
[‘Penis-y’? Really? And you’re being awful picky for someone who has yet to actually corrupt a dude.]
By that time, Angel had long since reached Rodger’s location and had taken a seat next to him at the bar. He didn’t seem to have noticed her though, busy as he was obnoxiously hooting as one of the players on the screen swept the feet of someone else out from under them. As a matter of fact, most of the bar was quite pleased by this turn of events, if their thunderous cheers were any indication. Angel didn’t really watch sports, so she didn’t understand what this foot sweeping actually meant, but she was not a fan of violence in general, so that was quite understandable.
[Just… uh… Oh! Convince him to run up his tab by buying a bunch of expensive drinks then bail without paying it! That’ll totally get the job done. Now, whenever you’re ready, just engage him and stick to the plan, got it?]
“Roger!” Angel affirmed.
“Huh?” Rodger said, giving her an inquisitive look over his shoulder. “Sorry, do I know you?”
[Oh for— You could’ve just said ‘affirmative’ or ‘got it.’ You could’ve just spoken to me in your head, like I know you fucking know how to do. Hell, you could’ve said nothing at all, but nooooo, you just had to say ‘Roger’!]
“Well no, I…” Angel started to say, flustered at the immediate derailment of their admittedly very rushed plan. “Um… I was gonna… Heh, sorry! The demon in my head got me all distracted, and I’ve plum forgotten what I was supposed to be doing!”
[Ffffff—]
“What? Sorry, it’s loud in here, and I’m having trouble hearing you!”
[The plan, kid, the plan! Stick to the plan!]
“Oh, right! Uh, sir? I’m Angel and… and… and I’m here to corrupt you, so you’ll go to hell when you die later tonight!”
There are few gestures quite as famous and versatile as the facepalm. With the simple application of a hand to the face and the ducking of one’s head, a whole world of meaning is conveyed. Your coworker made a colossal blunder that may well have cost your firm that new client? Facepalm. You’ve brought your partner to your parents’ house to meet them for the first time over dinner, and they got drunk and started a political argument? Facepalm. You sent your roommate to the grocery store with a very specific list of items to buy, and they returned with almost none of it? Facepalm.
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Unfortunately for Lew, he had neither a face nor a hand to palm it with. The poor demon would simply have to resort to good old fashioned words to explain how he felt about Angel’s performance.
[You shit-for-brains, imbecilic moron! Why in the nine circles would you actually admit that?!]
Now this name calling didn’t sit well by Angel, and there were two reasons she felt slighted by Lew’s verbal battery. First, she quite clearly remembered Lew himself had confessed his intent when he first met her on a hiking trail in the mountains. What Angel failed to account for when juxtaposing the previous event with her own performance, however, was that Lew had already been outed as a demon due to forgetting his human disguise. Granted, that was still a bad show all around on Lew’s part, but it nevertheless rendered it ineffective for comparison’s sake. Second, Angel felt like she had done her best, and to her credit, she had. Unfortunately, as is often the case in this brutal world of ours, one’s best is not always good enough, and in Angel’s case, it was very much so not good enough.
“Stop being mean, Lew!” Angel said with a pout—a gesture not quite as famous nor as versatile as the aforesaid facepalm, but one nonetheless quite potent if properly wielded.
“Oh, no! My name’s Rodger, not Lou, but I’ll absolutely take you up on that drink!” her target loudly replied, having quite obviously and spectacularly misheard everything Angel had said. This may have been because the noise level in the bar laid somewhere betwixt the loud but not quite uncomfortably so sound of a chorus a legion strong of male howler monkeys during mating season when a female howler monkey swings past and the loud but only ever so slightly uncomfortably so sound of rush hour traffic in New York. It may also have been because he was very apparently plastered, as evidenced by how he was uncontrollably swaying whilst still ass deep in a barstool. Of course arguments could be made for a combination of the two, but while the narrator had been waxing on and on about the varying reasons why Rodger may have blundered his way into the misunderstanding at hand, Angel’s target had already returned his attention to the game on the TV and begun cheering at a volume far too loud to be called for when the ball on the screen was bounced between two people wearing different colored shirts.
“Drink?” Angel repeated, perplexed, before she got a light bulb—which is distinct from the concept of getting an idea insofar as they have different names and Angel inexplicably believed them to be discrete. “Oh! Yes! I’ll just, uh, get one for you!”
Angel’s light bulb—and again, the narrator wishes you to know a light bulb should only be referred to as such vis-à-vis Angel and ought to be referred to properly as an idea in all other situations—was to get Rodger drunk. Her Mama had always stressed that alcohol and drugs were the gateways to all manner of evil actions, and though her warning had been thus conveyed for the express purpose of advocating against Angel getting involved with alcohol, evil was now decidedly Angel’s end goal—at least it was for others, such as Mr. Rodger Abrams of London.
The trouble was, Angel had never been in a pub, bar, tavern, saloon, taproom, alehouse, cocktail lounge, cabaret, or indeed any location whose sole purpose was to purvey alcohol. Her limited experience with the would-be purchase of alcohol was passing by it in the grocery, recalling her Mama’s warnings, and averting her gaze to avoid further contemplation on the matter. Much the same held true for drugs, albeit with the substitution of the pharmacy portion of the grocery for the refrigerated department, but Angel dismissed that as unimportant for the time being, as she did not know the area and whether any pharmacies were nearby, much less open at this late hour. She did not recall she could simply magic narcotics, opioids, and all other manner of drugs into existence using her Ledger, nor did she recall she could similarly refill Rodger’s glass with a simple tap of her finger and the appropriate incantation. No, her thought process defaulted first and foremost to her above mentioned experiences in the grocery store. Her Mama had forbidden grabbing it off the shelf, which naturally meant she need only do the opposite. Fortuitously, there was all manner of alcohol on the shelves behind the bar. She would just grab one and proceed to the nearest register to checkout, which like the alcohol, was also behind the bar. It did not escape her notice, however, that only one person was behind the bar, and she correctly deduced there must be a reason for this. After all, she was well acquainted with not being allowed near the register at the grocery store checkout lane, so perhaps, she decided, the reasons were similar.
This is all a very long-winded way of saying Angel ultimately followed the correct procedure for buying alcohol at a bar, though not at all for the same reason everyone else in the bar was doing so. If Lew had been able to make sense of the garbled rush of thoughts that reflected Angel’s chain of logic, then he doubtlessly would have sighed in a matter not dissimilar to a cat who ate too much wet cat food and vomited on the good carpet—a sound akin to a cat hacking up a hairball on the selfsame carpet spare the slight variance in the precipitating factor.
“Excuse me! Mister, uh, Bar... Man? I’d like to get this man another…” She turned to inspect his glass and found the color and consistency matched her recollection of cat piss. “Glass of piss?”
“Hey now,” Rodger complained as he turned back to her with a frown. “You might not like it, but Red Cat is good shit!”
“Red cat? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a red cat before.”
“What?! You ain’t had it before?! You’ve gotta try some! Oi, barman! One more on ‘er, of course!”
[It’s like watching a slow motion train wreck,] Lew remarked with completely unabashed snickering.
“What? Why?” Angel asked, unintentionally perpetuating the ongoing misunderstanding between herself and Rodger.
“Well it’s good ain’t it? And an ‘merican like you oughta enjoy something proper British while you’re here!”
The bartender slid glasses in front of each of them and as he grabbed Rodger’s old glass asked her, “Opening a tab?”
“Tab?” she asked, not understanding what the man meant. As you, the reader, have likely already guessed by the general arc of this encounter thus far, the questioning uplift at the end of Angel’s words was completely lost on all humans involved. To further the setup of this unlikely scenario, the narrator also wishes you to know the bartender was a skilled one indeed who had zero issues keeping track of what everyone at his bar ordered and thus did not ask Angel for her credit card to start said tab, which was the final piece atop the house of cards that represented everything about what had just happened.
The bartender moved off to take care of another needy customer with nary a blink, and Angel was left with a glass of British beer and a great deal of confusion as she awaited the arrival of the promised scarlet feline. Coupled with Lew’s continued amusement, which had grown from mere snickering to full blown cackling after first skipping over the ever popular chuckling and decidedly unfashionable chortling, the human turned soul possessing a demon was left truly nonplussed. Let it never be said, however, that Angela Cherie Kirk was an ungracious guest, for having had a drink placed in front of her by someone who looked to be in a relative position of authority in the establishment, she resolved that propriety dictated she must try at least one sip. Had her Mama’s warnings been more firmly lodged in place like a stripped screw that had also been welded in place, Angel may have recalled this was alcohol and therefore something she had been raised to avoid. Alas, she had already set said warnings aside in order to try and do the job she had been conscripted into a week prior, and consequently forgot this fact just long enough to take a sip of it.
Once the realization of what she was tasting set in, Angel promptly threw the glass away and scrambled back to put distance between herself and the shelves of liquor still before her. In so doing, this visceral reaction caused her to spill her beer over Rodger, who had once again turned away, while also causing her to smash her glass so hard over the back of his head it broke into pieces. Having conveniently sought distance between herself and the bar nary a second prior, the decidedly drunk Rodger whirled around and locked eyes with the young lady the next bar stool over, who even more conveniently had a build and hairstyle similar to Angel. This had the consequence of causing Mr. Rodger Abrams of London to mistake the innocent—at least in regards to smashing a full glass of beer over his head—lady for Angel. Convenience at its finest, truly.
Naturally Rodger took offense to being covered in broken pieces of glass and the sadly wasted glass of what may very well be a perfectly fine beer, not that the narrator would know being more of a mixed drink and hard cider drinker. He decided a good old fashioned round of fisticuffs was in order and knocked over his beer in his haste to begin the beating. Describing the beatdown that followed as ‘a gold old fashioned round of fisticuffs’ a mere sentence ago is, in case any reader is confused, the narrator’s way of politely explaining Rodger proceeded to beat the innocent—of all but looking like Angel, that is—woman senseless. This display of wanton, aggressive behavior being very much so uncalled for, several nearby patrons of the pub decided to give him what for, which caused their neighbors to conclude much the same. This chain proceeded ad nauseum, and in short order the whole pub was engaged in the resultant brawl, spare three people: Angel, who was not enjoying her first time in a pub at all; the bartender, who was valiantly defending the shelf of liquors behind him; and one lady several seats down who had eyes only for the on-going sportsball game and had literally pull herself up onto the bar to sit cross-legged below the TV in an attempt to better ignore the petty squabbling of man in favor of the game of champions being played out on the tele.
“Mama was right, Lew,” Angel whispered in shock and a dash of awe as she watched the entirety of the pub devolve into one grand melee. “Alcohol is the root of all evil.”
[Nah. It’s more of a ‘the chicken or the egg’ situation with OPEC and the liquefied remains of dead dinosaurs. Cool fight though. If I wasn’t literally in your head, I might have even been convinced you meant to start it.]
“Well shoot. I didn’t get him drunk, so I failed the case again!”
[Kid, he was already drunker than Esau.]
“Who?”
[Eh, it’s a Biblical thing. Also, getting someone drunk is only a sin if they’re under legal age, so your plan was doomed from the start.]
Angel was distraught over her plan not working and had just begun to debate how best to proceed when Rodger tripped over a felled basket of salted peanuts in such a spectacular fashion that his head smashed into the floor. This might not have been so bad for the fellow, since snapping one’s neck in a fall from standing height is ridiculously difficult to do, but this introduction of head to floor coincided with the sportsball team doing sportsball things and thus scoring a sportsball point. Somehow, despite the on-going bar fight, a good half the pub patrons noticed this sequence of sportsballing and began to celebrate uproariously, which resulted in Rodger’s body, in particular his head and neck, being trampled and mangled by a particularly weighty man standing over him to the point that Rodger gave up the ghost.
This was the point in the process where Angel’s ledger typically belched white smoke to signal she had screwed up the case, but to both her and Lew’s surprise, the smoke was actually black.
“Well that’s different,” Angel noted as she curiously examined the book while miraculously managing to avoid being caught up in turmoil around her.
[I don’t fucking believe it... You actually managed to corrupt the sonuvabitch in time!]
The demon ought not to have been so caught off guard by this result, given it is common knowledge that participating in a bar fight, food fight, or any deviation thereof is a sin of the highest order when wasted food is involved. The most famous example of someone being doomed to hell for squandering perfectly good food was when those twelve apostle fellows got all worked up over that Jesus guy predicting he would be betrayed and never finished the lovely feast that had been laid out for them, the selfish bastards—true story, ask your local Catholic cardinal. In this specific instance, the narrator definitely made a point to mention that Rodger knocked over his own mug of Red Cat when lunging into the fist fight that incited the general madness taking place in the pub—Go on and scroll back up. We’ll wait. See? Don’t you feel silly now?—and his beating that lady to a pulp probably wasn’t too good either. But really we all know it was spilling his drink that doomed him. It’s no use crying over spilled milk indeed!
“I did it?” Angel muttered in disbelief, the realization taking several long seconds to settle in. “I really did it! Hooray!”
Her cheering ended up blending in with the still on-going clamor about how sportsball is the sportsballsiest sport that ever did sport, and when she eventually left via portal—and none too soon, for the cops had shown up to investigate the whole ‘corpse in the middle of the room’ matter—it was with a renewed vigor.
She had successfully corrupted her first human! Only 625.74 tropical years to go.