[ pm ] A wish? What wish? [...] Wait, that was YOU? How did you not know that damn werewolf was talking about /me/?
[pm] She didn’t use names! She just said there was someone she wanted to seek vengeance on. And I was feeling peckish, Levi! No one is reading into things like that when they’re feeling snacky!
[ pm ] Went about as good as I expected, I guess. Which is to say not perfectly, but it's fine. Enough for now, anyway.
Huh. I /also/ ran into a drunk mara recently. While I was... trying to figure out how to make myself some opposable thumbs.
[pm] That’s good, isn’t it? Are you, like [...] fishier now?
Well, the one I ran into was a total dick. Who tried to fight me! After I tried to fight him. And I maybe compelled him a little bit. [...] You have opposable thumbs now, don’t you? You’re not typing this with your tail or something?
Participants: Levi (Eliott-Human?), Clay Hale (Tapir-Hunter)
Location: Coast
Summary: Following rumors at Finney Docks of strange rituals and lights in a storm-wracked cove, Clay tracks down Levi doing that occult stuff heavy metal fans are into. y’know?
Content Warnings: Some gore and gun use
The constellation of Cetus had burned bright in the sky as the storm came with unnatural suddenness, breaking over White Crest’s harbor’s like iron being pulled by some sort of magnet. Old salts knew these waters were cursed, though few ever spoke candidly of the things they’d seen in the mists. The most observant also knew that Clay Hale was one of those grim sorts who tended to show up whenever rumors start circulating on the docks about dead sailors who don’t stay drowned. When this storm breaking from a cloudless sky began to be mentioned alongside half-sober stories of seaside rituals, the old timers weren’t overly surprised when Clay arrived with questions and favors to call in.
Clay had beheaded quite a few unmentionable problems that’d crawled in with the tide over this past year. None of his past clients at the docks could ever admit to what Clay had helped them with exactly and Slayer didn’t force anyone to relive those morbid tragedies. He simply nodded amiably when fishers gave clean reasonable sounding explanations for what’d happened that neither of them actually believed. In return for his unacknowledged help and merciful lies, Clay was put on a trail of “well I know a guy who said his friend saw” that eventually led him out along the stormy coast towards a cove on the far side of Hanging Rock.
Wind screamed over the rocks as Clay descended down a trail cut into the rocky bluffs. The dark surf thrashed below him, slamming into the shore in a rush of roaring noise and white foam. Lightning lanced down in brilliant arcs over the stormy sea, each flash followed by a deep drum roll of thunder. The wet wind seemed to rip the breath out of his lungs and there were several points where Clay needed to flatten himself against the buff stones and gasp at their slick sharp edges to avoid being blown off his balance on the ledge. By the time he’d finally descended Hanging Rock down into this shadowed cove, even Clay’s thick storm gear had been pulverized till it’d been soaked through to his clammy cold skin.
The surf became a more distant roar as Clay dropped down within one of the two demilune wings of the cove. His boots sank into the sand as Clay shielded his eyes to see the curved inlets of barnacle-encrusted rock that sheltered this tiny little bay against the worst of the storm. The Slayers eyes, adapted to see even in this dark tumult, saw a cave at the nadir of the cove’s half circle.
Huh. The guys at the pub had been right. It did kinna look like a toothy lantern fish mouth if you squinted.
Clay turned his back to the storm and descended into the damp darkness of the coastal cave.
If summoning lesser demons without their names was this fucking complicated, Levi shuddered to think what it must have been like for the humans that had summoned it. After all, Leviathan wasn’t its original name and would be of little help in the way of summoning it, so the ex-demon could only imagine what an undertaking it had been for the group to slurp a greater demon right out of its fucking dimension.
The memories still left it bitter, because for all the good things that had come from being human for a year and however many months, it was maddening to know that it could just be forcibly removed from its home and stuffed into the nearest dead guy. How was that fair? Who the hell was going to serve time for that interdimensional kidnapping? The more it stewed, the angrier it got, until it came to the current conclusion that the only way to relieve some of that tension was to chip away at its little ankle biter problem. Hence the massive summoning circle that’d been scribbled on the cave floor, along with all other kinds of demonic and occult symbols scratched here and there. Since Levi didn’t really know the specifics of what it was doing, it figured that covering all of its bases would be easiest. The same logic was applied to the spoken words, though in this case, the ex-demon didn’t require a book to tell it what to say. There were many different methods for summoning lesser demons, and while it had a tendency to vary from demon to demon, speaking in their own abyssal tongue definitely helped in casting a wider net. As always, the most important aspect was intent.
A handful of candles lit the otherwise pitch-black cavern, flickering in the wind that blew in from the mouth but refusing to go out. It could hear the storm that raged outside, no doubt a result of the energies it was drawing from as it searched for those tethers, ready to snatch them from the void and rip the demons from their homes just as it had been—honestly, it was pretty cathartic. Two bodies were already slumped off to the side of the summoning circle, their eyes melted from their skulls, mouths agape in horror. Two down, about five dozen to go, Levi thought to itself with an irritated sigh. This had already taken several days, and it was fucking hungry. Some greasy diner food sounded a-fuckin’-plus, but it had to get at least one more. Just one.
Still chanting, Levi almost didn’t hear the scuff of boots and clatter of pebbles dislodged as someone else entered the cave. Brows furrowed, it was about to stop the ritual when it felt that familiar tug, times four. Four?! Four right fucking now?! Equally as stubborn as it was pissed that it was about to be interrupted, the ex-demon persisted with the ritual, keeping one eye on the gentle slope up that led to the mouth of the cave. One by one, it ensnared the lesser demons, reaching out with its physical hand to grab something unseen and give it a forceful yank, birthing them from thin air and dropping them into the center of the circle.
To its left, the intruder had now gotten close enough to see what was happening. Whether or not they understood what they were seeing was unknown to Levi, but it couldn’t start to worry about that. It had other things to worry about, like the four lesser demons that were stirring to life and no doubt ready to fight.
While Clay wasn’t a sorcerer, the natural course of his work had led him to so many summonings, conjurrings, evocations, and bloody rites that now even his muggle eyes could recognize a few common symbols for “Satan-Go-Vroom-Vroom.”
So when Clay’s descent down the sloping jaws of the cave took him into the candlelit hollow, a glance at the gesturing stranger, sigils set on damp stone, and amorphous forms writhing into alien shapes in the center of a circle, told the Hunter everything he thought he needed know.
“Hey Chad-Faustus,” Clay shouted as he unslung a rifle from his shoulder and ripped the gun slicker off it. “Gonna need you to get the hell out for a sec before the baby satans eat you.”
As much as Levi must have looked like a big bumbling idiot that had gotten in over his head (which to be fair, was not terribly far from the truth), the same could be said from the aberration’s perspective as a human wandered into the cave, whipped out a rifle without a second thought, and made a comment about satan. Levi furrowed its brow, ending the ritual and getting up from where it had been sitting, gaze still trained on the four beasts inside the circle. The gun screamed intent—this guy had come here on purpose, summoned by a feeling or word of mouth, which would indicate that he was either a moron or someone who was actually equipped for taking out demons. Seeing as how it was safest to bet on the latter and act accordingly, Levi leaned into the human’s apparent assumption that it had no fucking clue what it was doing, hands raised defensively as it stepped away from the circled and feigned horror.
Hopefully the stranger wouldn’t notice the two corpses in the corner just yet, or the ruse would all be for naught.
“Oh, shit!” it yelped, drawing the knife it’d klepped from Emilio. The demons wheezed and writhed, coming to in much the same way that Levi had—dazed, confused, and angry. A snarling started up as Levi moved around the perimeter of the circle, sneaking a glance at the newcomer. “You sure, man? I can help!”
Some people had very esoteric means of dealing with the supernatural or favored meeting the enemy head on in valorous combat. Clay, who didn’t have a faintest drop of magical or noble blood in his veins, preferred the more proletariat approach of sending chunks of metal through paranormals bodies at a velocity of five thousand feet per second until they stopped moving.
“How,” the Slayer asked, before the rifle's retort echoed through the cave, a brief whipcrask of sound and light that was swallowed by the rull roar of the storm outside. A writhing form staggered in spray of nauseous flesh and ichor, but a malevolent sense of purpose drew the chimeric forms towards Clay, who’d presented himself as an obvious threat.
Just like always, the ego was the first thing to get in the way of plans, carefully laid or otherwise. While this was an ‘otherwise’ situation, Levi found itself immediately put off by the human’s biting remark. Watching the first demon’s head cave in from the blast, Levi frowned and crossed its arms over its chest. “What, no ‘stay out of this, don’t get hurt’? Damn, that’s cold. What if I really was just an idiot?” Offended by the lack of care, Levi elected to drop all pretense and just let the guy do whatever he was gonna do.
The three remaining demons howled and lunged for Clay, who seemed well equipped to take care of them himself. Figuring as much, and with a heaping side of ‘I don’t give a shit’, Levi turned its back to the scene and moved toward the two carcasses that it had been worried about blowing its cover with only moments prior. The tip of Emilio’s blade dug into the first aberration’s sternum, ripping down toward its stomach. The ruckus behind it drew a curious eye, but as its help was so unwanted, Levi made no move to lend a hand. Instead, it buried that hand deep in the guts of the hellspawn, fishing around for something before pulling a small, stone-like object free. Rubbing it between its thumb and index finger, Levi smiled.
“Hey, you about done over there?” it called over its shoulder, shoving the corpse aside to repeat the process on the second one.
“Yup,” pronounced Clay, now reeking of otherworldly fluids as well as brine. The whites of the hunter’s eyes shone stark against in the lightning flashes outside, contrasted against the Jackson Pollock disaster of violets, greens and other colors of demonic ichor that Earth had no name for staining his already sodden clothes. Looking like he’d just survived a gory crossover between Alien and Willy Wonka, Clay sheathed and holstered the various blades and small arms that he’d employed when the melee came too close for rifles to be practical.
Clay descended the sea caverns incline towards Levi, eyes scanning the ritual site before he knelt down amidst the carnage. “You kill awfully well for someone who braingasmed off a Behemoth album,” the hunter noted as he retrieved a vial from somewhere under his jacket and began scooping demon ichor into it.
“What, is demon slaughter reserved for fans of a different flavor of metal? My mistake,” Levi retorted, pulling the second stone free and wiping it off with its shirt before stuffing it in its pocket. Curiosity got the better of it and it watched the human collect the ichor with a tilted head, gaze jumping from the vial to the man’s face.
“What’s that good for? Other than making you stink like a sewage treatment facility, I mean.” If the guy was collecting samples like Levi, that probably meant this far from his first tango with extra-dimensional beings. He’d probably be a good person to know… either to get information out of or know to avoid like the plague.
“That’s fair didn’t mean to gatekeep the Faustus buyers regret,” assented Clay. A flick of brown eyes noticed his companion pocketing another stone. Clay affected being completely absorbed in stoppering up sample vials of blood and sawing off chunks of chucks of bizarre flesh to place in canvas game bags, as if the demons were just a deer being field dressed.
“What can be tested, can be understood, and what can be understood…,” Clay shrugged off the sinister end of that mantra. “Just easier to protect against y'know,” he finished with a more casual tone, “Bill Nye shit.”
“So. Why’d you do it?”
Mm. This was leaning more toward ‘avoid’ the more the guy said. “Bill Nye shit, right,” Levi parroted him, wiping its hands on its jeans. “Lemme know if you find a consistent way to kill these fuckers, then. Sometimes it’s a real bitch, as you know.”
Ah. Why? Thinking back to the man’s Faustus comment, Levi smirked. “Well it certainly wasn’t because a devil deal gone wrong, I’ll say that much,” it chuckled. Hard to make those when you were the devil. Not impossible, though, which was something Levi was slowly coming to grips with. “More of a… get them before they get me kinda situation, you know? Eternal life spans really lend themselves to being huge grudge-holders.”
“Killing extraplanar gribblies isn’t the priority,” Clay said as he rose to his feet. While the adrenaline rush of the fight trickled out of him, the cold was making itself known again. There was an ache like icicles had been shoved into his bones. His sudden skin was becoming numb and his fingers were quickly losing dexterity with these vials. “It’s about evening the playing field,” said the Hunter, whose predecessors had perhaps also eagerly embraced each new scientific innovation in hope of casting down the hungry gods of old.
“While I’m not usually a huge fan of people of skullfucking reality full of holes,” Clay said, “I could help you with this grudge if it’ll get you to stop doing whatever the hell this was.”
Levi was, understandably, not a huge fan of the idea of said playing field being leveled. But then again, these mooks were all lesser demons. Peons. Surely there was nothing one hunter could do to raise himself to the heights of greater demons, no genophage he could create to wipe them out… it was preposterous. Once Levi was restored to his former self, he would have nothing to fear of this meddler.
“Right, well, best of luck to you,” it grumbled, sounding less than pleased. “And I’m going to have to keep doing ‘whatever the hell this was’ if I want to deal with the grudge, so… I don’t really understand what you’re offering, bro.” Getting to its feet, Levi stared down at the corpses that littered the cave floor. It could leave them here to rot, but that’d make the place stinky, and this turned out to be an excellent cave for rituals. No one wants to perform rituals in a stinky cave. Hooking its arms beneath the… oddly bent limbs..? of the demon it had just been elbow-deep in, Levi hoisted the carcass up to drag it up the slope. “Gonna dump these in the water. Wanna grab one?”
Clay rolled his eyes as he dragged a thing that looked like a praying mantis had hatesex with lamprey out of the cavern. He flinched as the storm’s fury hit him. Wind screamed in wobbling whistles off the jagged rocks. The fourteen stars of the Cetus constellation blazed bright against the brooding turmoil of the dark sky, though how they shone through the storm clouds Clay couldn’t say.
Clay dragged the demon corpse across the sodden sand, learning against the buffeting wind and squinting his eyes against the sting of sea spray. Strange prismatic fluids left a ichorous trail across the beach sand behind Clay , but the demon blood was soon swallowed by the raging elements. Waiting until the latest wave had finished crashing over the barnacle encrusted promontory that served as this little bay’s shelter against the tides, Clay heaved the alien body into the watery darkness.
“I mean,” Clay tried against wearily when they had returned to the shelter of the crave. “That with some help maybe you’ll be able to stop doing this sooner.”
Two of six taken care of. Should have been less greedy and stopped trying to summon them after the first two, Levi thought to itself, cursing its momentary lapse of patience. As they trekked back to the cave, it pushed the hair from its face that’d been whipped up by the wind and rain, scowling at the remaining corpses on the ground.
“Oh. Gotcha.” Stooping down to gather the next one in its arms bridal-style, it turned to Clay and waited for him to grab another as well. “... I’ve got a lot of enemies, man. I don’t think there’s any way of doing this that’s gonna be quick.” Of course it would be if Levi still had its powers instead of this measly connection to its home dimension, but if that was the case, it wouldn’t have to bother with a shitload of cranky lesser demons. “You’re probably better off just letting me handle it.”
Another trip into the stormy darkness later and Clay's dark hair was a sodden mess against his skull. Not even his formidable cowlick could save Clay from the drowned rat now. Suppressing the urge to strangle the obstinate ritualist with in his clammy cold hands, Clay consoled himself with the certain knowledge that if he died of mega-pneumonia tomorrow he’d arise as a memey sea-ghost that’d eternally shit brine all over Faustus’ leather jackets.
“Look Von Goethe,” Clay said, “If you fuck up that means that this town has a new demon problem. I don’t care how hot shit you think you are, I’d rather help you deal with this now then have to shoot your xenomorph chest burster babies later.”
Rolling its eyes, Levi gave a grunt of distaste as it picked up the second to last corpse. “Fine, man, whatever. I’ll make sure to hit you up the next time I start plucking demon cherries off the dimensional tree. Happy?” Hauling the final bodies outside and dumping them unceremoniously into the surf, Levi gave an upward glance at the angry, rolling clouds that’d seen fit to unleash Poseidon's fury upon them. Nevermind that it was almost certainly the aberration’s doing.
“It’s been real, but I’m gonna go clean the Luci goo out from under my nails and get some food. Fucking starving.” Giving a half-hearted two-finger salute, Levi turned on its heel to leave. Its immediate reaction was to absolutely never reach out to the guy, but maybe he would prove useful in a pinch. There was plenty of time to find out.
[ pm ] [ user has a REALLY BAD TIME WHICH YEAH. WAS THE OPPOSITE OF THE GOAL. ]
No game. Never mind.
[pm] No. No, you’re not coming in here like that after all the shit and then running away with your damn tail in between your legs. I heard you’re getting a good dose of all my shit now, ¿verdad? So, what, you want to try to make it less? To make it easier on you? You’re not any less of a piece of shit than you were a week ago.
[...] Where did he die? Where did you kill my friend, pedazo de mierda? Tell me that much.
If you miss 'em so much, maybe you'd better run on back home.
What is this, some kind of fucking taunt? You goddamn- You’re a fucking prick. Is this really- ¿Quieres morir? Yeah, well, I got something I gotta take care of here in town. Pest control situation.
[ pm ] Just name the time and place. [...] And hey, uh, if a really angry looking Mexican fella ever starts walking your way, just get out of there, okay?
[pm] Well, the boat was certainly a fun backdrop, wasn’t it? [...] I make it a rule to always steer clear of angry people, but this seems oddly specific. Should I be concerned about something here?
