Chapter Two [rough draft]
Now, I thought this over and realized it'd be a little hard to tell you the specifics of all this if you didn't even know the generalities. I mean, this all seems pretty darn normal to be. Daemons, angels, garbagemen and politicians; the same everyday Joe's on the streets. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that it is just a bit different, I guess you could say. So we're going to take a quick time-out while I let you in on some nice juicy secrets.
A long, long time ago, the Earth was created. No one knows how, really. All that hooplah about God alone spending seven days to make the trees and rivers and happy butterflies is a bunch of baloney. Maybe there was a Big Bang, or maybe it was just supposed to happen, but it's still all a mystery. Point is, we got a planet, and we got a God, and in the ultimate irony, we got a Satan. They built the world together. They even used to be buddies. I know a bunch of religious fanatics out there are going to be on my ass for saying that, but it's Hell's honest truth, plain and simple.
After all the bits and pieces were assembled, God and Satan decided that they didn't like eachother one whit anymore, and so they were going to fight over who got the Earth. Like two toddlers squabbling over a toy, they squabbled over the world. Neither of them won. It took a few thousand years for them to finally figure out that neither of them would ever win if they kept it up, so they made a gentlemanly agreement.
Thus, the Good-Bad Rule was created. Today we just call it The Rule.
It's simple, really. God can have his armies of angels, and Satan gets his hoards of daemons. Most of the time they'll leave the other alone and go about their own business. Obviously, though-- like I found out when Franky kicked the bucket-- something had to be done if one of them booted it. That was where The Rule came in.
In the untimely event that either God or Satan dies, the institution to which they belong-- Heaven or Hell, respectively-- has ten days in which to fill the empty position. Purgatory, the P.R. in-between for Earth's two kingdoms, helps out a little here. They're mostly in charge of the news, but just in case something like this happens, they also keep track of potential candidates. Time-consuming job, really. Some poor sap, probably a personnel manager just like me, gets to go around and keep a list of who'd make a good God or Satan if anything should happen. Then if The Rule has to be implemented, the even more pathetic sap-- in this case, moi-- has at least some semblance of a chance.
That's all fine and dandy, if it works. In all the bajillions of years since the Earth was created, we've managed to uphold the status quo. So far so good. But there's also a rule if the personnel manager fails; if no new ruler can be found, then the Earth defaults to whichever side still holds its ruler.
Say, for example, that Hank died. If I haven't mentioned it already-- and I probably forgot to-- God's name is Hank. Okay, so it's not. It's actually Henry, but we all call him Hank, even his angels, and it pisses him off something Satanawful. Rather funny, really. He has a mullet, too, which makes it even worse. Like those mullets you see on hockey fans in Canada. Big and foofy. I thought they were illegal; in fact, I think they are in the States, which maybe that's why Hank has been hiding out in Europe. There are all those stereotypes about Frenchies not shaving their armpits; maybe they don't mind mullets, either. Even shoulder-length stringy God mullets.
Hell, I get distracted easily. You have to remind me to stay on topic. Where was I? The Rule? Okay, so say that Hank dies. Ten days later, no new God. It'd mean that the world would fall into the nice grubby hands of Satan. Don't get so scared thinking about it; it wouldn't be all bad. Just a sort of sinful global warming. But if Satan were to die and God took over, can you imagine? All those happy people... all that sunshine and peace and love... the complete lack of lawyers and pimps and evil... all those mullets... it's too frightening of a prospect to think over for too long. I'm shaking right now, just thinking about it.
So anyway, that's The Rule. It sounds nice and reasonable, but let me tell you; it's fucking intimidating. I mean, what if I failed? What if I was the first personnel manager in all of the world's hundreds of thousands of millions of billions of years of existence to screw up and let it all go to default? What if... what if God got the world? Sheesh, talk about pressure.
Now you can understand why this was turning out to be such a bad day; bad also meaning terrible, catastrophic, Earth-shattering, Hell-raising, and Satandamn horrific. Me, little Cixer, the flighty, irresponsible personnel manager hired by Franky because I wore a miniskirt to my interview, me, the Queen of Procrastination and quite possibly one of the most spazzy daemons in hell-- damnit, I lost my train of thought again. It derailed somewhere in all that bitching and moaning.
I think that the original point to all that was that I was going to have to find a new Satan.
This wasn't going to be easy. Understatement of the day. The world is an awfully big place, and even with Purgatory's candidate list, it was going to take days of flying, hours of wheedling, and maybe a sexual favor or two for me to even begin to figure out who to pick. If some stranger were to come up to you and ask you to become the new Dark Lord of the Underworld, you'd laugh your ass off. I was anticipating a lot of laughing. Probably a lot of "This so-called daemon chick is off her rocker" looks, too.
And if that wasn't hard enough alone, I was going to have to deal with Hank's winged bitches. The last time he sent a delegation of angels to us it was because some dimwit-- okay, so we all paid him to try it, but that's not the point here-- tried to hack into Heaven's server. I think his name was Clay; "was" being the word of emphasis here. For all us calling them pansies, those angels are pretty tough. Clay screamed until they knocked him out and dragged him out of our office. I heard they took him back to Heaven, and for a daemon, that's the worst punishment of all.
I'd like to say that was the only reason I was nervous about the angels, but it's not.
If Hank was going to send angels to oversee The Rule, then he was going to send Angels. Archangels. The big, bad hands of God himself. And that meant Gabriel and Micheal. Gabe and Miche. If it were Gabriel alone I could handle this situation easy schmeesy. The man was an asshole and I'm a certified bitch, so we'd probably hate eachother and nothing more. But if Miche came then there, to state a cliche, would be Hell to pay. Why? Let's just say that I know what Miche looks like naked, and that I used to have a big fat rock on my finger, and we'll leave it at that for now. Don't ask questions.
Archangels were coming. The Rule was in effect. And now I had ten days to fight the angels off, to scour the Earth, to find my candidates and interview them all and somehow manage to convince one of them that they were Satan. The more I thought about my task, the more I wanted to die. But I was going to do it. Come Hell or high water, I was going to find Lucifer.
After much mental debate, right when I finally decided that I could do it, Isaac disturbed my dazed reverie with two words that, despite my resolve, I would have given anything not to hear.
"They're here."
And that's how all this began.
A long, long time ago, the Earth was created. No one knows how, really. All that hooplah about God alone spending seven days to make the trees and rivers and happy butterflies is a bunch of baloney. Maybe there was a Big Bang, or maybe it was just supposed to happen, but it's still all a mystery. Point is, we got a planet, and we got a God, and in the ultimate irony, we got a Satan. They built the world together. They even used to be buddies. I know a bunch of religious fanatics out there are going to be on my ass for saying that, but it's Hell's honest truth, plain and simple.
After all the bits and pieces were assembled, God and Satan decided that they didn't like eachother one whit anymore, and so they were going to fight over who got the Earth. Like two toddlers squabbling over a toy, they squabbled over the world. Neither of them won. It took a few thousand years for them to finally figure out that neither of them would ever win if they kept it up, so they made a gentlemanly agreement.
Thus, the Good-Bad Rule was created. Today we just call it The Rule.
It's simple, really. God can have his armies of angels, and Satan gets his hoards of daemons. Most of the time they'll leave the other alone and go about their own business. Obviously, though-- like I found out when Franky kicked the bucket-- something had to be done if one of them booted it. That was where The Rule came in.
In the untimely event that either God or Satan dies, the institution to which they belong-- Heaven or Hell, respectively-- has ten days in which to fill the empty position. Purgatory, the P.R. in-between for Earth's two kingdoms, helps out a little here. They're mostly in charge of the news, but just in case something like this happens, they also keep track of potential candidates. Time-consuming job, really. Some poor sap, probably a personnel manager just like me, gets to go around and keep a list of who'd make a good God or Satan if anything should happen. Then if The Rule has to be implemented, the even more pathetic sap-- in this case, moi-- has at least some semblance of a chance.
That's all fine and dandy, if it works. In all the bajillions of years since the Earth was created, we've managed to uphold the status quo. So far so good. But there's also a rule if the personnel manager fails; if no new ruler can be found, then the Earth defaults to whichever side still holds its ruler.
Say, for example, that Hank died. If I haven't mentioned it already-- and I probably forgot to-- God's name is Hank. Okay, so it's not. It's actually Henry, but we all call him Hank, even his angels, and it pisses him off something Satanawful. Rather funny, really. He has a mullet, too, which makes it even worse. Like those mullets you see on hockey fans in Canada. Big and foofy. I thought they were illegal; in fact, I think they are in the States, which maybe that's why Hank has been hiding out in Europe. There are all those stereotypes about Frenchies not shaving their armpits; maybe they don't mind mullets, either. Even shoulder-length stringy God mullets.
Hell, I get distracted easily. You have to remind me to stay on topic. Where was I? The Rule? Okay, so say that Hank dies. Ten days later, no new God. It'd mean that the world would fall into the nice grubby hands of Satan. Don't get so scared thinking about it; it wouldn't be all bad. Just a sort of sinful global warming. But if Satan were to die and God took over, can you imagine? All those happy people... all that sunshine and peace and love... the complete lack of lawyers and pimps and evil... all those mullets... it's too frightening of a prospect to think over for too long. I'm shaking right now, just thinking about it.
So anyway, that's The Rule. It sounds nice and reasonable, but let me tell you; it's fucking intimidating. I mean, what if I failed? What if I was the first personnel manager in all of the world's hundreds of thousands of millions of billions of years of existence to screw up and let it all go to default? What if... what if God got the world? Sheesh, talk about pressure.
Now you can understand why this was turning out to be such a bad day; bad also meaning terrible, catastrophic, Earth-shattering, Hell-raising, and Satandamn horrific. Me, little Cixer, the flighty, irresponsible personnel manager hired by Franky because I wore a miniskirt to my interview, me, the Queen of Procrastination and quite possibly one of the most spazzy daemons in hell-- damnit, I lost my train of thought again. It derailed somewhere in all that bitching and moaning.
I think that the original point to all that was that I was going to have to find a new Satan.
This wasn't going to be easy. Understatement of the day. The world is an awfully big place, and even with Purgatory's candidate list, it was going to take days of flying, hours of wheedling, and maybe a sexual favor or two for me to even begin to figure out who to pick. If some stranger were to come up to you and ask you to become the new Dark Lord of the Underworld, you'd laugh your ass off. I was anticipating a lot of laughing. Probably a lot of "This so-called daemon chick is off her rocker" looks, too.
And if that wasn't hard enough alone, I was going to have to deal with Hank's winged bitches. The last time he sent a delegation of angels to us it was because some dimwit-- okay, so we all paid him to try it, but that's not the point here-- tried to hack into Heaven's server. I think his name was Clay; "was" being the word of emphasis here. For all us calling them pansies, those angels are pretty tough. Clay screamed until they knocked him out and dragged him out of our office. I heard they took him back to Heaven, and for a daemon, that's the worst punishment of all.
I'd like to say that was the only reason I was nervous about the angels, but it's not.
If Hank was going to send angels to oversee The Rule, then he was going to send Angels. Archangels. The big, bad hands of God himself. And that meant Gabriel and Micheal. Gabe and Miche. If it were Gabriel alone I could handle this situation easy schmeesy. The man was an asshole and I'm a certified bitch, so we'd probably hate eachother and nothing more. But if Miche came then there, to state a cliche, would be Hell to pay. Why? Let's just say that I know what Miche looks like naked, and that I used to have a big fat rock on my finger, and we'll leave it at that for now. Don't ask questions.
Archangels were coming. The Rule was in effect. And now I had ten days to fight the angels off, to scour the Earth, to find my candidates and interview them all and somehow manage to convince one of them that they were Satan. The more I thought about my task, the more I wanted to die. But I was going to do it. Come Hell or high water, I was going to find Lucifer.
After much mental debate, right when I finally decided that I could do it, Isaac disturbed my dazed reverie with two words that, despite my resolve, I would have given anything not to hear.
"They're here."
And that's how all this began.