Page 20 of Winners, Losers, and Champagne Kisses
“Um, why are you playing chess with the adversary?” Michael asked.
“Because shit’s fucked and we’re trying to fix it,” Satan said. “It was fun when I thought I was torturing people who did bad things, but now that I know a lot of people ended up herebecause they felt guilty about not calling their moms, it doesn’t spark joy anymore. I changed how I was doing things.”
“How were you doing things?” I asked.
“Obviously, this is a punishment afterlife. Everyone is given the choice to torture someone or be tortured. If you pick torture because you don’t want to be tortured, then that’s your torture. If you pick it because you’re a sadist and think you’ll enjoy it, then surprise. You’ve got a manager who tells you how to do it and it becomes a job you hate. That’s their torture. The people who opt not to torture anyone is pretty self explanatory.”
“I could see a poetry to that if death didn’t work the way it did,” I said.
“I know, right?” Satan moaned. “I was super proud of that system. I might be the devil, but I’m not evil. My crossroads demons aren’t out there seeking people out to corrupt them. It’s only peoplelookingto make deals. Hey, are you still pretending to be me?”
“It has its benefits,” Lucifer sniffed. “Don’t you judge, either.”
“I wasn’t. Satan and I have been trying to figure out how to get the souls who don’t belong here where they should be. Ideally, I’d like to get the bad people out of my realm, but that isn’t exactly possible.”
“Yes, it is,” Michael said. “There are basically three factions of angels right now. The two fighting against each other and the archangels who are trying to stop it. One faction painted a sigil that banishes gods literally everywhere and the others have no desire to have it removed just yet because they think certain choirs need to be wiped from existence before you come home.
“The archangels have been removing the symbols, but there’s so few of us and some have been looking foryou.We got captured before we could erase all of them. We were tortured for centuries. They are doingallof this because they want yourattention. Are you killing female archangels?” Michael blurted out.
“No. I’d welcome them. If anyone was hurting archangels, it wasn’t under my orders. As you know, some of the other angels had an agenda that wasn’t mine. What do you need me to do? I can’t exactly show up and sayHi, I’m God, behave.The angels don’t know my face and the humans would think I needed to be medicated. It never works like that in real life.”
If only. We tended to make shit worse when we got involved. We’d all been around long enough to understand people a little better and gain more self awareness. It was why most of us who still lived on this realm flew under the radar.
Yeah, we did a pretty great thing coming together to get the Coalition outlawed, and wewantedthe angels to come, but there was probably a whole hot mess of things we’d set in motion. We needed Yahweh to rein in the angels, but I definitely didn’t want to trot him out and have him tell everyone to leave supernaturals alone. I just knew that would go ass up. We had him, but we didn’t actually have a plan.
“I was held captive with the faction of angels who set the humans on the supernaturals. They literally started that because they thought wherever you ended up, it would get your attention. I don’t thinkanyonewould have guessed you were going to end up playing chess with the adversary to figure out how to fix the system and didn’t know about any of this. I don’t think you should appear to the mortals and they never actually said what they would do when they saw you again, but they hurt countless innocents to force you to make yourself known. The least you could do is respond,” Michael said.
“Yes. I can and should do that, but you should know that if all the angels are mad at me, the civil war could spill onto Earth and I can’t exactly bring it back home with that sigil.”
“You’re forgetting something,” Lucifer said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a power you were self actualized with and have always hated using.”
“You want me to smite them.”
Lucifer just shrugged.
“Just the mouthy ones. The rest of them will fall in line. They are doing this shit because they aren’t properly scared of you.”
“You were a mouthy, little shit who rebelled and started a civil war and I didn’t smiteyou.”
“That’s because deep down, you knew I was right. I asked for the same rights as people on Earth and you refused. When I got banished, Inevertwisted your message to turn humans against innocents. All I did was enjoy myself and capitalize on the villainyoulet them turn me into. Please tell me you see how what they did was worse.”
I mean, Lucifer had a point. He was a dick most of the time andrelishedthe whole ‘fallen angel’ thing. When he was pretending to be Satan, he traded in favors, not souls. Like, he’d do something for someone and usually got a nice house or a new yacht out of it. He was also a pretty big patron of the arts. He’d get people in front of galleries, recording studios, ballet companies, or casting directors in exchange for art work or tickets.
But he never twisted any religious message or tried to turn people against his father. If anyone asked, he never badmouthed him that much, either. And he could have. I personally wouldn’t have blamed him if he wanted to clear the air that he wasn’t the bad guy in the whole situation.
“Yes, I’m not stupid, Lucifer and I’ve changed a lot since the last time I saw you. I’ve changed a lot since I was banished, too. This needs to stop in both realms. Smiting is aterriblepower and if I have to use it, I will.”
Yeah, smiting was a terrible power, but it was also kind of cool if you didn’t abuse it like Zeus and his lightning bolts. We still didn’t have much in the way of a plan, but we’d located a missing god, so we had enough to formulate one.
We’d thrown a gauntlet. Benji had millions of followers and he gained more with all of this. One of his followers just so happened to be Pepper Crane, who was stuck in the house for her protection. She must have been bored, even with Lucky in the house, so she was puttering about online.
She saw Benji and Cas’s video and made sure it got blasted to anyone who might not have seen it. We expected them to respond with violence. But while we were waiting, I dragged Alecto to my bedroom because something was up with her.
“Seriously, what’s up?”
