Interlude - Happy Thoughts (1/2)

“Alright, Koralenteprix,” called out Juan. “It’s about time for another detox session, so get our patient ready, will you?”

“... Sure,” came the dispirited response from the demon in question.

“Well, you don’t seem very cheerful today.”

“Yeah, not for nothing, Chief, but why did you go ahead and give me all this power if all I’m going to do is be a damn nursemaid?”

Having all this energy and strength at her fingertips and yet being unable to unleash it was way more frustrating than Kora had initially anticipated. Sure, she had a fun bout of ‘slap-the-bitch’ at the start, but ever since Boxxy left the tasks that Bellamy had her perform just seemed way too… mundane.

This feeling of disappointment was only made worse by the realization that Kora’s current godlike power and stature would be very much temporary. Once this whole rehabilitation thing was done, she’d return back to being a regular familiar, which meant that her strength would rely entirely on her summoner’s power. Sure, she would still be an Archfiend like her uncle and would therefore be stronger, faster, tougher and more versatile than before, but it would still be incomparable to her current state.

However, becoming powerful enough to easily surpass Nagnamor without Dick’s assistance would be more or less impossible. Even getting up to the level of the Overlord was out of the question, as that guy had millennia at his disposal to grow and develop his might, both physical and intellectual. It would be many centuries still before Kora herself could reach such heights, if at all.

“Because your charge is a fuck-mothering Goddess,” answered the Goddess of Misfortune. “Trust me on this, kiddo, even if it feels like a waste, there’s no such thing as ‘being too careful’ when dealing with the divines. It’s like, how did you yourself so eloquently put it? ‘There’s no kill quite like overkill?’ Think of it like that.”

“Ugh, whatever. I’ll just go get the bitch, shall I?”

“Please do,” said Billy with a nod of his porcupine and a wry smile on his wrist.

Kora got off her massive ass and stood up in the seemingly endless white space that was Elmer’s divine area. She stretched a bit to limber up her stiff-yet-bursting-with-power body. Being forced to temporarily live here felt like a privilege at first, but she quickly realized there was nothing to really do but watch the Boxxy Show alongside Keith. In some ways, it was even duller than being stuck in the Beyond since she couldn’t socialize with other demons, but she had no choice in the matter. She loved being an Archfiend, and Henrietta had threatened to demote her down to imp level unless she did exactly as she was told.

After warming up a bit, Kora disappeared with a rush of air as the Goddess of Uncertainty kept sitting on her sofa, watching her Hero. The titanic Archfiend dashed up, down and all around the divine area until she located its other temporary resident, grabbed her by the ankle, then dragged her kicking and screaming back towards where Randall was. Hearing that bitch Teresa wail desperately as she was being manhandled like a sack of old potatoes was pretty fun for the demon at first, but by now her crying had simply become pathetic and annoying. Angela had at least given Kora permission to be ‘as rough as needed’ with the Goddess, which meant it was okay to kick her in the head whenever she felt like it.

Even if this was ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘for her own good,’ Teresa still had to pay for disrespecting her divine duties. There could be no justice without punishment, after all.

“Here she is, Chief,” reported Kora once she appeared back at her starting position.

“No! No!” pleaded Teresa as she clawed desperately at the perfectly smooth floor. “Isn’t it enough?! Please, no more! I’m begging you, I can’t take any more of this! I need to hear my followers again! I need to! Please!”

Step one of Teresa’s rehabilitation plan involved, for lack of a better word, god-napping her and quite literally imprisoning her within Jerome’s divine area. That way she would be cut off completely from the stream of prayers, worship and religious offerings that her followers presented her with on a regular basis. Needless to say, being suddenly cut off like that had caused Teresa to enter a state of withdrawal, which was what led to her current pitiable behavior. However, this part was absolutely necessary if the core issue at hand was to be resolved.

“Koralenteprix, is Teresa wearing her robes again?” asked Dexter without even looking back.

“Yup,” confirmed Kora, causing the God of Probability to sigh heavily.

“Well, you know what to do.”

The fiend roughly threw Teresa onto the ground, kicked her lightly to flip her on her back and then straddled her legs.

“No! Noooooo!”

Ignoring her complaints, the red-skinned demon restrained the flailing deity’s hands with one of her own, then proceeded to strip her naked with practiced ease. The silky white robe was ripped to shreds while the golden jewelry, sandals and tiara were roughly taken off and mangled into a big lump, which was then haphazardly tossed to the side. It didn’t take more than a few seconds for Teresa to be left completely naked, curled up into a fetal position and sobbing uncontrollably.

“I’ll say it again, dearie,” Vanessa yelled without looking away from her screen, “those trappings of power do not fit your image at all. How can you hope to be a legitimate beacon of truth without being able to bare yourself fully before others?”

One could argue that ‘baring oneself’ was meant to be taken figuratively rather than literally, but that was only when it came to simpler, more mortal creatures. As amalgamations of thoughts, wishes and ideas, the difference between metaphors and reality was paper thin as far as divine beings were concerned.

“Alright, might as well get started. Koralenteprix, please assume the position.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

The fiend picked the sobbing goddess off the ground and dragged her up onto her knees. She forced the naked Teresa to bend over forward while holding her hands behind her back. Kora then stared hard at one of her right hands until the Demonic Armament protecting it suddenly split apart and fell off her skin. Doing so made her hand feel a bit itchy, but it couldn’t be helped since the gauntlet would get in the way otherwise. Besides, it would ‘grow back’ on its own soon enough, so there were no problems with exposing her hand like that. Finally, she placed said hand onto the back of the Goddess’s head and pressed firmly against her flowing gold locks, firmly grasping her skull with her oversized palm.

In the meantime, Terence had gotten his creme brulee off the couch and was calmly climbing up an invisible spiral staircase. When he got up to the much larger deity’s eye level, he stopped going upwards and walked horizontally over thin air as he approached her head.

“Really, Chief?” asked the demon, puzzled. “Why not just teleport to the spot like you normally do?”

“Variety is the spice of life, kiddo. If you don’t mix up your routine every now and then you’re bound to grow so bored of it you’d end up going nuts.”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

Pablo then stepped off of his imaginary catwalk and onto the back of Kora’s bare hand. He picked out what seemed like a good spot and sat his sharks down on her rough red skin.

“I’ll be starting now, Teresa.”

“No! Please, don’t!”

His warning caused the Goddess to reflexively struggle, followed by another round of pleading. Fortunately for her, she was not only removed from the source of her divine power, but also had her head, shoulders and arms firmly restrained by Kora. The only thing her futile struggling did was cause her naked breasts to sway gently, which would not disturb the following ritual in any way.

“Sorry about this,” muttered Casey. “You’ll probably thank me later.”

In the next instant, the God of Mishaps channeled his own divine power through Kora’s hand and into the back of Teresa’s head while repeatedly chanting ‘akuryo taisan.’

“Hack! Urk!”

The Goddess began choking and gagging in response, which soon turned to dry heaving. And then, after another 20 or 30 seconds, she started throwing up. A viscous black ooze that wriggled unnaturally all on its own fell out of her mouth in thick globs, forming a messy pile onto the pure white ground.

“Right, that’s enough for now, methinks,” declared Gilbert after Teresa had retched up a total of 13 globs of supernatural vomit.

He then stood up from Kora’s backhand and briskly walked off of it. Since the detox session was done for the moment, the fiend threw the pale and extremely weakened Goddess off to the side, well away from her ‘leavings.’ Lacking the strength to do something as cumbersome as controlling her limbs, Teresa merely flopped over on her side like a dead fish. If things proceeded as normal, she would get back up in about five or ten minutes and run off somewhere in a delirium. And then, three hours after that, she would have stabilized enough for another detox session.

“So what do we have this time?” mused Neal as he stared intently at the haystack-sized pile of godly vomit. “Hmm, lot of hatred in there. It’s almost completely filled with hatred actually, apart from a bit of pride and some resentment. Bit of jealousy too.”

While it could be said that a believer’s devotion, piety and respect for a God served as the deity’s ‘food,’ not all mortals had happy-go-lucky sentiments like those towards the Gods. Anger, hatred, disappointment, sadness, grief, revenge, desperation, loneliness - any and all such negative emotions also ended up being transmitted to their deities, though they rarely did so on purpose. If allowed to build up and fester within them, it could lead to the deity in question being ‘poisoned’ by their influence. That was why Kevin was so adamant about avoiding blaspheme, as expressing disdain towards a God, especially in public, was one of the main sources of thought-poisoning.

And should the thought-poisoning get out of hand, it would start gradually changing a God and twisting them away from their original purpose. The corruption would then trickle down to the deity’s most devout followers and adamant supporters, which would in turn infect the population at large and bounce all the way back to the God. It was a downward spiral that, if left unattended, could pervert the deity and the virtues and concepts he or she embodied. And the worst part of that scenario was that the divine beings themselves would not notice the change until it was too late.

“I really should have seen this coming,” Alberto chastised himself. “That Empire’s propensity for conflict, bigotry and treachery coupled with her corrupt clergy should have really tipped me off about her condition sooner.”

Indeed, this thought-poisoning phenomenon was one of the main reasons why Teresa had strayed from her path and was slowly but surely turning into her polar opposite - a Goddess of Lies and Evil.

“What?” asked Kora with a raised eyebrow. “You mean she wasn’t like that before?”

“Well no, she was always an insufferable, stuck-up bitch, but at least she was genuine and trustworthy. It wasn’t until about 1,200 years ago that she started skirting the rules and playing favorites with her Heroes, but our… bumpy relationship kept me from recognizing the signs. Heh, if it wasn’t for Boxxy’s, uh, ‘people skills’ rubbing off on me, I probably still wouldn’t have realized how far she was gone…”

“Uuugh,” groaned Teresa, as she gradually lifted her upper half off the floor.

She looked about in a drowsy state, her eyes settling on the mass of lumpy black goo on the nearby floor.

“Th-that… Did that come out of me?!”

“Oh? Now this is promising!” exclaimed Troy. “Finally regained enough of your senses to face your inner demons?”

*Snap*

The God of Luck snapped his shoes, causing the mass of lumpy black goo to oscillate in response. It steadily shrunk down as it vibrated, compressing itself until it adopted a vaguely humanoid form a little over two meters tall, adopting a distinctly feminine shape as it solidified further. A shape with shiny brown skin, a massive underbite, two rows of beady eyes, a pair of twin axes in her hands and heavy gladiator-like armor covering both shoulders and arms. Her body was extremely well toned, and her pitch-black hair was tied up in a wild ponytail, while a single onyx horn jutted out from the left side of her forehead.

“Well, outer demons now, to be precise,” said Jerome with a wry smile.

Both Kora and Teresa were taken aback by this sudden revelation.

“W-was that thing inside me?!”

“Damn. And here I was hoping to be the first one to get all up in that bitch’s guts, but I guess someone else beat me to it, huh?”

“I think I misspoke,” interjected Stephen. “What you saw earlier was the concentrated negativity of mortals, which had attached itself to Teresa’s being. This child was simply born from that.”

As if on cue, the newly created fiend that had been standing upright keeled over and fell on the ground, her limbs twitching slightly against the white surface.

“... Born?” asked the giant women in unison.

“Yup. What you witnessed just now was the birth of a brand new demonic entity.”

“Hold on a second there, Chief! Are you telling me all of demonkind started out as god-puke?!”

“Of course not, don’t be silly!” replied Johnny in a scolding tone. “Most of you are born from the residual sinister thoughts of mortals that got caught by the Beyond, well before they could reach and infect a divine being. Heck, most of those thoughts don’t even come from people, but from monsters. I mean, the whole point of that place is to serve as a lightning rod for that stuff, a filter if you will.”

“Soooo… What? We just… randomly pop up out of thin air?”

“More or less. You probably don’t want to hear this, but the fact that demons exist at all is something of an accident. I never intended for consciousness to flourish in that cesspit I created, and yet here you are - defying all logic and spitting right in the face of my divine design! The mind-boggling fact that all of you kids even exist is the whole reason why I’m so proud of you, you know!”

“Oh… Uh, thanks, I guess? What about me, though?”

“What about you?”

“I mean, do you know where specifically I came from?”

“Hmmm… I can’t be sure, but if I had to take an educated guess based on your appearance, then you’re probably the result of the Elven Dominion’s collapse. More specifically the hatred and anger that subsequent generations of elven slaves felt towards their human masters. And given your womanly disposition, I’m guessing it was mostly female sex slaves.”

“What, really?”

“Yup, your age fits. Not to mention it would explain those predominantly elfin ears and attractive features, not to mention why you’re considerably more, uh, intellectually challenged than your average fiend. I can’t imagine those slavers demanding that their fuck toys be intelligent. Quite the opposite, actually.“

“Huh. I guess that does make sense. I always wondered how come I got an unexpected boner from emasculating those slavers while the Boss was looking for a lair.”

“Yeees… quite. Well, I better send this child on her way so she can learn how to demon properly.”