“What is this s**t?” Gabriel asked, and rather loudly, as he stared at the TV pastor currently belting out a rather riveting speech concerning demons, hellfire and damnation. It was fairly typical, really, but his followers seemed entranced. Jamie looked up from her desk only enough to give the television a passing glance, then turned her attention back to the papers she was working on. “Religion,” she answered without much care for it.
The skin about Gabriel’s eyes wrinkled with the stress of not blinking but he didn’t seem to notice. The longer he stayed here on Earth with Jamie the more human he seemed to become, a fact she’d noticed but not yet dared to voice aloud for fear of his reaction. One finger pointed, flabbergasted, towards the television as his mouth speechlessly whilst searching for the proper words. “But he’s talking about Us!”
That certainly got the woman’s attention and she sat up, pulling her reading glasses from her nose as she regarded both her unwelcome bond-mate and the television set he was currently addicted to. After a moment of straining to hear what the preacher was saying, for Gabriel kept the volume low due to his higher hearing ability, Jamie finally got up and moved closer. “He’s talking about Hell, Gabe,” She pronounced a moment later.
“Yeah, that’s what I said!” The self-proclaimed ‘demon’ shot back. His violet eyes glowed faintly as he looked up at her, “He’s calling us evil!”
Jamie found herself a seat on the edge of the couch beside him and crossed her arms over her chest. “Y’know I never thought to ask about it… You’re a demon?”
“Duh.”
“From Hell?”
“Yes, Jamie,” Gabriel replied, voice beginning to drip with impatience. “Where did you think I was from? The Magical Gumdrop Palace?”
Favoring him with a look that was no less than scalding Jamie snorted, “Well, isn’t Hell the fire-and-brimstone home of Satan and his minions?” At the blank expression he rewarded her with, Jamie continued, “Y’know… The place where the souls of the damned and non-believers are sent to be tortured for all eternity.”
A silence stretched through the room, broken only by the faint screams and orders dictated by the over exuberant pastor. Jamie wasn’t even really certain what it was he was damning people for, only that he seemed rather insistent upon the subject’s evil. Finally, he spoke, “Wow that is amazingly arrogant.”
Jamie frowned, “How is that arrogant?”
“You think an entire dimension is devoted to dealing with your species’ ********?” Gabriel almost laughed, though he couldn’t stop the huge grin that spread across his face at the thought of all this. “That’s amazing! I’d always been told humans had issues with their own importance, but this is just classic!”
“I never said that I believed it!” Jamie’s frown deepened the more he teased and she slid from the couch’s arm into the space between his thigh and the arm cushion with a grumpy little noise. “Just that that’s… what they say.”
“Ahha, right.” Gabriel’s grin didn’t die; if anything it only got broader which doubled Jamie’s pout exponentially. Seeing that, and dead set on adding insult to injury, Gabriel slung his arm over her shoulders and pulled her against him with a one-armed hug. Jamie growled.
“Alright, smart a**, if it isn’t a place of spiritual damnation then what is Hell?”
“Well, my home for starters,” Gabriel shrugged, keeping his arm about her. She didn’t push him off, which was always a good sign as far as he was concerned, “the home of all the Demonic races. You’d call it our ‘Earth’ I guess… especially since we call ‘Earth,’ ‘Terra’. It’s a… hmm… I guess you’d call it an alternate dimension, in a way.”
“Right; because that makes sense.” Jamie considered this anyway, falling silent as Gabriel picked the remote back up and once more began to flip through the stations. There wasn’t much on at three on Sunday morning except religious shows, bad cartoons, and infomercials but Gabriel didn’t seem to mind. Then again, Jamie had always gathered that television wasn’t a medium they had in Hell, at least from the way that Gabriel had reacted to it.
He settled on reruns of “Rocko’s Modern Life,” a singularly disgusting product of the early ‘90s children’s entertainment, and a show that Jamie had adored for many years. Without realizing it she settled a little more firmly against his side, drawing her legs up underneath her and between herself and the arm of the couch. His arm tightened a little in turn, both partners seemed entirely unaware of it. “There’s more than one type of Demon?” She asked after a few minutes of mind numbing television.
“Yeah,” Gabriel replied in a similarly disconnected manner, eyes fixed upon the swirling Technicolor images, “a few different ones. I’m more of reptilian stock.”
“S’that why you’re always so cold?”
“Hah.” Gabriel snorted and shook his head, “Actually Dragons are warm-blooded. We’re one of the few reptiles that are…”
“Doesn’t that… sort of disqualify you for reptilian status, though?” Jamie couldn’t help but asking. She looked up at him, though all she could really see was his chin, cheekbones and bangs at this angle.
“I didn’t realize there were rules about that sort of thing,” Gabriel replied gruffly and shrugged, “Either way we consider ourselves to be reptiles, so shouldn’t that count for something? Besides, we have scales. There are more mammalian types, though, like my sister; she’s a dog.”
Unable to help herself, Jamie sat up a little more to see him better, “Now how does that work?”
“Well, her mom was a Cerberus, my dad’s a dragon... the kid can’t be mixed as our species doesn’t allow for that, so… after a few miscarriages they got my sister the Cerberus. It was more likely to happen that way anyway since Cerbi are born live,” The male gave a shudder at the thought of something so unnatural seeming, “And Dragons have to be born in proper eggs.”
“…I see.” Jamie digested all of this slowly, gradually settling down at his side once again. “… you were born… in an egg.”
“As proper people should be.”
The woman sat up abruptly and frowned at him, “You do realize that humans are mammals, don’t you?”
“I do now.”
“We give live birth.”
Gabriel’s nose wrinkled and he made a face which Jamie would have laughed about at any other time. Tonight, however, it was just plain annoying. “You do? That’s disgusting!”
Faced with no other alternative, at least to her mind, she smacked his arm and dropped once more back down against the couch with a huff, “Well I think eggs are disturbing, but I’m not saying anything am I?”
“You just did!” He protested with far more logic behind it than she cared to hear at the moment. When Jamie did nothing more than snort in response, Gabriel removed his arm from around her and crossed his arms in a direct mock of her posture. When the ending credits to the cartoon began to roll and the cheesy announcer started his pitch for the upcoming programs, Gabriel opened his mouth once again, “The different races don’t mix that often, but sometimes it’s necessary. For alliances.”
“Huh,” Jamie replied shortly. She unwound herself, though, shifting to sit cross-legged and Gabriel scooted over a little to give her some extra room. Jamie was small, certainly, but not quite small enough to sit in such a fashion in so tiny a space. “And you all… shift between forms? Like you with your dragon thing.”
“That’s right,” Gabriel nodded, “Dragon, Cerberus, Harpy, Phoenix, Naga and Brownie are the major forms. There are minors, but they’re… less numerous. I said our kind doesn’t allow for mixing, but that’s more of a… unwritten rule than a law. Every so often a mixed kid will come up as something weird, and the minor forms came from those usually. Like Trolls, which began as ill-mixings of Cerbi and Brownie.”
Again Jamie nodded, hands kneading on her ankle as she considered this new information. Slowly the woman leaned back into the couch cushion and raised her eyes to the ceiling, as if answers could be sought from there. “ok, since we’re finally having this little Q and A session… How is it that you know English?”
“I don’t.” Gabriel shrugged, “at least not… really. It’s a latent spell that we cast on our brood from birth. Demonic races tend to travel the dimensions readily, so we generally need to know languages in a hurry. The spell automatically reads the language being spoken to us and … sort of feeds me the knowledge. So long as I’m on this plane I’ll be able to speak and understand any of our languages, but the knowledge gets dumped as soon as I go home. “
“Sort of like RAM on a computer,” Jamie muttered. Gabriel gave her an odd look, not at all understanding what those words meant since he had nothing to associate them with. Jamie shook her head in response, “Nothing. So when you get to go back….”
Gabriel raised a brow when she didn’t continue her sentence. Jamie didn’t seem inclined to answer that silent prompting, though, and Gabriel shrugged it off, “I’ll forget English and everything associated with it. Unless someone who was there knew it. That’s the difference between being taught a language and being gifted with the knowledge of it. If I were taught I’d retain it, so long as I kept in practice.”
“It seems like there’s some sort of gap in logic there,” Jamie replied, “But I can’t put my finger on it.”
“Don’t try too hard; you’ll break that fragile brain of yours.”
With a growl Jamie punched his shoulder, only to be rewarded with a laugh and teasing pout. The woman rolled her eyes and got up, “Yeah, yeah, yeah; demonic superiority and all that. And you call we humans arrogant!”
“Damn straight,” Gabriel’s eyes followed her back to her seat before he turned back to his television and focused once more on the cartoons; strange beasts and their stories of repugnant, thinly-veiled homosexual animals.
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Notes for later:
Go into how magic works:
The idea of the life force energies and how its supplied to various planets/dimensions, and how its accessed to be used in spells and talents.
