Slumrat Rising

Susan came down the stairs in a bathrobe and a smile. “Who’s there?”

“Boo.”

“Boo who?”

“Don’t cry, it’s only a joke.” Truth’s voice was very soothing. He was smiling at the several large men glowering at him from the edges of the room.

“Hah! I see you have met my cousins.” She looked him over. “You are better looking than I was afraid of. Any chance of growing out a beard? Or at least shaving your head?”

“Honestly? Not much. Never liked that look.”

“Real shame. You are on the shorter side, but that physique. Mmm.”

“Who the fuck is this asshole, Suzy?” One of the protein aficionados couldn’t keep it in any longer. Before she could answer, Truth rushed him. Everyone in the room was a body cultivator- their eyes could follow him just fine. He was just fast. Impatient hadn’t got his hands up by the time Truth reached him.

Nice open shot at that lantern jaw. Obviously he would take it. Truth smashed Greasy right on the button and lifted the big fella up off his toes. He landed with an immense thud, and were he not a body cultivator, Truth would be concerned about the nasty crack his skull made when it hit the marble floor.

“Are you absolutely certain we aren’t related? Because other than being a bit short, you really do feel like family.” Susan’s voice was bone dry.

“I’m… less certain than I was before, at any rate. Pretty sure I do have some Nephilim blood in me from way, way back.”

“Oh? How’d you figure that out?”

“No comment.” Truth grinned.

“Used the spell, huh?”

“Something like that. We gonna chat in the entryway all day, or does this discreet cottage have chairs somewhere?”

Susan grinned right back. “Fuck discreet. The only time we’re discreet is when we’re setting someone up. Then we’re really sneaky. C’mon, I’ll take you up to my modest, tastefully appointed suite.”

Truth walked up the sweeping central staircase to the wrap-around balcony overlooking the atrium. “I have, and I mean this literally, I have seen mansions belonging to ancient clans that were less over the top than this place.”

“Tsch! Those clans aren’t ancient. OUR clan is ancient! Those guys just haven’t figured out how to live yet.” Susan waved away the comparison as they walked down the hallway.

Oil paintings of naked, greased up body-builders alternated with photographs of those same people tearing armed enemies into chunks, and in the case of a particularly well developed senior, tearing off one man’s head and throwing it at another man's head so hard that both heads exploded.

“Any reason they are all nude?”

“Any reason they shouldn’t be? They worked hard for that physique. That’s real value right there. Think of it as putting up pictures of virtuous elders to inspire the younger generations.”

Truth nodded. Seemed fair. She led him down an irritatingly long hallway, opened a heavy pair of double doors, and led him into a sitting room. The room was decorated in shades of ivory, gold and bronze. There were yet more heavily muscled nudes hanging on the walls, a polearm rack, a meter tall stack of books on natural philosophy, a squat rack and all the other ordinary things one would expect to find in a young lady’s chambers.

He blinked.

“You look surprised.”

“Just occurred to me that every time I have been in a woman’s bedroom, it was for a job or they were family.”

“Wait. No. No! I refuse to believe-” Susan shot to her feet, looking at him in horror. Truth rolled his eyes.

“No, I’m not a virgin.”

“Good. Good. Suddenly lost faith in the nature of reality for a moment there.” She patted her chest and sat again. Then shot up again. “You’re gay! That’s why you turned me down!”

Truth buried his face in his hands, and slowly started to laugh.

“Why is everyone so concerned about my sex life?!”

“This comes up a lot?”

“Not all the time, but weirdly often. Honestly? I spend so much time stressed or dealing with planetary scale weirdness that my libido is pretty much nil.”

Susan grunted. “Well that’s no good. That’s a fine body. Ought to enjoy it more.”

“I do! You wouldn’t believe what I do with it. Hell, I danced on top of lamp posts doing a sword drill above a city that couldn’t even see me, just because I could and it felt amazing.”

She smiled. “I’d enjoy watching that, I think. I didn’t really see you when we fought before. I mean, I saw you, but not very clearly.”

“Yeah, I’m the subject of at least one… two… two for sure… probably more than two… international manhunts. I do actually keep it sneaky.”

She blinked, then laughed. Laughed so hard she had to grab on to her guts and struggle not to fall off her chair.

“I don’t believe it! Oh my dog, you are Hell Prince! You are actually, literally, Hell Prince. And you stole a glorified pyramid scheme to promote civil society and public readiness.”

“Well. Starbrite came up with the name.”

“I’m dying. I am actually dying over here.” She was gasping for breath. Truth gave her a moment. Eventually she leaned back in the chair, wiping tears of mirth. “Why are you doing any of this anyhow? You know it’s not going to matter.”

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“Difference of opinion there. It will matter as much as anything does. And frankly? I am sick to death of God, or the planet, or Starbrite or some other unknowable godly power screwing around with people for no good reason. So. You know. Fuck ‘em. I’m not going to take it quietly. I’m not going to go quietly. I’m going to do everything I can to be a certifiable pain in the ass.”

That wiped the smile off her face.

“Say that again.”

“What? I’m a pain-”

“No, the other bit. The fighting God bit.”

“Well. I don’t know if I can fight literal God. But… this world is fucked. From what I can tell it always has been, at least as long as humans have been here. And the reason it has been is, basically, the planet likes demons better, and if it can’t have demons, it will take Nephilim. Everyone else? Suffer. And since the architect of so much of this misery is the massively-more-stabbable Starbrite…”

Truth shrugged. “Never thought it was very noble to suffer the slings and arrows when you could, by opposing, end them.” Susan looked blank. Truth smacked his forehead. “Don’t worry about it. Playing on an old quote. Bottom line? I’ve never been the peaceful sort, and I’m so damn burnt, I’m biting everyone like a mad dog.”

“By setting up food pantries.”

“Lots of ways to fight back.”

“And blowing up cities.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“No?”

“Didn’t know I had been accused of that, actually.”

Susan cupped her chin and looked at him. Really looked at him. Truth was starting to feel uncomfortable.

“Something on my face?”

“Yes.”

Truth started pawing at his cheeks. “Oh Hell. Did I get it off?”

“That might be hard. Have you… do you ever feel that there is someone watching over you? Guiding you through life?”

“Like a supernatural patron of some kind?”

“Yes, exactly!”

“Oh yes.”

“Have you ever… had visions of a large man? Maybe smelled blood or sex or metal for no apparent reason? Had an unreasonable hatred of both farming and farmers?”

“More like disappointed resentment. Wait, you too?!”

Susan sat back in her chair and slowly shook her head. “Not me. I was never so blessed. No wonder. No wonder. Not blood kin, but spiritual. Of all the strange things, here at the end of the age.”

“You know who the Rough Patron is? He said the Nephilim are his descendants.”

“Infinitely removed, yes. How much do you know about the creation of the universe?”

“Erm. Almost nothing. My girlfriend who may be my wife says there was an original hermaphrodite and they-” Susan waved him off.

“All wrong. Or, well. It’s not what we teach. Once upon a time, so long ago and so far away that it would be meaningless to measure, God made the world. Except they didn’t.”

“God is an ‘they’?”

“Real God is so far beyond everything that they sublimate the very concept of gender. They even sublimate the concept of personhood, so you could theoretically refer to God as ‘It,’ though I personally wouldn’t.”

“Fair. In the beginning, God didn’t create the world?”

“Exactly. Short version… very short, because the full version requires weeks of explanation and several diagrams, is to imagine a huge sphere. That’s God. And by the nature of its existence, it caused some subsidiary principles to come into existence. First was a ‘wife’ or consort figure, though sometimes they are presented as, yes, a hermaphrodite. Not a literal person here, just a concept or a principle like gravity.”

“What was the principle?”

“That other necessary, or beneficial, things should come into being. So aspects of the divine emanations were sort of tidied up into neat piles representing different virtues and principles-”

“Oh? Which?”

“Got two weeks and the patience to study some VERY complicated charts?”

“I apologize for interrupting. I was rude. Please, continue.”

“Right. So. Lots of principles created. The principals are divided up into, and again I’m not talking biology here, male and female pairings. I’m skipping over a lot of layers, but it basically goes God, their ‘wife’, multiple levels of everything else, then these subsidiary male-female paired principals. All of which are virtues. Everything I have described is good and godly, and can be understood as a natural consequence of the existence of God. Like the sun can’t help but be bright.”

“With you so far.”

“Well, the last one of these things didn’t get its pairing. It just kind of went off and did its own thing, which is ironic since it’s supposed to be the embodiment of intelligence.”

“Ah. Nerd shit. Never turns out well.” Truth nodded sagely.

“Yes. In this case, it turned into the whole universe.”

“Wait, what?”

“All this stuff I’m describing is happening on some higher cosmic level. There is no universe at this point. Or nothing made of matter, if that’s how you want to think about it.”

“So… just Heaven and Hell and-”

“Nope, before that.”

“Before Heaven!?”

Susan grinned. There was something unpleasant in her eyes. “Oh yes. I mean, the throne, the chariot, the choirs of angels who’s whole function is to sing hymns about how great God is… does this strike you as something an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being would do? My family may love its dominance games, but we’d still call that some deeply insecure prick behavior.”

Truth blinked. “I have wondered for a long time if God made the world wrong.”

Susan nodded, the nasty grin getting wider. “God is definitionally perfect. However, that doesn’t mean that some of the inevitable consequences of God’s existence are also perfect.”

“It doesn’t?”

“That’s how my family teaches it. Wisdom was created, then she figured since God can create life, she can too. So she makes her own attempt at a divine being like herself.”

Truth slowly closed his eyes, squeezing them tight. “She gets it wrong.”

“Yep. It takes a big chunk of her divinity, and still turns out all wrong. By all accounts, it’s hideous and possibly insane. Whether it’s malicious or just stupid is still under debate. What’s not debated is that it is CRAZY arrogant. And lonely. And insecure, because everything else in the universe is literally perfect and divine, and has absolutely no interest in this random little abomination running around.” She swatted the impossibly powerful being away with a flick of her hand.

“So it creates its own version of the universe out of the materials available to it. Which was matter, the lowest order of stuff in existence. From there, it builds everything. The universe, Heaven, Hell, The angels and devils and… literally just everything.”

“Stupid being a relative term, I guess.”

“It’s mom was literally the perfect embodiment of reason short of God.”

“Kind of surprised she fucked up that bad, then.”

“I never got a satisfying answer there myself, but that’s the story.”

“Okay, and from there?”

“Eventually the creator gets around to recreating his own birth by making humans. The exact process is debated amongst the Nephilim, and there was a sizable schism over whether the Creator’s mom interfered to give us all divine souls, or are those souls natural results of the creation process, derived from the Creator, or simply something that all fragments of God receive. Which is everything; some of us believe everything has some amount of ‘soul’ in it.”

“Huh.”

“And finally, those created humans, the first two, had kids. The middle child died young, the youngest lived an ordinary life and gave rise to the more common branch of humanity ie the Sethians, and one, the oldest, had a bunch of kids who had sex with angels and gave birth to the Nephilim.”

“Damn!”

“And that oldest child? He was the first person to tell “God” he got it wrong, then did something about it.”

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