Contracts

Heresy among devils. 

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Transcript

Through the many thousands of years I have wandered across this plane, there are few anomalies I have found as interesting as the humans who willingly cling to us. Now, these people, I understand many of the emotions going through their head, or the lack thereof. They usually tend ot be an emptier sort. But they’re all unfathomably stupid. They don’t know, at the end, what time really is. Because if you attempt to summon a demon, through whatever means. Either by killing a baby, that’s the most popular, basic method, or by constructing a statue out of heroin needles and lighting it aflame on the fifteenth of July - Tiamath’s birthday - whatever method you attempt, and you see an actual entity appear before you. A rather menacing one, usually. 

None of us are all too charismatic by virtue the fact that the material plane is 1. Not our home (not that we have much of a home). The material plane is almost anathema to us. It is painful to just exist out there. And here you are, making us come out here for a house call. Very few of my kindred will ever be pleasant under those circumstances. Although we embark willingly, of course, because we are all to our bones, patriotic, but you have this entity of unknown powers appear before you after a mess of a ritual that you had no guarantee with your understanding as a human would succeed. So, you come to the realization that all these things that they say about the afterlife are at least somewhat true. That the soul is real. We always ask for it. 

The contract, is, unfortunately, not binding. But, to our luck, those same said humans who contact us are so far gone that they will almost never ever ever do anything to rehabilitate themselves. What the contract really does is give us a tracking device on the person, so in the extraordinarily rare circumstances where a human who was willing to summon the damned and willing to give over their soul for such an audience is ever accosted by good, we can intervene as soon as possible to ensure our harvest. But that’s beside the point. I’ve always found these people perplexing because they see that we are real. That some notion of their eternal existence is real. And here they are, willing to give themselves over to what is essentially eternal torment. In some layers of the Abyss it is not so bad for humans, this is true. Barely worse than some places on the material plane. But still bad. And we do so, and have done so, tortured these people for thousands of years. 

What does a human know of a thousand years? Nothing, essentially. Most of these folks are in their 30’s, 40’s. Some of them are in their 80’s, seeking desperately to prolong their life ad infinitum. I’ve always found those people particularly adorable. Here you are at the end of your life and you think to yourself, hey I believe enough in the supernatural that I’m going to try and summon a demon, but I don’t believe in it enough to syncretize it into a coherent morality system. Absolutely wonderful. Mr. Vanderbilt was one of my favorite clients in that regard. And how long did we manage to preserve his life? Two days. He signed the contract nonetheless. Because of course a contract to us is non-binding. It’s a sheet of paper. Perhaps the paper is dipped in doe’s blood for the tracking feature I mentioned earlier on that person’s skin. And usually people don’t leave their skin until they’re dead, and even then the phenomena is rare, and usually deliberate. But… I don’t know. I’ve always found it so delightful that people would have this sort of conflict in their mind. It betrays their creation as part of the Word’s cadre, that they would be so schizophrenic and messed up about everything. 

And thing is, the number of people who try and contact us, even before we made our presence clear on earth, has always been substantial. A few million a year. Most people acting on the usual things. Sometimes to put a curse on a rival, other times to live through a famine. The whole range of human obsessions. And usually you don’t have to do anything more than mess with a couple peoples’ psychiatry to make the humans think you’ve carried out your part in full. Ah, yes, Clarisse down the street lost her baby because of that demon I summoned, not because I live in the 1300’s and nobody’s been bright enough to wash their hands with boiled water. And then what does the human sinner do for the rest of their life? Does the woman who signed over her soul to a demon to get back at her rival spend the rest of her life repenting? No! Of course not. It is much more difficult to climb up the mountain of holiness when you’ve let yourself slip all the way down into the canyon than from the halfway point that you started at. It’s simply too much work. So the normal human specimen gives up, spending the rest of their lives in cruel hedonism, knowing in their heart of hearts that they are damned. And, because of how they act in relation to that “knowledge,” it becomes true. 

They think at all times that they have no free will, and, in thinking so, they really do become slaves. It’s quite sad, really. They had a chance. What of us? We were given no chance, no vote, no rational alternative. The human maniac can let their anger simmer and abate. All it takes is a day or two, one little bit of introspection to realize that, no, Clarisse wasn’t the reason her marriage fell apart. It was the tree that konked Albert on his head that one day, gave him the source of the pain that he tried to drink away. There was no benefit in the curse, no benefit in selling yourself to evil. But what of us? Pain lingers in our carapaces,not by virtue of our choices, ANY of our choices. It is simply there because of our existence. And such is the life of the contract bound in hell. Pain can be said to wash away sins, for it washes away choice. Old lady Ashar down in the spider pits has paid off her debt from being an abusive mother over a thousand times since we captured her. But the incubuses who guide her torture had no element of her choice. In summoning me that one sweltering day, she became like me. Through choice. An absurd, stupid choice, for even we do not wish to be like us.