Your nemesis, a goofy and mischievous but ultimately harmless villain is standing over a group of bodies covered in blood, seething in anger. You’re sent to deescalate the situation and calm them down .
The Commission unofficially has a rating system for the various ne'er-do-wells that we've encountered over the decades. (Officially, they're only ever called persons of interest, but privately the terms villains, baddies, and rogues' gallery have all been used to describe them.) The higher your rating, the more dangerous you were, scaled from 0-10. Alien conqueror Gaej-Mo-Nai has been anywhere from 7 to 10, depending on how much of the imperial resources he has at his disposal. While your average, unpowered bank robber is at best going to top out at 1.
The Imp was only ever rated at his peak at 0.5. Despite his powers, Trey Vellin had only ever been an inconvenience, and his committal to "enjoying himself" through the public humiliation of others set him apart from a lot of the others. He could twist local reality to embarrass you in all kinds of ways, but the Imp never killed anyone. "The dead can't appreciate a good joke!" was how he liked to phrase it.
By the time I arrived on the scene, a few other heavy hitters from the Allied Heroes Commission were waiting around the perimeter. Voltaic looked antsy as they bounced with nervous energy, looking at the half-translucent dome around the building. Exo was atop a nearby rooftop, and I was not surprised to see that her techno-suit's frame had been reinforced and equipped with some of her heavier artillery. Pinnacle was hovering above, glimmering with cosmic energies.
I'd been briefed on my way over. The dome did not let anyone through, and the screams had stopped about ten minutes beforehand. I acknowledged them all as I stopped at the perimeter, hearing the local SWAT commander speak into his comms, "Doctor Ethereal's on-site. All units stay ready."
I spared little time for pleasantries. The Commission had a protocol for this kind of thing. I reached into the ether and plucked a few strands of the arcane weave before striding through the dome as if it weren't there. Voltaic was instantaneously there, but got knocked ass-over-teakettle by the dome's jolt. I ignored their protests as I went into the building, already picking up on the stain of some ritual in the ether as I went.
It didn't take long to find the scene of the crime. Even through the bloodstains, I could make out the arcanic circle scrawled into the floor, and when I stooped to touch it, I received a burst of psychometric memory fragments. It had been a complex ritual, a summoning combined with a binding spell. More than the simple binding that the summoning would normally entail, but one layered with a compulsion to the summoned's true nature. The imbeciles had no idea...
Only after I was finished parsing what I had learned did I finally look up to see the broken bodies of the cultists hanging from the walls and ceiling. Blood covered them all, oozing from orifices and lacerations, blank eyes staring into nothing, jaws slack and lifeless. The only one that didn't seem to have been broken in the same way occupied place of pride in the middle of the room, above the center of the circle, but even that was because the Imp hadn't finished with them yet.
I considered the Imp as I stood up. He'd gotten his moniker for a reason, being born of a demonic lineage to a human mother and father. He'd never been clear on where the demonic side of his lineage came from, but also never seemed to care about the specifics either. Blue-skinned and horned, his whip-like spade-tipped tail cracked behind him as he cradled the cult leader's skull in in his hands. The Imp's features had changed noticeably. The horns now curled back like a ram's, the tip of his tail looked sharper, more blade-like, his fingers sported wicked claws, and his eyes now glinted with gold in black sclera.
"I warned you," he hissed to the cultist as those claws curled a little tighter around his head, dug into his jaw and pried open his mouth. "Told you not to do it. That you wouldn't like the result. But you just - wouldn't - listen!"
I admit, I took a step back when the Imp's head swiveled around, 180 degrees, to look at me. His usual laughing smile now looked like a rictus grin. Tears streaked through the blood smeared across his features. "Why didn't they listen, Doctor?!"
"Who can say?" I kept my voice level, even as I metaphysically reached out to enmesh myself in the arcane weave. "But I'm here now, Trey. Why don't you tell me what happened?"
The Imp's head turned back to the cultist in his claws. "They've approached me many times before. Even summoned me," his tail whip-cracked against the floor, as if to indicate the circle, "to try to recruit me. But I've always said no. Do you know why?"
"Why's that, Trey?"
The Imp's fingers moved the cultist's jaw like he were some upside-down marionette, answering, "Because they want to burn it all down and build a new world from the ashes." He snorted. "Simple apocalypse cultists. How boring, no?"
"Very boring."
"They wanted me to embrace my calling," he continued, fingers tightening around the cultist's skull. "Even when I told them I wasn't interested! Wanted me to use my powers to tear down the veil and let the demons loose! As if I wasn't aware of exactly what that really meant."
"Tear down the veil?" Now he had my attention, as I regarded the cultist again. I'd heard phrases like that before. "Are they worshippers of the Sun Most Deep?"
The Imp giggled. It was the same high-pitched wheezing laugh that he'd always used, but at this time, in this place, it sounded far more sinister. "That would be a bingo!" His voice dropped an octave, growling at the cultist. "So they decided they'd force the issue. Summoned me again, but this time worked a new binding in there, so that my demonic lineage would come out, because of course a demon would want to destroy it all, right!?"
I said nothing, but my silence just compelled the Imp to fill it with words. "They didn't get it. I feel that demonic compulsion all - the - time. But I burn off the urges with mischief and entertainment at others' expense. So if they wanted me to embrace my nature, then I was happy to do so at their expense." He shook his head. "It never occurred to them that I don't want to be a monster."
"You shouldn't expect monsters to understand," I replied.
"Oh," the Imp's voice was softer now. "They'll understand. Eventually." He giggled again, and patted the cultist on the cheek, hearing the man whimper before his eyes rolled up in his head and he became as lifeless as the rest.
He stepped back from the last victim and with another whip-crack of his tail, I felt and saw the dome over the building vanish. I quickly got on the comms to SWAT and the Commission outside, telling them the threat had passed. Then I quickly wove bindings around the Imp's wrists, ankles, and tail, just as Voltaic burst into the room, took one look, and darted right back out to be sick.
The SWAT captain regarded the scene with a grim expression, turning as one of his officers checked the nearest cultist. "Got a pulse, but they're unresponsive."
"Sort of expected after he tortured them," the captain grunted. "Surprised he left them alive."
"Of course I did!" The Imp burst into a fresh round of giggles, his features starting to settle back into their normal devilish charm and whimsy, horns now reducing back to nubs and his tail soft-edged. "Why would I want to kill them? The dead can't appreciate a good joke!"
He fell into peals of laughter as he was dragged away, while Pinnacle met with me as I emerged from the cultists' building. He watched as Exo clamped a set of power-dampening cuffs around the Imp's wrists, then turned back to me. "What happened in there?"
I was silent as I mentally compartmentalized, taking the memory fragments I'd gleaned from the arcane circle and partitioning them away, where they would hopefully not plague my nightmares for the rest of my days. As it was, I'd be calling them at unpleasant moments for the next month at least. Finally, I took a deep breath and met Pinnacle's eyes.
"We may need to reassess the Imp's rating."
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