Slumrat Rising

Vol. 4 Chap. 30 Do Good By Stealth

Truth was elbow deep in the guts of the commercial cold box. A device that looked nearly as old as its owner, and that little senior looked as old as the hills. Or at least a hundred.

It was a combination of factors that led to the cold box blowing out. The most obvious was the air circulation tubes. The air circulation tubes, enchanted with a wind spell that pushed cold air out and sucked up the hot air, were badly damaged by intermittent cosmic energy spikes shorting out the finer spell lines. Lines that were apparently never maintained before they got damaged, so the tubes were, in his professional opinion, fucked.

Then there was the chill spell itself- dumping heat out of the box, generating a field of frigid air directly above itself. The air circulation tubes theoretically pushed the hot air into the field, chilled it down to basically nothing, then pulled it through the other side and dumped it into the freezer. From the freezer, the cold air made its way into the main body of the cold box.

Very simple, very reliable, very much a problem because the talisman that was supposed to be doing the chilling, the cold plate, was also busted. Never maintained, never cleaned, and roughly twenty five years beyond what even the manufacturers claimed was its service life. A Starbrite manufactured cold box, naturally.

Say what you like, but Starbrite really did make some great talismans. Truth had learned how to repair this model before he had ever heard of the Shattervoid clan.

“Well Senior, you want the good news or the bad news?”

“Oh, that’s not reassuring. Start with the good news.”

“I know what's wrong with your cold box, and I can kinda-sorta-for-today get it up and running again.”

“Ah. And the bad news?”

“Two of the three talismans that keep this thing running are broken. How the thermostat made it out alive, I don’t know.”

Truth shook his head, army cap swinging sharply from side to side.

“Oh dear. Expensive?”

Truth hesitated. “You know what? I don’t really know. Shouldn’t be. You might even be able to find them for free if you are really good at scavenging and get lucky. But that’s also kind of the problem. They stopped making this model of refrigerator… I want to say twenty years ago? And they were still supporting it until pretty recently because modern parts are pretty much the same as these older ones, just with more fancy extras added on. My point is, I don’t think you can still buy these exact parts in a store anymore, or order them from Starbrite for that matter.”

Truth was moving his hands around inside the box, pointing at where the problems were.

“Ah. So I could replace them if I found an old refrigerator like mine and moved the parts from one to the other, but they would be old and worn too.”

“Fraid so, senior.”

“Haaah.” She shook her head. “It was such a reliable refrigerator. Buying a new one is too much expense.”

“Not my area of expertise, but I have to think used refrigerators are pretty common.” Truth shrugged.

“Used to be, but they are all going for a lot of money these days. They are just so much more reliable with the sunspot activity.”

Truth had to blink at that. “Sunspot?”

“Isn’t that what they said? Some kind of problem with the sun, so now we get all these magic surges. And anti-surges. Whatever you call them.”

“A plunge, maybe? Err. That’s not exactly the opposite though.” Truth scratched his head in honest confusion.

The tiny elder waved away the distinction. “Well, the older things hold up better. LIKE I ALWAYS SAID!” She proclaimed with great satisfaction.

Truth had a quiet laugh at that. “Well, like I said, I can more or less get you up and running, but it’s a patch job and won’t last very long. I’d keep your eye out and ask around. Best would be if you found a cold box with a busted thermostat. Then you could just swap your thermostat into the new-to-you box, and be up and running.”

“Are you sure it wouldn’t be too much trouble to make the repair?”

“Nah, I have a bit of time left before my liberty ends, and, not to put too fine a point on it…”

“The bars are closed, and so are the girls?” She grinned. “Ah, the good old days…”

Truth declined to answer and got to work. It was the very first time since his army days that he worked on a cold box. His first time ever working on this model outside a classroom. Somehow, his hands remembered. He could trace every line in every talisman in this thing.

It took an hour and three quarters, since he had to use the owners tools and what he could improvise. He privately reckoned that with a proper tool kit, it would have been an hour, tops. Still, he didn’t begrudge the time. It was satisfying. He took a broken thing, and now it was… not exactly fixed, but up and running.

“I feel terrible. At least take some pickles with you.”

“Can’t. Army’s REALLY strict about soldiers “requisitioning” food from civilians right now, so if I turn up with pickles and my chit doesn’t show an order of takeout pickles, it’s my ass.” He politely shook his head. Partially because it was true, more because the old lady’s pickles were just okay, and he couldn’t be bothered to carry middling pickles around everywhere.

“Still though.”

“Really, don’t worry about it. I wanted to help. Oh, I think that table needs the check.” He pointed at a couple who were waving and trying to get the old lady’s attention.

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“Ah, coming, coming!” Truth discreetly cast Cup and Knife on the cold box. Cup and Knife clearly couldn’t be bothered, but after he bullied it a bit, the spell reluctantly, at immense energy cost, made the energy channels a bit more stable. It would hold up a lot longer than one day, though it was a long way from being like new.

When the old lady looked back, he was gone.

Truth smiled as he walked along the highway on Gamphe’s outskirts. A completely barren, ugly place, dotted by exurban big box stores, factories and office parks. Not a shred of life in it. Probably a lesson there. Happiness is where you make it?

“Hey Thrush?”

“Dread Magus?” The Imp’s voice came from its binding token.

“Do demons have fun?”

There was a long pause.

“You know, I’m not entirely sure how to answer that.”

“Really? Even blessed by the great debater Caym?”

“Probably because of that, actually. The glib answer is yes, of course we do. “Do what you love and you will never work a day in your life,” is one of the oldest and most used cliches in Hell.”

“Wait, really?”

“Certainly! By and large, we truly, sincerely, love our vocations.”

“So, the demon Child Eater, notorious for eating children and psychologically torturing their parents-”

“Is living their best life. Metaphorically speaking. Yes. They are having a great deal of fun.”

“Well that's horrifying.”

There was a polite, if theatrical cough. “Well, you did ask about demons, your Immensity.”

Truth mentally awarded a point for adding “immensity” to the honorifics rotation, then pressed on.

“What is the not-glib answer?”

“Also yes, but it’s more complicated than simply ‘fun.’”

Truth nodded. In his experience, now well tested, almost everything was more complicated than it seemed.

“How so?”

“Demons torture souls. We tell lies to mortals, kill, murder, rape, steal, every sort of violation imaginable. Every sort of degradation, physical, mental or spiritual, is within our command.”

“And that is fun?”

“Yes. Because it is a true expression of ourselves. We are exactly what we should be, doing exactly what we should be doing. It is an immensely fulfilling thing, being a demon.”

Truth grunted. Odd thought. “So why the wars with Heaven?”

“Because that is what demons should do.”

“You exist to fight Heaven?”

“We exist to repair the world. Return it to its purified state. It is Heaven that stands between Humanity and Hell. Condemning humanity to Hell, generation after generation.”

“Repair? Repair?!”

“Oh yes. Your souls come to us in very poor shape. Ill used by this world of yours. The whole universe, really. And it never. Ever. Stops. Endless waves of you, crashing upon infernal shores. Washing up, lost and confused. Horrified by what you see, by what is being done for you. “It’s not fair, it’s not right!” Ah, the cries are endless. Truly endless.”

The little bird hopped out of its binding token.

“We take great satisfaction in our work. It is, as you call it, fun. But even the most diligent servant can come to resent other, more overbearing, more stupid, servants. Especially when those other servants keep telling everyone that they, somehow, against all available evidence, are the “good” ones, and we the bad.”

Truth mentally circled that last sentence and dragged a line over to the monolog on all the horrible things demons did for a laugh.

“Angels are the bad guys, eh?”

“I would say so, though if Master was feeling charitable, he might call them simply dangerously deluded or insane.”

“Alright, I’ll bite. How so?”

“Angels, notoriously, will only act in accordance with God’s will. Except that they can be persuaded that all manner of idiocy is ‘God’s will,’ from arranging a human mating, to memorizing books, to finding buried treasure. And murdering one’s enemies, naturally, sparing not even the young lest their evil persist.”

Thrush stuck its beak under its wing and rearranged some feathers.

“In other words, they are incapable of independent moral judgment. They cannot be good, because they have no conception of “Good” or “Evil” in any way that is defined other than “in accordance with God’s will, or not.”

Truth smiled a little at that. “And so the great moral reformers raise their standards and sweep out of Hell, ready to slaughter as many angels as it takes. All in the name of bringing peace to the world.”

The little bird hopped around some. “Simply put. We are on an eternal mission to save the universe. What could be more fun than that?”

Truth started laughing. “Well, I’m not on that level. Now, where is the nearest person in urgent need of talisman maintenance?”

Truth spent the rest of the day wandering through the exurbs. People with broken down carriages, broken washers, broken automatic floor cleaners, found themselves visited by a strange, but alarmingly persuasive young man. A soldier, oddly enough. He was on liberty, and saw there was a spot of trouble. Going on silently, inside a house, on a street that hadn’t had a carriage going down it in an hour.

There was trouble, and he was here to help. No need to pay. This was his pleasure, really. And the work didn’t make everything like new- some people would need to order parts urgently. But the urgent problem was solved, and he usually got them more or less straightened out. And then he vanished.

“So why are you doing this?” The wary looking housewife asked the man buried half way into her carriage’s guts.

“Because helping people is fun, and since I’m on liberty to have fun, I’m doing it.”

“Helping people is fun.” Her tone suggested she had heard more sensible statements from derelicts in the gutter.

“Sure. Not everyone all the time, of course. That would be silly. But when I see a problem I can fix, it makes me happy to fix it. So what if it’s not my carriage?”

“That’s… one way to see things… I guess…”

“Yep. Wondering where the get-back is?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, let's say you work in a hospital.”

“I don’t.”

“Work with me here.”

She snorted. “Alright, I work in a hospital.”

“So you have a reliable carriage. You get to work on time, every time. Your hospital runs that little bit better. So if I get blown up, or my buddies get blown up or something, you guys are there to save us.”

“And if I was a clerical assistant to a two person accountancy firm specializing in scallop fishing boats?”

“Then I have contributed, however remotely, to dinner. Ain’t that good enough?”