A Hunt Begins, and a Plot Thickens

He passed through the filament port, in the shape of a warped and twisted human body whose legs formed the doorway. (Or perhaps it was a warped and twisted human body.) The unthinkably vast domed room was full of demons who looked like him, jostling each other to fulfil the errands of their masters. He steered fluidly among them like a sailor through a storm. Eventually, he reached the Centre.

The Centre was a vast complex the size of an universe, colored grim grey, in the shape of a human skull. It was inside the Centre that the gogolplexes of gogolplexes of calculations per second necessary to keep Hell's vast multiversal beuauraucracy running were performed. The beings who lived in the Centre had a liftetime that could be measured in fractions of picoseconds, for time is very malleable near the Eternal Realms. If you looked closely at the surface of the Centre, you could see each part of it was constantly breaking down and being repaired, caught in the eternal act of change.

A small skull face formed on the side of the Centre's jawbone, and the demon shoved his request, encoded on the subatomic molecules of a punchcard, into its mouth. As far as the current Chairman of the Board would know he was only a minor demon, going to a nearby dimension to obtain some supernatural weapons for Hell's allies in the brewing Shadow War. Only he and a few of his close allies knew about the Slipgate Key. Many in all the Offices had heard rumors of it, but none knew its true nature, or his connection with it. Nor would they, until it was too late for them.

He flew into the jaw of the Centre and was encoded into an interdimensional tightbeam transmission that would intersect with the filaments of Earth-735.002-Alpha-12. As it left Hell, one of his satellites staged a carfully constructed intercept of the transmission and directed one of his disposeable minions wearing the form he had previously assumed (who of course knew nothing of his real mission) in his place. He slipped into the form in which he had been born as he entered the Pit of the Hellkites.

There was no light in this Pit, not even the reflected light from Heaven that all but the lowest dimensions of Hell had. It was full of the spiritual stench of death and despair. Crawling along its walls were a group of winged creatures with skin of dark red. Their eyes were pits of blackness. They were Hellkites, shapeshifting predators that fed on the energy of human souls. Once they had been common in the Lower Realms, in the age of the Great Old Ones and the Guardians before the Offices had come into being, an age when primal forces of good and evil fought battles that smashed worlds, but they had all been thought exterminated by the Edict of Mount Dante. Yet the demon had found some which had escaped exterimation and a way to control them. They were one of the many secret weapons in his arsenal which not even most of his allies knew about. It was always good to never show all your cards.

He held out a dark brown hair. This was a hair from the head of Stacy Jones, preserved in Logopolis as a sacred relic after she had saved it, and recently stolen by him. The Hellkites sailed through the air and smelled the hair's biodata with interest. From now on, they would go to any lengths to track her down. This was not the way he intended to kill her, of course, although the Hellkites played a major role in his plan. He had something far more subtle in mind. He opened the hole of the Pit, and they greedily sped out.

With that, the Demon left the PIt and entered Purgatory. He put on the form he preferred to use--that of a chubby man, with a face flushed with red and an aureole of closely cropped gray hair--that of The Black Prince. He resumed the business transaction he'd been carrying out with an analog of Frederigo. From his client's point of view, he had been gone for about a microsecond.

1. In Purgatory, the transaction continues...
2. In a world unknown, Stacy is pursued...

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