milliways_bar | (no subject)

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The door opens, and a woman with long dark hair and a short black dress steps in.

Well, really, that's technically only partly true. But it's probably close enough to accurate. Workable, at any rate.

She stops and looks around. This doesn't feel like any bar she's ever been in before, and, darling, she has been in a lot of bars. Desperate people do like to drink, and a week in a bar here or there, that's like picking ripe fruit off low-hanging branches.

Well, well, well. Isn't this . . . interesting?

[OOC: If you're the sort who's good at recognizing demons, feel free. If you're not, though, chances are she's just going to come off as young human woman. Questions, etc., ping elsinorequeen.]

[tiny tag: the crossroads demon, cerberus]

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"You may find dragon sign in the mountains here though I have not very often since the last season turning. There are sea monsters and harpy as well. And creatures like yourself."

Mentioning other "neighbors" is mannerly. Even herbivores do it. Gorgons are not mentioned. She has met him, which means she has in effect met the pack, even if it is only the omega.

Creatures like herself. An interesting way to but it.

"More of those than men? Or are 'creatures like myself,' or you, the rule rather than the exception here?"

"Dogs come through rather regularly." A breif pause. "They've all been mortal, though. I... I have not seen many, but I have smelled many..." He trails off helplessly. He does not know what her kind call themselves.

She smiles, very slowly.

"Demons, dear.

"Creatures like me? We're demons."

A slight headtilt.

"Smelled?"

There is the briefest of silences as Ceberus puzzles over how this might be explained with words. Words can be cumbersome things for both the teller and the listner, after all. Which is why, rather suddenly, there is an enormous hellhound sitting in the place the young man had been seconds before.

Oh!

Realization dawns.

Yes, there are a great many of small ones living out there. What sort of daemon are you? If you don't mind my asking?

Demons. Daemons. One could possibly be forgiven for confusing the two.

Possibly.

The woman (who isn't really a woman) smiles very brightly at the hellhound (who apparently isn't really a boy).

"Well, hello, there.

"I'm the sort of demon you meet on a bad night at a deserted crossroads.

"And I know some of your . . . let's say 'distant cousins,' shall we?"

That gets his interest, oh yes.

I don't think I've met any... The family is very large. Who is it that you know?

He had been certain they were from different ~~lands~~ worlds...

The names she gives him are . . . rather difficult to reproduce in written English. (Or written much of anything else, for that matter.)

"Quite distant, I suspect. As cousins go. But hellhounds, to be sure.

"I'd get very little done without them."

Cerberus cants his heads, listening intently as the foriegn names are pronounced. It is, however a different word that makes his earss prick forward with curiosity.

People keep saying that. Um. What is a hellhound? I've asked Epimetheus but the only thing he said he knew of them was they weren't his doing.

It's a bit like having Bono ask you what a rockstar is.

"Demonic dogs of Hell. Or Hades, I suspect, is your term. They're not exactly analogous words, but they'll do."

One thing at a time.

"They guard the gates, and when things need hunting down, they hunt them down."

Like, say, to choose a random example, a person whose ten years are up.

....

Cerberus has never caught on to the practice of facepalming. Thankfully. The narration suspects he would have a permanent handprint across his visage were it not the case. As it is, The hellhound hunches his shoulders and offers a trio of sheepish doggy grins.

And somehow it all becomes clear. He says in a uncharacteristically dry tone. I am the only one back home. I did not know Hell had any.

"Happy I could help," she says.

And given that he is a cousin, however distant, of certain associates of whom Verity is quite fond, she won't even see this as something that needs to be repaid.

"The simplest things can be the hardest to see."

Most of the time, she's glad of that fact. When it's this is a bad deal for you and not there's a Devil's Trap on the underside of the water tower.

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