"This sucks," Ashtoreth said an hour later.
She groaned. She was lying on her belly on the roof of her tiny house, wings splayed out and her cheek pressed against the shingles. Icon was still back in Diadem: Ashtoreth hadn't removed the quarantine keeping her there, not yet. She'd told the archival spirit that she needed to think about things, then left.
Below her, Frost spoke. "We're not completely out of options."
"I appreciate your optimism."
"You're right, though," he said. "This isn't a good position to be in. It doesn't sound like this Icon is going to start trusting you just because you two pop into Earth and she can't find any humans in manacles being whipped by demon overlords."
Ashtoreth sighed. "She's not, no."
"And we're not on good terms with the governnts," Frost continued. "You definitely can't just take a stroll down a given street and expect it to go well. We have no idea what people will do when they recognize you."
Kylie looked up from her tablet. "God, I'd love to see that. No matter what happens, it would be interesting. She'd go to take a selfie with an admirer, and then soone else would try to shoot her while she's at it."
"Would they, though?" Frost asked. "I can believe that so people want her dead despite not knowing anything at all. But if you believe that Ashtoreth is a conquerer from Hell, and she's really right in front of you, I feel like you're much more likely to start welcoming our new demon overlords than shoot her."
Kylie grinned. "Co on, Officer Frost. You're telling that everyone acts reasonably in the interest of self-preservation when faced with superior force?"
Frost let out a sigh. "Fair point."
"I could try and spin the narrative," Ashtoreth said. "Point out that all the distrust is the result of my not being a steel-fisted conquerer from Hell." She sighed, then lifted her head to glance down at her gauntletted hand. "Figuratively, speaking, that is. Icon can then see that I've left humanity to formulate a plurality of opinions, including the ones that are dumb because they don't cast favorably. And if the governnts get involved, we can point out that letting them sche against instead of shipping them off to the gulags was, you know, very nice of ."
"You could try it," Kylie said. "But it doesn't sound like she's gonna give you a cookie for not being Stalin."
Ashtoreth raised her head, then thumped her horns against the roof shingles. "She's not," she said. "Honestly, the real complications here co from the fact that even if I thought I could get her to trust , I don't trust her."
"None of us should," said Frost. "We don't know what she knows. We don't even rightly know what she is."
"Old-school humans were capable of so seriously insane feats of magical engineering," Kylie said. "And as far as we know, this is the only thinking, feeling creature they left behind for us. If she knows anything that can help us fix the Diadem reality spool, and if she can fracture an extrely powerful outsider into nine thousand other outsiders, what the hell else can she do?"
"Dazel could have built her to help him carry out his goals, whatever they are, and she wouldn't even need to know that before he activated her. The biggest reason we want to lock down the Pinnacle realm asap is because of him. What's she gonna do when she finds out that he's alive? Even if she's never t him, she'll definitely have heard of him."
"So are we just ignoring her for now, then?" Frost asked.
"That might get awkward if we're still trying to fix up Diadem," Ashtoreth said. "But… I guess? You know, she was apparently a lot nicer when it was just Hunter and he was hiding the fact that I was an archfiend for her. And honestly, I think that fact really goes a long way to justify the deception."
"Yeah, Hunter seed like he liked her," said Kylie. "He said she was really nice."
"Sort of?" Ashtoreth said dubiously. "Apparently, she was all full of bubbly pep when she thought that things were going her way. Then I showed up, and even though she wasn't happy, she hardly ca off as competent. But once I started actually pushing her? It's like the semblance of naivete just vanishes and she's made entirely of insight and cunning. Not fun."
"Yeah, that really sounds like it sucks," said Kylie, suppressing a smile. "Also, it sounds like you two should be best friends."
Ashtoreth leaned back and sighed as she stared at the ceiling. "Ugh. She might even be doing all this because she actually wants to protect humanity, too. Which would be another thing we've got in common, even if I've got a more original style."
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"So do you shut her down for a while?" Frost asked. "You said you could make her go dormant, right?"
"Nah—if Dazel has a plan for her, the shutdown will be a fakeout or he'll just be able to turn her back on. Either way, I don't see how it would do much except guarantee that she won't trust us."
"To be fair," Kylie began, "if Dazel built her with so kind of plan in mind, we're pretty much screwed. Why would he build her with any restrictions or the ability to circumvent his will at all? The quarantine, her seeming lack of power, her obedience to you as a [Pinnacle Curator]... all of it could be fake."
"Not a happy thought," said Ashtoreth. "He could have put the outsiders in there sohow, too. Triggered the quarantine just to give himself more ti to prepare—block the way to Pinnacle with a massive, godlike outsider so he could get in first through so backdoor he'd made."
"We can only hope that's not the case," Frost said. "It makes no sense to plan for scenarios where we lose no matter what."
Ashtoreth looked down at Kylie. "Say, speaking of planning, how are we on the governnt side of things?"
Kylie shrugged. "Well, they did so damage control. Basically, a guy stepped down from his job as your public liaison. You guys were supposed to get the ssage ready, but then wait on posting it until every one of the governnts and militaries could be brought into the loop and prepare to do press releases and whatnot once the word got out. Instead you got the ssage ready, then sent it out imdiately because of bureaucratic incompetence."
"Not though."
"No, not you—of course not you. You're completely within their control, obviously. The guy who resigned, though? He really ssed up on this one."
"And that explains why my video ca out on social dia with nothing official about it."
"Yeah," she said. "As for the whole, 'Heaven and Hell are against you and ancient humanity was a cosmic superpower,' the bossn are all trying varying degrees of telling people not to panic. Actually, there's a you might like. One sec, it's my new background."
She prodded her screen a few tis, then held up her tablet to show Ashtoreth an image that was simply the words keep calm and carry on on a purple background under a silhouette of Ashtoreth's horns.
Ashtoreth grinned. "So. Cool!"
"I thought you'd appreciate it," Kylie said. "Anyway, now that you showed up and talked to people, one of the conspiracy theories gaining traction is that you're actually fake."
"Uh, excuse ? I keep it real, thanks. I'm a hundred percent authentic all of the ti."
"Yeah, sure," said Kylie. "But they think you're actually not real. The video was an illusion and the announcent that [Vampiric Archfiend Ashtoreth] is now the monarch was just so kind of mass psychic trick. From there it splinters off into even more interesting theories—my favorite is that the more you believe in Ashtoreth, the more the governnt controls your mind."
Ashtoreth frowned. "You know, this all goes very far in making it clear that we're not going to control what people believe no matter how much of the truth we tell them."
"That's hardly surprising," said Frost. "Look how much work it took people in dia to lean on everyone's belief systems back when everything was normal."
"And people didn't exactly trust mainstream dia of all stripes back when it wasn't the apocalypse," said Kylie. "Anyway, it looks like part of their damage control strategy was also to bring in the treaties we're signing with the Eldunari Alliance, but I think that's running into its own problems."
Ashtoreth sat up and looked over. If there was one thing she didn't want to deal right now, it was complications with the elves. "What problems?"
"Well, they want to shift focus and keep the news cycle going, right? Except they can't actually get many elves in front of the caras. There's pretty much none at all, honestly."
"Why do you think that is?" Frost asked.
"My guess? Elves really don't want to be involved in human politics. They're probably not savvy enough when it cos to humanity to see the exact details of whatever political plays are at work, and so they're just not going to participate. The big one is that none of them have stepped up to answer the question of what they're going to do if the Authority of Heaven declares war on us."
Ashtoreth groaned. "Probably nothing. You think we should answer their calls?"
"The governnt?" Kylie asked. "Yeah, probably. We haven't got any more developnts in the pipeline, right?"
"No," she said. "We could try to repair the reality spool ourselves, but I don't even know where it is, let alone whether or not it'll give us instructions on how to fix its 98 service requests."
"I thought you said there were 91, before."
"There's 98 now," Ashtoreth said. Thinking back on the multiple hellfire novas, she added, "I, uh, might have had sothing to do with the increase. I can pop back into Diadem and check, and we can always try using the [Archive Consults] to see if there's repair instructions in the archive sowhere, but if Icon is lying to us, those can leave us vulnerable."
"I think it's ti, then," said Frost. "I think you should bring the governnts back in."
Ashtoreth let out a sigh, falling back to sit with her palms against the roof. "Yeah…"
"If we can get into Pinnacle first, that's better. But if we're not getting into Pinnacle anyti soon, then we should open up Orchard to humanity at large and let the scientists start poking around in Core. They've got a much better shot of finding sothing interesting than just Kylie with a bunch of ghosts."
"They're going to want to get into Diadem and talk to Icon," Ashtoreth said.
"They probably won't want to lift the quarantine, either," said Frost. "So you'll at least have until they hit 650."
"True," she said. "Honestly, I expect they'll be on the sa page as us when it cos to Icon, anyway." She blew out her cheeks, then dropped down to the ground in front of the house. "Anyone want to co with ?" she asked. "I'm going to pop back to Earth and give them a call. Set up a eting, then maybe get to bed."
"Already?" Frost asked, standing.
"Yeah, why not?" She asked. "We've done everything else as if we're on a deadline. If we're bringing the bossn back into the fold, we'd best get to it as soon as possible."
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