Prometheus
23th of December 2006 A.D.
I was starting to learn the path though Undertown to the Station, rarely a good sign when someone is this familiar with how to get to an underground lair. In my defense most underground lairs are not filled with the savory smells of lamb ribs, the sizzle of great spongy pancakes topped with curry made with onion chili and a bunch of spices I did not know the names of until two months ago. It was a good place to pick up rumors from the darker side of town the way Mac's was for minor minor talents and practitioners. A lot of people would talk to a ghoul who wouldn't give the resident warden the time of day. At least that was my excuse and I was sticking to it... even as I grabbed a bowl of stew from the kitchen, a hard-boiled egg bobbing inside it.
"The Lady is doing something intensely arcane and sure to have all sorts of
exciting consequences," the smarmy dark haired vampire said not looking up from his laptop as I passed though the common room.
One of the kid ghouls giggled and then looked up guiltily just as one of the wall-lights grew a stone lid to wink at him. Like Alice in Wonderland if it was written by.... No come to think about it Lewis Carol was probably weird enough to have come up with this stuff. The station felt more like the Nevernever every time I visited. Bob called it a shallowing and insisted that is was 'perfectly normal' for active nodes where a lot of magic was being used, but I was reminded that Bob's notion of normal was not one most people, even most wizards shared when he started talking about some Alpine town that lost half its name and a third of its hours to Faerie but 'made a killing on trade... mostly not a literal killing.'
Call me old fashioned but the idea of having kids and a baby around this much magic made me nervous even before I got into the laboratory done up like a scene from Conan the Barbarian if they had a way better budget.
At the center of the room a pillar of stone had been not erected but grown from the floor presumably by Porter and to this spike of stone was chained what at first seemed to be a woman on her knees arms behind her back and it was only on a second look that I realized it was a marble statue so finely made as to seem alive, a winged statue. When I finally manages to tear my eyes away from the impossible detail in every line of it I realized there was something else odd about it, the joints were too flexible, marble should not bend like that or hair of spun gold flow and ripple in the soft hiss of the air conditioning.
"Do you like it?" Molly asked, smiling, a little sheepish maybe over that phone call.
But I couldn't answer, damn my curiosity I'd already opened my Sight to get a better look at it.... and almost fell right on my ass from sheer vertigo. I had seem some pretty awful things with the sight and some wonderful things too, but this had to be one of the weirdest. It was stone and gold and wheels of brass and it was a body at the same time, like Molly had written: "2+2=5" on some cosmic blackboard and made it true, logical inconsistencies be damned. Like a funhouse mirror the more I looked the more I saw, like losing myself in its depths, vessel and sanctuary, idol and eidolon.
Who says the blackboard is 2D?
The Sight being what it was as soon as the thought had entered my head I cranked my metaphorical neck and I could kind of see it, the other side on which the missing 'numbers' had been written. It was like trying to read an IKEA manual though a snowglobe when you also had the sneaking suspicion that it was all in Chinese anyway. But now that I knew that space was there I could... Well truth be told I was not sure what I could do with it, but I'm a wizard, figuring stuff like that stuff is half of my job.
"It's very impressive," I managed to get out as I closed myself up again.
"Thank you," Molly and Lash said at the same time.
"Well it is my body," the... spirit, I couldn't really think of her as a demon anymore could I? If I did I might have to object to this whole ritual to embody her to work her will in the material world to do
even Heaven did not know what.
"This is going to take till midnight, there's snacks and a bottle of water over there." Molly motioned towards an armchair and a coffee table someone had moved to the other side of the room as she set Lash's mirror down... in midair opposite the pillar and the body.
Of course there's snacks, what kind of a birthday party would there be without snacks. What did it say about me that I wasn't even that surprised at this point.
Once I had taken my seat Molly started to chant in the same alien inhuman tongue she had been speaking to Lash before, green fire kindling all about her. The words beat upon the ear like storm-winds not beat upon the ear like storm-winds and the roar of distant thunder. The mirror started to move slowly clockwise five full circles then the words changed, the crackle in them was not lightning but fire raging over the earth, dancing in tongues of light that touched the heavens exulting in power higher and higher.
The Mirror moved faster. Where its first five cycles had taken it more than three hours the next five took only an hour.
Down at the roots of the flames I could ear something else, the chants spoke of the groaning of stones as they gave way into deep clean earth renewed so that...
The mirror moved even faster. Five turns again in forty five minutes
Words of earth gave way to words of water, first ones that brought to mind rivers flowing in their banks then the sea roaring free. Almost fifteen minutes past as now the mirror's wings seemed almost to come alive.
Like a storm though deep deep jungles untouched by human hands the last words came, the mirror now so fast it it was a blur until it reached the point opposite the pillar.
Lash Spoke and her voice was white lighting cutting though the air, it was the sound of an skyscraper's worth of glass shattering not just one hand sized mirror and these words of all words I understood:
"[I am Myself Apart I am.]"
In one motion the body snapped its chains and broke the pillar wings unfurling and it... and
she rose and rose, impossibility tall for something that could fit inside the underground room, the hem of her robes was smoke and shadow, her flesh was stone carved without flaw, her hair of gold like a crown on marble brow hallowed in that same white light that pierced the eye and demanded the eye take keep. Her wings clinked like crystal set against the darkness behind her for the light illuminated her and only her.
Behind and all around the room Molly's green flames grew brighter. They had not really gone away I realized, it was just that for a moment my eyes refused to see them, refused to see anything beside Lash herself.
"Good?" Molly asked, a little awkwardly, but Lash was too busy looking down at herself in wonder.
She walked over to one of the walls and and splayed her fingers on it, then she tapped it and tipped her head as though listening for the echoes. "Wh... what have you done?" she barely managed to get out the last word in a voice like bells and wind-chimes somehow assembling into a semblance of English in perfect harmony before she breaks down laughing in sheer joy, unlike something I had ever heard from her, unlike anything I had ever heard from anyone.
"I made you a body," Molly answered patiently, but she did not try to hold back the enormous smile on a face now slick with sweat.
"Did you... did you fucking
ever?" The wings fold inwards, the light going with them, until Lash was standing there looking like what my brain insisted was her 'normal' six foot tall blond sporty Girl-Next-Door only here in the flesh and also in a black cocktail dress.
She turned to me, lips parting slightly as she considered her next words and asked softly: "Permission to punch you in the nose?"
"What?" I blurted out after a no doubt appropriate amount of time.
"I need to test something, it's important," she insisted earnestly. "I can't ask Molly, she might be too weird to count"
"Don't look at me, she's telling the truth," Molly said from by left.
"Alright," I agree, that is just your luck isn't it? Though I take care to add: "You only get one you hear. And just a normal punch I don't want to explain a broken nose to Butters."
Lash nodded solemnly, then she socked me, a respectable right hook though it wasn't any harder than a woman of her apparent size and strength could deliver so that was a relief.
"Nothing," she sighs, sounding both disappointed and relieved. "I can't get power from suffering like I could... like She can."
"Good," I get out rubbing my nose.
"Well the other way I can get it is to make pacts with mortals. What do you say Harry, fancy supernatural charm? Maybe a quicker wit?" I was about to open my mouth to quip when she added counting on her shapely fingers fingers. "Immunity to mind control, immunity to possession, resistance to illusion."
"And what would you get out of that?" I manage.
"Your faith in her to provide those things," Molly answers in the same tone she mentioned the phone call earlier. "That is what the built the... er... prayer channels. Though I am not sure, what can you do," she adds to Lash.
"Oh you know I can make the blind see and the lame walk," Lash starts out faux casually. "But mine is the Lore of Light, Longing and... Flesh." She trails off her expression unreadable. "Right I don't have a Coin, no access Down Below, limits of scale, but I can... and even..."
"Starting to get worried here, just a bit," you interject.
Lash does not answer, she just puts her hands to her temples, closes her eyes and thinks or maybe meditates. Slowly, reluctantly she says to Molly: "I think I need to have a talk with your father... and maybe his Sword."
What does Molly reply?
[] Let's go, Harry can come along if he wants
[] Wait until morning so as not to spring this on her parents in the middle of the night
[] Write in
OOC: Congratulations, you just invented Demons... well specifically the non-Earthbound Demons from Demon the Fallen. Just infernal things. 
