RP Syndicate of Sinners

Delfi

Delfi

Active member
The smell of the leak wasn't as strong when room 106’s door was closed. Dahlia couldn't complain, the sewer leak, that hadn't been fixed in over two years ensured the higher ups wouldn't venture down to the ground floor, making the meeting that was about to start relatively safe from prying eyes - devilish eyes.

The entire floor was no longer in use, except for those who longed for a place to hide for a couple minutes - or hours, if they were lucky. After bribing surveillance, they had at least 2 hours guaranteed, that should be enough for that particular encounter.

It was 10 past five, and most workers would be leaving their shifts at that time and heading to the cafeteria, except for the members of the Syndicate of Sinners. Dahlia, as it was often the case, had been the first to arrive. She sat on an old metal bench, across from the pile of carton boxes that had been pushed aside to make room in the space that used to be used for storage. She waited for the others to arrive, thinking over the topics that were supposed to be discussed that afternoon.
 
Belloq counted in his free time.

He counted hours, minutes, and seconds. He counted the days left before expiry - the end of the last vestiges of his contracts from the world above. There were an embarrassing number of people getting unearned rewards - those heroes who had paid for victories with their very souls. Yet he, the collector, was nowhere to be seen. Cast down in his prime, he was unable to reap his just rewards - and as a result, there were people up there walking away from their deals having paid effectively nothing because he wasn't available to collect.

There was a saying he thought of frequently, and with bitterness: that it was better to reign in Hell than serve above. Well, now he served in Hell, which was a double loss by any accounting. His loss of status had been the height of all humiliations.

Or so he'd thought. Now he was debasing himself further by willingly associating with the so-called Syndicate of Sinners. The special thing about losing out in a deal with Mephistopholes was that every single day was somehow worse than the last. Every time anyone saw him, it was on the worst day of his existence. That was a most disquieting thought.

He had spent an average amount of time preening before a mirror, running a moleskin-gloved hand over two tiny horns which protruded from his forehead. Sharp, but none too large - he preferred a sleek appearance, to not be weighed down by an oversized goat-like crown. Red-yellow eyes stared hatefully at the reflection, a sneer breaking across his uncannily handsome features; yes, he'd chosen a more-or-less fair form, as devils went, but that was because he preferred to be normal and to the point. He didn't strut about, all fire-and-brimstone, all terror - no, for the most part, he looked like a mortal with red skin, little horns, and black bat wings neatly folded across his back.

For his garb, he elected to go with a simple black doublet, the collar none too high, with matching dark gloves and boots. He threw a furred cloak over his right shoulder and proceeded toward the meeting place. Hell alternated between quite hot and quite cold, but as he felt neither really, he opted for a simple, functional fashion statement. Yes, he'd been divested of nearly all his wealth and power, but he was still a foreman, and he meant to show it.

Gliding into Room 106 as a mist would, he eyed the purple-skinned lesser soul with quiet contempt. Truly did misery acquaint a devil with strange bedfellows.

"Supervisor Daeva," he nodded, bowing slightly, but never taking his eyes off her. They beamed with hate - yet he had come here to join her little league, having run out of other options. Even for a devil, insubordination was low on his list of values. Things, he reminded himself, could always be worse. Much worse. What rotten fruit might this association bear? He masked his sense of foreboding with a cool calm. After all, he was higher status than them. He let that be what little comfort it was.
 
The room was smelly.

Jake had always thought that word came off wrong. If something was tasty it was usually considered a good thing, wasn't it? Why was it that if something was smelly it was generally considered bad? He didn't mind the smells, regardless of what other people thought of them. He knew there were a lot of things to learn from smell.

For example, he knew the sewer was still leaking two doors down. This was not exactly new knowledge, because it had been that way for a long time. Sometimes people complained about it, but no one fixed it. Jake didn't fix it either, but he also didn't complain about it.

Fixing it was not his job. Jake had learned that some people were very particular about jobs and who was supposed to be doing what. No one ever got too upset about him emptying the bins, though, so that was most of what Jake did. He walked around the factory with a cart that had three wheels that worked all right and one that didn't. He knew how to put a little more pressure on the left side of the handle so it tipped up and didn't push down so much on the bad wheel, and most of the time that was fine. He emptied the little bins into the big bins, and kept an eye out in case there was something interesting in there.

Earlier he had found a fish bone. The tail of it currently dangled from his mouth like an odd cigarette, wiggling occasionally as he slowly crunched his way through it. It was a good bone, and he didn't want to eat it too fast.

He had left the cart in the hallway, because there wasn't very much space in the room. Mostly it was full of boxes, but it also had two other people. One of them had very fancy clothes on, which wasn't going to be very good for going through the bins, but Jake tried not to judge other people. The other was seated on a bench, looking like she was thinking about something. He didn't judge her for that, either. Jake spent a lot of time thinking. It was something to do, while going between the bins.

Because there didn't seem to be anything better to do right now, he slunk his way across the floor, looking to see if the bins in the room had been emptied yet, and if there might be anything good in them.
 
Golian stood at the edge of the kitchen, signing out for the night, the smell of the day's food sticking to him like bad body odor. He removed his hair net and Smock and placed them in the laundry pile, for all the good that did. It always looked as if no one did a damn thing in the way of cleaning clothing around here. He then took off his kitchen booties and placed them in his locker, and laced up his leather boots. He put on his patchwork leather coat and headed toward the meeting room.

Looking down the hall with a blank stare, his mind a daze of preparing the food for the evening, making sure the second shift had everything they needed. The Gobshites on the second shift couldn't warm a pot of beans, well alone clean a damn dish. As he walked the air grew thick with the smell of tainted arse as he reached the meeting room, 106. He opened the door, then shut it behind him, looking about the room, his eyes darting between the three others in here with him.

He took a seat on the floor, his back against the wall. He pulled a bottle of fermented fruit ale from his coat and took a long drink from it. "Evening, Dahlia, and Belloq. We are still waiting on the others, I take it? Fancy a drink, I've got two more bottles of this gut rot." His voice was harsh, like grinding stones.

As he looked again around the room, he saw Jake, whom he called the Bin-Rat, looking through the bins. He raised a brow at him, watching him scuttle about.
 
Meetings that became meetings about meetings that became meetings about how no work was getting done which themselves became reminders that soon there would be individual meetings to review the work that each person had done. So much talking and reminders about how there would soon be more taking that by the time it all wrapped itself up there wasn’t much time to get anything done. That was the point of it perhaps, because Cara never found that people were given work to do that would be impossible to accomplish just that there was never enough time to finish anything so it all simply began to pile up in thick dusty stacks of things that could be done if only there was ever time to do it.

Eventually the meetings ended on a collection of reminders about tomorrow and the various gatherings she would need to attend, and Cara was finally free to take care of the tasks she had meant to get to a week ago. Or was it a month ago? It didn’t really matter, a work order to fix something out in the city that maybe would possibly get fixed once she hit it with a rubber stamp or maybe would continue to languish, she had other places to go and she just needed it to look like she had done something with her day even if it didn’t do anything about the stack of papers on her desk. Maybe she’d put together the schedule for her lesser-devil boss later tonight, but she had somewhere else to be.

Cara made her way down, and down, and down, and — well she was just belaboring the point wasn’t she — until she was out on a street and making her way to the meeting point. The ground floor of some feverish building that was long into suffering a sewage clog. Perhaps that clog was one of the papers languishing on her desk? Who knew. Cara did however take a moment to brush the wrinkles out of her skirt and blouse, which did feel a touch silly to do immersed in the smell of rot next to a cart full of garbage thank you very much, before pushing the door open and taking a step inside.

Another meeting she was unsurprised to see, it was meetings all the way down in this place. She pushed the door closed before giving the ones who had gathered a nod. Lord above that door really didn’t help with the stench much did it?

“Hello, not too late I take it?” She said crisply, taking an empty seat at the table.
 
Dahlia responded with a nod when the demon arrived, knowing very well he would have preferred someone to unroll a carpet for his entrance, and maybe give a kiss on his ass. He faked it well enough, the disdain for everyone he saw as below him. His position as foreman and shapeshifting abilities were useful, so Dahlia pretended not to be bothered by it.

The next one to enter was the newest addition to the team, a wild card that despite the harmless front, Dahlia trusted the least. Her nose flinched just slightly at the corpse of a fish dangling from his mouth, but down there, she couldn't really judge anyone’s diet because they were all fed the same shit. If it was in the trash, it probably tasted the same as what they were fed at the cafeteria.

Golian arrived next, offering something that was definitely not served at the cafeteria.

“Where did you get it?” The supervisor asked, raising an eyebrow and her hand, to reach for the bottle. She smelled it, the sweetness of it barely masking the alcohol. Honestly she could use a drink, but unlike Golian, Dahlia didn’t drink things she didn't know the precedence of. It wasn't like drinking it could kill her, that was impossible in Hell. But there were worse things than death that could happen.

Her attention was turned away from the bottle when the door opened again and Cara walked in. As secretary for the factory, she was pretty good at taking notes - and even better at hiding sensible information in case the notes fell into the wrong hands. Dahlia looked at the clock on her wrist.

“Five more minutes. Then we’ll start with who’s here.” She said, returning the bottle to Golian. “We’ll have two hours.”
 
How overly familiar, thou wretch, he thought bitterly as the dwarf greeted him.

"Master dwarf," he said with a slight upward tilt of his chin - a customary salutation. Yet, internally, Belloq blazed and seethed at the perfunctory use of his name, and not his title. It was authority he clung to now, and this sad assortment of walking, breathing, shitting tools. With these sad implements, he would rebuild his dominion. Had he not some need of them, he'd put in a recommendation for a long flaying.

But of course, mustn't they have known how he despised them? It was almost beautiful, in a way - that they could be forced into cooperation with each other notwithstanding their mutual hatred. As with anything flavored as good down here - including Golian's smuggled ale - it served only to accentuate and amplify the bad. Whatever respite they found, or meaning, or light at the end of the tunnel...it served only to heighten any suffering they experienced by contrast. It was elaborate, and it was by design. This was Hell, and they deserved to be here, one way or the other.

Indeed, satisfaction was more or less unknown to Ludor Belloq; as a devil, he had a perpetual kind of greed that could never be sated, one altogether alien and menacing to those of a more mortal mindset. A creature of malcontentment and vice, he doubted whether he could ever truly be happy - for that would require a kind of gratification and fulfillment totally foreign to his kind. Even the most powerful devils never knew true happiness - only the momentary abatement of desire that further accentuated their suffering, their willful distance from good. He was an artifact of malice, capable of good works only insofar as they led to greater evils. And he deserved everything he was getting, make no mistake of that.

So it was that he declined Golian's ale with a subtle upturned palm and easy smile - a demeanor as false as his appearance, and as what passed for his soul.

His eyes scanned the rest of the room. A hideous imp-thing scurried about and rummaged through bins, leading a quiet, uninterrupted existence. A lower form of being (he wouldn't call it life) - he pondered for a moment whether the creature thrived in Hell or bore the evils along with the rest of them. Perhaps his twisted existence was its own torture.

Then, a human soul entered the room. She bore a modest skirt-and-blouse. From what he knew of the factory, she was overly burdened by logistical work, the sort of which her kind had no taste for. Her wrinkled nose betrayed her unease - undoubtedly, the overpowering smell of garbage and waste had made its way to her nostrils, and those of the others. Belloq was not so above mortals that he was immune to such distasteful scents, but as with Hell's heat and cold, he was fairly adapted to it. It barely registered to him.

Regarding the dwarf's ale -

"Indeed - where?" he asked, echoing Dahlia. He leaned back in his seat, one leg crossed up over the other, and steepled his gloved fingertips. They tapped together innocently as he waited for the answer. A fun little game - what did they dare disclose to him?

Not that it much mattered. They were all already trapped in Hell, after all.
 
“Very well.” Cara said with an incline of her head. Five minutes seemed a fine enough pause, it would take time to catch up any latecomers to the meeting but surely less time for that than they would waste simply waiting. They had all the time of existence available to them in Hell, but hell had many ways of making an ill used hour into a torment, a well used hour too, mind, but Cara still believed in holding to some virtues.

Discussion in the room had turned to a bottle in the dwarf’s hand, which if Cara’s nose wasn’t fooled left the distinct ethanol burn of truly cheap liquor in the air. Were there foodstuffs that you could even ferment in hell? Well, clearly there were given the bottle existed and was filled with something sharp.

“Well if you can batch it to scale perhaps we can fund this whole operation with illicit drink.” Cara said with an idle wave of her hand. This was a mistake as it replaced the almost pleasant smell of ethanol with the far less pleasant smell outside. Shame that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top