"Radioactive"
(Rules horror)
[Satan is a devil. Don't believe a devil's lies.]
[World consciousnesses may exist in different forms.]
[The clichéd method of seizure might be a smokescreen.]
"Let's make a deal."
The scroll had an aged hue somewhere between beige and grayish white, impossible to pin down.
Its edges curled irregularly, glowing with sparks.
It should have felt rough, but John, wary, did not reach out.
He simply stared at the paper:
The writing on it looked neither English nor Latin, nor like any human language.
Yet he found he could understand every abstract word.
"You know, contracts in Hell never use ink."
Lucifer spread the parchment across the table and smoothed it with his palm.
Dark red sparks on its surface danced once beneath his fingertips, then went out.
"We generally use blood, or souls, or some other, rarer hard currency.
But for yours, I could offer a discount."
"Spit it out. I don't have time for all this bullshit!"
John stood where he was, his right hand hanging at his side, the dark red glow around his eyes not yet entirely faded.
"Oh... easy now."
Lucifer leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. He looked in no hurry whatsoever.
Time remained frozen around them. That drop from the kitchen faucet still hung in midair.
The mass of black mist inside Jonathan's chest still held its eyes-open posture.
In the gap where time stood still, Lucifer was like a spectator sitting in the back row of a movie theater.
He neither cared how the film playing before him ended nor minded leaving halfway through.
He was just here for fun.
The parchment's meaning was clear: he was to plunder something.
As for a being suspected of being Satan wanting to plunder something?
That was pretty fucking liable to give people the wrong idea, wasn't it?
"So you want me to kill people for you?"
John frowned and tilted his head.
"Oh... be a gentleman. I never asked you to kill anyone."
Lucifer pushed the parchment toward him with a delicately raised pinkie, smiling brightly.
"To be frank, there's a kind of mind-over-matter power derived from a world's will, called the Power of the World.
Put plainly, it's the universe's favoritism toward its 'protagonist.'
Like I just told you, every world has a script.
Some scripts are beautifully bound, while others have already fallen apart...
But either way, a few names in every script are stamped in gold.
Those names are anchors for the Power of the World. Your job is to cross those names out of the script."
"How?"
"However you like~"
Lucifer scratched his ear, leaned back in his chair, and crossed his legs.
Then he extended a finger and traced an arc through the air.
A dark red trail of light remained along its path.
The trail split into two, then those two split into countless others, finally weaving a spiderweb in the air.
Every node in the web glimmered faintly. Some blazed like stars; others had dimmed until only one last trace of light remained.
And the sharp-eyed John unexpectedly noticed what seemed to be holes at the web's far ends.
"The multiverse is like a spiderweb. You can think of the holes in that web as a pass for smuggling yourself across."
"Every node represents a world. In the dimmer places, holes will form once the light disappears.
But look back at where you came from. That crack is still there; no one's discovered it yet.
You can slip right back through it and return to your original world."
"The Power of the World is the only hard currency that can ransom Jonathan Kent from the corrective force.
So the question isn't 'whether I'll give it to you,' but 'how you should get it.'"
"So you want me to extract the Power of the World from that world?"
"From a world I lived in for twenty years, from myself?"
"No."
Lucifer pushed the parchment forward an inch.
Its edge touched an empty cup Martha had left on the table that morning, producing the faintest chime.
"Extracting the Power of the World from yourself would be like pulling the bones out of your own body. I wouldn't recommend anything that stupid.
When a universe has two of you, your weight will be assessed as well."
So you can use another method.
The Power of the World in your original world may have been anchored to you, but those anchors loosened when you came here.
Then it needs a new host. It will distribute that weight among the people left behind.
But no matter who gets it, the total stays the same.
That total is the thickness of that world's script.
Your job is to get back before it finishes distributing the shares, then seize those shares back."
"How do I seize them?"
John raised an eyebrow. That word suited his tastes.
"There are two methods."
Lucifer raised two fingers, gleaming coldly beneath the dim kitchen light.
"The first is destruction. Snap that world off the story tree, branch and all.
Dimensions collapse, timelines break, and every anchor loses what it is attached to at the instant of collapse.
The Power of the World will fall off by itself like overripe fruit.
Efficient, clean, done in one step.
If you choose this route, I suggest you act now.
The sooner you act, the clearer that world's memory of you will be, and the more energy will remain after its collapse.
The larger the share you'll get."
"However, the grander the world, the more terrifying its will, so there's a possibility you might be hunted down."
"...And the second?"
"The second is seizure.
Redistributing the Power of the World is a process. It can't happen in an instant.
Its nature is like an inheritance.
Before the court announces the will, whoever sits in that chair first is the heir.
Your job is to return to that world and seize your share back before anyone settles firmly into your seat.
But you must make a choice at the very beginning."
"What choice?"
"This is the key... so, in what capacity do you intend to return?"
John looked down at the paper. The writhing words in the signature field crawled across his retinas like living worms.
He did not reach for a pen. Instead, he slipped both hands into his leather jacket pockets, stepped half a pace back, and leaned against the kitchen wall.
In his previous life, he had signed countless contracts.
Vought contracts, military contracts, endorsement contracts, and whatever bullshit licensing contracts.
For every one, Ashley had stood beside him, marking the "clauses" requiring attention with three different colors of highlighter.
Public relations lawyers had also reviewed them word by word for him.
No matter how fancy those contracts were, their core terms always came down to one fucking word: profit.
Yet this contract from Hell had not mentioned a single word from beginning to end-
About what Lucifer himself would get out of it.
An educated John and the Homelander of his previous life were already creatures on two different planes.
Incidentally, John personally reviewed and cross-checked every account on the farm, large or small.
"You told me how the Power of the World works... but you never said what you get."
"And you said yourself that this is a deal."
Lucifer did not lower his head to look at his fingers.
He merely tilted his head, though the smile at the corner of his mouth noticeably faded half a degree.
There was absolutely none of the embarrassment of being exposed on this Satan's face.
Instead, he wore that punchable "Oh~ you finally asked" expression.
Fucking spectacular.
"A former old Satan from Hell comes into my kitchen, sits down, and explains how the multiverse works... what's in it for you?"
In this life, Jonathan had taught him to fix pipes and change motor oil, and had also taught him a saying:
When someone fawns over you for no reason, they're either a scoundrel or a thief.
"So is your Hell some new kind of poverty relief office?"
"The terms you're offering are too good... so good they don't look like a deal with the devil. I'm even trembling a little."
At that, John felt thoroughly satisfied with his reasoning, pressing his two canine teeth together and displaying his signature fake smile.
"Interesting. Most people either kneel before me, run, or...
Heh. It's been a long time since I met someone who dared negotiate with me like this."
"I mocked Clark Kent for being a scripted slave, a puppet locked in place by the script.
From birth to death, not one choice truly belonged to him-
To me, someone like that is a caged bird. Pretty, but boring, and utterly unworthy of investment.
"But you-"
Lucifer pointed his index finger toward John's chest.
"You're a mutant isotope written wrong.
You bear a World Mark that appears in none of the multiverse's catalogs. You're the sole variable."
"I'm interested in you because you're a butterfly that metamorphosed outside every known ecosystem.
I want to know how many worlds your beating wings can stir up storms in, and how great those storms will be. I've lived too long...
Consider it adding a little spice to my long, rotting life."
"Although I'd like to ignore a devil's lies, I really am out of time."
Having decided to save Jonathan, John hesitated no further.
His eyes immediately lit up, firing two beams of Heat Vision at his own wrist.
Soon, several drops of scorching blood splashed out.
The parchment began burning where the blood landed. Flames spread outward from the signature field before finally vanishing at the edges.
In the signature field, John's signature appeared
-John.
"One last piece of information, free of charge. Timeline correction is one of the most troublesome things in the entire multiverse.
Its command consists of just one word:
[Return]
Jonathan Kent was supposed to [Return] this afternoon, but he didn't [Return].
So it will keep hounding him until he [Returns].
I can suppress it, but I can't remove it... unless you come back with enough weight."
Then Lucifer walked over to Jonathan's side and placed his hand on his chest, spreading all five fingers.
He pressed his knuckles into the gaps between the ribs.
The next second.
The entire mass of black mist tried to shrink deeper into the heart, but the dark red energy on Lucifer's hand moved faster.
In a single breath, it split into countless hair-thin tendrils, wrapping around the black mist from every direction.
One layer, two layers, three layers.
Finally, it condensed into a translucent dark red membrane around the black mist.
The mist still writhed inside, but it could no longer tighten on its own. It could only slam repeatedly against the membrane's inner walls.
But aside from producing a few ripples, the membrane held firm and unbroken.
"So, how long will this last?"
John crouched beside Jonathan, reactivating his X-Ray Vision and staring at the dark red membrane surrounding the black mist.
The membrane was thinning at an extremely slow rate.
"Three months. Three months in this world."
Lucifer removed his hand from Jonathan's chest.
"After three months, this suppression will run out... If you still haven't come back by then, Jonathan Kent will die the instant time restarts."
John said nothing.
He pulled Jonathan's work shirt down to cover his body, his movements gentle.
"Oh, right. Something for you."
Lucifer took something out of his pocket.
It was a flat piece of something.
Translucent, very thin, and about the size of a credit card.
John took it. The instant the thin piece landed in his palm, it merged into his body.
Soon, a modern projection panel appeared on his retina.
"What you're seeing is an information panel."
Lucifer spoke.
"When you're traveling through different worlds, get close to an anchor in that world.
Whether it's a person, an item, a location, or an event node, it'll respond automatically."
"You can use it to locate what you're looking for."
"Since when did your fucking Hell start using high tech too?"
"Hey, that's a stereotype... Dude, what do you think Hell is?
Sulfur, fire pits, a bunch of shameless souls wailing like ghosts and howling like wolves in deep water and scorching fire?
That's fucking Bronze Age Hell.
Hell today has several million souls, and a third of them were in Silicon Valley when they were alive.
Hmm, a fifth spent time in Shenzhen, China.
Jonathan Ive, Steve Jobs. I don't know if you know them.
He took over Hell's UI design department in the third year after his death. Now he designs the interfaces for Hell's entire bureaucratic system.
Smooth, minimalist, rounded rectangles. Even I, Satan himself, can't find fault with it."
"And there's Alan Turing. After Crick and Watson died, they sued each other for fifty years over credit for discovering DNA.
And now they're still colleagues in the same department.
Hell stopped being a fire pit ages ago... my dear counterpart."
By now, John had no interest in bickering.
Soon, he used his eyes to control the information panel and located an option called "Memory Retrospection Anchoring."
"What's this?"