XIII. Damnation Achieved

Dahl's eyes adjusted instantly to the light of the new chamber. He smelled cigarettes.

"You again?" he said.

"Who were you expecting?" Briggs replied, taking a drag. "The Devil himself?"

The room could have been a waiting room anywhere; its walls were blank, its floor a carpetted gray, its only furniture a set of institutional-style chairs. Briggs sat in the corner.

"So, what am I supposed to do here?" asked Dahl.

"Well, I'm going to show you how to tap into the Nexus, hell's overarching database. Normally they'd have someone else do it, but my superior wants me to oversee this personally. Go on, have a seat, this won't take long."

Dahl remained standing. "So, you were a demon all along?"

"Explains a lot, doesn't it?" said Briggs, focusing on his cigarette instead of at Dahl. "By the way, the name's not Briggs, not anymore at least. Call me Darrus."

"I'm Dahl."

"I know." he tapped his forehead. "Nexus."

Dahl sat.

"Remember that note I left on you, back at the church?" said Darrus, still not making eye contact.

"Yeah."

"Well, I think this should explain everything, as promised." With that, Darrus snapped his fingers.

Dahl braced himself, expecting another rush of unpleasantness. Instead, he felt a minor chill run down his spine, and then nothing.

"Congratulations, you are now officially a minion of the Pits of Hell." said Darrus, now standing in front of Dahl.

"But...nothing happened." he said.

"Think about that, why don't you." said Darrus, tossing away his cigarette and lighting another.

Dahl thought about his questions--and realized that he knew the answers. When Darrus had described the Nexus as a database, he had assumed it worked like the pre-Rehnquist computer search databases, hunting down specific data automatically and presenting it. Instead, it was more like memory--he simply knew what the answers were, as if remembering things that had never happened.

It all came to him at once. The red flask Darrus had retrieved from Hosanna of Bethany was a container of blood from a Fallen Angel, immensely powerful and exceedingly rare. Darrus had had to ask permission before entering Hosanna of Bethany because demons could not enter a holy place without permission. The Nexus had provided all of Darrus' information. Darrus smoked constantly to cover up the odor of sulphur that permiated his being. It all became so clear.

As for the training rooms, they were all connected but not connected. Hell wasn't bound to the same laws of time and space as the earth was--A and B could connected without ever touching the distances between them.

But the Nexus told him something else. He was a demon, and Reaver, but there was something more. He was a specific type of demon, a Doppelganger. He could take on the form of anything he could see.

Dahl looked up and Darrus, and simply understood the procedure. There was a sound like the shutter of a camera clicking open, and Dahl had changed forms.

"Impressive." said Darrus, looking at his own mirror image. "But you made a little flaw. You made a mirror image of me; everything backwards. Try it again."

Dahl focused harder this time, and the shutter clicked once more. This time the illusion was perfect.

"Better?" he asked, speaking in Darrus' smoke-ravaged baritone instead of his own voice.

"Passable, I think." said Darrus. "Now, you should also know how doors work. Any door for a demon connects to any other door. Now, you need to leave this room and come back out on earth. I think you know your first assignment, correct?"

Dahl thought for a moment, and understood. The Nexus told him everything he needed to know. With the camera sound, he reverted to his normal form and pulled out the shining sword--a Rhythm Blade, the Nexus called it.

"I understand." said Dahl. He turned to the door, and was gone.

"No, not really." Darrus said to the empty room. "You've lost that capacity. You don't have enough free will to really understand anything, anymore."

With that, Darrus left the room, and it ceased to exist.