Chapter 550: A Little Hell

The bus took them all the way to the Eighth Ward before Arc noticed she’d spaced out entirely on where they were going. At that point, the bus driver announced that they were going on lunch, and services would resume in an hour.

Arc, Owyn, and Raven wound up being the last ones off the bus, just in time to see the bus driver walk down a street containing many "edge of town" themed pubs, on the other side of which was the large tower built specifically to house much of Norneau’s angelic community.

"Oh, I love this place!" Raven crowed excitedly, and when Arc turned, she found Raven looking across the street to one of the few places in the city that had been allowed to wall itself in.

Demonward, better known as Little Hell.

The outer side of the wall was covered in graffiti, but dominating the wall were massive, spiky letters in demonic style, spelling out their message in Common...

"Raise Hell," Owyn read. "What’s that about?"

"It’s part of a saying, from the months after the apocalypse." Raven cleared her throat, quoting, "Can’t raise the dead. Raise Hell instead."

"Meaning?"

Raven raised an eyebrow at him. "How do you not know this stuff? I don’t care if you’re not the sharpest knife in the crayon box, but if you’re our age, you should have at least seen the aftermath of the Demon Riots."

Arc stopped her internal cringing to facepalm. How could Owyn manage to ruin his cover with only two questions?!

But then she realised the one she’d underestimated this whole time had been Raven. She’d assumed wrongly that because Raven had been an annoyance pointed in her direction, she was somehow oblivious to other people.

She still wanted to shout at Owyn so badly... But holding her mouth and glaring at him stopped him from continuing his foolishness. So instead, he tried a new sort of foolishness: Making it her problem.

"Should I tell her?" he asked.

"Ugh!" Arc’s hands both came up to slap herself over the eyes before dragging her fingers down. "The Chancellor is going to kill me..."

Raven, looking from Owyn to Arc, continued to prove herself quick on the uptake. "Let’s at least get out of the street... Ever had Hellish food? I know a good spot."

Arc couldn’t bring herself to care when Owyn admitted he hadn’t, though to be fair, neither had she. Father didn’t know any recipes, even though he baked a mean pizza. Amarena could burn a cup of ice water because she had exactly zero patience for cooking. And Anko, for some reason, just never seemed to cook for anyone, though Arc could have sworn she had mentioned it at some point.

In any case, they soon found themselves seated in the back corner of a restaurant that... wasn’t too shabby considering Little Hell’s reputation. All things considered, it was a middling restaurant filled with the exotic smell of spices and the chatter of workers having their own lunches. Given the recent incursion, most conversations Arc picked up on were about that. Some of the demons gave the group’s table a glance, but seemed to lose interest in Raven and Owyn once they saw Arc was with them, like she was their chaperone or something.

Come to think of it, every non-demon here seems to have a demon they’re with. The amount of wariness she felt in the threads around her threatened to overwhelm her. She just wished they would go away...

But unfortunately, she had no idea how to accomplish that.

She was a little grateful when the waitress came over with menus and asked for their orders, since it gave her something to focus on. The waitress was either a half-demon or someone so close to one of the mankin species it was hard to tell. She had horns, but they were nubs in a small crown at the line of her forehead, and her skin was a healthy red-brown.

"What are the portion sizes like?" Owyn asked.

"There’s a one-thousand crysta surcharge for giant portions," she replied.

"That’s pretty cheap," Raven explained.

The waitress shrugged, "Not a lot of giants come around, and there’s always a bit of extra at the end of the day."

"The, uh, Pandemonium," Owyn said the word a bit slowly, "Platter sounds interesting."

"Your funeral," The waitress muttered under her breath with a cocked smile, then wrote down his order as Arc remembered she needed to order something too. While she was browsing the menu, Raven ordered something called an ’arrakhait bowl’ and a non-alcoholic version of a Hell Eye.

Arc only knew about the latter because one of her moms, Sin, had run a piece on the news about the bar scene in Little Hell.

"And you, kin?" the waitress asked Arc.

"Do you have a dessert menu?" Arc asked.

The waitress let out a resounding "Ha! Good one!" before resuming her wait. When Arc waited back, she realised, "Oh, wait, you were serious? This is Hell food, no such thing as dessert."

"I’ll just have a water then," Arc replied sheepishly as the waitress’s threads brought her a sense of angry betrayal that utterly baffled Arc. The waitress wrote it down and had the good grace to walk away before shaking her head.

In less time than Arc had hoped, their food and Arc’s drink were laid before them.

"One Pandemonium Platter," the waitress deposited what looked to Arc like a whole wok full of blackened... everything. "One virgin Hell Eye and arrakhait," she placed a cup of amber liquid with an orange-yellow something oozing out of the crust on top in front of Raven, and a bowl of what looked to Arc like blood and noodles with unidentifiable bits. "And one... water." She placed Arc’s glass on the table with a little bit of force that made it splash a bit. "Enjoy."

The water was black, and Arc stared at it apprehensively.

Perhaps he’d sensed her feelings, but Arc only felt dread and embarrassment as Owyn raised his voice. "Hey! What did you do to her water?"

Enough heads turned that Arc had to resist the urge to curl up and hide under the table.

"It’s just charcoal," the demoness replied. "Thought she might want the real Hell food experience."

"You didn’t say anything about..."

Charcoal... Arc met the waitress’s challenging gaze. She saw that a few other patrons had glasses of just regular water, and the demons nearest were now watching the exchange with interest. "Owyn!" Arc snapped, "It’s fine."

Arc lifted the glass and stared back at the waitress as she drank down the water in one go, wiping a moustache of black sludge from her upper lip. She sensed a bit of... respect? Through some of the threads of the demons watching her, and the waitress’s threads mixed respect and annoyance as she offered the pitcher, "Fill your cup before I go?"

"Please," Arc replied, not flinching as more black water was poured for her. The waitress seemed happy to walk off.

Owyn lowered his voice, "Why did you stop me? That could have been poison."

"Charcoal’s just carbon. I’ve had enough burnt pastries in my life to know it’s safe," Arc replied. "Besides, this is a restaurant. Why would she poison a customer? That would just get her fired."

Raven cleared her throat, having tried a spoonful of the liquid in her bowl. Arc felt a bit of pain from her, localised in her tongue, before shoving it aside to be with the rest of the pain she couldn’t afford to let in. "Demons can be pretty harsh to each other. Especially when one tries to act like they’re better for not, well, acting like a demon."

"And how are demons supposed to act?" Arc rested her head on the table and held herself by the forehead.

"Well, you just managed it. I think you can go from there well enough," Raven smirked. "But maybe don’t show so much ignorance about their food. Demons might not need to eat, but it seems they take to it just fine, so they don’t have to feed on each other. And like your Father, they’re very proud."

"Do not bring up my Father," Arc warned. "Bad enough when they don’t know I’m three-quarters angel, even if I don’t look it." The contradiction in her blood remained a mystery of her existence, and she wondered if her sister would experience a similar dissonance if she ever visited the angelic community. For that matter, she wondered if Owyn was experiencing the same with the local giants. He seemed... bigger than most she’d seen. Not always physically, but rather like he had more presence, at least to her.

"They love him here, you know," Raven pointed towards the bar, where in place of prominence, a picture of her Father cast its gaze over the entire bar. Whoever had painted it made him look far too shadowy and arrogant. The Father she knew was just... kindof sad.

Thinking about him made Arc sad, so she changed the subject to the reason she’d asked the two of them out in the first place.

"We should talk about the other night," she said, lowering her voice a bit.