Re: The Wretched Rite - Round Two - Inferno Alpha
05-07-2012, 07:54 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Jacquerel.
The tunnels that Alluvion was being led through were, as far as the river spirit could tell, both near-endless and identical (though to be fair he hadn't quite got the hang of artificial structures quite yet, the Library had been the first house he'd ever entered and it wasn't like he'd spent long in there before being whisked off here and stuffed into a coffin (not that he knew what a coffin was either)) but at least it gave him and the irascible imp plenty of time to talk. Or rather, plenty of time for Alluvion to ask hundreds of questions, the answers to almost all of which his beleaguered conversational partner frankly believed could have been answered by even the least intellectual of toddlers. The first and easiest was the exchange of names (“Just call me Beezle, everyone else does whether I like it or not”) but it only went downhill from there. I mean yeah this wasn't exactly the first weird alien type he'd seen and it seemed like all the oddballs had always ended up on his floor (honestly how nuts do you have to be to end up in the circle for heretics when you know for a fact that hell is real and that you will be incarcerated in a burning tomb for not doing it right?) but this guy didn't even seem to know the most basic tenets of religion, let alone what religion was. He even claimed to be a God, which explained why he had ended up on that particular circle but added the more burning question of what the hell he was doing in Hell in the first place. Sure, this being Hell they were meant to be at least nominally nefarious, but the whole thing was also basically voluntary and how could you volunteer if you didn't even know what Hell was? Beezle-808 and all the rest of his mechanical gang had been programmed to be intensely loyal to the cause (sufficiently enough that he was deeply resentful of his current task, though not quite enough to actively resist the new code that had been inserted into his robot brain) but this was giving him serious doubts about the competency of upper management. He was, by design, utterly sold on the concept of voluntary eternal torment, but that didn't mean he had to like individual members of staff. He'd be angrier at the drop in standards if it didn't mean he might finally be able to get back to his old and infinitely preferable job of poking the damned with a hot fork, released from the forced servitude he had needed to endure for a span of centuries now, but the hypocrisy was getting on his synthetic nerves.
Most things tended to do that.
“Look, that's just how it is OK? God warned people that they wouldn't be able to handle the responsibility of free will but they took it anyway and then what do you know but it turns out the omniscient guy knew better than a bunch of people he'd created in his image, with lesser intellect. He gave them a bunch of really simple laws and yet everyone manages to break at least one of them, usually most of them, so we exist to punish them for what they did wrong. Forever.”
”I just do not understand... it is like using pain to reinforce the lesson in their head, yes? It does indeed not make sense for one to kill another and not to eat him-
“Cannibalism is a sin too! You can't do that!” “-This I understand, but I do not see the purpose to this when they are never released to demonstrate that they have learned anything. If they are kept here forever... what is the point? Does that not just break 'The Rules' itself?”
To the imp, the answers to these questions were blindingly obvious (they were built right into his head, after all) but for some reason he found them difficult to put into words despite the fact that they were a defining point of his very being. He knew in what passed for his heart that they had to be right. Every time he explained something he was just confronted by more questions that he was sure he must have already answered but that did not seem to satisfy his charge.
Was Alluvion playing a trick on him? How about just stupid? Fuck it, he was a demon, not a priest. Nobody expected him to know the scripture by heart!
“Here I'm not going to sit around arguing theology all day, I know you're a bloody heretic but heavens above, there's more than one conversational topic!”
Alluvion on the other hand was enjoying himself immensely. He was asking so many questions not because he was cynical but because he found the idea fascinating. These “people” (so far he'd seen upright animals, regular humans, Tsote and robots and had no means of divining which were actually the most common) had created so many wonderful things (the concept of language for instance, that was totally new to him) that surely they couldn't be wrong about the existence of a divine ruler as well? Alluvion didn't particularly understand it all, but he was prepared to accept that these people were much smarter than he was, that was why he had to find out more!
Being basically a god himself, he didn't find believing in another god to be too much of a stretch of the imagination, and while it was true that when he was guardian of the river (it seemed so long ago but it couldn't even have been a whole day, could it?) he'd never needed anything like laws or commandments or circles of hell, as far as he was aware nothing at all happened to fish when they died except that they were eaten by other fish or occasionally birds or otters. Fish didn't really have the intellect to sin and thus did it not stand to reason that if people were more smarter than fish then they'd need more complicated rules? And therefore also that whatever gods they spawned would be more complicated too?
He found it fairly easy to dismiss any logical inconsistencies in the imp's explanation not as errors with the machine-being's belief system (that was another interesting development that he'd still not quite come to terms with; as far as his god-senses could tell Beezle wasn't alive at all but that was clearly far from the truth) but rather as gaps in his own understanding caused by his humble piscine origins.
Another thing he didn't really understand was the robot's constant reference to the fact that he didn't really enjoy what he was doing and would much rather be doing something else, but then doing it anyway. His explanation that he was “a robot” didn't really help, and while Beezle had tried to outline the limiting effects of machine programming on free will he had quickly realised that this was a bit of a dead end and given up. All Alluvion really knew was that the imp's obscure mission meant that he and his posse of robot followers (all of which had remained entirely silent, apparently happy to let their boss do all of the talking) occasionally had to stop out of sight of a corner to let an group of superficially identical machines move past, or occasionally conceal themselves behind the hulking warrior machine as it intoned in a stony voice, “Corridor closed for cleaning, no entry.”
It looked fairly ridiculous holding a mop, but it was larger and more physically threatening than any of the other robots in the machine tunnels, and besides all the demons were on the same side so it couldn't possibly be lying to them about the cleaning, could it?
The majority of the tunnels other inhabitants were more robotic imps though, and Beezle seemed to afford them almost no attention at all, nobody bothered to hide from them and in return they didn't bother looking up from what they were doing, which was usually cleaning. A fairly large number of them seemed to be employed with dusting away cobwebs and incinerating the inhabitants with tiny jets of flame, which upset Alluvion slightly as they were the only tangibly living creatures he had encountered for a fair while, but his guide explained that they weren't really supposed to be there and invasive species were something he certainly did understand. “Not even Hell knows how they got up here either, must have hitched a lift on The Luggage of the Damned.”
After an interminable number of ramps, turns, crossroads and the the occasional lift ride, the steel-walled tunnel opened out into wider and better lit corridors and they had to stop much more often to hide, apparently this was some kind of administration level. Alluvion believed that this likely would have been more difficult had anyone actually gone out of their way to look for intruders but nobody seemed even slightly wary, they weren't expecting anyone to be creeping around who shouldn't be.
The imp's goal appeared to be a neglected-looking console built into the wall at a three-way intersection. He signalled for his gang to move out and watch for people coming while he tapped commands onto the keyboard. The hulking warrior machine leaned itself against a nearby wall to watch.
“Almost done here and then I can get you off my hands. I'd say it's been a pleasure meeting you but it really wasn't at all. Best case scenario after the next few minutes I never see you a-”KSHHHKKKHccckkkHHKksss
The end of the sentence was drowned out by a burst of static from ancient speakers, startling Alluvion and bringing Beezle immediately to attention.
“About bloody time Luce, I thought you weren't going to show up.”
I TOLD YOU Nnnhhkkkh CALL ME THAT, MY NAME IS LUCYhhhkksshsss
“Where's that interference coming from?”
WHATEVER
IT'S BEEN schhshskk YEARS SINCE I SENT YOU OFF- “Not that you asked...” DON'T INTERRUPT, I HOPE YOU HSsschshhs TO SHOW FOR IT
BAD ENOUGH THAT Ikschs ME I DON'T NEED SASS FROM YOU
I AM NOT HAVING A GOOD DAY
YOU DON'T EVEN DO WHAT YOU ARE kschshh AS IT IS
CAN'T EVEN GET YOU TO kchhsss WITHOUT ENDLESS COMPLAINTS
“Yeah ok boss whatever you say, just wanted to let you know that I found you someone.
No need to thank me, just doing my duty, don't care about material reward etcetera etcetera.
If you felt like letting me go back to my old job that would be nice though-”
NO BE QUIET
ARE YOU SURE?
Kschsssshkkk THOUSAND YEARS AND THEN THREE AT ONCE?
YOU HAD kcksssskkkhkk NOT BE LYING TO ME
“Don't you have cameras around here?”
Ktthhsssshkk TRYING TO SHUT ME OUT
“Well he's some weird snake thing, turned up in a cell down on six. Seems to be made of water or something, hell if I know. Doesn't seem to get on well with electronics either if my second in command was anything to go by...”
”Are you talking about me?” Alluvion had been waiting in patient confusion as his new friend talked to a wall and it spoke (loudly) back to him, but now that they had mentioned him specifically he thought it was about time he found out what was actually going on.
“Who are you talking to? Are they in there? Let me see!”
“Wait no don't touch that!”
DON'T TOUCH WHAKKHshkKHKhskskskshsskssshhhshshshhhhhhh
Alluvion leaned over the console and peered into the screen, placing one webbed hand onto the keypad. His liquid fingers slipped between the keys and into the circuitry and with a static screech the display flashed several different colours and then died completely, taking “Lucy”'s voice with it. The second one in the space of hours, at least this one hadn't exploded.
“Oh for crying out loud! The next one's two floors up!”
The river god's trail of destruction had yet to reach its conclusion though, the bright flash and loud noises sent him stumbling backwards in panic (or whatever the equivalent of stumbling is when you don't have any legs), splashing against the chest of Beezle's mop-wielding bodyguard. The make of machine that had so threatened Poran looked far less intimidating when locked in some form of robot seizure on the ground, an involuntary course of action that only served to drench itself further in the liquid that was such an antithesis to its internal circuitry. Its thrashing lapsed quickly into limpness and the corridor was suddenly terribly still.
“Are... are your friends OK?” Alluvion asked, after a long pause. He had been aid to both prey and predator in the past, but the idea that he might have just killed something personally and (worse) by accident, without anything gained to compensate for the loss, was terrifying.
Beezle fixed him with a long, hard stare by way of response, then shooed him out of the way (“Don't want any of that shit on me, thank you”) so that he could inspect his former-companion's corpse.
“Well there ain't anything I can do for this one, just going to have to leave him here it looks like.”
”So he's... dead?”
“Dead? What? No, he's a robot. I already explained this to you!
It's a right pain in the ass that you've gone and melted his brain but as soon as some other demon drags him down to the workshop he'll be all fixed up. Problem is that they'll fix everything, lucky bastard, he can go back to chopping people up on 8.9 while I now have to escort you up god knows how many floors to find another working terminal. Not quite sure yet how we're going to manage that, especially now that we're down a man...”
The knowledge that the machine creature would eventually be ok was reassuring, though Alluvion was still deeply embarrassed.
“What about your friend in the wall?”
“In the wall...? Oh!
Luce- Lucy doesn't live in the wall you twit, you just wrecked a computer. She'll be fine although I doubt you improved her mood any with that little stunt. Or mine for that matter, but I imagine we're probably both stuck with you now.
Now unless you really want to kill more of my henchmen we had better get moving before all that noise attracts someone's attention, that wasn't a great display of subtlety right there.”
Alas, it was too late. Unwanted attention had already arrived, walked up behind Beezle and tapped him on one tiny shoulder. Apparently his guard imps had fanned out to guard the two corridors to the side but completely neglected to watch the one that they had come from themselves.
”I- Excuse me?”, it was a rather dishevelled looking woman with a bush growing out of their back.
Even with the map, the labyrinthine service tunnels of the hell station were fairly hard to navigate (especially avoiding the blacked out areas) and it hadn't taken her long to get fairly lost. The tiny computer's screen really was too small to see properly and few of the survival lessons she had learned in the last few years turned out to be any use at all for navigating inside an enormous building.
It was entirely by chance that she'd stumbled upon one of the people she had been tasked with looking for, attracted by the sound of voices. All of the other machines (regardless of whatever bizarre shape they'd been built in, she was sure she'd seen at least six kinds on the way here) had basically treated her as if she wasn't there and so eventually she'd been decided to just start ignoring them back. The sudden noise of angry conversation had been bit of a give away after that, although she was sure she had heard three voices. Had one of them been from the big machine now lying on the ground?
“Is this... man... your responsibility? Are you taking him back to where he's meant to be going?”
She wasn't really sure how she knew that this was what she was looking for but she could have sworn she recognised the bizarre creature at the other end of the corridor from somewhere, and besides that he certainly fit the description what with being the only non-mechanical being she'd met so far.
What worried her was the fact that the giant snake that she had been tasked with apprehending had apparently just taken down a robot that was even larger than the gorilla-esque demon that had given her this job in the first place, and the imp seemed to be planning on collaborating with it.
“I uh- need to make sure that he gets there?”
This was starting to seem like a worse idea with every second that the demon in front of her spent staring at her instead of replying, but what else could she do? It was this or vacuum, she only wished she'd been able to get the robot gorilla to come with her. She was starting to realise that getting people to go back to where they were supposed to be was probably going to take more than a few stern words.
The tunnels that Alluvion was being led through were, as far as the river spirit could tell, both near-endless and identical (though to be fair he hadn't quite got the hang of artificial structures quite yet, the Library had been the first house he'd ever entered and it wasn't like he'd spent long in there before being whisked off here and stuffed into a coffin (not that he knew what a coffin was either)) but at least it gave him and the irascible imp plenty of time to talk. Or rather, plenty of time for Alluvion to ask hundreds of questions, the answers to almost all of which his beleaguered conversational partner frankly believed could have been answered by even the least intellectual of toddlers. The first and easiest was the exchange of names (“Just call me Beezle, everyone else does whether I like it or not”) but it only went downhill from there. I mean yeah this wasn't exactly the first weird alien type he'd seen and it seemed like all the oddballs had always ended up on his floor (honestly how nuts do you have to be to end up in the circle for heretics when you know for a fact that hell is real and that you will be incarcerated in a burning tomb for not doing it right?) but this guy didn't even seem to know the most basic tenets of religion, let alone what religion was. He even claimed to be a God, which explained why he had ended up on that particular circle but added the more burning question of what the hell he was doing in Hell in the first place. Sure, this being Hell they were meant to be at least nominally nefarious, but the whole thing was also basically voluntary and how could you volunteer if you didn't even know what Hell was? Beezle-808 and all the rest of his mechanical gang had been programmed to be intensely loyal to the cause (sufficiently enough that he was deeply resentful of his current task, though not quite enough to actively resist the new code that had been inserted into his robot brain) but this was giving him serious doubts about the competency of upper management. He was, by design, utterly sold on the concept of voluntary eternal torment, but that didn't mean he had to like individual members of staff. He'd be angrier at the drop in standards if it didn't mean he might finally be able to get back to his old and infinitely preferable job of poking the damned with a hot fork, released from the forced servitude he had needed to endure for a span of centuries now, but the hypocrisy was getting on his synthetic nerves.
Most things tended to do that.
“Look, that's just how it is OK? God warned people that they wouldn't be able to handle the responsibility of free will but they took it anyway and then what do you know but it turns out the omniscient guy knew better than a bunch of people he'd created in his image, with lesser intellect. He gave them a bunch of really simple laws and yet everyone manages to break at least one of them, usually most of them, so we exist to punish them for what they did wrong. Forever.”
”I just do not understand... it is like using pain to reinforce the lesson in their head, yes? It does indeed not make sense for one to kill another and not to eat him-
“Cannibalism is a sin too! You can't do that!” “-This I understand, but I do not see the purpose to this when they are never released to demonstrate that they have learned anything. If they are kept here forever... what is the point? Does that not just break 'The Rules' itself?”
To the imp, the answers to these questions were blindingly obvious (they were built right into his head, after all) but for some reason he found them difficult to put into words despite the fact that they were a defining point of his very being. He knew in what passed for his heart that they had to be right. Every time he explained something he was just confronted by more questions that he was sure he must have already answered but that did not seem to satisfy his charge.
Was Alluvion playing a trick on him? How about just stupid? Fuck it, he was a demon, not a priest. Nobody expected him to know the scripture by heart!
“Here I'm not going to sit around arguing theology all day, I know you're a bloody heretic but heavens above, there's more than one conversational topic!”
Alluvion on the other hand was enjoying himself immensely. He was asking so many questions not because he was cynical but because he found the idea fascinating. These “people” (so far he'd seen upright animals, regular humans, Tsote and robots and had no means of divining which were actually the most common) had created so many wonderful things (the concept of language for instance, that was totally new to him) that surely they couldn't be wrong about the existence of a divine ruler as well? Alluvion didn't particularly understand it all, but he was prepared to accept that these people were much smarter than he was, that was why he had to find out more!
Being basically a god himself, he didn't find believing in another god to be too much of a stretch of the imagination, and while it was true that when he was guardian of the river (it seemed so long ago but it couldn't even have been a whole day, could it?) he'd never needed anything like laws or commandments or circles of hell, as far as he was aware nothing at all happened to fish when they died except that they were eaten by other fish or occasionally birds or otters. Fish didn't really have the intellect to sin and thus did it not stand to reason that if people were more smarter than fish then they'd need more complicated rules? And therefore also that whatever gods they spawned would be more complicated too?
He found it fairly easy to dismiss any logical inconsistencies in the imp's explanation not as errors with the machine-being's belief system (that was another interesting development that he'd still not quite come to terms with; as far as his god-senses could tell Beezle wasn't alive at all but that was clearly far from the truth) but rather as gaps in his own understanding caused by his humble piscine origins.
Another thing he didn't really understand was the robot's constant reference to the fact that he didn't really enjoy what he was doing and would much rather be doing something else, but then doing it anyway. His explanation that he was “a robot” didn't really help, and while Beezle had tried to outline the limiting effects of machine programming on free will he had quickly realised that this was a bit of a dead end and given up. All Alluvion really knew was that the imp's obscure mission meant that he and his posse of robot followers (all of which had remained entirely silent, apparently happy to let their boss do all of the talking) occasionally had to stop out of sight of a corner to let an group of superficially identical machines move past, or occasionally conceal themselves behind the hulking warrior machine as it intoned in a stony voice, “Corridor closed for cleaning, no entry.”
It looked fairly ridiculous holding a mop, but it was larger and more physically threatening than any of the other robots in the machine tunnels, and besides all the demons were on the same side so it couldn't possibly be lying to them about the cleaning, could it?
The majority of the tunnels other inhabitants were more robotic imps though, and Beezle seemed to afford them almost no attention at all, nobody bothered to hide from them and in return they didn't bother looking up from what they were doing, which was usually cleaning. A fairly large number of them seemed to be employed with dusting away cobwebs and incinerating the inhabitants with tiny jets of flame, which upset Alluvion slightly as they were the only tangibly living creatures he had encountered for a fair while, but his guide explained that they weren't really supposed to be there and invasive species were something he certainly did understand. “Not even Hell knows how they got up here either, must have hitched a lift on The Luggage of the Damned.”
After an interminable number of ramps, turns, crossroads and the the occasional lift ride, the steel-walled tunnel opened out into wider and better lit corridors and they had to stop much more often to hide, apparently this was some kind of administration level. Alluvion believed that this likely would have been more difficult had anyone actually gone out of their way to look for intruders but nobody seemed even slightly wary, they weren't expecting anyone to be creeping around who shouldn't be.
The imp's goal appeared to be a neglected-looking console built into the wall at a three-way intersection. He signalled for his gang to move out and watch for people coming while he tapped commands onto the keyboard. The hulking warrior machine leaned itself against a nearby wall to watch.
“Almost done here and then I can get you off my hands. I'd say it's been a pleasure meeting you but it really wasn't at all. Best case scenario after the next few minutes I never see you a-”KSHHHKKKHccckkkHHKksss
The end of the sentence was drowned out by a burst of static from ancient speakers, startling Alluvion and bringing Beezle immediately to attention.
“About bloody time Luce, I thought you weren't going to show up.”
I TOLD YOU Nnnhhkkkh CALL ME THAT, MY NAME IS LUCYhhhkksshsss
“Where's that interference coming from?”
WHATEVER
IT'S BEEN schhshskk YEARS SINCE I SENT YOU OFF- “Not that you asked...” DON'T INTERRUPT, I HOPE YOU HSsschshhs TO SHOW FOR IT
BAD ENOUGH THAT Ikschs ME I DON'T NEED SASS FROM YOU
I AM NOT HAVING A GOOD DAY
YOU DON'T EVEN DO WHAT YOU ARE kschshh AS IT IS
CAN'T EVEN GET YOU TO kchhsss WITHOUT ENDLESS COMPLAINTS
“Yeah ok boss whatever you say, just wanted to let you know that I found you someone.
No need to thank me, just doing my duty, don't care about material reward etcetera etcetera.
If you felt like letting me go back to my old job that would be nice though-”
NO BE QUIET
ARE YOU SURE?
Kschsssshkkk THOUSAND YEARS AND THEN THREE AT ONCE?
YOU HAD kcksssskkkhkk NOT BE LYING TO ME
“Don't you have cameras around here?”
Ktthhsssshkk TRYING TO SHUT ME OUT
“Well he's some weird snake thing, turned up in a cell down on six. Seems to be made of water or something, hell if I know. Doesn't seem to get on well with electronics either if my second in command was anything to go by...”
”Are you talking about me?” Alluvion had been waiting in patient confusion as his new friend talked to a wall and it spoke (loudly) back to him, but now that they had mentioned him specifically he thought it was about time he found out what was actually going on.
“Who are you talking to? Are they in there? Let me see!”
“Wait no don't touch that!”
DON'T TOUCH WHAKKHshkKHKhskskskshsskssshhhshshshhhhhhh
Alluvion leaned over the console and peered into the screen, placing one webbed hand onto the keypad. His liquid fingers slipped between the keys and into the circuitry and with a static screech the display flashed several different colours and then died completely, taking “Lucy”'s voice with it. The second one in the space of hours, at least this one hadn't exploded.
“Oh for crying out loud! The next one's two floors up!”
The river god's trail of destruction had yet to reach its conclusion though, the bright flash and loud noises sent him stumbling backwards in panic (or whatever the equivalent of stumbling is when you don't have any legs), splashing against the chest of Beezle's mop-wielding bodyguard. The make of machine that had so threatened Poran looked far less intimidating when locked in some form of robot seizure on the ground, an involuntary course of action that only served to drench itself further in the liquid that was such an antithesis to its internal circuitry. Its thrashing lapsed quickly into limpness and the corridor was suddenly terribly still.
“Are... are your friends OK?” Alluvion asked, after a long pause. He had been aid to both prey and predator in the past, but the idea that he might have just killed something personally and (worse) by accident, without anything gained to compensate for the loss, was terrifying.
Beezle fixed him with a long, hard stare by way of response, then shooed him out of the way (“Don't want any of that shit on me, thank you”) so that he could inspect his former-companion's corpse.
“Well there ain't anything I can do for this one, just going to have to leave him here it looks like.”
”So he's... dead?”
“Dead? What? No, he's a robot. I already explained this to you!
It's a right pain in the ass that you've gone and melted his brain but as soon as some other demon drags him down to the workshop he'll be all fixed up. Problem is that they'll fix everything, lucky bastard, he can go back to chopping people up on 8.9 while I now have to escort you up god knows how many floors to find another working terminal. Not quite sure yet how we're going to manage that, especially now that we're down a man...”
The knowledge that the machine creature would eventually be ok was reassuring, though Alluvion was still deeply embarrassed.
“What about your friend in the wall?”
“In the wall...? Oh!
Luce- Lucy doesn't live in the wall you twit, you just wrecked a computer. She'll be fine although I doubt you improved her mood any with that little stunt. Or mine for that matter, but I imagine we're probably both stuck with you now.
Now unless you really want to kill more of my henchmen we had better get moving before all that noise attracts someone's attention, that wasn't a great display of subtlety right there.”
Alas, it was too late. Unwanted attention had already arrived, walked up behind Beezle and tapped him on one tiny shoulder. Apparently his guard imps had fanned out to guard the two corridors to the side but completely neglected to watch the one that they had come from themselves.
”I- Excuse me?”, it was a rather dishevelled looking woman with a bush growing out of their back.
Even with the map, the labyrinthine service tunnels of the hell station were fairly hard to navigate (especially avoiding the blacked out areas) and it hadn't taken her long to get fairly lost. The tiny computer's screen really was too small to see properly and few of the survival lessons she had learned in the last few years turned out to be any use at all for navigating inside an enormous building.
It was entirely by chance that she'd stumbled upon one of the people she had been tasked with looking for, attracted by the sound of voices. All of the other machines (regardless of whatever bizarre shape they'd been built in, she was sure she'd seen at least six kinds on the way here) had basically treated her as if she wasn't there and so eventually she'd been decided to just start ignoring them back. The sudden noise of angry conversation had been bit of a give away after that, although she was sure she had heard three voices. Had one of them been from the big machine now lying on the ground?
“Is this... man... your responsibility? Are you taking him back to where he's meant to be going?”
She wasn't really sure how she knew that this was what she was looking for but she could have sworn she recognised the bizarre creature at the other end of the corridor from somewhere, and besides that he certainly fit the description what with being the only non-mechanical being she'd met so far.
What worried her was the fact that the giant snake that she had been tasked with apprehending had apparently just taken down a robot that was even larger than the gorilla-esque demon that had given her this job in the first place, and the imp seemed to be planning on collaborating with it.
“I uh- need to make sure that he gets there?”
This was starting to seem like a worse idea with every second that the demon in front of her spent staring at her instead of replying, but what else could she do? It was this or vacuum, she only wished she'd been able to get the robot gorilla to come with her. She was starting to realise that getting people to go back to where they were supposed to be was probably going to take more than a few stern words.