Nago & the Demon | A Samurai Jack fanfic

Pilot (Prologue)

[Content Warnings: Mentions of and references to death and mild gore. Heavy violence implied (but not well described).]

. . .

Plat. Plat. Plat.

Black rubber boots squelched in the mud brought on by the onslaught of heavy rain that had begun over two hours ago. No doubt the road back would be flooded...but she could wait it out. What she had been promised could be found here would be more than worth such a wait.

Digging into her poncho, she retrieved a scrap of paper with a haphazardly drawn portrait of a house on one side. She held it up to the house atop the hill before her. The details matched. There was no doubt in her mind – this was the place. Returning the scrap of paper to the protection of her poncho's interior, she plodded ahead through the thick mud until she reached the home's front door. There, she knocked three times. For a moment, there was no sound but the pouring of rain around her. Then, a security camera built into the door whirred to life, and the voice of the home's occupant spoke up.

"What'dy'a want?"

She kept her head down, avoiding looking directly into the camera. "I heard I might be able to find some...oddities here." She said calmly. "You see, I'm in the market for something very rare, and my quest has led me here."

"...Well, that depends on who you are, what you're looking for, and most importantly—who you serve." The occupant replied. "So, how 'bout you give me some answers before I tell you what I've got here."

"Very well." She glanced into the camera, revealing her face to be covered by a white mask bearing the expression of a winking cat. "For reasons I'm sure someone like yourself could understand, I do not often reveal my face to those I've only just met. I am called Nago. And I have come searching for the genuine remains of a demon. I serve no one but the innocent harmed by that black-hearted devil, Aku."

"...Heheh..." The occupant of the house chuckled slightly. "Well, then, little lady, c'mon in." She heard the door unlatch. "Any enemy of Aku is a friend of mine."

She twisted the knob and pushed the door open, and wasted no time in stepping inside, shutting the door to keep out the rain. The house's interior was filled with oddities of most imaginable shapes and sizes. Artifacts from cultures now long dead, taxidermied creatures she had never seen alive, and a wide assortment of bones. She had come for remains, but at a glance, none of the bones appeared to have ever belonged to a demon.

Standing at the counter at the far wall was a large, well-muscled man with a full dark beard. She noted that he was wearing an eyepatch, and wondered briefly if Aku's forces had taken half of his sight as well. His bad eye was opposite to her own, a coincidence that might have been mildly funny, had it not been so unfortunate. "Well don't just stand there. You said you were looking for demon parts, right? Luckily for you, I think I've got just what you're looking for!" He turned around as Nago approached the counter, and moments later, placed a dusty glass box onto the counter—inside of it, was a severed hand.

Nago froze, her gaze fixated solely on the strange artifact. It was as black as coal, and it's fingers were long, slender, and claw-like. It called to her mind the image of Aku himself...she wondered what sort of body the hand had been connected to in life. At the end of its wrist, its internal flesh was an almost pretty shade of light blue. Nago smiled slightly, an involuntary reaction to the thought of a powerful and likely well-respected demon within Aku's ranks being quite literally blue-blooded. At times, life could be...fitting like that.

She finally broke her gaze from its focus on the hand, and looked to the seller. "...There is no doubt in my mind that this is the severed hand of a demon. Where did you get this?" She inquired.

It didn't take long for the man to begin spinning Nago quite a yarn. "The bastard this hand belonged to put me and several thousand others through a special kind of hell. It was decades ago that he got the better of me when my friends and I tried to launch an attack on those blasted beetle drones." The man closed his eyes for a moment, seeming contemplative. "He appeared out of nowhere, and before we knew it, we were swarmed not with beetle drones, but with ghostly warriors! We fought them for as long as we could..." He bowed his head slightly. "...But we couldn't win. Every time we destroyed one of the warriors, they would just come right back! It was endless...my friends were eventually killed in the struggle...until only I was left. Only then did the monster's army stop. I thought he'd finish me off...but instead, he had his soldiers hold me in place while he appeared behind me and sank his teeth into my neck! After that...everything went black." He paused, then shook his head before resuming his tale. "No, it wasn't black...it was blue, just like the still bloody flesh inside that arm. There I was, in the belly of the beast—literally! He'd consumed my very soul and trapped it within some sort of internal prison. There were thousands more like me as far as my eyes could see, all of us kept prisoner by rings of unbreakable flame. I don't know how long I spent in there, or how many fellow warriors I was forced to destroy whenever I was summoned...all I know is that one day, the target was the Samurai himself. I tell ya, miss...every legend you've heard about that man is the utmost truth. He did what no other warrior had ever accomplished...he freed us." The man began to smile in a manner that seemed almost wistful. "Course, after we were freed, the demon was rendered powerless...and us, well...we had a score to settle, all 3,999 of us. I think you can guess what we did." He gestured to the severed hand.

It was then that Nago noticed its claw-like fingers were frozen in a sort of permanent flinch, the fingers curled towards the floor of the case, as though it had been removed while its owner clawed desperately at the ground. She grimaced a bit, unable to keep from imagining the full extent of the demon's fate. Though, from the sound of the man's tale, the bastard had certainly deserved whatever he'd gotten. "...I'm sorry, but for my purposes I need more remains than a mere hand. Is this hand all that remains of the demon?" She thought to ask.

"Ah, then you're in luck. Far as I know, I was the only one who chose to keep a trophy of him." The man replied. "I got crushed bone and a bottle of blood in the back, but I haven't figured out what to do with them. I figured there had to be some sort of ritual that required those things, but so far no one's offered to take 'em off my hands." He smiled wryly. "I take it you might, though. One moment, I'll bring them in from the back." He turned and vanished through a doorway directly behind him.

Nago, in the meantime, continued to look at the hand. To think of such an artifact belonging to a demon who had served Aku for so many years...she could have rejoiced. 15 long years, and her grand scheme was finally coming to fruition. With the hand, ground bones, and blood, she would have everything the ritual called for.

The man at last returned from the back room, carrying a tied bag in one hand and a wine bottle in the other. He placed both upon the counter, neatly framing the hand on both sides. Upon closer inspection, the liquid inside the bottle was the same hue as the flesh inside the hand's severed wrist. "There. Genuine demon bone powder and equally genuine demon blood." The man announced. "Tell ya what...if they don't work in whatever ritual you're planning, bring 'em back to me for a fu—" He paused, and scowled slightly. "I mean, half a refund."

Nago arched a brow behind her mask, but relented. "So be it. For what I seek, no price could be too great." She retrieved a jingling bag from her poncho, placing it into the outstretched hands of the seller. "But I trust 15,000 is enough?"

The man beamed. "You're damn right it is!" She'd managed to make him quite cheerful with this generous donation. He paused though, and narrowed his eye at her. "Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, lady, but...what exactly do you plan to do with those parts?"

Nago paused for a moment...and then, she removed her mask. Staring back at the man was a sightless gray eye beside a darker one blazing with fury. "...I'm going to make the monster who slaughtered my people regret ever coming to this planet." It was a simple response...but it would tell the man everything he might have wanted to know.

The man stared for a moment, before he, too, lifted his eyepatch, revealing a milky eye much like her own. "Give him hell for me, then."