The Sin Hunter: Double or Nothing

Learning the Hard Way

The feeling of doing something that you may not want to do is always an exhilarating thing. And Jules felt the very same way when she leapt across the rooftop, leaping toward the edge of the next building. She knew that it would have been better to stay with her family, but she chose to leave on her own terms instead. And now she was forced to make the big choice if it meant she had to survive.

Jules soared across the rooftop, diving to the ground in a roll across the metal grating of a ventilator while Deck leapt across after her, clearing the gap with a lunge across two water towers. "So!" Deck exclaimed, clapping his hands as they screeched to a stop at the rooftop ledge. "You got us this far. What's the game plan, kiddo?" Jules holstered both of her revolvers, stepping over the ledge and looking down into the barrier separating Pride from Greed. Somewhere in the left distance of the wall between alleys, a crowd of tents and bonfires filled the smoky air.

Jules crouched low, keeping her wrists balanced on her knees. Unlike her mentor, although Jules wore the shadow-cloaking fedora with style, her long, midnight black hair draped down past the collar of her loose jacket as she rolled her sleeves back, exposing pale peach skin. "We need to get into Pride. Is there some way to get past these barriers?" Above the wall, arching high above in a dome-like shape, a faint, translucent layer of bubble gum pink energy flowed along the edge of the wall, trapping something in or keeping something out.

Deck tapped his platinum boot on the side of the roof, keeping a hand on his chin. "That would depend. First off, what's in Pride that you need to see?" Jules never turned her eyes away from the wall when she spoke to Deck. "The source of this filth and madness started behind that wall. I need to know where we can start grabbing the reins of this deadly toxin." Deck planted himself on his hands, his legs dangling around his arms and swaying off the window ledge. "Sounds good to me. Though I betcha it'll take a moment to find what we're looking for."

Jules stepped away from the ledge, rising like a cloud of murky, muddy water. Her eyes were fixed tight against the rippling surface of the barrier between Sins. "There are terminals between these things, right? Exits to leave or travel, I mean." Her thumb jerked toward the wall as Deck rose from his crouched stance, joining the young Sin Hunter beside the ledge. "Well, sure. But we gotta find somebody who can get us through those terminals without too much hassle." Jules cocked her fedora to an angle. The barrier rippled in the reflection of her slitted white lenses.

"Hmm. Maybe there's something we can do at the entrance to the terminals. Start a riot, or something like that." Deck crossed his sleeves, standing on the tips of his hooves to level his gaze with Jules' chin. "We could try something like that. I've started riots before, but the tricky stuff with riots is that they change immediately upon creation." "Like the stock market. Constantly changing." Deck turned with a smile, his vertically arranged eyes gleaming with delight. "I think you refer to the Living World's market. See, in Hell, the market is called 'Mug 'em till they drop'."

Jules' eyes raised in stunned silence, her mouth curling into a pursed frown. "Oh. So you just kill each other until somebody gets up to the top of the pile?" Deck chuckled, crossing his arms behind his back and arching down, cracking his spine. "Yup!" He muttered, cracking his back with a loud and audible snap. "That's Hell for ya! Welcome to the most dysfunctional society the universe over." Jules turned away from Deck's chuckling, her eyes fixing on a shadowed group of people in the alleyway below the rooftop.

When Deck noticed this, he quieted down, tipping onto his toes to stand at shoulder height with Jules. "Kid, I'll be square with you. It's not too late for us to head back to the group and reconnect. Are you feeling any different now?" Jules, however, shook her head when she replied. "Like it or not, I'm not going back there. The rest of the team can hold their own in a fight. I'm not my mom or my dad. I can solve problems on my own." The Demon shrugged, his vertically arranged eyes narrowing with puzzled silence. "Yet you requested the help of someone anyway."

Jules crossed her arms, crouching low to try listening in on the conversations in the alley below. "You know Hell better than anyone else on the team. I need a Demon who can see the streets with their eyes closed." Deck nodded, his expression growing more serious when he turned away from the group of clustered figures below. "You can refer to me as a he. I'm sick of all this nonsense with misgendering. You call them what they are based on what their biological makeup says they are." Jules raised her eyebrows, surprised by the sudden shift in tone.

Added to this was her knowing people who became very upset when misgendered or misidentified. "You're not a big fan of that stuff, are you?" She asked. Deck scoffed, crossing his gauntlets and planting his boots on the ledge. "I hate it. Free will has taken a turn for the worse, and it started with one idiot taking the belief that you can be whatever you want too seriously. It started as attraction to genders, which, by the way," he gestured with a gauntlet, "I have the utmost respect for. My uncle lives with his husband in a motel in Lust, they do scrapbooking every Thursday."

Jules shrugged, and the Demon and Sin Hunter returned focus to the crowd below. From their vantage point, it should have been impossible to discern them from a rag in the wind. But Jules could tell something was off. The sporadic movements of the rags hinting at displaced wind movement told Jules that such a rag was unnatural. "Deck," she whispered. The Demon cut himself short, moving over to view the crowd below them. "Hmm," he muttered, crossing his gauntlets flat behind his back as he leaned forward, "now that could be interesting." Jules crouched low, reaching a hand behind her belt. She removed a large, silver revolver from her holster.

However, Jules paused when Deck waved his hand in front of her face. "Hold it. Demons and Sinners may be trouble, but let's try reasoning with them first. Maybe we can find some common ground." Jules remained quiet, slowly pushing her revolver back into its holster before standing up, dusting off her knees. "Fair enough. Let's go." As Jules turned around, she faced a new face with an eyepatch, a small but mousy nose and a blazing purple eye in a beautiful shade of almond gold. Then something poked against her. From the corner of her eye, Jules watched the tip of a cutlass tap her chest. "Hey there, cutie."