Orange Crush

Prologue - #TeamLucifer

It may have been a cliché move borrowed from too many Prime and/or Second 'Verse dictators to count, but almost every room in Samael's particular corner of Purgatorio bore a most regal portrait of his own blond likeness. And as virtually everyone in this particular corner knew, the eyes of those portraits were always watching. Though not by Samael himself. That was too many eyes. No, he employed a whole team of people to stay piped into those camera feeds all the time. Actually, "employed" wasn't the right word. That implied that he was paying them, which of course wasn't the case. Too bad. They all needed a leg up financially, none of them having a single serpent whatsoever. And they always had a good glimpse of the single Orange Crush that he always wore on his arm. The rarest of all, only because he had them all.

Except now, the one he carried on his arm, her recent clutch of eggs had just been stolen.

So he was personally keeping eyes on certain key people in Purgatorio. People he thought would be just enterprising enough to get their hands on his missing Crushes. Or, more likely, sell them to anyone else who may have really wanted one.

Certain people like the visitors from the Silicon Valley on their semi-annual retreat. The aforementioned dictators, many of whom were trying to reestablish some of their former glories on this new planet, and were often failing.

And of course, his littlest brother.

That piece of crap. He hadn't seen Josh in quite a while. A couple of millennia, at least. He looked good, admittedly. He was working out more; he had a very deep tan; he had some seriously cool tattoos. If only Samael could have tats himself, but maybe it was a side effect of being the original Lucifer Morningstar that any such attempt would light up the ink and burn it out right quick. Great, envy. One of those Seven Deadly Sins that Dad always wanted to purge from people, and yet half the time he couldn't purge them from himself, let alone his too many kids.

If only Dad had stopped with him as the only child. Well, maybe Michael, except Michael was too similar to Samael in terms of both looks and personality. Like Dad had somehow suspected Samael would be a problem child by his capricious standards, so he had a near-duplicate with the same woman? And then, unable to keep his dick in his...well, they didn't really wear pants back then, but the expression still stood.

The point was, Dad slept around with so many women to make new archangels and shit, and he had the audacity to declare it wrong when anyone else did it? This was so typical of cult leaders. Samael had yet to meet anyone of mortal religious authority who didn't follow the same exact playbook. Though, of course, anyone who was, and wasn't a total hypocrite, likely never came to this particular ass end of the multiverse. Not even on some kind of missionary duty, as if there'd be any to be done here. Samael was pretty sure that faith in any God was no more than five percent in Purgatorio on a good day.

Josh wasn't here on missionary duty either, was he? No way, not when he was doing trash take-out at one of those clubs where the Silicon Valley types always liked to go. And yet, pretty quickly, it appeared that he'd found one of those Orange Crushes that had gotten loose. According to the camera feed inside the club, anyway. Good thing permanent residents all had to go sleeveless so they would show however many snakes they had on hand - or, at least, one or two.

Not bad, Samael thought, for a guy who'd only been back in Purgatorio for a month or two. The exact number of days, weeks, whatever, he wasn't sure of anymore. Even for him - especially for him, spending eternity here and all - those numbers had a way of blurring together.

Now, though...?

Great. Now he needed to come up with an actual plan to execute in order to get that serpent back. When was the last time he actually came up with a plan? Sloth, another one of those deadly sins of Daddy's. His laziness in actually doing shit.

Well, no longer. Samael was about to get that snake back, because otherwise, his carefully ordered chaos would all come crashing down about his ears.