Devil's Candy

ch06-devilizer

Posted November 24, 2017 at 5:00 am

Deep in the deepest of deep space, beyond the galaxy, the super galaxy and far into the gala gala galaxy, there dwelled the dying planet of Darknazar 66. “Dying” is perhaps a kind way to put it, for in truth the planet was being killed, or rather, executed by the Federation of Space Justice. Charged with countless acts of space crimes against space people and gross misuse of universe-threatening space science, Darknazar 66 had received several warnings before a super-ion weapon of mass destruction was deployed against their world.

Their world-king had gazed into the abyss of forbidden science and danced deeper and deeper into its depths, seduced by the power it provided his planet. Unwilling to abandon this dark technology, the king hoped to fight and destroy the Federation of Space Justice. However, as Darknazar’s core split into pieces, its oceans boiled away and its skies filled with fire, it was clear that his rebellion would not end in victory.

For better or worse, the king had planned for such a defeat and in the final moments of his world, that plan was being carried out by two scientists, huddled near a pulsating black mass in a tube. The King himself was a bloody heap in the corner of the lab, murdered by none other than the scientists tasked with preserving his legacy.

The pair had thought themselves physicists, rather than murderers, but desperate times had driven them to madness. Or perhaps they were mad to begin with; they had committed their lives to dangerous and forbidden sciences, after all. In the dying moments of the planet, who could say if they had been corrupted by a twisted world or if their world had been corrupted by them.

At any rate, they blamed their current state on their world-king and refused to give him a throne to sit upon in the strange new future they were creating.

Although Darknazar 66 itself was doomed, if things went according to plan, it would be preserved thanks to the strange black mass before them, hidden away in their rapidly collapsing lab. Known as the “Psychoarc Planisorb,” it was intended to absorb and condense every element of Darknazar 66 into its core, then depart for a new planet, shooting across the cosmos like a meteor. It would absorb not only biological matter, but sociological and philosophical concepts as well. Once it crashed on a faraway planet, it would release all the Darknazarian Elements contained within and transform the world into a new Darknazar.

Although it was too late for the inhabitants of Darknazar, the device could house one Darknazarian, who alone would be the herald of their legacy. That was intended to be the world-king, but the pair of scientists had decided they were better suited to be lord and lady of their new world. Although the device was only designed for one, they were unwilling to sacrifice each other and decided that a new world would not be worth seeing if they couldn’t see it together. So, with this act of love and selfishness, they held hands and pressed the button to activate the Psychoarc Planisorb, instantly reducing their burning world to nothing but a tiny, lonely sphere in a seemingly endless sea of stars.

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Many many space miles away, on a much more familiar planet, in a much more familiar city, filled with much more familiar devils, a young kobold named Chip Brisket took his glamdogg, Kiggy for a walk. Glamdoggs were a rare sight in the city, or to be more specific, a rare sight anywhere. The gentle and noble beasts were highly coveted as pets, but extremely difficult to acquire. This was partially due to the fact that they were quite picky about their owners and prone to sometimes fatal fits of depression. If an owner’s love for their glamdogg were to fade, then the glamdogg’s body would wither away. If their owner’s love for them was pure, then they would become more and more glamorous.

Chip’s glamdogg was extremely glamorous. Its silky soft fur was so plush that all of its features, save its tiny black feet, were buried in a beautiful, multicolored ball of fluff. This was thanks to the fact that Chip had no living relatives, no friends, no significant other and no particular hobbies. All he had in his life was work, love for his glamdogg and uncertainty about the future. Both his job and his glamdogg had been more or less inherited from his grandfather. Having no direction in life, Chip followed in his grandfather’s footsteps and became a police officer after he passed away. “That’s what Kiggy would want,” he thought, making wild assumptions about the animal’s feelings. Regardless, Kiggy was quite happy and seemed to want to share that happiness with Chip. Every morning, Chip awoke to its little black paws sitting on his chest as it chirped quietly, almost like a tiny bird.

Chip gave no outward impression that he suffered from ennui. His ears and tiny tail were well-trimmed, he was in excellent shape, and he was both handsome and fairly well-spoken. Despite his lack of passion for his profession, he passed his aptitude tests with flying colors. He was even convinced, for a time, that he would be a good police officer. His hostile work environment soon eliminated all of those hopes.

The hostility was not directed at Chip himself, nor did it come from his fellow officers. Rather, it came entirely from the chief of police and was directed entirely at devils who had committed traffic violations. This may sound insignificant, but the amount of fury that the chief had for traffic violators was enough to make everyone at the station uneasy. He would bring in the offenders himself and drag them into his office by the ear or tail or tentacle. What followed was pure terror; banging, screaming, begging for mercy. No one knew what the chief was doing and no one had the courage to ask. Some officers even brought earplugs to spare themselves from both the screams and the equally-awkward silence that followed.

Chip wondered if perhaps the chief had lost a family member to a traffic accident and was taking out his inconsolable rage on the world. “Maybe I should try reaching out to him,” he thought. This, of course, was never going to happen, partially thanks to the chief’s strange behavior towards the police officers.

“Do you think I’m smart?” he would often ask.

“Sure, chief. You’re a smart guy.”

“Yeah, but do you think I’m smarter than I was last week?”

“I, uh…I wouldn’t know, chief.”

Then the chief would click his tongue and walk away in a huff. Not very approachable.

All of this stress, which could not possibly be rationalized or dealt with, was swallowed into the soft fur of Kiggy as Chip cuddled him each night. Taking Kiggy for a walk also put Chip at ease. In this case, that was to his detriment. Perhaps because he was happy to be walking his glamdogg and perhaps because he was desensitized to screaming thanks to the chief, Chip failed to notice the flocks of people running away from the park and yelling at the top of their lungs. It wasn’t until the sky turned an eerie purple that he noticed anything was wrong and by then, it was far too late to run from the large black mass hurtling towards the ground like a meteor. Chip instinctively grabbed Kiggy and held him in his arms protectively, because he did indeed love his glamdogg and despite being a sorry excuse for a police officer, in his heart, he still longed to protect others.

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Chip was plagued by a strange dream. For someone else, it might have been amusing, but for him it was quite stressful. It was a nightmare about Kiggy’s name-choosing ceremony.

Glamdoggs were not named by their owner, but rather, chose their own name by being placed on a large mat with the alphabet written on it. When the real Kiggy, not Dream-Kiggy, chose its name, it walked over the letter “K,” then spun around and chirped again and again on the letter “G.” As a result, the name on its birth certificate was “Kgggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg.”

Dream-Kiggy, however, was a very naughty glamdogg. He chose a profane and extremely inappropriate name for himself. Horrified, Chip entreated him to try again. Each new name that Dream-Kiggy chose was more lewd than the last. It was as nightmarish as a dream about a glamdogg names could possibly be.

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Chip awoke as he always did, with Kiggy’s paws resting on his chest. Relieved that both the profane naming ceremony and strange falling object seemed to be nothing more than his imagination, he clutched Kiggy ever tighter. Alas, Kiggy had already left this world. All that was left was ash and two charred, disembodied little paws.

Yet rather than being swallowed by anguish, Chip was seized with fear, for it seemed that something strange and terrible had happened to his body as well. The claw-like hands that clutched the ashen Kiggy were hardly recognizable as his own. He scrambled up with a start, examining his body in confusion and panic. He was covered in what seemed to be leather, accented by pieces of thick shell on his chest and shoulders. His head was the wrong shape entirely. It felt hard, like a helmet, but spikey and oddly-shaped, jutting out in unusual directions.

Under normal circumstances, one would think that he had simply been changed into some sort of odd costume, but Chip felt an overwhelming and deeply unsettling lack of self within the “clothes” that he wore. He removed his hands from the “helmet,” fearing that it may come undone, leaving only an empty void where his head should be. Within this living suit of armor that had become his body, Chip could feel only one thing: rushing, burning blood. There was a fire, flowing like a river through every inch of the emptiness inside him. It hissed maddeningly, like the whisper of a thousand voices. Unable to silence them, he could do little but listen to their call.

Justice

Chip was shaken from his daze by the sound of sobbing. Searching for its source, he saw that he had awoken in some sort of hellscape. He never could have guessed that it was simply the park transformed. There was no sign of life anywhere in sight and a sort of strange black ooze could be found all over the barren ground. On closer inspection, the “ooze” seemed be a living creature, or rather, many living creatures. Like tiny worms, they stretched themselves up towards the hazy purple sky. Some of them seemed to have little white teeth shining amidst their ichor, but Chip could not be troubled by such details at the time.

Following the crying, like a siren song, he made his way to a massive crater in the ground. Within it was the black mass that had fallen from the sky and a pure-white figure huddled beside it. The mass itself seemed to consist of a countless number of the black worms that littered the former park. They threaded together tightly into larger, belt-like pieces that wrapped around each other to form a sort of orb. The figure, from which the sobbing came, was daemon-like in appearance, with horns and wings. Their pale skin seemed to glow faintly, and their long white hair shimmered as if moonlight were dancing upon it. Gazing at the sky, Chip saw only darkness, with no such silver illumination to speak of.

There was something tender and tragic about the figure, but upon closer inspection, their physique was quite imposing. Their silky hair cascaded over broad shoulders and their muscular arms lead to long, dagger-like claws. It was as if they were carved out of marble, their creator unsure if they were sculpting a goddess of the moon or a god of war.

Momentarily transfixed, Chip noticed that the figure was clutching a hand, pale and immaculate like their own, reaching out from the orb-like mass. Although Chip could not even begin to decipher this scene, there was something about it that made his burning blood run cold. Suddenly fearing that the creature would turn their daze towards him, Chip fled from the crater as quickly as his unfamiliar feet would carry him.

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It was to Chip’s great surprise that he had not been transported to some sort of terrifying afterlife. In fact, as soon as he fled the park, he found the city he lived in to be almost exactly as he left it. The park itself had been covered in what appeared to be a purple dome that he had unknowingly passed through the walls of when he fled. The hazy, dark sky that he had gazed upon was simply its ceiling, blocking out the light of the natural world. Chip was in no state to hypothesize about what had occurred, but he did immediately notice that his emergence from the dome caused great alarm among the curious and frightened people surrounding it. As Chip stepped out, a bold onlooker tried to walk in, only to find himself violently thrown on the ground. Another mystery that there was no time to solve.

As he walked the streets in a daze, Chip realized that he was unwittingly making his way to the police station where he worked. This in itself was not especially odd, but the motivation behind his actions perplexed him. It was not that he was searching for a familiar place, but rather that he was being “propelled” to the location. His burning blood pulsed hotter and hotter, pushing his strange new body forward. As he drew closer to the station, however, he came to an understanding. He was answering the call of the blood, whispering, now screaming, in his ears.

Justice

The station was in an uproar when Chip entered, which was no surprise, considering that a massive purple dome had suddenly appeared in the middle of the city.

Perhaps it was fear, or shock, or something else, but the other officers did not halt Chip’s advance to the chief’s office. Although the door was locked, he tore the doorknob clean out and walked inside without a second thought.

The Chief, an unusually large goblin with greenish flesh packed into a blue uniform, was licking his fingers, covered in something juicy. His office was strewn with the corpses of traffic offenders, their heads sawed open and their brains removed.

“Why?” Chip demanded, coldly. The chief dared not defy him.

“I’m gonna be smart, that’s why! I’m gonna eat all these brains and then solve all the crossword puzzles! I’ll get smarter and smarter, and then I’ll figure out how to rig the lottery and get rich! All I gotta do is keep eating brains!”

“Eating the brains of criminals didn’t make you smart, it just made you a criminal!” Chip boomed, surprised at himself. The voice that came out of the strange helmet head was unrecognizable as his own.

The chief drew his gun, but it was far too late. Chip delivered a swift chop to his head, neatly exposing the portion of his brain that wasn’t strewn to the wall along with the top of his skull. The chief gurgled for a moment, a sorry excuse for last words, then slumped over, sliding gracelessly from his chair to the floor.

Chip paused. Was this the justice he was seeking? It felt like the right thing to do, but as he gazed upon the chaos of the room, it also felt like he had only added one more corpse to the pile. He could not return the brains to the traffic offenders, after all. Had he really been taken here by the power that seized him, or had he actually wanted to kill the chief on his own? These ponderings, resembling rational thought, began to awaken Chip from his daze. No longer an instrument of some blind force of justice, Chip was unsure where to go. Perhaps jail would be his home now. He had committed murder, after all. He walked from the chief’s office slowly, hands raised.

All eyes in the station were glued to him.

“Are you…some kinda superhero?” a werewolf police officer asked. It was Yams Dougherty. Chip didn’t care for him much, but he didn’t seem like such a bad guy.

“I’m a beast. I hunger only for justice.”

Did I really just say that!? I mean, it’s true, but in context it makes me sound even more like a superhero. I’m just a very confused murderer!

“What’s your name?” asked Bourbon McDermott, a yeti officer. Chip didn’t care for him much either, but not for any particular reason, mostly just because his personal hygiene wasn’t so great.

My name?

Chip’s mind was in a strange place. Thinking about superheroes reminded him of a TV show he enjoyed called “Eggmaster Gorgos.” It was not about a superhero, but the protagonist had a young son who read comic books. His favorite comic book hero was a character named “Devilizer.” Devilizer didn’t decapitate corrupt police chiefs and his mental health was not nearly as uncertain as Chip’s right now, but there was no time to think of something clever.

“Devilizer.” Chip said, unwilling to reveal his true identity (if that person even existed anymore).

Attempting to escape the station before he had to answer any more questions, Chip marched out the door, hoping that the stunned silence he left behind would buy him enough time to escape to his apartment. Although the police officers remained frozen in place, Chip found himself suddenly lethargic. He hobbled down the street at a snail’s pace, his burning blood now scarcely room temperature. Or perhaps whatever mysterious power that propelled him before had already been spent and he would dry up on the sidewalk like a dead fish. At any rate, even as his body failed him, he was happy that he would die with his mind intact. The fog of fury and justice had left his head and a sort of euphoria seemed to creep into his skull.

This moment of peace was soon interrupted by the strangest sight Chip had ever seen, even at the end of an extraordinary strange day.

Before him stood some sort of monster. It was certainly nothing like any devil Chip knew of. It was tall and bulky and shaped like a picnic basket. Large, white, angry-looking eyes peeked from inside along with various, cartoonishly oversized foods. The creature had four arms, bursting from the sides of the basket, each of them holding a pair of scissors. Its thin, but muscular legs peeked out from the basket as well, adorned with scandalously short athletic shorts and stylish running shoes.

Like any normal anyone would, Chip hoped he could avoid this logic-defying monstrosity, but it seemed that it had come specifically to meet him. Blocking the entire sidewalk, it stood in Chip’s way. Even though its face (if it even had one) was all but hidden, the angry look in its shining white eyes made it clear that it was looking for a fight.

“You belong with us!” the basket monster screeched. Chip wasn’t sure what kind of voice a scissor-wielding basket should have, but it definitely wasn’t this. Other than the obvious, there was something deeply unnatural about this creature. Something ominous and loathsome. It wasn’t what it had (its food looked rather delicious, actually), but what it was lacking. There was an intangible element that all devils possessed that was absent in this creature.

“I am a Cultural Ambassador!” it said, proudly. “I represent the world of Darknazar 66. Soon, this world shall be Darknazar as well!”

Boy, he sure doesn’t make any sense.

“My name is Gracoorus! Short for Grandma’s-Cooking-Running-With-Scissors! I am the combined essence of two Darknazarian cultural concepts! Grandma’s cooking…and running with scissors!”

“We have those here, too.” Chip said weakly.

The monster was furious. It ran at Chip with its scissors flailing. It really was as dangerous as your mother told you. Pierced by one of the hateful utensils, Chip bled profusely onto the sidewalk.

Ah, I must have a body in here after all. I’m too tired to fight back…too tired to run. I’ll be with you soon, sweet Kiggy.

The monster dropped two pairs of its scissors and lifted Chip up, stuffing him into its giant basket.

“You’ll be one with us now! You’ll see! You’ll see!” it said, as if it somehow had food in its mouth. This strange and grotesque scene was suddenly interrupted by rapid gunfire, striking the basket monster and sending sparks flying everywhere.

“You put Devilizer down!” yelled Bourbon McDermott. Every officer in the station except one guy named Friendo Biscuitson came to Chip’s aid. Although it was blatantly against policy, they blasted the basket monster in the back with bullets again and again to save their new favorite superhero.

“We’re tired of being such crappy cops!” cried Yams Dougherty. “We got our justice back!”

The monster turned around furiously. Perhaps too furiously, as he accidently flung Chip onto the pavement in the process.

“You aliens ain’t gonna take our city!” It was Friendo Biscuitson! He came after all, he just didn’t run as fast as the other guys!

Aliens? Is that what they were? He said he was from Darknazar 66. Maybe that orb was their UFO and they came here to conquer our planet.

Chip wasn’t the type to shoot first and ask questions later, so he wasn’t ready to make a judgement call on whatever cosmic struggle was occurring. However, he did know one thing…

They killed Kiggy. They killed a poor, innocent creature and probably everyone else in that park. If they’re allowed to continue, even more glamdoggs could die.

Chip’s blood on the sidewalk began to boil. If you listened to its hissing closely enough, you might even make out a word.

Justice.

Ah, there’s that fire again.

Chip rose from the ground and thrust his open hand toward the sky. Cheering, the police irresponsibly fired their weapons in the air. The blood was more than a whisper now, it was a scream.

“Howl! Burning Blood!” Chip cried aloud. He flew at the basket monster like a tornado of claws and vengeance.

There was a bit of a logistical issue in attacking a creature with such a strange shape. Would harming the food harm it? Was it actually a smaller creature inside the basket or was the basket itself like flesh? Faced with these impossible questions, Chip simply tore the arms off of the monster. All of its strength and all of its courage melted in an instant, for true justice is both swift and certain. The creature fled in terror, spewing blood and spilling grandma’s cooking all over the sidewalk. To its credit, the running shoes it wore weren’t just for show, and it was well beyond Chip’s reach in no time at all.

Acting quickly, Chip wrenched a pair of scissors from one of its disembodied hands and launched them at the creature’s muscular legs. It fell hard and fast. Dashing after it like a lightning bolt, Chip grabbed the handle of the basket and turned the creature around to face him.

“If you want grandma’s cooking, you can find it on this world. As for running with scissors…you can take that to the afterlife with you!”

With that said, Chip drove his claws into the creature’s big, silly-looking eyes again and again until its screams were no more. Whatever was inside the basket bubbled and oozed, until there was nothing left except the little black worms that Chip had seen in the park. Upon closer inspection, they did have mouths, which they used for one tiny, final wail, before they melted into nothingness.

Like a cymbal crashing in his face, Chip was struck with a powerful vision. Countless grandmothers from an unknown place and time, cooking for their loved ones. Children running with scissors, for whatever foolish reason they do that. If they were aliens, they didn’t look so different than the people of this world. Were they finally free now?

Chip felt an immeasurable wave of relief wash over him. His armored breastplate began to crack and his helmet soon followed. He could feel his own kobold body beneath it. He could feel the hairs on his arm standing on end. Whatever the armored suit had taken, it was giving back. He was alive after all.

Once again fearing that his identity would be revealed, Chip ran away swiftly. The police officers were distracted by all the food on the ground.

“You gotta try this!” said some idiot. “Tastes just like grandma used to make!”

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In the newly-dubbed Darknazar Park, a daemonic figure stretched out their muscular arms as a beautiful black gown slithered up their naked body, hugging it tightly. As they donned a white mask, a razer-toothed smile spread across their face.

“This justice of which you speak is a puzzle to me, Devilizer…for you have stolen it from its rightful place, here in my heart. Yet I do not despair, for I know it will taste all the sweeter when I seize it back… from your cold, dead body.”

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