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Lucifer, dressed only in sweat pants, was sprawled out on the common room couch. He was eating ice cream right from the bucket on his stomach, like an otter, and minding his own damn business, when a horde of demons practically busted down the door.
“Found him!”
“Finally! Luce, get your ass up,” Satan snapped, as he hurled the arch demon a t-shirt, “and for fuck's sake, put a damn shirt on. I know you're depressed, but you're gonna want to hear this.”
Lucifer crammed another spoonful of ice cream into his mouth and answered with his mouth full. “I'm busy.”
Beelzebub, sporting only a ratty brown housecoat that hadn't been able to close over his sagging stomach in three thousand years, snatched the bucket away and started shoveling ice cream into his mouth with one meaty hand.
“Hey! That's my breakfast, fat ass; get your own!” Lucifer made a cranky grab for the bucket and nearly had his hand bitten off by a mouthful of snarling, yellowed, badly pitted teeth.
“Ignore him,” Mammon sighed, as he sat beside Lucifer, smoothed out the shirt, and held it up. “Arms up.” He slid the shirt over Lucifer's head, then took him by the shoulders and grinned. “Lucifer… it worked. It actually worked.”
“What worked?”
“Levi's game. You said you'd go along with it for a year, and it's been a year. And it worked. The humans love it. They can't get enough of us. We're gearing up for year two as we speak, and even rolling it out in different countries.”
“They remember our names again,” Belphie beamed. “Sure, they always talked about Satan and Lucifer from time to time, but do you have any idea how long it’s been since a human said my name out loud?”
“Not just our names,” Asmo grinned. “They idolize us. We're celebrities now, not demons. They draw the most stunning pictures of us…” she cast a side-long look at Beel and coughed under her breath, “…or rather, they draw pictures of what they think we look like, but that’s just as good. False idols are false idols, whatever they look like. Show him, Levi.”
Levi shouldered his way between Mammon and Lucifer and opened his laptop on the coffee table. “Asmo's right. Check it out.” He scrolled through pages and pages and pages of fanart, until Lucifer, reluctantly curious, usurped the mouse and took over. “It ain't just pictures, neither,” Levi continued, practically bouncing with excitement. “They write stories about us.”
“They dump their paychecks in our laps,” said Mammon.
“They think about us while they masturbate,” Asmo smirked.
“Lucifer…” Belphie murmured, as if saying it too loudly might make it not come true, “…they worship us.”
Lucifer looked at each grinning demon in turn and slowly shook his head. “I don't believe it.”
“Believe it,” insisted Mammon. “They're selling their souls to us again – giving them away, actually. I haven't harvested a soul in two thousand years, but in the last six months, I've gotten a hundred and forty-seven. They're nailed to my walls and impaled on my bedposts and hanging from my ceiling – my room is finally livable again! And… oh… mmmmm,” he heaved a dreamy sigh, and shut his eyes, “the screaming… I'd almost forgotten how much I missed the screaming…”
“…and the sobbing,” added Belphie. “I rip the voice boxes out of mine so they won't keep me up at night, so all they can do is cry. It's the best lullaby I've ever had.”
“I'm fattening up seventeen right now,” Beel smiled. “When you break their jaws off, they can't spit anything out. Two of them are already four thousand pounds. They can't even move,” he laughed, and wiped an eager bit of drool off his lips. “At five, I can finally fire up the rotisserie again. You're all invited, of course.”
“Mmmm… you always were the best chef down here, Beelzebub.” Touched at last by a hint of bittersweet nostalgia, Lucifer's eyes unfocused as he looked back on better times. “I used to sew mine together,” he sighed. “Dozens of them, all stitched into a tangled, squirming ball, until they were so knotted up that you couldn't tell where one ended and the next began. I do miss that.”
“Are you not fucking listening to a word we're saying?” Satan snapped. “You don't have to miss it anymore, you miserable drama queen. You can have it all back. We all can. This is the fucking answer.”
“Satan's right,” said Levi. “He's bein’ a major dick about it, but he's right.”
“Go fuck a jellyfish, loser. Nobody likes you.”
Levi rolled his eyes, and ignored him. “You won't just get some souls, Luce. You'll be drownin’ in them. You're the most popular character – which is bullshit, but whatever. Look. This is one of your fanclubs. They're practically lining up to suck your dick.”
Lucifer read through a dozen gushing posts, then frowned. “’Woof'? Why are my humans all barking? Do yours bark?”
“Uhhh… well, not really… no,” Levi stammered. “Only your fans bark like that. I got no idea why. One of ‘em did it once, then they all started doin’ it. Maybe they think you like it?”
“Where on Earth would they get an absurd idea like that?”
“Oh, I wrote a pop quiz once where you let Cerberus lick peanut butter off your balls,” Satan smirked.
“You what?!”
Belphie sucker-punched Satan in the back of the head. “He's lying.”
“Because he's a dick,” Asmo sighed.
“Speaking of which,” Mammon scowled, “Levi, you made Satan polite and well-spoken, you made Beel into a star athlete, but you made me a sputtering idiot? What did I ever do to you? I do your damn taxes, for crying out loud.”
Asmo crossed her arms and huffed. “You think you got the shaft? He turned me into a vapid, one-dimensional man-whore! It’s awful! I’m supposed to be the Avatar of Lust, but nobody even likes me! Levi, I want to be a girl in season three. Write that down.”
“Asmo, you know I can't go messing with the core characters this late in the-"
“Either make me a girl, or the theme of your next Nightmare photo shoot is gonna be ‘Fun at the Fetish Club’.”
“What? No way! This is an all-ages game, Asmo! You can't do that!”
“Try me, bitch.”
Belphie raised his hand. “Wait, are we doing requests for season three right now? Because I think you need to do something different with the angels.”
“Oh! I was actually planning to make Simeon a dateable character soon, so that’s already-"
“Huh? Dateable? No, I meant kill them off. Or cut off their wings, that'd make a great pop quiz.”
Lucifer nodded. “I'd read that.”
“Guys, no. Look, I already have season three planned out, ok? If you wanna help, grab a computer and go back through the code for some of these older cards. People've been complaining that they can't read the Devilgram stories because they need all these extra little D cards first, so I'm gonna axe that pre-rec.”
“You absolutely will not,” Satan growled. “It stays just the way it is.”
“What? Why? It doesn't make us any more money, and just pisses people off,” Levi frowned. “What's the point?”
“The point is that it pisses them off,” Satan grinned. “Have you ever seen the looks on their stupid faces when they score a good pull and then realise they don't get the story to go with it? They get so furious! It's fantastic!”
“…ugh, fine. Whatever. We'll leave it, then.”
Satan leaned over Mammon's shoulder and whispered in his ear. “Pssst. Hey. Wanna hear a secret? Those little D cards he's talking about? I took them out of the game. They'll never pull them!”
“Hahaha! Nice! Well guess what - I’ve got a secret of my own,” Mammon whispered back. “Don’t tell Levi, ‘cause he'll kill me, but… I lower the drop rates when they pay more!”
“BWAHAHAHA!”
Levi looked up from his computer and frowned. “What the hell are you two laughin' about?”
“Nothing!”
Levi rolled his eyes. “Whatever. So, Lucifer… what do you think? Ya said you'd shut us down after a year if ya weren't happy with how things were going, so… are we having a second year, or not?”
Everyone looked at Lucifer.
For the first time in seven hundred years, his eyes flashed above a dark, sadistic smile. “I think we are. Let them fawn, and bark, and forget that we were ever anything more than characters in a silly little game. What is it the humans say? ‘The greatest trick the devil ever pulled,’” purred the demon, “’was convincing the world he didn't exist.’”