Chapter Text
“Niffty? Don’t take this question the wrong way, but… why are you vacuuming up Husk?” Charlie timidly asked.
The smaller cyclops stopped, the whir of her vacuum ominously dying as she switched it off and faced the very princess of Hell herself with a stony glare. “That’s not Husk,” she answered, before flipping her vacuum back on and resuming her task.
“That’s not Husk? Then what is…” Charlie leaned in and looked closer. No, it wasn’t Husk. It was a Husk sized and shaped pile of Husk fur, but not the grumpy cat himself. That explained Niffty’s sudden foul disposition. It was summer in Hell, when the weather went from “Ha ha, guess it’s hot as Hell” to picking melted sinners off the sidewalk with a spatula. In other words… shedding season. And the hotel was certainly full of hairy sinners.
Niffty grumbled in rage and stomped upstairs once she’d cleaned up enough Husk hair to make a second Husk. They’d just heard the vacuum turn on again when there was a loud THWUMPH, followed by the sound of the vacuum gurling and Niffty screaming with a demonic howl that would have woken the Goetia.
“What’s wrong? Niffty ?Are you hurt??” Charlie asked, running up the stairs with a concerned Vaggie immediately at her heels.
Niffty turned the vacuum up so they could see inside of it, hissing with rage. Coiled around the center roller… was the very crinkly shed skin of Sir Pentious. Pentious had only just stuck his head out of his room to see what the commotion was, and nearly got it taken off by Niffty swinging the heavy vacuum as easily as a kid’s baseball bat. “You can fix this or I can SKIN YOU AGAIN,” she growled at him, stomping back down the stairs. “I’m going to get my emergency vacuum.”
“If I had known she was going to be vacuuming I wouldn’t have left it where she’d run over it,” Pentious grumbled, pulling the machine into his room and grabbing a screwdriver off his desk. “Wait, I’d better empty this before I take it apart. I don’t want the contents everywhere…” the snake paused, studying the see-through bin. “Say, Princess? There seems to be quite a lot of Angel Dust’s fur in here.”
“Well, he does have a lot of hair,” Vaggie shrugged.
“No, Miss Vagatha, you are missing my point. Don’t spiders molt? If spiders molt, then…”
They could hear a terrifying THWUNK sound as the noise of the emergency vacuum suddenly halted. Then, a scream rose through the corridors of the hotel. It was the kind of scream you would expect from the tortured and damned souls of Hell, coming from a very powerful sinner herself. A few moments later they could hear the terrified high-pitched shriek of Angel Dust and the clatter of his heels on the wooden floors, followed by the sounds of Niffty thumping along like a raging elephant, shouting words in a language long forgotten to the ears of mankind.
“We’d…. better warn Al not to leave his antlers lying around,” Charlie said, flinching as she heard the crashing noises accompanying Angel’s desperate flee through the labyrinth hotel.
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that,” Husk grunted, emerging from his room and rubbing his eyes. “He gets kind of… sensitive about not having any antlers, so he finds a way to wear the old ones until his new ones come in.”
“How does he do that?” Vaggie asked.
A moment later, Alastor answered it himself by strolling by. He was now wearing a ridiculous hat with a brim as wide as his grin. Two horns had clearly been glued to it. “Good evening, ladies,” he said as he slipped past, eager to see the chaos unfolding as Niffty pursued a squealing Angel Dust.