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To be comfy and cozy at home in one's armchair was a simple, carnal delight that not even Hell itself could fully diminish. Alastor's parlor was well lit with lamps on the small tables and an overhead chandelier that never went on, as it went against the entire air of the den-like seclusion he was trying to build here, and the temperature was a perfect seventy degrees. He had little reason to move. His freezer in the kitchen was well-stocked with the flesh of demons and his pantry was full to bursting with whatever odds and ends he needed to spice up the repetitive nature of his punishing diet. The book in his hands was shaping up to be rather interesting, a murder mystery he thought he had sorted out from the first act which surely precluded a twist he hoped would be properly foreshadowed on later readings. He had no need for Niffty, the newest little darling he'd snapped up right before the last extermination, and had set to cleaning his home in exchange for a place to stay and protection from the angels. Alastor could hear her rattling about upstairs, hunting down the spiders that had made a habit of descending out of the forests that hid his manor from Pentagram City. According to her, the year 'upstairs' was 1957. He'd been dead for almost a quarter century.
And life was good.
So what was with this peculiar urge to go for a walk? Alastor certainly didn't feel antsy. If anything he was almost drowsy. Not quite, he was thoroughly involved with this novel of his, far too engrossed to be sleepy. Yet, his instincts were telling him it would behoove him to get up and have a mosey around town, despite needing nothing and wanting for even less. To that extent, his shadow had drawn his outdoor shoes over to his footrest and then retreated under his chair. He could take a hint. His subconscious or his spies knew something he himself did not, alright, understood. Getting up then.
He switched his indoor shoes for his around-town loafers, slotting his dewclaws into the depression that had been molded into the leather for them. Finding shoes that worked with his new anatomy was an absolute bear, but in Hell, if there was a need to be fulfilled, someone would fulfill it. Often for a rather exorbitant price tag, but he'd found rather quickly that public radio, and his reputation, and an army of souls beholden to his beck and call, did pay well! Well enough to afford shows for his... Ugh, hooves.
"Next time I die, Niffty dear, remind me not to look like a deer while I'm doing it!"
"Okay, Mister Alastor!" Niffty called from the top of the stairs. It had only been a few weeks since he'd taken her under his thrall, but she was proving to be absolutely invaluable company. He didn't think himself the type to be lonely, especially when his activities ranged from macabre to legitimately homicidal, but she fit right in without a qualm for anything other than a mess. Be it butchery or disposal, she was up for it all with a gleeful, if manic grin and a can-do attitude. As long as he tried not to track mud in on his own carpet, which he thought a fair trade.
Standing up and summoning his cane, feeling his shadow grab at his ankles, he tapped his toes against the floor to settle his hooves into his Brogues a bit more comfortably. "I'm heading out for a bit! Not sure when I'll return, so tuck in whenever you feel the need."
The response he got was muffled through the floor but vaguely affirmative and thankful, so he didn't feel pressed to ask her to repeat herself. Alastor sank into shadow and crawled out from his parlor, through his foyer, and out from under his front door, scuttling into the dark to make his way into Pentagram City.
Alastor had been here for near enough to an hour and still wasn't quite sure why, but at this point, he was beginning to get rather peeved with himself and those damnable instincts that were always right, if not always punctual. He wasn't stupid enough to think that a walk was the driving force behind his sudden urge to vacate his own premises, and after a firm lecture about mixing chemicals, he felt confident enough that it wasn't an impending gas attack courtesy of his maid. He'd run three laps around the clocktower and main square, killed two demons who looked at him funny, and was tempted to call this entire thing a wash when he finally felt... Something.
It buzzed in his antlers like a hive of ground wasps, rattled the top of his skull until his ears began to pitch back against his will. He clamped his teeth together tightly, feeling phantom vibrations running through his enamel and down the roots of his teeth. It hurt. It was pleasant. It felt like a deep tissue massage, the kind that made one dig their fingers, claws, or other appendages into the leather of the chair until it was over and left them boneless and puddly-feeling afterward. Sweet, sinful discomfort, beautiful, horrible, curling around his brainstem and spine to tingle in his fingertips, then racing back up to pool in the space between his horns to repeat the cycle. His microphone spat out a blare of static, and it was only then he realized what he was hearing.
Radio waves. High-powered, unfiltered, raw radio waves on the wrong frequency, like a sister station that was out of tune, encroaching on his wavelength. That was why it was comforting and crazed at once. It also came with bits and pieces of thoughts that were not his own, too fragmented to be understood but there all the same. He'd been picking up on this all the way from his living room, and only now had the source been brought close enough for him to know it for what it was.
Alastor took stock of his positioning. In front of the clocktower, which was boasting 347 days until the next Extermination. A quick scan of the area revealed nothing unusual. The majority of cleanup had been done, he'd scavenged a bit of meat for himself once the dust had settled and left the rest for janitors and whoever else gave a damn about the dead and dying. Angelic weapons had been claimed by Carmine Industries, so there was no fear of accidentally nicking oneself on a discarded blade and a trip to an all-but-useless hospital. Sinners who had been here for long enough were going about their days and stepping over the piles of indeterminate rotting viscera, those who had not were still in hiding, and everyone down to a man was giving him a wide berth.
But the radio waves remained, snapping down his antlers in a crackling concerto of conflicting sensations that caused his tail to flutter under his coat. Whatever was producing these broadcasts needed to cease doing so. Immediately. Bodily sensations like this were all but illegal, and if they weren't, they should be. Alastor shook himself out like a dog and picked a direction to walk in, then started walking, anything to vent this nervous energy.
It went against every fiber of his being to walk toward the radio waves, but the quickest way to make this stop was to take the blunt end of his cane to the source until it ceased making noise and or moving. Straight down Clocktower Avenue, a pause. Right down Leviathan Road, all the way down to the end, where it was bisected by Envy Street, at which point Alastor had to stop and concentrate, because the buzzing was severe and ceaseless. He put a hand to his temple, rubbing at it as he hung a left down a nameless, faceless alley and tripped over an equally nameless, faceless something or other.
Alastor hung onto his cane and swung around, letting his left foot get caught and planting the right safely over the hump in the street. He broke his neck swinging it around to specifically curse whatever piece of garbage had hung up his hoof when, blissfully, he had silence.
He was staring down at what was man-shaped and boxy all at once. A strange wood casing sat atop a pencil-thin neck, with a pair of dials across a thin plank of lighter-colored wood at the bottom. A pair of eyes blinked at him from a grey void, scared, but not without defiance, not without a will to survive. His clothes were ripped, and he was soaked in blood from collar to halfway down his chest. But the radio waves had stopped, so none of that mattered, because he could think again. Any other day, such a distraction, and an unenjoyable one at that, would've resulted in a second death for the newly-fallen sinner.
Instead, Alastor smiled, turned his body around to match his head, and offered the misfit the end of his microphone to pull himself up.
"You seem to be in a bit of a bind, my good man! Here, let me help you up. Have you got a name to your person?"
Suspicion turned to internal struggle turned to resignation, an acceptance of fate. Blunted gunmetal grey fingers wrapped around the cane.
"... Vernon."
"Vernon! Delighted to meet you. My name is Alastor."