The Cave

James quickly realized that staying put had been beneficial to only himself, when the chaos of the stones falling and people running and pulling away happened faster than he could react. He slowly knelt forward towards Jaron, who had plopped in front of him, hitting his head. Just as he made it to the small fox, he saw one of the teenagers getting dragged away from the stones and pulled to the side. Luke. Luke was their name.

But when Luke’s eyes opened and revealed that they were red, James froze. He wanted to say that Luke had somehow bled into his eyes, but that wasn’t what it looked like.

“Luke, Jaron, are you alright?” he asked, looking between them both.

As much as his ears rang, Jaron could've sworn he heard his name. Was that Kendrik? Placing his working arm on the ground, Jaron slowly pushed himself onto his side, then sat up. He rubbed the back of his head. Spots danced in front of his eyes, the ground swayed side to side, and he felt like falling back down. Nevertheless, he stayed in place long enough to see the blood on his paw and the pile of rocks now in front of -

Where was Kendrik?

Jaron stared at the pile of rocks, mouth agape. He only started breathing again when he heard what sounded like voices on the other side of the pile. His breaths raspy and drawn out, Jaron resisted the urge to reach into a pocket and pull out one of his inventions. It'd be too dangerous in this small and cramped cave. Better to find something else he could do. But what could he do? The fox began to hyperventilate.

He glanced to his right, where a teenager had been propped up against the wall. The red-eyed teen was covered in blood; he'd clearly been crushed by the stones. Pulling out a cloth from a pocket, Jaron reached over and began wiping the blood from the teen's face. He wasn't a healer, and there likely wasn't much he could do, but it was something.

"It's alright," Luke reassured the fox - Jaron, Levi faintly recalled - as he reached a hand up to grab onto his wrist. He lowered it carefully. Though the movement was gentle, it seemed like he possessed an almost inhuman strength. "I've dealt with worse injuries before."

Levi opened his mouth to argue that it was, in fact, not alright because no one could ever be okay after receiving an injury to that extent, but Luke was already in the middle of getting to his feet. His eyes flickered between red and blue. They would linger on one color for several seconds before switching to the next, almost like Luke was trying to decide which one to use.

But that would be absurd! No human could do something like that.

Unless he wasn't human.

Which would completely change the game.

Levi absentmindedly studied his fingernails. "Say, Luke. That thing you're doing isn't normal, is it? What exactly are you hiding?"

Luke came to a stop in front of him and stared up at the other boy. His eyes continued to flicker from one color to the other. "You're not normal either," Luke quietly accused him. "You teleported. You went from one place to another in less than a second. I'm not sure what you are, but you're not human. That's what your soul says."

"And Jaron's not human either," James replied, still sounding as tired as ever. "What does it matter? It doesn't." He didn't care if they were human or werewolf or whatever the heck they wanted to be. As long as they kept things civil.

The stench of blood hit his nostrils as they spoke, instantly snapping him out of his daze and pulling at his instinct. No, no, no, it was not time to feed. He forced it down and glanced back towards the door - whatever he’d done, he’d triggered it.

Kratzer’s gaze wandered up to where the ceiling split to see if it’d opened something up or was simply trapping them.

Jaron watched Luke push his hand back and stand up, eyes changing color. The fox felt his throat constrict. Luke had easily brushed Jaron's hand away, and Jaron had the uneasy impression that he could never have stopped Luke from doing so. Besides, there was no way that a human could lose that much blood and still be alive. As someone who had been in a few battles, he felt reasonably sure of it. To say nothing of the conversation between Luke and Levi that confirmed neither were human, or Luke's weird eyes.

Jaron wrapped his cloth around his head like a bandana to stem the bleeding, then stood up. "How?" Jaron stammered, pointing to Luke.

******

Kendrik tried to yank a particularly heavy rock from the pile. When his arms screamed, he fell on his knees and panted. No luck. "I can smell the blood," he whispered, staring at the ground. "So no, it ain't okay." He knew Jaron could take care of himself, but he wasn't about to be responsible for Jaron's being hurt.

Luke awkwardly shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He stared at the ground for a moment, sliding his hands into the pockets of his hoodie as he did so. He looked incredibly uncomfortable. For a moment, Levi actually felt bad for the kid. Then he remembered that he was dealing with something completely unknown to him - and frankly more than a little impossible - and decided that he needed answers immediately.

"I-I don't usually share this," Luke muttered, his voice barely audible. "People get scared, and then they don't want to be near me anymore. But it's the only way I can explain this..."

He took a deep breath.

"Please don't scream or run away when I change my form."

Levi opened his mouth to question what he just said, but Luke's body had already begun to change. He grew taller. His ears grew more pointed. Horns began to curl out of his forehead. His eyes finally settled on a color, choosing red over the blue. He looked older and more mature, almost like an adult version of Luke with an extra addition here or there.

"My real name is Lucifer," he said.

Levi just stared, because how else are you supposed to reply to something like that?



Reyes was close enough to overhear what Kendrik had said. It was hard to tell if he was talking about something on the other side of the cave or on the side they were on. Still, it didn't hurt to be careful. He slunk a little farther back into the cave and continued to hide his slowly healing foot behind his perfectly fine one.

James raised his brows in witness of the boy’s transformation. He’d never seen a species like that before, but he wondered if it was anything like werewolves and how they shifted from one form to the next. He blinked, finding no significance in the name given.

“Is that name supposed to mean something to me?” he asked. “Because while I don’t know what you are, I’ve never heard of you either. But you make it sound like I ought to.”

Everything happened way too fast for him to follow. They pushed buttons, there's the devil himself and then there's no more ceiling? Did he even go through the events in the right order?
He sighed and shook his head.
"So uh, what now?" he asked. He didn't direct the question at anyone in particular, nor did he bother to give attention to the dude who had just sort of...transformed? Right now he just wanted to know what to do next, because what had already happened was not beyond him.

Kratzer tripped over himself when he heard the word 'Lucifer' Through the wall, nearly faceplanting into the rocks. "Sohn einer Hündin! What the **** are you doing here, eh? What's it you want? Why not just send that miststück Apophis?" his accent came out particularly thickly with the surprise he felt and the sudden lack of effort towards clearing it up.

Since Jaron's first instinct was to scream and run away, he wasn't quite sure what to do otherwise. He couldn't stop the adrenaline from pumping through his veins as he watched Luke grow horns and height, those eerie red eyes returning. Ears twitching, Jaron stayed frozen in place. When Luke had finished transforming and introduced himself as Lucifer, the fox reached out and tapped at one of Lucifer's horns. The texture reminded him of deer antlers, but harder and thicker. This form certainly wasn't anything he was familiar with, but at least it answered the earlier question about Luke's blood loss.



Where Kendrik's eyesight failed, he had his nose to rely on.

He could trace the smell of blood to a few points. One was close, and a glance in that direction showed Reyes hiding one foot behind the other. Odd. The other two were on the other side of the rocks. One was familiar; one wasn't. Since the familiar smell was vastly weaker, Kendrik could breathe a sigh of relief. He started to stand up, ready to ask why Reyes was hiding his injury.

Click!

Kendrik wheeled around in time to see the metal door swinging open. A sudden burst of wind pulled him in the direction of the door. He had the reaction speed to cling onto one of the larger rocks in the pile, but the wind only grew stronger with each passing second.

"Jaron!" Kendrik shouted as his claws scraped off the rock. He flew past the door and into some kind of metallic tube. It twisted and looped, throwing him around until it finally dumped him out onto a sandy beach.

Groaning, Kendrik rested the side of his head on his hand and blinked, looking around at his surroundings. The lights on the metal tube above him illuminated a tiny island composed entirely out of sand, surrounded on all sides by still water. In front of him, a wooden dock protruded out into the lake, two canoes attached to it by ropes and posts.

And, far overhead, were the stone walls and stalactites of the cave.

That was about when someone fell on him.

He really wasn't liking the situation right now. The people here were bad enough, but the strange reactions to his transformation were even worse. He had become so accustomed to fear that anything besides it gave him a deeply unsettling feeling. He slowly raised a hand and removed Jaron's hand from his horns. Then he looked over at the rocks, his mind trying to wrap itself around what the man had said. The man whose soul, like the others here, hadn't been quite right. None of them really were, except for the man who apparently didn't know who he was.

"I don't know you?" he hesitantly replied, taking a step over to the rocks. He got as close as he could to them, so close that he accidentally hit one with the tip of his shoe. "And Apophis and I are friends, but I haven't seen him for the past few weeks because we've both been busy. But how did you even know that? It's not like we hang out a lot-"

"I'm imagining this," Levi interrupted, though Lucifer was guessing it was more for him than anyone else. "I'm just having a really weird dream, one that I'm going to wake up from in a few minutes. Because gods just don't exist here!"

"Here?" Lucifer asked.

Levi waved his hands about. "Here! Earth! They're not supposed to be here. Earth is just all humans. Nothing else. No gods, no weird animal guys, no demons. Just plain old boring humans."

Lucifer stared at him.

"Look, if gods existed here, I would have met them. And they would have reeked of magic the moment I ran into them. But nope, there's none. Nothing. Just little old me."

"...You're a god?" Lucifer incredulously asked. It seemed impossible, but the more he looked at Levi's soul, the more it seemed likely. There were attributes of it that fit with what he knew of the souls of gods, even though he couldn't place some other parts of it.

"I am," Levi said, straightening and looking him in the eye. Lucifer couldn't help but gulp, because there was just something about the look on his face that made him seem more powerful than he had appeared only moments earlier. "King Kartiel of the End, at your service."


Reyes normally prided himself on his ability to adapt to sudden changes in a situation, but today was one of the days were that certain ability was lacking. The wind had immediately taken him by surprise. Throw his balancing issues due to the awkward position his foot was in, and he had been pulled into the tunnel in a matter of seconds. He gave a startled cry as he went tumbling down it.

Then he was suddenly not in the tunnel, instead slamming down into the bipedal hound. He groaned and immediately rolled off of him, but the damage had been done. "I'm sorry," he apologized, staring up at the ceiling of the cave. He didn't want to get up from where he was laying. "I would have landed somewhere else if I had known what I was doing."

Jaron patiently waited while they talked about gods and kings and "weird animal guys," the last of which he took slight offense to. Still, there were more pressing matters, like that awful sucking noise and Kendrik calling his name. The longer the teenagers kept on talking, the more and more Jaron started shaking and gritting his teeth, until he finally used a pause in the conversation to put a hand on Lucifer's shoulder.

"So," Jaron stammered, nearly stopping when Lucifer stared down at him. "Uh, hello, king and other guy. The others are gone or, or something, and I have a bomb in one of my pockets, and I want to blow up that pile, unless you, uh, have any ideas?" He hated speaking for that long, and it had showed in the way his voice had gone up and down. Hopefully they understood him.



Well, so much for his back.

He knew that it wasn't Reyes's fault, that it had been an accident brought about by the tunnel. Still, without Jaron or anything familiar around, Kendrik growled, stretching out his back and wincing as he heard pops. "I'll make ya sorry ta have met me," he said, grabbing Reyes by the foot. Kendrik glanced down and paused. "What's that?" He sounded startled.

"If you have explosives, Jaron, by all means use them to get to your friend," James said, finally getting to his feet with a groan for the first time since he'd entered the cave. "I don't give a sh*t what either of you are, but keep it in your pants," he said as he trudged towards them all.

Oh no, was his fly open again? He always forgot about that, especially in the mornings or whenever he was distracted. Jaron looked down, only to find that he was still wearing his overalls. This had to be one of those "expressions" he'd heard about.

"But, uh," said Jaron, keeping a grip on Lucifer. "It could explode and kill everyone. Which would be, uh, bad."