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TouchedByADevilContinued

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Touched By A Devil (intro cont.)

You are then reminded of the time you and God were fishing by the unnamed river (it was unnamed as there was no-one around to name it... in fact, there were no creatures that had a language so the river was not in fact even called a river, as that word came much later... you even begin to wonder if there were any fish in the river at all). These thoughts confuse the hell out of you, because as far as you can remember, you've never fished, let alone with God.

You then think that you thought you had it clear... but you are as confused as you have ever been.

Then you remember that angels never speak to humans, they are only able to send memories and impressions and ideas, and the humans confuse it with their own thoughts. Oh right, you remember now.

At that point, a door opens and in walks a guy you could swear you knew.

He walks up the table and says, "Sorry I'm late. Had to clean up a mess I made in the kitchen."

"Hi. I'm Phil Hartman. You may remember me from such movies as 'Sgt. Bilko' and 'Jingle All The Way', and as the voice of Troy ~McClure? from 'The Simpsons'."

His head falls to his chest, and then jerks up as he cries, "Aaargh! Why do I always say that when I enter a room? Hi guys, it's me... Lucifer. I don't often take over the body of someone, but what I have to tell you is important, and I can't risk you not understanding due to misinterpretations of the mind images I send you..."

"So, back to my story... There I was, innocently fishing with God, chatting to him about nothing in particular when I got a thought in my head. At least, I'm sure it was my own thought. Pretty sure. I don't really remember having a thought like it before, but I am almost certain I thought it all by myself (but since God speaks to me the same way I speak to you guys, I'll never know for sure, I guess)... anyway, so I mention this thought to God (since I was his best and most respected servant). I remember telling Him how I think that some of the humans coming into heaven were not really fitting in, as they maintained their free will that they had on Earth, and were not choosing to worship Him... and maybe they should not be allowed in until they are ready to supplicate themselves before Him and worship Him like the Angels were made to do.

Phil/Lucifer shudders, and continues, "I can still remember how quickly He got angry... and I did not really mean to get defensive, it's just things were said that could not be unsaid and before you knew it, battle lines had been drawn in the metaphorical sand, angel fought against angel, choir against choir. A thousand years of death and destruction raged across heaven until I was finally defeated by Michael (and I am still convinced he sucker punched me), and was cast out of Heaven."

"I can still remember the fall from Grace. Of course, landing with a bump surrounded by thousands of lost souls did not help either. And I remember God's last words to me as I fell, 'OK, I see your point. If you can ready the souls from the place where you land, to be ready for Heaven, you can come back to Heaven. But only once all the souls there are ready.'"

"It was a Pyrrhic victory. I can still taste the bitterness in my mouth. If I could taste... "

"But", Phil/Lucifer said, with a resigned sigh, "I set about to strip the free will from the lost souls so that they may be accepted into Heaven and could grovel unworthily at the feet of the Big Cheese Himself. It took a while, stripping all those souls, but finally, my task was done. I had started at the beginning of the Not Heaven and had arrived at the end and had done every last damned soul there! So I started to head back to the beginning so I could ascend back to Heaven... but as I traveled back I saw that the Not Heaven was as crowded as ever, but with new souls. What The Fuck??"

So I rushed back to the Gates of Heaven, with a sense of foreboding growing stronger in my mind. I arrived at the Gates, and demanded to see the Big Guy. Of course, I was not allowed in. But the Metetron did come out with a message from The Big Kahuna In The Sky. Basically, it boiled down to the fact that while I was converting the souls that were all ready in the Not Heaven, new souls (not ready for Heaven) had arrived, and they had to be converted as well.

At this point you could not help but say out aloud, "Oh well, that just bites the big one." All the eyes of the other people there turn to look at you, and then they look back at Lucifer, and then to Phil as he said, "Well, yeah, no shit, Sherlock."

"So I gathered all the Fallen Angels together, and showed them how to convert the souls... and set about clearing the souls out of the Not Heaven. But the problem was that as souls were sent up to Heaven, more souls arrived in the Not Heaven."

"So I thought, 'I have to stop the tide at the source... Earth.'"

"Now, I have made a few mistakes in my existence... talking back to Him was a biggie, but this next one was probably the whopper. I decided to tell everyone on Earth about Heaven and tell them how to get themselves ready to go there before they died... that way, no-one would come to the Not Heaven, and I could go back to being in His Grace. I thought it was a great plan. And if it were not for the damned humans, it probably would have been."

"So I went looking for the person who could be my conduit to the minds of Men. He needed to be eloquent, but not too bright (kinda like Mr Hartman here).

Someone then asked, "Why should the person not have been bright?"

And you all are suddenly bombarded with a flood of memories of people in insane asylums screaming about the voices in their heads that were not their own. You realise that if a person was too intelligent, they would recognise that the thoughts and memories sent to them from an Angel were not their own thoughts and memories, and if the Angel tried to communicate with them for too long, it would drive them insane.

"So why aren't we being driven insane, since I am beginning to tell the difference between my own thoughts and those sent to me by you", you ask. You then remember that you are dead and the questions of life after death, the existence of Angels and the whole Heaven and Hell thing have all been answered... and for once, you actually know what the answers are.

"So... back to my story. I was looking for the person that could be my conduit to the minds of Men. He needed to be eloquent, but not too bright. And there he was a perfect specimen, Shmuel, son of a poor carpenter, with an over-protective mother. Not too bright, but he looked good... which was what was important... even today... just look at today's news reporters... and politicians... you see what I mean."

"So I started sending Shmuel impressions. I would send him the feelings of rapture while being in His Grace, and the despair when not being His Grace. And I impressed upon Shmuel the trick to getting into Heaven, which is simple really... Just have Love in your heart. That's it. You do not need to be good, or pious or religious. You do not need to believe in a supreme being. You do not need to eat special foods, or not eat special foods. You do not need to believe the same thing that your next door neighbour believes in, and he does not need to believe what you believe in... As long as you don't hate him, you get into Heaven. Because once you are in Heaven, you will love Him and you will be in His Grace. It was so simple."

"But some people confused Shmuel's message with one of rebellion. So then the authorities got involved and before you knew it, Shmuel was hung up like a scarecrow. When Shmuel died, and I could reveal myself to him he begged me for a favour. He wanted to say goodbye to his mother. Let's just say that sending him back to Earth in his old body is not a mistake I will repeat. People are still talking about it."

"Thankfully my original message was still out there, but people were beginning to forget it. So once again I went back to earth to get some of the people who were there at the time to write down what had happened. But they were not the most literate of people (in fact, they were downright ignorant), so they got others to write it down for them. And, of course since they were only human, they exaggerated a bit here, embellished a bit there, added in their own take on things... and before I could stop it suddenly the New Testament was in existence. And it had a load of shit that was totally untrue in it."

"But there was enough of the truth in there for me to let it slide. That was mistake number three. I really should have nipped that in the bud and had the whole thing rewritten."

"It was around the Middle Ages, when things started going really pear-shaped. The book had gone through a few revisions and instead of them embellishing and making Heaven sound better, they went totally overboard and started making some weird shit up about Not Heaven. Fire, brimstone, lava pits, demons, eternal torture... it was crazy. And then the changes started happening. The Not Heaven started evolving to become what all the dead souls were expecting it to become. Before I could stop it, the place WAS filled with sulfur burning lava pits. My beautiful brethren, my fallen angels started turning into grotesque demons. And soon they were torturing the souls, instead of cleansing them and sending them up to heaven. Thank goodness, not all my angels have turned and some are still converting souls."

"I remember the time before the fucking sulfur arrived, how blandly beautiful the Not Heaven was. I can't go out there any more. Do you know how hard it is to get the smell of Sulfur out of feathers? I went to inspect the first couple of sulfur pits that arrived and it took me almost 10 years to get the smell of rotten eggs out of my wings!!"

"I realised that I'd made a mistake. More people were flowing into the Not Heaven every day... mainly people who claimed to be followers of the Book I had had written. There had been no love in their hearts when they died, only hatred. Funnily enough, most of the people they killed on their Crusades, landed up in Heaven. It was a sad irony."

"So I realised that the usefulness of the book and its message was so diluted as to have no practical purpose any more. So I am now working tirelessly to get it out of the minds of man. My latest ploy is sending up one of my fallen angels to act as a Televangelist. The Televangelist had two purposes. One, to convert the simpleminded and make them believe in the Book and then cause them to question their belief when the Televangelist is caught in some scandal or another... and two, to make the more intelligent of the population turn away from the Book and the Word in disgust at what it has become.

Suddenly a line from an old movie enters into your mind "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist". You then think "If only that were really true."

So then you wonder what Lucifer does, since he is obviously not looking to buy anyone's soul from them. He then replies through Phil, "Well, I send my Fallen Angels up to Earth to keep the humans... well... good. In a way. Not good by the Bible way, or any other organised religion way... but good in the way that will get them into Heaven. They make sure that the humans have love in their heart when they die. If you have heard that someone has found their soul mate, the one person that is their one true love... more often than not, one of the couple is a Fallen Angel in disguise."

"And I have not been doing too badly. Except He started playing unfairly. He started sending down His Angels to give the human's choices. Now, it's easy enough to keep a human loving for the majority of his or her life if they are never given the choice of whether to love or hate... but give them a choice and they makes stupid decisions. They might be committed to their soul mate, but trot an 18 year old Nympho into their lives and suddenly they have to choose between long lasting love, and a short term physical release... no need to tell you what some of them do."

"So it's an eternal struggle I try to keep them loving, and He keeps testing them, never happy with their reactions. Neither me nor Him are actually evil... only humans are really capable of evil."

So you ask, "Um... what does all of this have to do with me? Or any of us?"

"I'm glad you asked that question".

You remember the faces of a number of people, and you remember that they have found their way back to Earth, after being in the Not Heaven. You realise that they have to be returned to the Not Heaven to be converted.

You then hear another one of the people at the table ask, "But why us? Why not send some of your angels to go get them?"

"Because that is what He is expecting me to do. And I don't have a lot of Angels to spare, whereas I do have more than enough human souls to go around. Also, Angels can sense Fallen Angels, and vice versa... so they would probably end up just fighting between themselves and never actually getting the job done. But Angels can not tell normal humans from ones I send back, so you should all go unnoticed, at least for the time being. Also, Angels do not deal with technology well... show us a sword and we pretty much know what to do with it... anything else, and we are totally useless."

A new voice then asks, "So why should we even do this? And what would we have to do to get these souls back?"

"Because you never belonged in Hell, and this would be your ticket to Heaven."

You then think "But I do belong in Hell."

You then think, "That is exactly the point. Until I truly believe I don't belong in Hell, I can never go to Heaven... and this would be my ticket to Heaven."

That felt like Lucifer in your head again. And you remember that to send a soul back to heaven, all you need to do is poke your fingers into the eyes of the body it is inhabiting, and it will release the soul and the soul will automatically go back to Hell.

Suddenly, you find yourself and your companions on a street in a city...

Inspirations for the look and feel of this game:

(Book) Good Omens
(Comic) Sandman: Seasons of Mist (TV) Brimstone
(Movie) Prophecy I & II

The world is a combination of the In Nomine and Children of Clay worlds, but the system will be a slightly modified Witchcraft rules (basically, you are pretty much normal humans and there are no magical societies... but if you look hard enough, there are pockets of magic... just as starter characters, none of you have any magic)