#like it's nowhere. i've checked my whole file system

[draconicace]

periodic reminder to not open files from suspicious emails, no matter how urgent they seem

[sinner-sunflower]

P.2 HH Lucifer-centric AU 20/?

STORY 1, PART 1, PART 2, PART 3, PART 4, PART 5, PART 6, PART 7, PART 8, PART 9, PART 10, PART 11, PART 12, PART 13, PART 14, PART 14.5, PART 15, PART 16, PART 17, PART 18, PART 19, PART 21, PART 22, PART 23, PART 24, PART 25, PART 26

Surprise! Early update teehee

-----------------------------------------------

Lucifer was roused from unconsciousness by murmurs—some panicked, others with anger, and a few laced with authority.

A sudden wet sensation against his face jolted him awake, causing him to flinch and startle the person beside him.

Lucifer: C-Charlie?

Charlie: Oh dad, thank goodness you're awake!

He lets out an 'oof' when he suddenly got an armful of his little girl. Not that he's complaining.

Lucifer: Uhm, did I pass out?

Charlie: Yeah. I don't blame you, though! I can't even begin to understand what you were feeling after witnessing that. Vaggie still hasn't woken up. She's up in our room; Cherri's watching her. Sorry we couldn't take you to yours. You put up wards there too.

Lucifer: That... what?

Charlie: What do you remember, Dad?

Lucifer: I remember being in the palace with Adam organizing my files and then Nifty came and said- Shit! Heaven!

His abrupt attempt to rise left him lightheaded, causing him to sway unsteadily before collapsing back onto the couch where he had been lying.

Charlie: Careful!

Lucifer: I can't believe I passed out. Again!

Angel: Yous should really stop doing that, shorty. Makin' all o' us worry for ya.

Angel appears out of thin air and handed him a bottle of water, expression filled with concern. He gives the actor a 'Thank you', accepting the offering.

Lucifer: But what's going on now? What happened to the ang- body? Did anyone else see it?

He doesn't like the look Charlie and Angel gave each other. Not at all.

Charlie: Dad... it wasn't just one body.

Angel: The fallin' shit we was seeing before? Those were angels too. As far as we can tell, they are littered all over the Ring.

Charlie: Rosie and the cannibals are more than willing to help with collecting them but there's too many bodies to round up even with their numbers.

Lucifer: They're still falling?

Charlie: Alastor and some of the magic-using sinners have put up a temporary barrier since you were out for the count. There's still a few bodies coming down but not as much.

Angel: The city looks fucked as hell. No pun intended.

Lucifer: Alright. Tell Rosie to take the bodies to the Embassy. I'll set it on hellfire to dispose of the corpses. Wait-

Lucifer's eyes scanned the surroundings, searching intently for a bunch of someones. Frustration etched lines on his forehead as he realized that they were nowhere to be found amidst the chaos.

Lucifer: Are the Sins here? What about Adam? Oh Father, I left him back there with Nifty!

Charlie: That's another problem-

She gestures quickly and wildly hearing what she just said.

Charlie: - But it's not Adam! He's still back at the palace, don't worry, I checked. In one piece-

Angel: Tch. Unfortunately.

Charlie: I think he's pretty shaken up by the whole thing too. He's refusing to leave the palace.

Lucifer: O-okay. That's fine. I can work with that. What about the Sins?

Charlie purses her lips.

Charlie: ...The impact of some of the fallen bodies damaged our communication systems.

Angel: Yous fancy elevators are also not working.

Charlie: Yes. I've opened the hotel for Hellborns that got stuck here that wanted to. But with the elevator down and having most of the demons here that aren't sinners being imps who do not have access to strong magic....

His daughter's words trailed off, conveying a sense of concern that Lucifer could keenly empathize with. Most of Hell's forces resided in the lower Rings, but with their current inability to even contact them by their usual means only makes their position more dangerous.

Determined to find a solution, Lucifer attempts to conjure a portal, his brows furrowing in concentration. However, to his mounting frustration, it proved futile. So he tries again. Nothing. And again and again and again.

Lucifer: What the hell?

With a flick of his hand, an apple materialized out of nothing. He briefly transforms into various forms—a snake, a bird, before returning to his normal form. A sense of unease is gnawing at him.

Everything seems to be fine so he tries to make a portal again. Fucking nothing.

Lucifer: W-why isn't it working?!

Angel: Hey hey. Maybe you're just having performance issues. Calm down.

Lucifer: I can't calm down! Why can't I make a portal?! I-I need to see them. I need the Sins!

Charlie: Dad!

But he can't. He's panicking and he feels himself beginning to spiral again until something struck him hard across the face, causing his head to swivel to the side.

He slowly looks back and realizes that Angel Dust just slapped him. A sinner dare to slap him. Him! The fucking King of Hell!

Anger begins to boil inside him until he really looks Angel in the eye. The porn star is looking back at him with eyes full of worry and concern.

It seems the other realizes what he's just done too because his eyes widened and he scrambled forward, multiple hands cupping Lucifer's face gently as he softly patted the spot he had just struck.

Angel: I'm sososososososo sorry, baby-uhm uh Your Majesty! Oh my god- I mean- gosh-sorry, am I allowed to say God? Ack! I did it again. But I'm so sorry, I don't know why I did that. I mean- I know why. You were about to have a panic attack and I really shouldn't have slapped you though. I totally could've just kissed you and you'll snap out of it all da same but we can kiss oh wait the strawberry pimp might actually murder me. I'm really really so-

He was cut off by Lucifer giving him a hug to which Angel all but melts into.

Lucifer: Thanks, Angel. I needed that. Don't make it a habit though.

However, their brief moment was shattered by a flash of light outside, followed by a shockwave that reverberated through the ground, sending tremors rippling through the hotel. A chorus of screams followed.

Lucifer: What was that?

Lucifer sounds like a broken record. He really needs to stop fainting and missing stuff or Katie Killjoy will call him a weak ass bitch in her next news segment.

Angel: It's the same light show we witnessed a few weeks back.

Lucifer: Michael?

Charlie: It's not aimed at us, Dad.

Angel: Pfft. Yeah, for now.

Charlie: But it's been going off so much. Whatever's going on up there... it's bad.

Angel: It's probably that, ain't it?

They don't have to say it out loud to know that the 3rd Heavenly War is happening. It had only been short of a month since he met with Michael and now things have escalated to the point that Michael is wrecking havoc upon his own people.

A weak part of him feels bad for his brother for being put in that position.

Lucifer shudders. When Roo told him of his death, he was in disbelief. When Michael showed him his Fate, he was not afraid. But now that the war is actually here, he only feels dread at the thought of what is bound to happen next. He can almost hear Roo's laugh.

With no way to get the Sins, all they have are sinners and some imps to defend themselves. It's only a matter of time before the mess in Heaven reaches them and cuts his thread.

Lucifer: Okay. For now, our strongest players are me, you, and the overlords. So, call them here. I need to speak with them.

Charlie: What are we going to do, Dad?

Angel: What's the plan, boss man?

For someone who kept wishing for death for over ten thousand years, he never wanted to live to see tomorrow more than now.

Lucifer: We're going to defend our home.

-----------------------------------------------

Appledust is like a guilty pleasure ship. There's something about 2 broken souls finding togehter that gets me.

They are platonic in this fic tho. Radioapple is my life

I also promise that Lucifer is only gonna pass out one more time. for the last time

oops

[aewrie]

distractions aren't working so

(yelling into the void to get this out of my system but seriously tread carefully if you're sensitive to topics of abuse/ c/sa /mental health crap)

i'd be looking for a therapist but am not exactly in the headspace to do so. my old one was overall great and i'd be contacting her but she was basically useless when it came to this topic. think she was more confused and conflicted at the idea of a child being the abuser than me. which. that's not gonna help. and by the time i'd trust myself to see through that ordeal idk. i could probably use it anyway but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

could use it right now. i've been crying on and off for like 3-4 hours, while teetering on the edge of another breakdown

took me what, 10?? years before i felt ok using the word trauma in reference to being bullied for years. even after i kinda knew how fucked it all was. only after a health professional was like 'yeah, that's trauma you've got going on' after hearing the tl;dr of my life i felt i was allowed to. (she then proceeded to recommend therapy lmao). bc it wasn't so bad. boy i'm good at rationalizing all that away. other people always have it worse! and it's not like there was obvious violence, so obviously it doesn't count.

same fucking thing when i got diagnosed with depression and anxiety. i was passively suicidal & heading into worse direction and i was only willing to admit that i was sad & anxious. probably. surely not anything that would warrant treatment.

and now this thing i've filed away under 'miscellaneous shit that was not ideal probably, but surely it wasn't' That Bad, other people have it Worse':

yesterday i checked out this vr interview stream dealing with abuse right before i had to go sleep (the best idea ever. clearly) and at the point i started watching the discussion made basically no sense so i figure i go to the start and watch from there. and the interviewee describes the abuse, and i'm fine until a particular detail comes up and then it kinda unraveled from there. i had to pause just to get a breather. i watched maybe a few minutes more idk.

i've looked into child psychology and sexual development before bc ever since i bumped into the term child-on-child sa i've been stuck with the whole 'but does it count if x y z' (mostly: can someone so young even be an abuser, bc obviously if he didnt' intentionally & maliciously do it, i am not allowed to feel upset), even earlier that same damn day! but nothing unequivocally said yes or no. so of course i'm going with the safe answer of no, i'm not allowed to call it abuse.

but after that Moment i looked at some more stuff and found a couple of videos, one from a therapist knowledgeable on the topic, and one first-hand account, read some comments to boot, and then i'm having the sort of crying episode that leaves me feeling physically sick for a full day at least

at work today I was distracted the second i was not properly busy, then i managed to keep it together for a bit when i got home and now here we are. fuck i'm glad i'll have multiple days off now. on the long run this is good to process. but def not feeling it right now lol. at least i'm not stuck in a corner of fandom where loaded buzzwords get thrown around like they mean nothing, i knew that fucked with my head even back during the vl/d heyday and i was just getting around to the 'ok that Happened and maybe it was messed up, but Not abuse' stage of denial

good news i might be done crying rn so i guess that helped

i guess this was gonna be happening sooner or later bc i've been somewhat actively thinking about all that for months but rip it came out of nowhere

(and gonna throw it in here just in case; i'd rather not have 'i'm sorry' messages or similar, 9 times out of 10 i just feel awkward as shit. more neutral (not sure what's the best word?) is fine)

[e-spexially]

If you don't want to read this whole thing, I've provided the audio reading of it. I suggest giving it a listen, it adds a whole different and more unsettling mood

I’d like to share with you all an incident that actually happened in my little home town. When it first happened, I was pretty young, so I just picked up bits and pieces from hearing adults talk. But that was rare. It’s like they thought, whatever happened, there was something in it that had to be shameful. It always scared the heck out of me when they did whisper about it. Now, after what happened here and knowing more, it’s even scarier.

For me, it started when I was nearly ending my shift at the clinic one night. It was a gloomy evening. We’d had a hunting accident earlier, but otherwise it was quiet. Mitch Lemieux, this guy who owns a garage on Cartier Blvd, five-time arm-wrestling champ down at the Caribou bar, comes in panicking, looks spooked out of his mind. Never seen him so much as flinch before that. So I’m expecting some serious carnage.

He’s shouting for help, so I call two EMTs to go out with him. They come back with a half-naked girl. Her clothes are torn to ribbons and what’s left of them is soiled. She has cuts, bruises, and like pond scum or something over her. She has this deadness in her eyes like nothing I’ve ever seen.

They get her in a blanket, a stretcher and take her away. Everyone in the waiting room is standing now and the only sound is Mitch panting. Because everyone knew that girl was Chantal Norman. The same Chantal who’s been missing for twelve years.

Since then, I’ve found out a lot more details about her disappearance. I had to. I got specifics wherever possible. I’m going to lay them out here.

The Girls Who Went Away

I may have heard more talk than some as a kid because my big sister, Virginia, was friends with Chantal and the other two, Jenna and Lise. She was supposed to hang out with them one weekend. I remember she was talking about it all week. I guess Chantal’s parents were out of town, so she was excited.

When Thursday came around, she starts saying she doesn’t feel like going anymore. My Mom questions her, asks if she’s had a fight with the girls, that sort of thing. Even if she’s pregnant. Virginia got upset and left the table, saying, “You don’t understand.”

By Saturday, she was starting to cry all the time for no good reason. She finally told my parents she knew something bad was going to happen that weekend. “They’re going to die, Mom!” she said. That sticks in my memory like it was yesterday. She was so certain it gave me chills. But nobody believed her.

On Monday, Virginia came home from school hyperventilating. My Mom could hardly get a word out of her. When she did, it was, “They’re gone!”

Soon the story was all the town could talk about. The three girls disappeared that Saturday night. Had Virginia gone, she would’ve been the fourth.

The night of the disappearance, Maestro’s Pizza had a call from Chantal’s phone at 8:47pm for pizza. The driver recorded the delivery at 9:20pm. He said the girls looked ok when he delivered the pizza. All three were at the door. He said it seemed like one of them kept looking behind her, like someone else was there. He couldn’t see anyone.

A receipt from a nearby liquor store was timestamped 9:39pm. The clerk recalls only seeing Jenna and Lise. (Chantal was not yet 18, so that may have been why.) They did not seem distressed to him, although one kept checking her watch.

At 10:14pm and 10:17pm, two calls were found in Chantal’s phone records. Neither call was local. One was to a law office three-hundred miles away. The recorded voicemail was one minute and sixteen seconds of breathing. The second call was to a residence on Prince Edward Island. The woman who answered the phone said the caller asked, “Is he there?” and hung up before she could get clarification. She’d never heard of Chantal and had no idea why Chantal would be calling her. The law office said the same.

That was the last confirmed time anyone heard from Chantal, Jenna, and Lise.

At 11:29pm a 911 call was placed from an unknown phone. A woman is heard whispering, “Send someone, please.” And when the dispatcher asks where, she says, “We don’t know” and the call drops. None of the girls’ parents could say it was their daughter. It may have been a coincidence.

The next day, after not being able to reach her daughter or Chantal, Lise’s mother calls for a wellness check. At 5:45pm on Sunday, police arrive. Chantal’s home is locked up. No signs of a break-in or a struggle. The alarm system was in ‘Home’ mode. The cars were still parked outside. The girls’ phones had been left on the table, one was even left charging. Nothing had been stolen. Slices of pizza were out on the coffee table, partially eaten. Half-drunk drinks were beside the plates.

It’s like they’d just been in the middle of having a good time, drinking, listening to music, when they suddenly dropped everything and ran off. It’s not even clear how they locked up, because the house keys were found on the kitchen counter.

Nobody could understand it. But there was a bad feeling about the whole thing. Even the cops say they felt “dread” when they approached the home. They felt what Virginia had felt before: that something terrible happened.

The usual events that surround missing girls followed. Much of the community helped search surrounding wooded areas. Signs were put up everywhere, all the way to Montreal. It must’ve cost a ton. The bay was searched and a body was found. It turned out to be someone else. In fact, I believe that body was never positively identified.

Police questioned everyone who knew the girls. Family, friends, neighbors. Nobody saw anything, heard anything particularly suspicious. They questioned Virginia a few times about why she didn’t spend the weekend with them as planned and why she wasn’t helping with the searches. To the latter, she said, “It’s too late.”

The Case Gets Stranger

That’s when the weird stuff started to come out. I think every case that’s low on leads like this is going to have some degree of strange tips that go nowhere. But these strange tips went somewhere. This is the stuff that made people not so keen to talk about it.

The first strange report was from an old man, an ex-cop, in a town an hour away. The night the girls disappeared, he was having trouble sleeping. This was around 1 am, he says. While he’s taking a leak, he thinks he hears someone in his yard. It sounded like it might’ve been giggling. Figuring it was kids, he ran out with a bat just to scare them. When he got to his backyard, which backs up to the tree line, he saw three girls holding hands and running single file into the woods.

He ran after them, because there’s a lot of woods back there. He was afraid they’d get lost or hurt. When he got to the woods, he couldn’t find them. They were just gone. He felt stupid about the whole thing, so he kept it to himself. Until he heard three girls had gone missing.

A search was conducted in the area, dogs brought in, but nothing was ever found to say the girls were actually there. It creeps me out thinking about it, because, if it was them, why would they be there? It’s a long walk from Chantal’s home to this town. Why would they walk all that way to wander into the woods?

Chantal’s parents were questioned repeatedly if they’d received demands. Someone said they’d seen Chantal’s father meeting with some men in black suits the week before the girls disappeared. They were getting into a black car when he’d been spotted. Chantal’s dad was a roofing contractor, so top secret meetings wouldn’t have been his thing. He denied it at first. Later he said they were hardware salesmen. So why’d he start by lying? What hardware salesmen act like that?

It didn’t help their case that Chantal’s mother believed the girls were dead. She said it was because of something that happened while she was out of town. At the hotel where she was staying, three birds got into the lobby the same night the girls disappeared. Staff got a 40 foot ladder to get the birds down, but when they got up there, the birds were nowhere to be seen. “Why exactly three birds? That was their spirits. They’re with God now.” That’s what she used to tell people.

I guess that brought her comfort. Someone told Virginia about it once and she said, “They’re nowhere near God…”

Some people shared that opinion because, when police went through their search history, there was a lot of odd stuff you wouldn’t expect popular, cheerleader types to be into. There was a lot of occulty stuff and conspiracy theories. One weird search phrase stood out on the report, “can a TV signal make you do things” and variants on it. The last item in Chantal’s history, at 10:01pm, was for a mountain cottage in Arkansas.

They were in contact with someone with the handle ThePrince. Not many details of those interactions came out. I heard from someone in the police department that he was telling them to do things. There was only one of those he felt he could tell me: this guy had asked them to do something to Virginia. He wanted them to bring her out to this old woodshed back behind the yellow house on Nelson Rd. That was supposed to happen the night they disappeared. “Think about it,” he told me. “What do you think would’ve happened to your sister if she went that night? What would’ve happened?” His look told me this was something that kept him up at night thinking about it. I know the feeling.

They were never able to track down who this ThePrince was, from what I understand. Efforts to contact him online failed.

One of their mutual friends heard Chantal talking about some guy named ‘Vincenzo.’ How Vincenzo knew everything and told them things nobody’s supposed to know. She said Chantal told her Vincenzo took them out to a secret place. Another friend said while sitting with some other friends he saw Chantal talking on her phone at school. She was talking for five minutes or so. She came back and said it was Vincenzo. But everyone at the table swore she didn’t even have a phone in her hand. She was just facing the wall, talking. Whether real or made up, Vincenzo was another dead end.

And there were sightings of the girls everywhere. Sometimes locally, but some claims came from as far as Vancouver and even Australia. Sometimes in the woods, sometimes walking along the street, at the beach. Someone said he was sure it was Chantal who begged him for money in Toronto. Someone else said they saw the girls along the street on a vacation to Mexico. She said the girls retreated into the crowd when she called to them. “Why would they run away like that?” she asked.

Maybe the strangest was a guy who could point to some photos he and his wife had taken at a party. In the background, two girls and part of a third that looked just like them. The thing is, the photos were at a watch party for the fall of the Berlin Wall. The girls were infants at the time those pictures had been taken.

There was a lot mysterious about this case. Why’d they disappear? How’d they get where they were going? Was someone else involved? Where’d they go? Were they dead? The odds of them still being alive were extremely low. Nobody believed we’d ever see them again. With the reappearance of Chantal, the question now was: Where have they been for the past twelve years? And where are the others?

Chantal

Mitch told me, officers, everyone who’d listen, how he found her. He’d been out on his own land—his father’s land, technically, acres and acres of it going way back into the woods—hunting deer. He was up in his stand, way back there, having a few beers. He saw some movement far off in the trees. He was ready to take a shot, but something made him hold on. Just the way it’s moving. Too slow and unsteady for a deer, even a wounded one. It’s a sickly walk. He keeps watching as it comes closer. It’s a person, he’s sure. He’d normally be furious someone was trespassing. But this is too weird. She’s slowly walking straight toward the tree where his stand is and he can now see it’s this half-naked, beaten girl.

“Wherever she’s been, I don’t ever wanna go there,” he told me that night. Sent a shudder right through me. He reeked of something, like a scorched tar smell. And all I could think was that she’d been to hell and back.

The ER docs concluded she was physically ok. She needed food and warmth, but otherwise just bruised up. What she needed was psychological evaluation.

Whatever peace and quiet she had in her room ended quick. Police arrived to question her, her parents (now divorced) were called, and they all wanted to know where she’d been, if she was ok. She still had that dazed, mindless look, even with her mother caressing her.

When she finally spoke, she gave an address. They tried to get her to say more, but that’s all she’d tell them. Just the address. It was a local one, on the other side of town past the old drive-in. Not many people live out that way anymore.

Police sent someone to the address immediately, hoping the other girls would be there. I found out from a friend that they had trouble finding it because the yard was so overgrown that the house number was covered. The house itself was sagging, a rotten old house with busted out windows.

Two cops were checking it out and even with two of them, both armed, the place made them nervous. They go inside and find an old mattress and a bunch of dolls on the floor. They heard a thudding sound from upstairs. One of them went up to check it out, while the other looked around downstairs.

The one upstairs went room to room looking for the source of the noise. He comes to one room where he sees the window shutters are open. He thinks he’s seen this in the movies before: it’s just the wind. What next, a cat jumps out? So he goes and closes the shutters. Then it occurs to him. There isn’t any wind.

He searches the upstairs and finds no-one there. He runs downstairs and asks his partner if he’s seen anyone. He hasn’t. He’s been flipping through a book he found. It’s a book about the Nazis with polaroids of children between the pages. They decide to get out of the creepy place and come back in daylight. On the way out, they both notice the back door’s been opened. They were sure it was shut when they’d arrived.

Investigators looked all over the property the next few days. One of the upstairs rooms has a lot of bloodstains. They’re tested and come back inconclusive. The polaroids are reviewed, but no-one recognizes the children. There wasn’t even a hint that Chantal or the others had been in that house. They can’t figure out why Chantal was so fixated on that address.

The owner of the house, according to records, made the purchase in 1974. Nobody in town had ever seen or heard of this person. More, as far as police could determine, this person didn’t exist. Others still living in the area say they’ve seen vehicles at the home before, years back. Never the same vehicle twice. But they never met anyone.

Hospital staff left Chantal’s mother stay with her the rest of the night. She didn’t want to leave her side. She was afraid of losing her again, perhaps. One of the nurses heard her mother asking her, “Where were you all that time, Chantal?” and saying things like, “You don’t look a day older.” And Chantal said, “I wasn’t anywhere.”

Technically my shift was over, but with what happened, I stayed on to help. And I was nosey. I didn’t try to go visit Chantal. I never really knew my sister’s friends. So I was surprised when I heard Chantal wanted to see me. I figured it would have to do with Virginia and I was right. She asked me if Virginia could come see her.

I just imagined how much she missed her friends and family after all this time, so I was quick to promise I’d try my best. Virginia had left town eleven years ago. She rarely even called. Something about the incident changed her. But I had her number, of course, so I called and told her everything that happened.

Up to, “She’s been asking to see you, V. Maybe she’ll tell you more.”

I was sure she would say she’s hopping on a plane. Instead, she said, “Chantal is dead. They’re all dead. They’ve been dead all this time.”

I said, “V, I was looking right at her. She spoke to me. She’s on an IV drip. She’s alive.”

“I don’t know who or what that is. All I know is if I come home, I’ll never be seen again.”

And she hung up. I called back a few times. She wouldn’t answer. My parents couldn’t believe it. She wouldn’t answer for them either. I couldn’t go face Chantal with that news, so I just went home.

I spent the night beating myself up about it. I could hardly sleep. Around 3am I heard faint knocking on my front door. All sorts of ideas went through my mind. What if Virginia decided to fly in after all?

Before I could go to the door to look, my phone rang. It was Virginia. I answered and asked right away if that was her at the front door. She told me she had a bad feeling and woke up in tears, sure something had happened to me.

“Don’t answer the door,” she said. “Please.”

I didn’t. I heard the knock again and I didn’t answer. V and I weren’t close. But I trusted her. I spent the rest of the night hiding in my own home, because she really freaked the shit out of me.

I found out the next day that Chantal had gotten out of her bed during the night, around 2:45am, while her mother slept. Hospital cameras show her walking out calmly, nobody notices. And just like that, she disappeared again. Nobody’s seen her since. No idea where she went after leaving the hospital, and still no idea where she’d been for the past twelve years. There’ve been searches, but I’m sure it’ll be all dead ends again.