The Height of Narcissism

As far as sins went, in The Loremaster’s opinion, Pride was by far the one that was almost too easy to commit: Have a healthy regard of yourself and care for your work and you’re halfway there according to some people. Make your thesis about modern sin thinking you could somehow avoid falling and become a demon yourself while doing it and that was the Hubris subcategory of Pride well covered. She had learned to accept that. Kind of.

But well, that didn’t mean that now that she was officially a demon she couldn’t keep studying sin did it? Specially since these days she did it with more style and flair than any angel could hope to reach.

Loremaster had been experimenting with will lately: An important component for both virtuous acts and sins, will. Everyone had it, and Loremaster knew she had it in spades. There had been a prime specimen with even higher octane amounts of will before - amounts never before or after seen in a single entity - but the fact of the matter was that Helltaker, Mister Helltaker whenever she somehow still felt sentimental, had long since disappeared, hadn’t he?

She had witnessed him dying in a pillar of light multiple times and coming back completely unscathed during his time acquiring demon girls in Hell - not much at all during their short stint at having a domestic life - but he’d still ended up disappearing for good. Not even a big explosion to mark the occasion.

A shame really. He had been only human after all, and perhaps limited in scope in what he could do with his will because of it, even if coming back from incineration wasn’t in most human’s wheelhouses.

Now, what more could she do if she boosted will with her own abilities and the knowledge she’d been given by her subjects?

Rewrite time maybe?

That starts as a half baked joke between her and Lucy - or her and Lucy’s death glares -  but it’d been based on how at around Subject 20 of the second series of demon hybrids they had noticed that especially motivated Subjects would sometimes reappear at the start of her test chambers whenever they got failed: Seemingly unscathed, almost like their injuries had never happened, right after disappearing in a pillar of light.

They knew exactly what that looked like, and Loremaster was still not sure if what he did was actual time travel or not, perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t. In any case getting to witness all that had proven itself a very interesting quirk on an otherwise dull experiment: Again, Helltaker wasn’t there to try to explain how he’d done it anymore and Subject 21 through 25 had still quickly scattered to super-heated dust from the test chamber’s lasers shortly after the first couple of times, leaving them a Subject 26 that hadn’t even displayed the same behavior before succumbing and left her fresh out of that week’s hybrid batch.

And without a viable way to observe the phenomenon once more until the next series finished cooking, that left her with far too long to stand still, she would have to get to work.

Unlike her roommates and the human-devil-monster hybrids she had made to be her test subjects, The Loremaster was not limited by such a thing as humanity or having been a devil for long enough that they didn’t feel the power of sheer innocent curiosity any longer.

And sometimes when you want something done right you have to do it yourself.

So she does.

---

What follows is perhaps a bit much.

See: The thing about setting up test chambers is that by definition you had to know or mostly know how to solve them yourself, so you have to hand someone control. Justice might have been fine for the task but Loremaster knows she’s too much of a softie towards her. Only Lucy would give her what she needed.

But combine that with how your tsundere maid waifu dearest quite obviously only knows how to flirt by showing how much she wants to kill you, keeps upping the difficulty of the puzzles and the laser beam’s strength - even adding a few holy water fountains made specially for you and far outside experiment parameter scope as revenge over something as tiny and insignificant as usurping the throne of Hell - and you might find yourself in a world of lovely pain.

Still, Loremaster was only seconds away from kicking the last box required to complete the test into place - hope of success was a strong component for will, relentless opposition could focus it. Not to mention that through Pandemonica and Zdrada’s mentorship (Judgement’s too, even if she never pulled her chains tight enough when they weren’t directed at herself) had taught her well about taking pain and bodily harm elegantly: Smile or smirk through it, look directly at your darling CEO-turned-slave and learn how to pitch your breath and voice just so, let your tongue loll out for full effect to let her know how much you love her touch.

Sometimes it gets her to blush and fluster. Just enough to hold still long enough to catch your breath and recover between sections, hope to cross the puzzle gates and see how the world reacts. 

Sometimes it makes the Morningstar press the big red button that fills the room with divine light strong enough to nearly obliterate you both, scorch your skin, meld your screams in horrendous cacophony, even if at least you’re both aware that this won’t be your end just yet.

Such is life. But it definitely was a bit much, perhaps.

---

It’s… Not an elegant thing, falling upwards the way she was falling. And it did feel like that’s what was happening, gravity twisting and passing through Heaven’s clouds’ before landing again, 

The clouds are not painful to lay on at all, really, but they are like a too-soft mattress or ill-fitting shoes to her current sensibilities, overstuffed, over-cushioned.

Opposite of her but upside down stands a much younger version of herself, eyes wide and blue, reaching out her still intact hand to help her up.

Being able to see the flush in her own face as she gives her a once-over that lingers too long on her horns kind of explains some things about them.

“Who… are you? How do you have horns in here?”

This isn’t a perfect run of the puzzle just yet, absolutely not. This was definitely too far back and Loremaster could feel that light surrounding her again. It would probably jerk her back to the present moment in due time, specially since Azazel’s expression gave off that the light was visible to her too.

But there was room to grow from here perhaps, and just in case this was a fluke and she wouldn’t ever be able to come back in time at all, then…

Far be it from her to cloud her capital S Science with romantic notions of Fate, but there really was only one correct course of action here. And as weird as it is to create memories this circular, her lips taste so sweet and the wings enveloping them (out of a hurried need for privacy, how adorable of them) feel so soft.

“I think you’ll come to find that out yourself some day, Azzy.”

Lucifer stands where she had been once she’s back, and in hindsight she really should have given herself a far less chaste kiss. That might become an excuse for further miscalculations in the future, but who cares really?