"A sickness? Ha," All Eris did when he told her was lower her teacup and roll her eyes. "Void Rulers to-be do not get sick, or ever should. And something as weak as love! That's for the mortals." She threw down her teacup, the red liquor spilling everywhere and the porcelain in shards. "Love? That's what I think of love. It is war, and no child of mine will lose at it." She waved over a servant. "Clean this up." Then she flounced out of the room, the smell of hateful bitch, what Insa liked calling Eris' perfume and a title that he wholeheartedly agreed with, lingering. Now that she was gone, Dev could finally gag. It had been like that for years. His mother leaves, he either breathed a sigh of relief, dry heaved, cursed until he ran out of breath, or all 3 and maybe more.
Theodosius was slightly better, if extreme confusion was better than Eris just being Eris, which was. But still, nothing useful came from him, aside from the line "So are you going to die?" And the fact his eyebrows ascended so hard they were probably breaking into Edens at this point.
Insa, now there was a person who actually spoke some common sense. A pity that their only general in the Void with 2 brain cells to rub together was insane, hence the name. Dev found her at her usual place, sitting on a stone bench in the Garden of the Hesperides.
"Lemme guess. You asked Eris and she did something over-dramatic and bitchy and not at all helpful, and when you went to Theo he was rather befuddled, yeah?" Insa tugged apart her hands, a tangle of red strings suspended in between them connected to her fingers. She liked playing this unorthodox version of Cat's Cradle quite a lot, and when asked she'd say "I like it because it reminds me of my mind." True. Both Dev and her and anyone who'd ever met Insa would say her thoughts were just like the swath of threads she pulled and twisted about: a tangled mess stretching for infinity inside of their confines. But all minds were like that, to a certain extent, Insa always argued. Everyone had a bit of chaos and insanity laying dormant inside of them.
"Always right, aren't you?" Not sarcasm. Dev knee that Insa could probably predict the apocalypse if she wanted to. Thank Void the only mischief she wanted to cause was in the minds of her colleagues and not the entire world. Not yet, anyway.
"Lovesickness is a psychosomatic thing. Do you mind lowering your Shields for a moment?" Shields were the first thing Insa had taught him. It kept an enemy from reading your thoughts or anything of the sort. If captured, unpredictability and unreadability were your greatest weapons. Insa was basically asking him to let him into his mind to do whatever she pleased.
"What are you gonna do?"
"Weigh something."
"That's it?"
"Actually it isn't but yes. That's it."
"Alright." Nothing's what it seemed in someone's mind, unless it was. The inside of someone's head was a bit like that children's book Insa seemed rather fond of, something about painting white roses red, a raving neurotic rabbit with a pocket watch that reminded him of Kyu, and a queen of hearts exactly like Eris. Everything topsy-turvy, and positively messed up. Insa says that's why she likes breaking into people's minds so much. Each was its own little Wonderland, full of fun and strange things for Insa to play with. Dev didn't think she was lying about that, either.
"Just... Don't break anything that seems important, ok?"
"Ha."
"I hope that's a yes-"
"I don't make promises, but I'll try not to debilitate you in a significant way while I'm in there, awright?" Classic Insa.
"Eh. Seems good enough. Hey, are you gonna use Cords?"
"Nope, I don't feel that stabby today."
"Woooowww. That's impossible." Sarcasm was basically their own secret language. Eris would bitchingly get mad at it all the time so no, she wouldn't know, Theo was just bad at speech with meanings that exceeded one, and Kyu was the same, but in a really soft and squishy-hearted way, and not because he wasn't smart, no, it was because he didn't understand what it meant to be mean.
"Hell, I'm even feeling less malicious, so I'll let you pick," She pulled apart her hands quickly and wadded up the string. "Where to?"
"The Cube, please."
"Coming right up," Insa slammed the red tangle on the tiles of the Garden and snapped her fingers. The thread rose and formed a doorway, a crimson knot stretched into a cube-shaped frame. Looking through it, Dev could see the hallway of the Chambers, and at the end, the door of the room where the Cube was stored.
"Well? Whaddya want, a kiss on the cheek? Move!" She didn't really shove Dev so much as basically picked him up and threw him in.
Getting into a box is one thing. Getting into a giant box that pulsed and bled like some giant disgusting square heart and was full of sharp, bloody daggers? Not the same. At least it wouldn't be as painful or horrific as Insa letting loose and just plain-up tearing into Dev's skull with her bare hands. And at least the Cube was humane enough to have strong topical anesthetic, whatever Charon called the numbing substance he used for every procedure that could hurt.
"Are you in?" Insa's voice should've sounded distorted in the box, but it always stayed the same. Maybe it was because the Cube was of her own blood and flesh. Yes, disgusting, he knew, and that was something Insa took great glee in using as a threat, as in "if you don't can it this second I'm building a Box and I'm going to leave you in it for a week."
"Yep."
"And a one, and a two, and a STAB!!" Yeah. Insa said stab instead of 'three'. Dev knew her whole persona was to be as unsettling, manic, and fun as possible.
The sides of the Cube contracted, and the knives lining the sides all drew a bit of blood from Dev. It took him a whole of 3 seconds before he went completely under.
__
"...I think it'd be safe to say whoever ends up dating you are fucked, don't ya think?"
"Yeah."
"I can't believe it. We went looking for a snake and found a dragon..."
"So, uh... Is it not the time to say what I found proves you are not sick and dying?"
He scoffed. After the sim, nothing could compare to what they just witnessed.
"You can say it. Plus, it's not like this thing can tell the future, right?"
"..."
"I'm pretty sure I wouldn't murder Gray."
"Don't say that. You might be wrong."
"Who's side are you on?"
"Yours."
"Then don't fucking say that."
"I don't know if you'll actually kill him, it's the fact that we still don't know that scares me. You might do something worse."
"Something worse than killing Gray?"
"Something that makes death look like mercy."