My name's Rixanne Victoria Beaufort- well, that's what my parents call me, anyways.
Right now there's not much I can do, especially since I'm living under their roof, but the second I turn 18 I'm changing my name to something cool and badass like Rix V. Danger! I'll get my own house and my own lab and my own friends, and I'll have 'em all to myself. The house won't be some twelve-story victorian mansion, either- it'll be just two stories, and plus it'll be inside an active volcano on an island shaped like a skull. I might have to design the island myself since skull-shaped natural property doesn't come cheap.
I live in the capital district of the capital city of Wonlandica, a country that's been obsessed with the apocalypse since before I was born, but is especially obsessed with it these days. See, a fortune teller from a few centuries ago said it was 'sposed to happen about 47 years from now, which means half the people alive today'll be alive when everything goes kapow! So it'll happen- but the thing is, nobody knows how.
You got three major theories that they call the Three Horsemen. One is that demons from hell will come and invade the world. A real religious theory. Geologists down there are constantly saying the ceiling is gonna crumble and that when it does, and when the magical shield they got down there breaks, the whole world will go up in flames. Azwrath, the prime minister of Hell, gave a big speech saying that was all conjecture and it got put on every network in the country. Some of them called it a sham while others congratulated the guy for quenching the controversy!
The second one is about the glitch dimension, or the glitchniverse- that second one is what all the people I know call it, and that first one is what the dossiers my mama reads call it. It's supposed to be this broken dystopian alternate dimension where reality doesn't work quite the same, and the big thing about it is that it's set to collide with our dimension around the time of the apocalypse! You got two sides on that as well- when it collides, some people say it'll just pass through, while others say it'll rip through the fabric of spacetime and put an end to the world as we know it. There's never been anything like this before that we know of, so it's all new territory.
Third, final, last but not least: nukes. Nuclear war is always loomin' in the distance according to the pundits who push this one around. Nobody knows who's gonna start it- like, which country, or if it'll maybe be a civilian with access to nukes considerin' that they're easier than ever to get into nowadays. My papa is big on this theory, and he works for WPN, a big big news network that's always talking about it! I wish he was some glitchhead or a zealot, 'cause his position means I can never ever tell him my biggest secret: I wanna go into nuclear power.
Not nukes- well, maybe nukes if I can get the funding, but not nukes right away. I'm a scientist by heart, see? The social worker assigned to my case back when I was going to the Caulvener Institute for Troubled Children said I was a mad genius, a real troublemaker, a danger to be supervised at all costs. Sure, I put on a smile and braided my hair and stopped wearing clothes I designed myself, but none of that ever went away when I got discharged- I just got better at hiding it. They mighta discovered my secret invention room at the Institute and burnt all my creations to the ground, but they couldn't burn my dreams to the ground- nor the fireproof blueprints I secretly stashed underneath the floorboards and then retrieved on my last day.
Here at my parents' mansion, I have a new invention room, and this time nobody will ever find it without me wantin' 'em to. For one thing, I installed revolving walls- at the press of a button, the room goes from my mad scientist laboratory to a boy band poster paradise. It makes sense that I'd want to keep something like that a secret, so no one will ever suspect it's anything more. Would you expect a prim, proper noble girl to have an obsession with the Barracuda Boys or Harminie? What about an evil genius with impeccable fashion sense? Exactly: You wouldn't expect it from either of them, so both of them would want to keep it a secret. Try and keep up. Truth is, I don't even listen to those bands... more than five times a week.
My mama is on the government's big anti-apocalyptic task force, and that's why we make bank and live in the capital. My dad's a famous newscaster for a big anti-nuke news network. I'm their only kid since they've barely got any time to spend with each other, and so that means if I'm a disappointment I lose access to all the money I need to make my mechanical dreams come true! If I don't step up and prove that I got the potential to be a big shot engineer, I'm gonna be living in a van rather than in a volcano on an island, and that's not something I'm willing to risk.
I will impress them. I'm gonna do what everybody says is impossible: I'm gonna figure out what'll cause the apocalypse and then stop it from happening! Then I can prove to them that nuclear power is the only way forward, and then I can do everything I've been waiting to do my whole life. But that will all come after I impress them. Maybe it's foolhardy to worry so much about their opinions of me, but isn't practicality a virtue? If it isn't, it ought to be.
And all that is what's runnin' around in my head as I flip through the pages of the old grimoire I bought at a yard sale with my weekly allowance when I was seven. It was just a cool-lookin' book back then, and I couldn't read anything inside since it was all written in ancient Wonlandican. I spent the next year after that learning to read old scripts just in case the info in the book ever came in useful. It never did- until now, that is!
HOW TO SUMMON A DÆMON
See, my train of thought is that there's no one better to interrogate about Hell than a real-life demon. Unless I roll snake eyes and summon a politician, they've gotta be more honest than the representatives who talk to our people on TV, so I can go straight to the source! Then I just gotta find a way to contact somebody from the Glitchniverse and my plan is in place. I wear them down until they spill their secrets, then follow whichever trail seems most promising until I uncover a bubble waiting to burst in, say, 47 years. Then I just invent something to fix the problem before it happens! Easy, especially for someone with my intellect... well, that's how it seems in my head.
Right now I'm sitting on my knees in the lab. I pushed my work-in-progress cryogenic freezing chamber out of the way to make room for the circle I need to draw on the floor, so I have enough space for a demon for sure. Do demons come in different sizes? Well, I have enough space for a human-sized demon for sure. If a bigger demon comes out, I'll just have to see where fate takes me.
The instructions are mega vague, even now that I can understand 'em, but maybe that means summoning is easy! Course, it's technically illegal considering the ramifications of pulling ordinary demons into the mortal world, but that just means I gotta take extra measures to not get caught. I've been doing stuff like that my whole life.
The instructions say to use dye, but I figure paint will work as well, so I dip my old brush into the same can of neon pink day-glo paint I painted the walls of the disguised lab with. My rendition of the fancy circle in the book looks kinda lopsided- I'm a scientist, not an artist- but I figure the universe has gotta know what I mean either way. Then the instructions say to use a catalyst, which can be anything. There's a note about how using something rare or precious makes your chances of summoning a powerful one more likely- what, so it doesn't guarantee anything?
My catalyst will be a candle. The ritual book says to use eleven candles around the circle, but I could only find packs of twelve at the store.
When the whole thing is set up, I grimace and prepare to read the incantation. The Hell reps say that arcanism is just science nobody understands yet, so this shouldn't be too tough for me, right? The syllables are foreign to my tongue, but I manage to get them out. I only stumble once on a word with seven consonants in a row. Maybe this is why the instructions for summoning aren't more widespread!
The candles flicker purple and a spectral door, which looks more like a regular door than I expected, suddenly materializes in the center of the circle. It's closed. Suddenly, the handle rattles! I wait with bated breath... and the handle rattles again. C'mon, the suspense is killing me!
Then there's an apathetic voice from beyond.
"I guess it's locked," says the voice, somehow sighing with every word.
"Wait!" I yell, rushing to the door. There's a little knob on the doorknob to lock and unlock it! How come I didn't see that?
I give the knob a twist and shove myself through the door as it opens like a character in a Rom-Com after he sees his love interest boarding a train back home. I make sure to keep my foot in the door. There's a demon- a real flesh and blood one, too- standing in the middle of what looks unsettlingly like the kitchen of a fast food restaurant. She turns her head to look at me- her eyes are bright red, as is her hair.
"Uh," I stutter, trying to think of a catchphrase a cool mad scientist with a plan would say. "Uh, hi." I fail. I'm not used to failure.
"Hi," says the demon in return. She's wearing a red and white uniform like something out of... a fast food restaurant. Wait, not just any fast food restaurant- that's the Billy Burgermeister uniform! I see those ads on TV all the time! What's a demon doing dressed like a line cook?
"Uh, where is this?"
"...Billy Burgermeister."
I knew it!
"But... I didn't know they had them in Hell."
"They have them everywhere."
"And what are the burgers like in Hell? What are they made of? Human souls?"
"Mostly beef," she says, "Unless you're talking about the rumors that they have chicken cartilage in them too."
"Huh. That's the same as home."
"Where's home?"
"Wachi," I mumbled, "Or W.C., whichever name you know it by. Capital of Wonlandica. I'm sure you've heard of it."
"Sure. Couldn't tell you where it is, though."
"East of Lumivila, north of the Iris River."
"None of that means anything to me, sorry."
"The Iris River is the one that'll flow into Hell if the ceiling crumbles!"
"Oh. Look, I don't follow politics much."
That wasn't even about politics! I hold my tongue. Could it be that I, an average (or perhaps above-average) human, know more about the affairs of Hell than someone who has presumably lived there her whole life?
"I'm going to go summon another demon."
"Summon a demon? But you didn't summon anybody. You just created a space-rhyme between hell and the mortal world. Actual summoning doesn't even really exist- the closest you get to approximating it is using a space-rhyme along with an item teleportation charm and a pre-prepared positioning plan."
Hmm- maybe she will be useful after all.
"So you know a lot about arcanism, eh?"
"No. I learned that stuff in middle school. I wasn't even paying attention in that class."
Guh!
"Why'd you even do the spell?"
"Well," I begin, realizing that what I'm about to say will sound awfully silly out loud, "I want to stop the apocalypse."
"Oh."
"You're not surprised...?"
"No, I just don't see how I'm supposed to help with that."
"I was thinking I'd get one demon, one... person, from the glitchniverse, and one nuclear scientist together to, I dunno, figure out which of the three horsemen is actually gonna happen."
"That last one sounds like it'll be tough."
"No, actually, that's me."
She squints at me and sets the spatula she's holding down on the countertop.
"Kid, what are you, twelve?"
"I'm fourteen!"
"And you cal yourself a nuclear scientist?"
"I don't just call myself one, I am one! You have not been yet privy to my inexhaustible genius!"
She rolls her eyes. Doesn't she know who she's dealing with?
"Look, I have one actual skill, aside from flipping burgers and playing arcade games," she says, approaching the door. "I can read people."
"Oh, really? Then tell me what my name is."
"It's not magic, dude. It's like a personality thing. How am I supposed to know what your name is from your personality?"
"Uhh," I grumble, considering my next words carefully but sounding like a dope in the meantime. "Uh, then, what's my personality like?"
Curse this unquenchable curiosity! What if her reading isn't flattering? My ego could shatter.
"You're the kind of person who gets delusions of grandeur,"
Fair enough.
",You like to think you have it real bad, but you don't know what it's like to have it real bad."
Well, I'm rich, so maybe that could be accurate, too...
"You're not as smart as you think you are."
Hey!
"Hey," I growl, trying to sound like some sort of ancient, primal beast but ending up sounding like I'm suppressing a burp.
"You think you're super cool, but nobody else sees you as you see yourself. You're lonely because you tell yourself everybody is below you. You want to be a rebel, but you're afraid of your loved ones abandoning you, and so you never do anything rebellious unless it's in private."
Each new statement is like another arrow to my heart! How can this be?
"Did I get anything right?"
"No. You're so far off you don't even know who you're messing with."
"Whatever you say. Look, I can come with you back to the mortal realm or you can close the door and go back alone- I don't care."
What was that just now?
"You'll come with me?"
"Right now, I'm living in a rowhouse and working minimum wage at a boardwalk burger shop. It's summer, and so everything's sweltering, but I have to wear two layers and closed-toed shoes because that's store policy. I get two hours of sleep per night because there's a bowling alley next door-"
"Okay, I get it! And you'll help me stop the apocalypse?"
"I can't stop it, and neither can you."
"Everything ever done was unheard of until somebody did it!"
"Sure, but just because some things are possible, doesn't mean everything is possible."
"You'll see... they'll all see."
I clench my fists. The demon girl laughs, and it infuriates me.
"Fine. Let's just say we'll see how things go. I'm Axe Johnson- what's your name?"
"Rix V. Danger. The V is for Victory."
"Okay, but what's your real name?"
"That is my real name!"
"Okay, no judgement. You just seemed... not so used to saying it."
I huff and backpedal through the door into my lab, then hold it open so Axe can use it. When we're both on the other side, I set it closed and wait for it to vanish. And I wait. And I wait...
"What's going on with this thing?"
I try slammin' it a few times, but nothing happens.
"Are you sure you said the incantation properly?"
"Yes! Well, I messed up one word, but..."
"That's why, then. Looks like it's here for good unless you find a dismissal ritual."
"I think having a door to the underworld in my lab might be a boon to the apocalypse-stopping process, actually!"
"Whatever."
I drape a sheet over the door and it's stained pink by the paint, which still hasn't dried. Earlier on in the conversation, Axe said somethin' I was curious about but didn't manage to ask.
"You said that findin' a nuke scientist would be harder than findin' a demon or someone from the glitchniverse. Does that mean you know how to find someone from the glitchniverse?"
"Well, to be honest, there's a theory down in Hell that the glitchniverse isn't actually just a parallel dimension."
"Tell me more."
"Nah, maybe later- I gotta catch up on sleep."
With that, she collapses onto the ground and begins snoring loud enough to wake the dead. I put my head in my hands and take the dumbwaiter back up to my bedroom.
Why does nothing ever go according to plan?
Dreams fill my head as I lie down for an impromptu nap- dreams of a secret lair inside of a volcano on an island shaped like a skull.