Plan

"I wanted to ask, has there never been anyone else like me?" Evan asked, leaning back in his chair and looking up at the night sky. They had been given a skyrise room in a high end hotel for the duration of their stay, courtesy of McCarney, one that came with a plethora of desirable extras, including the spacious balcony currently in use.

"In the sense of the Crimson thing? No," Elias answered with certainty. "Whenever a Demon takes a host, before you, it was a given that the person was dead. The Demon would do whatever it wanted to with the form it had taken, before discarding the body once it became useless. Whatever you did to win against it, to harness its power for yourself, it's a one of a kind thing."

"Is it the same with Angels?"

"No, not in the slightest. Well, kind of. Angels very rarely take a human form, because taking their bodies would decrease their power. Lesser Angels, like Jeremy's bird ally that you met, will lend their strength to humans who fight against Demons, using their body as a conduit for the power. But there has been very few examples of Angels undergoing a crimson like process. With myself, I had just been attacked by a few dozen Royalty class Demons. I killed a few, but would have died had I not been saved by a group of Grounded."

"You're…"

"Even then, I was too weak. A roaming peasant would have been an issue for me, and there was no way I was going to survive if anything else more threatening showed up. Elias, the man whose body this is, allowed me to use it for me to regain my strength, and in return I saved his life. He's mostly gone now, I think, but so is the me from when all of this happened.

The difference between us is that Angels know what restraint is, while the Demons don't care to learn. They know the body is something, and they know that the person within is at risk, but they just do not care. Why do you ask?"

"I just don't like the idea of us humans needing to rely on nothing but the Angels for a chance to fight against a threat to us. I wish we had something that we could use ourselves, something we could control. It just makes sense, having something we can use that is ours. Maybe I've watched one too many shows."

"The way your mind went to it right away, I'd have guessed you had dreams of doing something techy in life."

"No," Evan laughed. "Maybe, somewhere down the line. I have no idea."

"I wouldn't worry about it if I were you. Before I came along, what I am now, Elias was content to just work for his life. He had no aspirations, no dreams, sure, but no delusions of grandeur either. That in of itself is something to be happy with. But then I did come along, and everything changed for him. Some people just need to wait for that one thing to come along, that one thing that impacts them in the right way to force a change in their life. Nothing wrong with that."

"Never really thought about it too much. Never really thought of a whole lot, and I can't say I've enjoyed it so far.

A short silence fell over the pair, one that was swiftly interrupted by Evan.

"You know that stuff you were saying about the weapons earlier? How they needed to be infused by Angels, or whatever it was?"

"Yeah?"

"When I first encountered Jeremy, he had a hammer with a name, and he said it was from a place, a continent I've never heard of."

"Bahlresh. It was a place in the Angel's domain, where plants grew as tall as skyscrapers and as nourishing as things like Nectar from old human myths. Named after an old Canaanite God of fertility. Confused about something?" he asked in response to the face Evan made.

"I thought there was meant to be one?"

"The first Commandment of the Abrahamic bible pretty much confirms other Gods, if you think about it. Other religions never had a single deity for worship, either. Greek, Norse, Buddhist, you get the picture. But, I can't say I know for certain. There were rumours of Angels standing alongside God, or Gods, centuries, millenia ago, long before I was around. Since then… I honestly have no idea."

"So they took inspiration from human religions?"

"In part. We take a lot of inspiration from humans, more than you'd expect. Although, there was a schism in the Angel domain, similar to the kind of thing that caused the Grounded to be forged. Some didn't like the Demonic connotations with the name that came from the humans, tried to raze it and some other places down…"

Evan found the fact that Angels would be influenced by things from the human world so easily rather strange, given the status that they have compared to humans. But, seeing how badly the short tale was affecting Elias, Evan decided not to mention it.

"Shall we get on with it?" Evan asked after another, longer silence caused by Elias' obvious discomfort, gesturing to the table in front of them.

"How confident are you that Aaron was right? That this Alvarez was responsible?"

"You know more about this world than me."

"Just have a think about it and answer. This isn't the world of Angels and Demons. This is people. I'm sure you know people."

"Get me a drink and I might be able to do a bit better," Evan joked. "Even though I haven't worked off my last hangover."

"You'll do fine."

"It seems like an odd hill to stand on, and surely he'd be hurting the people of the nation that he thinks he's somehow fighting for by doing this, but people with extreme ideology tend to be a little off the edge of sanity. It definitely feels like it could be him, more than something else. With the amount of people that have gone missing, it's more likely for it to be targeted than coincidental. It's worth paying him a visit, I think."

"Thought you said you'd never thought about things before. Not a bad analysis, all things considered."

"When you know a guy who asks the most out of pocket things you've ever heard, you know certain situations. Ritual sacrifice, with a sprinkling of dogmatic patriotism seems par for the course with that."

"What about specifics?" Elias asked, leaning forward to listen intently.

"Specifics? We just go and put pressure on him. If anything goes wrong, we've got someone who's at least Royalty class. Don't need much of a plan with that."