Chapter Text
Zdrada’s hand shivers and shakes, the color in it bleeding out into the warm classroom air like a clumsy watercolor. “Miss Lucifer! Miss Lucifer!”
A chalk stump tumbles onto the thin metal lip under the blackboard. “Yes, my precious child?”
Zdrada’s hand lands delicately on top of her desk.
“Well.” She seems not to know herself in the pause. “I wanted to thank you again for liberating me from the scourge of illiteracy and all, but I’m still curious about what the virtue of education is, beyond just how much fun it is!”
“Well.” Lucifer claps her hands and leans over her. “What is the virtue of a good education, beyond the fact that it enables you to prostate yourself to my pedagogical glory? Well, as trivial as this is going to sound, education enables you to pursue your dreams!”
Enthusiasm seizes Zdrada, her pigtails sway back and forth. “Oh boy, I love pursuing my dreams!”
“Yes!” The teacher runs her bejeweled hand through the tightly braided hair. “And you should always pursue your dreams, even if they are trite, stupid little things, just so long as they are in line with municipal, state, federal, and meta-physical regulations!”
“Hey.”
“Oh golly, I can just see it all in front of me! Putting slips of papers into divisions in filing cabinets! Really, of what more could a girl dream?”
“HEY!”
The fetal fantasy dissipates, and Azazel blinks a seething Zdrada back into concrete form.
“What the fuck was that?”
Azazel blinks at her. “What do you mean?”
“You just called me illiterate. What do you mean what do you mean?”
“I didn’t call you illiterate, my interpretation of Lucifer called you illiterate.”
Zdrada rolls her eyes. “Don’t pull that shit. Lucy’s talked a lotta shit, but she’s never called me illiterate.”
“She has.” Malina says
“Really? When?”
“Constantly All the time Almost every moment you aren’t around.” Each testimony a liver shot, the bottom falls out of her and her face goes flaccid.
“Good thing Lucy is a fucking liar. Modeus and I are the only ones who have ever been shown canonically reading a book.”
Modeus leans over. “It’s ‘Me and Modeus’.”
“Fuck off.”
A low canine whine rises from the corner. “What about that Halloween strip? I was holding some books.”
Zdrada puts her glasses on and then pushes them up her nose so quickly they shatter into pieces, leaving only the crumpled plastic bridge pressed into the top of her nose. “Holding, my dear mutt, is not the same thing as reading. You just found some books that looked spooky and held them.”
“When did you read a book in a canonical source?” Helltaker asks.
Her face recoils. “In the comic when you say my glasses are cute.”
“You weren’t reading in that comic.”
“I wasn’t?”
“No. You’ve never been shown reading a book in any canonical materiel.”
The remnant of her glasses falls on the ground, smugness melts from her face, and her arrogance bleeds out in front of the sharks.
“But- There’s all those references to me playing Heroes 3 with Malina.”
Cerberus drops a few friendly hands on Zdrada’s shoulders. “Looking at a screen, my dear nut, is not the same thing as reading. It’s just trial and error with you.”
“I am the goat of book-reading.” It’s a step up from Modeus’ usual porn babblings.
“Well- kids can’t fuckin read anyway, so-”
“No that was supposed to be College.” At the end of every path a gleaming blade. To have your freshly rebuilt, half melted snowman, the carrot carving a bloody path downwards, knocked over again is one atrocity, but for it to be done so innocently, with such an earnest matter of factness- even obscenity can’t save her now. “Most kids learn how to read around 6 or 7.”
She can’t look at Azazel, her innocent eyes incinerators, arms resting, draped over one another on the wide circular half-circle desk they share. She turns to her sister, and Malina laughs.
“Ahem.” The class looks at their two lecturers, Lucifer in an unwrinkled business casual outfit and Beelzebub in a wildly unfitting tweed jacket, pink elbow patches peeling off.
“Today my- overly entitled teaching assistant has insisted that we attempt to reach you at your own philistinic level, which is why- may Demosthenes save us all, we are going to host an impromptu debate about-”
Even she doesn’t know if she’s feigning a gag reflex anymore, so Beelzebub tries to serve over-enthusiastic-stepdad/guidance counselor cunt.
“We’re going to debate which hip-hop group is more influential, the Beastie Boys or the Wu-Tang clan!”
Her audience, so briefly liberated from the prospect of effort, is now faced with a cringe apocalypse, the scholastic gulags that emerge when pedagogues take a stab at a nympherudite hipness.
“Uh- professor?” Azazel’s got a wavering hand up.
“Yes!” The sheep are coming to them!
“Isn’t this obvious? Does anyone seriously buy into the notion that the Beastie Boys, as ebullient and creative as they are, have the same level of influence or talent as Wu-Tang, especially when the solo albums are factored in?”
Beelzebub gets up on her tip toes and leans over Lucifer, her head and neck forming the smaller part of an upside-down L. “So quickly refuted by your own students! Well, I suppose we can move on to the next topic-”.
Lucifer whips her desk with a ruler. Glowering, she turns around and starts furiously marking up a whiteboard. Finishing in a few frenetic seconds she pirouettes and proudly crosses her sheathed arms. Crickets.
A paper football screams across the sky, nailing her button nose so hard that she starts leaking blue blood of a slightly inbred European vintage (Baltic German, 1919-1920 perhaps? Good year). She blinks in shock as Justice high-fives an innocently guilty Judgement.
“Not all of us are visual learners Lucy.” Lucifer can sense the shit eating smile behind Justice’s wiggling, desk-mounted boots, the tread carved into scenes of hellfire as elaborate as the shield of Achillies.
“Fine. Hear ye, hear ye! Foes! Hell spawn! Il-lit-er-ates.”
Modeus throws a copy of The Cat in the Hat and a bucket of ice water at a whimpering Zdrada.
“Modeus! Please do not perform penitence for polluting my place of pedagogy with this philistinic pamphlet portraying a paedophilic Panthera plundering the primordial purity of primitive places and personas!”
“You want me to not apologize?”
“Yes!”
“Bet.” Modeus pulls out a copy of One fish two fish red fish blue fish.
“I see that public education has been an unceasing series of lateral moves for you.”
Azazel is slowly dipping her feet into the pools of intellectual pretension. “Modeus, have you considered a more… scientific approach to research?”
Modeus scoffs. “This ain’t for no motherfucking research purposes I’m tryna get my dick sucked by a motherfucking fish.”
Lucifer blinks her feelings out into a hateful grimace. “Well, what an excellent display of memetic Ebonics. Befitting of those who attend public universities.”
Modeus doesn’t look up. “Fucked Ronald Reagan so hard I gave him Alzheimer’s.”
“You CUNT!” Lucifer rips the whiteboard off the wall and throws it at Modeus. It achieves victory on all fronts except the point of contact. Modeus continues to turn the pages underneath her impromptu cone of shame.
“I was so, fucking, CLOSE!” Beelzebub glomps her mid leap, Lucifer scratching and clawing and screaming. “I could have had that sonuvabitch in there for-ever if it wasn’t for you! We were going to sell crack to more minorities! Sell the Iranians more missiles! Let Saddam Hussein gas more Kurds! And you just had to fuck it all up! I shoulda known you were behind it when he got soft on the goddamn communists! You and all your free love shiet!”
Beelzebub lovingly strokes Lucifer’s hair as the other demonesses present a phalanx of phlegm parting umbrellas. “Shhh, shhh, you’ll get em with climate refugees, don’t worry about it.” Lucifer’s body relaxes, her face space-cadeting and a low purr rumbling out of her diaphragm before the other intrudes and she wrestles out of Beelzebub’s grasp, rubbing a faux-wrist-wound to hide her disemboweled pride.
“Yes, yes, where were- (fuck)- the philistinism!” She rights herself. Her audience tosses the umbrellas away in one fluid motion like the catamite chorus cooked up in a musical from one of the less impressive materializations of Broadway’s unyielding homosexual streak. (Uh-oh, she’s starting to write like a mid-century eunuch to the dead God-Austrian).
“Well, I could reference Licensed to Ill being the first chronologically released disco-rap album to go diamond, Paul’s Boutique being the greatest tribute to sampling in the genre’s history, or their noted influence on all successive melding of cool-rabbiting and stone. However, I might note that one word is necessary to surmise their magisterial influence: Eminem. What is Eminem if not the purest iteration of Yakub’s children? What, exactly, is more Yakubian than rapping about raping your own mother? Could such sublime sadism simply fall from the oedipal vault of heaven? No. It evolved continuously, and the auditory genealogy is the Beastie Boys distributing Spanish fly into the Dionysian libations of adolescent girls. Furthermore!”
She leaps on the desk, a violent grin scaring her face.
“We must conduct a political-phenomenological exegesis of his canonical-corpus! Thus, I spake: of what significance is his life’s endeavor? What is his music if not the ultimate pre-political cultural revolt against the hegemony of a castrated, zombified liberal moralism? A mutated, inauthentic corpse, incapable of transcending its purely nominal victory, a haunting, blistering victory, a miasmatic psychosis-drug deranging, mocking, enflaming everyone slowly crushed by its transubstantiated economic privations, within it a great beast growing, sucking the soft interior flesh off the bone from the inside until it rips through the skin! When the camps are built, when the nukes fly, the world will scream in its death throes, and it will wonder as the synapses fail: ‘who?’. And I will answer: ‘The Bea-stie-Boys’.”
Malina pipes up: “Are we voting for the better argument or the more elaborate academic malpractice?”
Beelzebub leans over her desk, eyes glittering. “RZA is the beta version of Kanye.”
An avalanche of Wu-Tangs pours down the mountain, burying Lucifer and leaving Beelzebub dressed like a Roman Triumphator, a dream of spring carried on her laurel leaves, the blood of a slain Queen painting her face red. Lucifer pulls herself out of the ruble, gasping for air.
“Is your approval really so easily purchased?” Another gasp. “Those were the only words that you needed to hear?”
“Yes.” Cerberus says.
“Mind you.” Pandemonica says. “This is the alternate universe in which he isn’t an antisemite.”
“He also never stopped being the old Kanye.” Judgement is just happy to be included.
“Fascinating. When in the original cannon do you suppose he stopped being the old Kanye?”
There are livelier graves. Azazel brings herself to slowly speak. “That is- a topic that cannot be broached safely.”
“Broach it anyway.”
She hears practically every answer under the sun, one Demon venturing Vultures 2 and another offering Yandhi.
“Personally, I think his last good project was Get Well Soon, and by the time he got to The College Dropout he was finished.”
“I will go back in time to your happiest childhood memory and, at the point of highest ecstasy, molest you.”
“We didn’t have childhoods.”
“Then I’ll give you one.”
A sparkle is seen in Lucifer’s eyes, and a trumpet fills the hall. “Cease! We shall move on to a less anarchical form of pedagogy.” She turns around and starts drawing a tortoise and Goku on the whiteboard. “Goku Esq., and Tortoise et al., are in a race, and the Tortoise et al., starts with a slight advantage. For Goku Esq., to overcome the Tortoise et al., he must move to the point at which Tortoise et al., was, at which point the Tortoise et al., will have moved to a new point, ad Infinitum. Goku Esq., never catches the Tortoise et al., and in conjunction with 40 or so other unmentioned paradoxes, motion is impossible. A refutation: if you dare?”
“What are you, stupid? Goku would just fly past it.” Cerberus dodges the apple easily.
Azazel is vibrating. “Yes, child?”
“Well-” Azazel, coup de grace in hand. “Zeno’s paradoxes don’t work because time and space are not at any point indivisible.”
“Correct. You just lost a letter grade.”
She’d sooner slaughter her first born. “Wa- what?”
“You got the answer from Wikipedia, and I won’t tolerate anything aside from complete ignorance.”
Modeus looks up from a leatherbound copy of How the Grinch stole Christmas. “Zeno is wrong because people fuck.”
“You are one step removed from LOL XD burrito I’m so random tier shit Modeus, and I want you to die knowing that!”
“It’s a serious critique, with great antiquity to it.”
“Wha-.” Relief floods her face. “Oh, the Diogenes method? Please, spare us all your turgid tautologies.”
“It’s not tautological at all. Zeno is using a series of hypotheticals to disprove an empirical phenomenon, something that can be observed outside of, and independently of, abstract reason. Therefore, if I can demonstrate the reality of that phenomenon, any purely rational or hypothetical arguments against that phenomenon are instantly negated and rendered superfluous by the demonstration of said empirical phenomenon. The alternative in this case would be ludicrous. Not only would thought, and Zeno’s paradoxes themselves be impossible on account of the inability of electricity to move between synapses, but so would human reproduction and Zeno’s very existence! Does he suppose that bitches are impregnated through nonconsensual penis manifestation? Preposterous!”
“The- the amount of epistemological front-loading you are engaged in is an achievement all its own.”
“Excuse me?” Judgement banishes the fantasy with a few words. “This has been- enlightening, but are we going anywhere with this?”
It’s hard to shoot someone a contemptuous look when your eyes are throbbing anime hearts, but Modeus manages. “Are you not paying attention? None of this is going anywhere. There’s gonna be like 4 scenes total that meaningfully advance the plot.”
“The pigdog has a point.” Beelzebub plays with a fidget spinner she stole from Cerberus. “This is getting awfully tedious, even for me. We did dispose of that first conflict so quickly.”
Azazel starts shuffling papers in her hand, hoping to conjure up bylaws “But- this isn’t fair.”
Pandemonica rests a hand on her shoulder. “Think of this as a chance to study impromptu Daemonic Democracy.”