#androdragynous

anyway. so it's dealing in lativerse, which is a verse me and @lightspeedpowerpunk have had brewing together since we were uhhhh 14?? sort of an urban fantasy slapdash thing that rose up from all the rp we were doing and decided to declare it all in the same sandbox verse that's effectively modern day but also vampires and werewolves and demons and different pantheons of gods and the fair folk and everything are also real just living on the dl mostly due to not wanting to get hunted or harassed. hunting was made illegal decades ago but old habits die hard. like, "there's a magic internet called the undernet accessible via the regular internet if you apply the right squiggles to your device" flavor of "monsters and gods and stuff are living among us" urban fantasy. i can write a treatise on how the different courts and flavors of supernatural/magical being live together but the undernet is relevant to the fic concept so that is the important takeaway here. also important is that typically the surface courts (fair folk, vampire elders, werewolves, everyone who just lives on the regular surface of the earth) are pretty heavily enmeshed with each other but the various underworlds and celestial realms keep to themselves; there's a token undernet presence with official government sites and obv social media accounts but for the most part officially they stay out of things. the infernal court (demons) are especially notorious for this as leadership pretty famously doesn't like humanity and can't leave their realm. human mages don't belong to any court and are thus popular for anything needing a neutral party. this is also relevant.

basic idea is that this guy, just a regular guy, basic american human reporter, his name is jeremy bennett because i literally googled "popular boy names 1980s usa" and "most common surnames usa" and picked names that sounded good together but still basic, is also a mage due to some great-grandparent or something who's a supernatural being of some sort, and he uses that to make money going around the world reporting on different goings-on in the magical community like fair folk court drama and illegal hunting activity, and even sometimes getting to do interviews with major players or get inside looks in places the average mage or whoever probably doesn't know much about. this is a common thing (see "humans are neutral parties") and he's been making a decent living writing for an undernet news site. and he's been in norway for a couple years because there was an incident with a dhampyr who illegally hunted a demon who turned out to be Somebody Really Important and there's a major legal battle going down, but that's wrapped up recently and jeremy's trying to figure out what to do and where to go next when he gets a call from his editor. and his editor tells him to go to hell.

turns out, in the interest of smoothing out relations with the surface courts after the whole Incident™, the infernal court is (very grudgingly) offering to allow One (1) human reporter downstairs to write about their realm and society and ideally reassure people on the surface that demons really have no interest in war or anything, because a whole lot of feathers got ruffled by a multi-year court battle where infernal leadership sure seemed really intent on burning everything to the ground if justice wasn't served to their satisfaction. this includes getting to see five of the seven regions in the cavern, meeting some of the bastards in charge (for interviews to prove they're calm now), an escort to show him around and also keep him from wandering anywhere he really shouldn't (there are a lot of notes about the very active volcano and very carnivorous plants), a couple very expensive charms for free to translate the infernal language and keep him safe from the realm's natural corruption, and a pinky swear that nobody will kill him or try to take his soul as long as he Leaves by the time his allotted visiting days are up. and as ominous as this whole plan sounds it also sounds like a really good career boost so he agrees.

he's given a couple days to pack and do some research before he goes, as well as a list of basic guidelines and "things to know". the charms arrive via teleport spell (appear in a puff of sulfur-smelling smoke on his coffee table) with a note about where to meet his guide. said guide turns out to be a very polite and gentle young man who doesn't seem like a demon at all, he's so relaxed and charming and handsome aaaaaaand he's a literal prince. because of course he is. why wouldn't he be. logically it makes sense of course he's a very nice young man and given the circumstances it tracks for them to have the guide be somebody relatively important and recognizable as a gesture of goodwill but also what do you meeeeaaaaaan the guide is theeeeee prince orion. why would you do that to poor jeremy.

anyway. that's the basic setup, he gets 7 days downstairs to be shown around and do his interviews. rough itinerary, he gets a day to get acclimated and ask orion whatever questions he thinks of (e.g. "is that the fucking sun," answer is more complicated than you think), then a day each to see the regions of (in order) lust, gluttony, wrath, greed, and pride (envy and sloth are off-limits due to spies and danger, respectively) and meet the respective lords. despite not visiting the regions he's informed he'll still meet the lords of sloth and envy, entirely because if any one of the seven gets left out of something the others are getting there Will be a royal fit pitched by whoever's not included, and when a Fallen archangel with power to rival a titan "pitches a fit" bad things happen like an 11.0 earthquake or a category 6 hurricane or that supervolcano you can see out your window in the distance blowing its top. the lord of sloth gets paired with gluttony because they get along well, and the lord of envy paired with greed because they metronome wildly back and forth between plotting against each other and plotting against everyone else together so it's really in jeremy's best interest to meet them simultaneously so they don't try to use him for their own nefarious ends. the seventh and final day, it turns out, is the day of another prince, in fact the Important Demon who got assaulted by a hunter and kicked off the exact court case jeremy was just reporting on, is being officially presented to the court (and various guests from the surface and other underworlds) as lucifer's heir now that he's moving downstairs for good due to aforementioned danger from hunters. this was not mentioned in the brief but it's too late to back out now, which he concedes is certainly on brand for demons to do.

he does ask if he's expected to meet satan himself at some point. he's assured he's not that important, the king doesn't care enough, and he should relax and not worry about the royalty, just the nobility he's slated to meet. he meets the queen anyway because she's curious and likes raising her husband's blood pressure (<- hobbies literally fatal to anybody else who tries them). he thinks maybe demons are not isolationist enough.