He can look hatefully at Asmodeus, but this guy's been nothing but helpful so far. Including the most recent bit. That, by some miracle of sense, he opted to listen to instead of push back against.
So, no hate from him.
"You giving me yours says nothing great about your position here." Just pointing that out. "Is it actual name that's the problem, or do I need to get used to answering to 'hey you'?" There's some wry, tired humor in there.
"Maybe I'm just arrogant." Which, in fairness, isn't not true. It's just kind of besides the point.
"Aliases are safer." Not completely fine, because those can still be a piece of you, but frankly the man is in Hell. Any potential complications there don't even rate as a problem.
Instead of continuing with the armour, he unclips the mace and, in contrast to the treatment of his gauntlets, gently rests it on a side table.
"Maybe, but ego isn't motivation for leading with telling me not to give you my name." Alias might work. It might not. His default, easy to answer to stuff is currently pretty loaded, but-it also might work for him and might not.
As problems go, what he gets called is pretty low on the list.
He rolls his sleeves up to below the elbow and stops there.
The mace being set down? Better and gets a twitch of a smile. also, though: "Do your gauntlets bite? Magic abilities? Turn people who aren't of hell into ash?" Is he being serious? ...Uh, kind of, actually. Because if Zerxus doesn't pick those up, he's going to.
"After we get through that one, I've got a whole set of other questions to get answered, so I can have an idea of how to prioritize." Then he'll think about freaking out a little, maybe. Or enjoying the break. Kind of depends.
He's slit enough throats with those claws that they're probably as much copper as iron.
"I'll answer as much as I can." It's not always clear what he can and can't say; it depends on who he's talking to and what Asmodeus plans for them. He doesn't bother testing those boundaries much, any more.
"Great," he says, walks closer to Zerxus, leans down and carefully picks them up and deposits them on the table, near the mace. "So, you said mortals have wound up here before. Are you using mortal to mean 'can die', has physical form, or human?"
Zerxus is so nonplussed that he almost forgets who and what he is - he opens his mouth, stops, and then starts again.
"Question for a question." That's how it works, you don't give something for nothing, not down here. "Yes, it only means 'capable of dying'. Do you pick up after monsters often?"
"Only the ones that aren't housebroken." He'll do what he wants, thanks, at least until he's given a damn good reason otherwise - and damn good reason means he not only knows what the 'rules' are, but knows the way of them.
He'll keep answering anything asked of him, though. "Call my Cap or Captain." Not real relevant, but he'll answer to it and it's not a name. "What happens when those mortals who end up here do die?"
"If you've brought me to the actual devil's literal privacy house, I have even more questions than I thought." Most of them variations of why. "Meanwhile, those are sharp and don't belong on the floor." He might step on one.
Is it even consideration at that point? Probably. Not like they'd do much to him. Or that he'd admit it when he's got a practical, simple reason to explain his action away with.
"Why did you bring me here?" He points down. He is well aware the guy doesn't know why he's in hell.
"They're not exactly hard to miss." He's - having fun, in this conversation, and that's incredibly dangerous so he's just going to distract himself with his armour. There are a lot of straps to undo.
"And I wasn't exaggerating, this is - we're in a palace. This is a suite of rooms that belongs to me, but ultimately - " He pauses in his work long enough to shrug. "In a way, that makes it the safest place in Hell. What were you doing right before you fell?"
"Gee, thanks." Because brought straight to the actual devil's palace sounded like more of a problem than a solution. On the other hand, he wasn't on the street, it was less hot, and mr 'wings made of fire' lived here, so he wasn't actually being entirely sarcastic about the thanks, at least.
Probably.
Yet.
"I don't know that I can explain what I was doing in a way that will make sense to you." He'll give it a shot? "I had a group who'd infiltrated an organization I worked with hunting me down. They thought I was cornered. I didn't share their assessment, and jumped through a," glass, "wall. Then fell. Do you bring home a lot of mortals?"
"...The broad strokes are very familiar." It's a worn, frayed bitterness - it's been centuries since Avalir was betrayed from within, after all - but he's seen it play out over and over since. People turn on each other so easily.
"I don't make a habit of it, no. Have you always been able to survive jumping out of buildings?"
People turn on each other all the time. The scale of that betrayal is variable.
He's noticing that this is definitely a back and forth, question for question thing. "Not always. I signed up to be a test subject in a military project a long time ago. I'm still mortal, but a lot more durable than most." Mortal meaning to die. "Why me, then?"
Of course. Of course he signed up to be a guinea pig for a grander cause.
Quietly, still focused on his armour and not the man across from him, "You don't belong here."
No one belongs here, not really, but he hasn't been able to do much about that. It would be - nice, if he could just -
"Physical danger isn't what you need to worry about the most. Devils want your soul, above anything else. Don't talk to any of them if you can avoid it."
Belatedly, halfway through tugging his chest piece over his head, "Does your world have mages?"
He waits for Zerxus to finish removing the chest-plate, then looks him very pointedly over and lifts both his eyebrows. 'Are you shitting me right now' could not be more clear if the words had been spoken - or written across his forehead in a bold font.
Then he keeps talking to a devil, because what else is he going to do?
"You know, I tend to operate on the principal that I should be worrying about my soul more than my physical state, anyway/ Some funny habit I picked up, somewhere. Might be the being able to fall twenty stories and walk away. Might have to add the ability to throw a car in to get the full reasoning." It's a drawl, but it is a really weary and wry one. It is also absolutely not a thing that happened with the serum. It's just Steve.
He looks back at the shield he left on an armchair briefly, then back. "I don't know if we have mages. Probably, by at least if the definition stretches as far as the god one does." Meaning... kind of? Close? Close enough? "So, do you have a plan or are you leaving me to find one?" He is... intentionally sticking to one question at a time and avoiding rhetorical ones since he found the rhythm of this thing. Even deliberately altering how he'd ask that last one to do it.
Edited (fixing my icon, ignore) 2024-10-19 04:22 (UTC)
Zerxus very pointedly pretends that he does not notice. He is dealing with this armour, you know, it's very complicated and heavy.
"If more people had that priority, we'd be less crowded." It's wry, but there's...a much deeper, darker well of weariness in there. A devil probably shouldn't sound that damned sad about how many souls were snared by hell's flames. "Right now, I'm trying to learn enough to make a decent report and buy us some time. We won't solve this in a day."
He almost doesn't want to, but he isn't thinking about that.
"Whoever did this was very skilled in some kind of magic - but a lot of that's going to depend on if it came from my side or yours. Or both, working together, after some earlier contact. Do you know if that's happened, communication between your plane - or realm, or world, I don't know - and another place?"
"I'd like to be surprised that hell comes with paperwork, but I'm pretty convinced it wouldn't really be hell if it didn't."
Look.
Just... look.
Keep dealing with your armor. And keep keeping it off the floor. The more serious question isn't one he even has a hard time answering. Because those theories he had? There's one at the top. "Yeah. There is. Chaos trickster 'God'." The lack of being impressed or considering Loki a god is audible. "Showed up, tried to take over the world with an army no one knows the origin of. We got his portal closed, dealt with them and sent him home to jail in a muzzle. And kept his shit."
That gets a snort of laughter even as he fumbles with various clasps; they may be immune to rust and all but impervious to damage but they are NOT immune to blood drying in the crevices. "You would be right."
That revelation actually stills his progress entirely, though, and Zerxus does look up, eyes gleaming with vicious approval. "Well done. Let's hope he's involved - Asmodeus will be more interesting in punishing him than you."
With a wry nod at a desk with stacks of that paperwork, "Trickery is one of his domains, and so is Order."
Different reality or not, this god will stick in his craw.
Steve is at least acclimating to both the heat and the scent of blood in the air. Not unaware or immune but enough to have it move to the back of his mind and not be a distraction. He'll take it.
"Trickery and Order with paperwork." He doesn't roll his eyes so much as pinch the bridge of his nose. "Sounds like the guy I worked for." Meaning Fury, at least Fury right now and some of his more recent bullshit.
As for the rest of that... Steve shrugs. "I'd probably he rather not be." That it not be Loki. He is tactically smart enough to spell out why, but... He'd really rather not have there be a step in there that involves opening earth up to this.
"I wouldn't compare him to a mortal to his face." Judging by the smirk, though, Zerxus himself wholly approves. (The blood in his head pulses, pain blooming behind his eyes; he does not visibly react.)
"It would mean he got out of his cage, but that was probably inevitable." His fingertips alight as he looks down again, and he just seers the blood away. Sorry, Steve, that's a fresh new wave of carnage in your nostrils. "When you say home - he can't be the only god who wants to make trouble."
The smell of burning blood is... really, really not great. It mingles in with the scent already in the air to something thick enough (at least to Steve) to feel like it's coating the back of his throat. It's something he can taste, and results in a slow rolling wave of nausea.
He doesn't quite manage to stop the teeth bared grimace that comes with it. Dismisses it and fixes his expression back to merely uncomfortable pretty quickly, though. More worried about the blood being there to start with.
"Unfortunately for you, I'm gonna stick with your first advice which was to worry about my soul instead of my safety." Brace yourself now, is the warning behind what mostly sounds like (gentle) snark. "He's probably not the only one. He's just the only one who'd have a personal problem with me. Though I guess whoever and wherever his army came from would apply there, too."
The truly ridiculous thing here is that Zerxus didn't even consider what an assault burning blood tends to be on mortal senses.
There are so many things that he's forgotten.
"Shit, hold on - " He waves a hand towards one of those goblets and it immediately fills with clear, cool water. "And no, I'm sure he isn't." Gentle snark right back at you, sir, even if there's still a wry note of apology in there. (That's as explicit as he'll get. Devils don't apologise out loud, not sincerely.)
"You've lasted - how long, exactly, with that attitude?" Durability only counts for so much, especially when you're going around fighting gods.
Moral enhanced senses. How much the enhanced has any relevance when it's burning blood, with the scent of both blood and ash already in the air, even Steve couldn't know. There's a point it'd be a problem, anyway.
He eyes the goblet with some suspicion but ultimately isn't the cautious sort. Besides, Zerxus has consistently tried to be helpful. "I'd like to say just shy of a hundred years, but I think I'm too honest to pretend that I had an attitude or anybody was around to object to it when I was in the middle of a block of ice."
He actually shrugs at the end of his statement and drinks his water, though the shrug's slight. The shrug isn't apologetic.
Zerxus honestly expected to have to vow that it really is Just Water, and between that and the casual reference to exactly where Steve was for a century he's just...staring, aghast, for a full few seconds.
There is not a single reason asking for verbal confirmation that the water is water would make sense. If Zerxus had ill intentions, he'd lie and claim it was. If it was just water, all asking would do would establish Steve as actively mistrusting him.
Besides, it's Steve.
He makes a low, indecisive noise in response to the question that echos in the goblet. Sets it back down on the table when he's drained it. "You know, you're the first person to ask that." He's touched - however weird that is. "I never thawed out enough to fully wake up, but it wasn't a controlled environment or static temperature, so I was up and down. Why?"
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So, no hate from him.
"You giving me yours says nothing great about your position here." Just pointing that out. "Is it actual name that's the problem, or do I need to get used to answering to 'hey you'?" There's some wry, tired humor in there.
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"Aliases are safer." Not completely fine, because those can still be a piece of you, but frankly the man is in Hell. Any potential complications there don't even rate as a problem.
Instead of continuing with the armour, he unclips the mace and, in contrast to the treatment of his gauntlets, gently rests it on a side table.
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As problems go, what he gets called is pretty low on the list.
He rolls his sleeves up to below the elbow and stops there.
The mace being set down? Better and gets a twitch of a smile. also, though: "Do your gauntlets bite? Magic abilities? Turn people who aren't of hell into ash?" Is he being serious? ...Uh, kind of, actually. Because if Zerxus doesn't pick those up, he's going to.
"After we get through that one, I've got a whole set of other questions to get answered, so I can have an idea of how to prioritize." Then he'll think about freaking out a little, maybe. Or enjoying the break. Kind of depends.
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He's slit enough throats with those claws that they're probably as much copper as iron.
"I'll answer as much as I can." It's not always clear what he can and can't say; it depends on who he's talking to and what Asmodeus plans for them. He doesn't bother testing those boundaries much, any more.
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"Question for a question." That's how it works, you don't give something for nothing, not down here. "Yes, it only means 'capable of dying'. Do you pick up after monsters often?"
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He'll keep answering anything asked of him, though. "Call my Cap or Captain." Not real relevant, but he'll answer to it and it's not a name. "What happens when those mortals who end up here do die?"
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That said, when he pulls of a skull pauldron he sets it alongside the other pieces.
"If they were just visiting, their soul will ascend to whichever plane it would have been drawn to before - unless they sold their soul first."
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Is it even consideration at that point? Probably. Not like they'd do much to him. Or that he'd admit it when he's got a practical, simple reason to explain his action away with.
"Why did you bring me here?" He points down. He is well aware the guy doesn't know why he's in hell.
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"And I wasn't exaggerating, this is - we're in a palace. This is a suite of rooms that belongs to me, but ultimately - " He pauses in his work long enough to shrug. "In a way, that makes it the safest place in Hell. What were you doing right before you fell?"
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Probably.
Yet.
"I don't know that I can explain what I was doing in a way that will make sense to you." He'll give it a shot? "I had a group who'd infiltrated an organization I worked with hunting me down. They thought I was cornered. I didn't share their assessment, and jumped through a," glass, "wall. Then fell. Do you bring home a lot of mortals?"
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"I don't make a habit of it, no. Have you always been able to survive jumping out of buildings?"
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He's noticing that this is definitely a back and forth, question for question thing. "Not always. I signed up to be a test subject in a military project a long time ago. I'm still mortal, but a lot more durable than most." Mortal meaning to die. "Why me, then?"
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Quietly, still focused on his armour and not the man across from him, "You don't belong here."
No one belongs here, not really, but he hasn't been able to do much about that. It would be - nice, if he could just -
"Physical danger isn't what you need to worry about the most. Devils want your soul, above anything else. Don't talk to any of them if you can avoid it."
Belatedly, halfway through tugging his chest piece over his head, "Does your world have mages?"
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Then he keeps talking to a devil, because what else is he going to do?
"You know, I tend to operate on the principal that I should be worrying about my soul more than my physical state, anyway/ Some funny habit I picked up, somewhere. Might be the being able to fall twenty stories and walk away. Might have to add the ability to throw a car in to get the full reasoning." It's a drawl, but it is a really weary and wry one. It is also absolutely not a thing that happened with the serum. It's just Steve.
He looks back at the shield he left on an armchair briefly, then back. "I don't know if we have mages. Probably, by at least if the definition stretches as far as the god one does." Meaning... kind of? Close? Close enough? "So, do you have a plan or are you leaving me to find one?" He is... intentionally sticking to one question at a time and avoiding rhetorical ones since he found the rhythm of this thing. Even deliberately altering how he'd ask that last one to do it.
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"If more people had that priority, we'd be less crowded." It's wry, but there's...a much deeper, darker well of weariness in there. A devil probably shouldn't sound that damned sad about how many souls were snared by hell's flames. "Right now, I'm trying to learn enough to make a decent report and buy us some time. We won't solve this in a day."
He almost doesn't want to, but he isn't thinking about that.
"Whoever did this was very skilled in some kind of magic - but a lot of that's going to depend on if it came from my side or yours. Or both, working together, after some earlier contact. Do you know if that's happened, communication between your plane - or realm, or world, I don't know - and another place?"
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Look.
Just... look.
Keep dealing with your armor. And keep keeping it off the floor. The more serious question isn't one he even has a hard time answering. Because those theories he had? There's one at the top. "Yeah. There is. Chaos trickster 'God'." The lack of being impressed or considering Loki a god is audible. "Showed up, tried to take over the world with an army no one knows the origin of. We got his portal closed, dealt with them and sent him home to jail in a muzzle. And kept his shit."
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That revelation actually stills his progress entirely, though, and Zerxus does look up, eyes gleaming with vicious approval. "Well done. Let's hope he's involved - Asmodeus will be more interesting in punishing him than you."
With a wry nod at a desk with stacks of that paperwork, "Trickery is one of his domains, and so is Order."
Different reality or not, this god will stick in his craw.
Presumptuous of you.
Yes, but I'm right.
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"Trickery and Order with paperwork." He doesn't roll his eyes so much as pinch the bridge of his nose. "Sounds like the guy I worked for." Meaning Fury, at least Fury right now and some of his more recent bullshit.
As for the rest of that... Steve shrugs. "I'd probably he rather not be." That it not be Loki. He is tactically smart enough to spell out why, but... He'd really rather not have there be a step in there that involves opening earth up to this.
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"It would mean he got out of his cage, but that was probably inevitable." His fingertips alight as he looks down again, and he just seers the blood away. Sorry, Steve, that's a fresh new wave of carnage in your nostrils. "When you say home - he can't be the only god who wants to make trouble."
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He doesn't quite manage to stop the teeth bared grimace that comes with it. Dismisses it and fixes his expression back to merely uncomfortable pretty quickly, though. More worried about the blood being there to start with.
"Unfortunately for you, I'm gonna stick with your first advice which was to worry about my soul instead of my safety." Brace yourself now, is the warning behind what mostly sounds like (gentle) snark. "He's probably not the only one. He's just the only one who'd have a personal problem with me. Though I guess whoever and wherever his army came from would apply there, too."
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There are so many things that he's forgotten.
"Shit, hold on - " He waves a hand towards one of those goblets and it immediately fills with clear, cool water. "And no, I'm sure he isn't." Gentle snark right back at you, sir, even if there's still a wry note of apology in there. (That's as explicit as he'll get. Devils don't apologise out loud, not sincerely.)
"You've lasted - how long, exactly, with that attitude?" Durability only counts for so much, especially when you're going around fighting gods.
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He eyes the goblet with some suspicion but ultimately isn't the cautious sort. Besides, Zerxus has consistently tried to be helpful. "I'd like to say just shy of a hundred years, but I think I'm too honest to pretend that I had an attitude or anybody was around to object to it when I was in the middle of a block of ice."
He actually shrugs at the end of his statement and drinks his water, though the shrug's slight. The shrug isn't apologetic.
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"...Were you conscious for any of that?"
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Besides, it's Steve.
He makes a low, indecisive noise in response to the question that echos in the goblet. Sets it back down on the table when he's drained it. "You know, you're the first person to ask that." He's touched - however weird that is. "I never thawed out enough to fully wake up, but it wasn't a controlled environment or static temperature, so I was up and down. Why?"
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