15868/A divine brew

A divine brew
Date of Scene:	04 December 2023
Location:	The Coffee Bean - Manhattan
Synopsis:	Summary needed
Cast of Characters:	Aphrodite, Satana

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Aphrodite has posed:
Was it vanity? Coincidence? A little vindictiveness maybe...but Aphrodite was here at the Coffee Bean that just happened to be so close to the Amazon Embassy. The redhead was currently sitting there, clasping a mug in her hands and seemingly just...people watching. People coming and going, couples, lovers, romance, longing. It was in the air all the time among mortals and she could feel each and every beat of their hearts.

Of course, it wasn't like the goddess herself didn't tend to create more than a little of that effect just with her very presence.

Satana has posed:
One of the things to watch is the VERY vintage Bugatti Type 41 (a.k.a. "Royale") that drives up, looking grossly out of place in the modern world of Manhattan. It pulls up, with its bundled-up driver in its open cockpit, stops in a no stopping zone, and disgorges...

Well, Aphrodite knows who it is. Many people, in fact, would know who she is, given how often she circulates in investment banking circles. (As a side note, it is interesting how in recent years there has been a distinct uptick in the sudden disappearances of Wall Street tycoons. Very mysterious.) There's something very recognizable about the well-shaped woman in clothing that makes an average street walker sit up and say 'girl, that's just over the top!'. And since it's not Emma Frost, that leaves Satana Hellstrom, the openly sensual, positively dripping sexuality, heiress who seems incapable of feeling shame.

She is naturally the centre of attention when she makes her grand entrance into the coffee shop. Most men (and a fraction of the women) look at her with open desire. Most women (and some men) stare at her, oozing disapproval and jealousy. Neither of which really has an impact on her (beyond her catching one of the younger students from the university, a football player seemingly, and tossing him a smile that stops his heart for a second). She slithers her way to the counter, past the lineup, whose protests she silences by just turning around and looking at them--those sensitive to magicks will feel some kind of domination magick at play--before she orders...

...

...a plain coffee. And an obnoxiously large pastry.

Getting her order she turns around, and heads straight to Aphrodite.

"I thought I felt the divine presence here," she says by way of greeting as she slips into the chair opposite the Olympian. "You're looking positively edible today, darling."

Aphrodite has posed:
Everything about Satana from natural to supernatural, it radiated things Aphrodite could sense...but that was hardly a bad thing. 'Love' was more complex than most thought and the madness of 'Eros' was practically personified in Satana. Still, she sips her drink, tilting her head to the side. Of course, she wasn't ignored, clearly important for the Olympian who...didn't exactly have a great record with being slighted.

"Ms Hellstrom," she smiles, a little lift of her hand coming to offer invitation for Satana to sit down. "You should know there are dangers in making such promises...still what mischief finds you today?"

Satana has posed:
"I was just untangling myself from a pile of lovers after a night of indolent sensual pleasures when I realized that I hadn't had my coffee yet. Usually I would just send a servitor to make it for me, but I'm breaking in some new imps..." Something in her inflection says that 'breaking' here is literal. "...and they don't know how to make a decent coffee yet. For some reason they keep burning the beans."

Satana pauses to see if Aphrodite gets the joke before continuing.

"So I find myself here and gazing into the eyes of someone whom I'd rather be exploring the thighs of."

Beat.

"Or, you know, making conversation. Whichever is least impolitic here in public. Mortals are so fussy about where and when they mate."

Aphrodite has posed:
"I would have considered you almost disorganized, but good help is hard to find and it's easy enough to find oneself distracted with...well, pleasent distractions."

Did she get the joke? Hard to tell, but the goddess gives a smirk at that last little comment, a little wave of her hand almost dismissively. "It's probably for the best that they are. After all, what they might see? Well, it might break their own delicate comprehensions...and it's been a while since I drove a mortal insane, I'd hate to start with somewhere that actually made good coffee."

Satana has posed:
"Yes, exactly. If one is to punish sinners, start with those who have committed the most sin, not the least."

Satana breathes in the steam from her coffee and then sips it. This she follows with a large bite from her pastry which engenders a profoundly contented smile. "See, this," she says, waving the pastry in the air with a semicircle missing, "is positively sinful. But making it isn't the sin. Consuming it will cause sinful thoughts, however."

Aphrodite has posed:
"-Exactly-!" Aphrodite grins, gesturing with her own mug and a soft chuckle before reaching out, her hand gently taking Satana's wrist and guiding the pastry towards her, claiming herself a bite slowly and deliberately. As if she were entitled.

Offering a quiet noise of enjoyment, her eyes half-lid for a moment before giving a little chuckle.

"Mmmn, and I imagine such thoughts are oh-so-uncommon?"

Satana has posed:
"Strangely, whenever I'm out and about among the mortals, even in another guise, there tends to be a lot of such thoughts," Satana says, impish grin on her face. "It's a mystery to me."

Says the succubus who is currently poised at the table to let people look up along her parted thighs to see if she's doing a Sharon Stone (she is) if they're not staring at the chest that looks like it's in imminent danger of falling out of what little contains it. It's a mystery indeed.

"I think mortals are just fundamentally dishonest, don't you agree?"

And while the deity/demigoddess pair speak, scrying eyes manage to overlook the threat as they focus instead on one particular person. The person whose existence the owner of the eyes wishes to kidnap, without regard for extra casualties. Soldiers are on standby, ready to go on a moment's notice as the equipment powers up to tear a hole in the fabric of reality.

Aphrodite has posed:
"One could only imagine why..." Aphrodite murmers, the goddess smirking a little before gesturing with a hand. "And absolutely, most of all to themselves...but one could hardly be supprised by it. Values shift, the masses change their views, their gods, their stories...and yet? Lust, love, desire, longing...they're all as potent and inescapable as existance itself for them. They're just more embarassed to admit it than they used to be."

The deity and the demigoddess were there, an intense mix of beauty and tempation that so often could only be overcome by one more thing: obsession.

It had taken but a little promise, a little temptation whispered in the ear by external forces and a paultry price of their soul...but now they had power, means, the ability to make what they wanted theirs.

Most people who had a crush on the cute barrista? They asked for their number. The sudden crackling sound of space shattering and the wash of heat as grotesque imps surged out of the portal to start seizing their prey? Well, that reflected a little more extreme an approach.

The thing with magic however? It could be fickle...and things like imps aren't exactly known for super intelligence, so an instruction of 'bring me the girl in the coffee shop'? Well...the summoned creatures were clearly going for a 'grab them all and sort them out later' approach as several screaming victims were already being pulled towards the portal.

Satana has posed:
It actually takes Satana a few seconds to respond to the screams. She's used to hearing them after all. Like for her life from age 12 until fairly recently hearing them non-stop in large numbers... Finally they register and she looks across at the unfolding chaos, seeing the portal, the imps--none of them hers (yet)--and the girls being dragged screaming to said portal.

"How rude!" she says, her demeanour going from congenial and chatty to angry in record time.

"I was trying to have a peaceful coffee while seducing a fascinating woman!" she says as anger turns to fury, causing her eyes to start burning with the flames. Her face turns into something that would make the most socially awkward incel realize bad shit was about to go down.

"YOU!" her voice booms out, finger pointing imperiously at one of the imps dragging away a customer. She brings to bear her full demonic dominance and causes said imp to stop, staring at her slack-jawed.

"Who ordered this attack in my realm while I was trying to rest?!" she demands. Her eyes narrow. "Nilzkla, by the invocation of your True Name, I demand you answer!"

She's not accounted as one of the GOATs of demonology. Not a lot of people have the encyclopaedic knowledge of even as low-grade a demon as an imp as she does. It's a bit of a flex to use the True Name of a random passing imp...

Aphrodite has posed:
Aphrodite would be lying if she said screams were unknown to her...but they were usually in other kinds beyond terror so, this was indeed an interuption for her. Lowering her mug as the first miniture demonling comes scurrying over, intent to seize the next prize by the ankle and drag her away completely unaware of her Olympian nature...but -very- much aware as that infernal aura radiates off Satana enough to skid to a stop, its footclaws clacking almost comically against the floor as it desperately tris to retreat.

For her part, the goddess begins to stand, wiping her mouth on her napkin even as the imp invoked frantically throws himself down and offers his stammering apologies in tongues that none of the mortals in the space could ever hope to understand....and Aphrodite herself might almost find offensive in their harshness.

"Do you know what happened to the last demon that tried to lay a hand on an unwilling Olympian enjoying her time in this world?" she asks the imp that was retreating, tilting her head. No words followed, but then even for the infernal imagination was almost certainly more terrifying.

Satana has posed:
Satana stands, then, and changes as she does so. Curled horns sprout from the side of her head in a spiral. Bat wings unfold from her back. This by itself causes more screaming as customers mistakenly believe that she is in control of the demons.

"Demonstrate it," she says to Aphrodite, her voice now doubled almost an octave lower as something else within her speaks atop her mortal shell's voice. "And I will teach Nilzkla why it shouldn't be where I am."

"NO, MISTRESS! MERCY!" her own imp starts to beg before suddenly cut short by a thin stream of flame so intense it leaves a temporary trail of black in most people's eyesight if they saw it. The flame envelopes said demon, causing it to scream in agony and helpless rage before it ... implodes, coverting the demon's body to a greasy ash pile on the floor.

"Those who remain from the infernal realms, thy contracts are nullified and thou art now of my coterie!" she says loudly, proudly, and angrily. "If thou wishest not to suffer the same fate as Nilzkla, thou wilt obey me. Return from whence ye came and destroy the one who dared interfere with my seduction!"

Beat.

While that was spoken in a loud voice that cut through the noise of the chaos, the following is spoken in a very quiet voice, laced with threat. "Now." The sudden silence that came from the shocked reaction at the Soulfire destruction allows that quiet voice to be heard, dripping as it is with menace.

"Or you will face the wrath of my Infernal Father."

Aphrodite has posed:
"The punishments of the gods are the stuff of literal legend," she continues, apparently encouraged by Satana rather than taking the words of the infernal daughter as a command. It wasn't like the fickle goddess really needed that much encouragement to exercise a little wrath.

Where Satana's wings manifested and those horns grew, Aphrodite's eyes grew alight with the divine and arcane, her form aglow and light beneath her skin dancing as if she were simply more than eyes could comprehend fully. Areia, Pandemos...these were the potent sides of her being, not the 'sweet' and gentle sides of love that 'Urania' embodied.

"Madness, passion, that very desperation and desire that makes others claw out their very heart and soul..." she lifts her hand as reality crackled and the wrath of an Olympian flowed around the unfortunate imp who'd thought to lay a hand on her.

He wasn't dragged to hell, not fully anyway, or not the hell that he'd expect. Instead the creature began to scream as he began to shift and crystalize, hardening into a parody sculpture of itself...but that didn't mean it was dead. No, instead it was frozen in a permenant moment of torment, its very being bombarded with visions of ambition and longing never to be achieved.

Between these two punishments? What could the other imps do but abandon their prizes and begin to flee in task and terror.

Satana has posed:
As the imps pour through the portal, fleeing for their very souls, abandoning their prizes, Satana stalks toward the hole in reality, heedless of the screams of those around her who still mistakenly think she's the source of the aggression. (Toward them, that is.) This does not help when, with wide arms, eldritch syllables flowing from her lips like fine wine from a decanter, a far larger version of the imps she's tormented pops into being in the cafe. Standing at almost 3 metres tall to the imps' barely over 1, the being, spiked at every joint and looking like it came from a particularly hard core horror movie, releases a gutteral growl and seems about to lunge at a guest when Satana's hand makes a pulling motion and it is stopped mid-step.

"Not here, love," she says imperiously. Wait. 'Love'?! "Through that portal. Kill everything there that isn't an imp."

The black being glares at Satana then nods curtly.

"And be sure to capture the imps who are still in their mortal garb. They will be joining my stable."

And with that the being steps through the portal, presumably to visit violence of the highest order on the person who annoyed the Princess of Hell.