Ptolomaea hoped Antenora was dead. Well and truly dead.

It would mean his plan for revenge would be a flop, but it would also save him a lot of time. With Antenora out of the way, Ptolomaea could instead focus on his usual and real goal, namely the eradication of half the human race. Not an easy feat, but neither was killing a God.

Ptolomaea had never had anything against his fellow Evil God. In a way, he had always admired him, not only for his devotion to explaining Magick and his intelligence, but also because he was, simply put, his senior. When Ptolomaea was just a child, before he had died and before everything bad had happened, Antenora had ravaged the world, becoming a God through sheer notoriety. He had never imagined he would ever meet such a legendary figure.

But he did.

In the form of a Rattice.

It had been shameful, almost, but Antenora, despite his silence, was a surprisingly swell fellow. Never got out of line, never did much other than studying and testing out spells Ptolomaea could never hope to use, and never joined them on the frontlines when it came down to it.

Ptolomaea was the fourth. before him came Judecca, a greedy little bastard with a taste for betrayal, Antenora, and finally Diabolus, who was the only man among them. Everybody else, including Ptolomaea, was hardly human at all. But they had all been, once upon a time. Well, Ptolomaea knew he had once been but a man, and Diabolus had told him that Judecca had been a boy once upon a time, but Antenora was a different case.

He couldn’t be sure, he shouldn’t have been, but he was. He knew that there was something human in the way that tentacled monster moved, in the intelligence it showed. Slowly, Ptolomaea grew to admire the silent thing, how it did its thing and bothered no one. It became a one-sided camaraderie, and Ptolomaea didn’t really think that anything would change.

But it did. She came.

Caïna was her name, but he called her Caïn, if only to show her the affection he felt for her. After a while, she started calling him Ptolemy, and he realized maybe, just maybe, she felt the same.

They became a good pair. When human armies invaded, they went together. One supported the other, and although he was her senior, they felt like equals. Maybe even more.

He loved her. As it turns out, she loved him, too.

They shared things, things they wouldn’t share with anybody else.

She had been a farmer’s wife, a happy one. Two children, two little boys. One would inherit the farm, the other would seek his fortune elsewhere. Maybe open up his own little farm. Days and months and years passed, happy, content, wrong. They were so sweet, all three of them, all three of the ones she loved so dearly. Her three victims.

At this point, heavy, dark tears fell from her eyes, staining the grass they were sitting on, the bloodied hill of a battle long since won. Countless bodies laid at her feet, but she only regretted three deaths. This she said through gritted, predatory teeth.

Everything that happened after that was a blur. Her village burned down, her form was twisted into a beast, and she roamed. She couldn’t remember it. Not the years that came before, not the years that followed. She had forgotten her whole life, all except what she had done, her irredeemable sin. A slight smile tugged at her lips, and she turned to Ptolomaea.

That is, until she met Diabolus. A man. But so much more. He had told her, he had said to her, that she was the final piece of the puzzle. The final rung, the last one needed. She laughed. She didn’t know what that meant, she probably never would, but it would be better than whatever this was. All of this was so strange to her. Mute Evil Gods and devoted cultists and armies to defeat and… but he grounded it. Ptolemy.

They smiled at each other.

Ptolomaea knew that this was it, this was the time. He shed his fleshy, rodent form, revealing his spirit, his soul, restless and guilt-ridden. She saw him, he saw her, and they kissed there, under the silvery moonlight.

But that was a hundred and years ago. She was gone now. Decapitated, put down like some mere beast, by a creature Ptolomaea could no longer even consider human. It couldn’t have ever been one. The idea that it lived yet was soothing only in that it meant he could personally enact revenge upon that dastardly thing.

He saw it all from atop a building, in the body of some small, four-legged Rattice. Three days. It had only been three days since he got here. Since he woke up, inside the body of a disgusting man, inside an oddly coloured room, inside a building of such strange form that he knew the second he saw it that he was not at home. He spent his first five minutes in a human body by jumping out of a window to rid himself of it.

Once that was over and done with, he spooked a fair few strangely dressed humans by flashing his ghost-form at them, and subsequently fleeing into the sewers. He wanted Rattices, he had always loved the disease-carrying buggers, but these four-legged ones would do. After amassing a small army of these, he felt confident enough to send a few up on land to scout out what the situation exactly was.

A couple of his brave scouts died, but it was a sacrifice he was willing to make. Firstly, he was not on Lutum anymore. This place was more of a sci-fi kind of place, with tall buildings that pierced the skies and roads of stone. Secondly, there were men here. Gods damn it. And, thirdly… he wasn’t the only Lutum-resident here. As a couple odd moving pictures showcased, Antenora was here. The one person Ptolomaea never wanted to see again.

Piss.

The only good thing about this was that it meant Ptolomaea could enact revenge. It would take some planning, and some sacrifices would have to be made, but… Caïn needed to be at peace, and with her murderer running rampant, this would be impossible. The only stint in his plan was whether he would hijack the minds of females since he’d rather possess the body of a female than a male, or possess a bunch of males since he would rather they died. In the end, he reluctantly picked the latter.

Let’s just say a lot of men woke up at night with a rat up their asses.

With human hosts procured, Ptolomaea went onto the other matter at hand, namely learning the language. Nobody here spoke Lutum common or any other language Ptolomaea might recognize, so it was back to the basics. A for apple. B for betrayal.

You can say what you will about Ptolomaea’s personal philosophy or favourite animal or whatever, but he was a genius, undoubtedly. He learnt basic English after two days of rigorous book-studying. There were a lot of books here, that was for sure. Once that was done and he could say a word or two to explain who he was, his accent about as thick as any, he could infiltrate some sort of laboratory. Get a hold of ingredients and things he could use to create the perfect slug-repellant.

The first thing he noticed after taking over the body of Herman Gosjevic was that, thankfully, the chemicals were all labeled in Demonic. Sadly, even though Ptolomaea was somewhat proficient in Demonic, what the hell everything meant was still pretty much beyond him. Thankfully though, Ptolomaea had plenty of human subjects to try out the effects on.

Eager to get revenge, Ptolomaea got to work.

The day after, Antenora descended upon Humbugg once more.

Gods be fucking damned. He didn’t have anything nearly potent enough to do away with that pest once and for all, nothing even close. All he had was a dozen or so dead men, which wasn’t bad, but suboptimal at best.

So, he was left staring at the discord, wondering if half a dozen humans and a literal army of “rats”, as they were called (nowhere near as cool as Rattices though) could kill one (1) otherworldly Evil God. About five seconds of thinking lead to the answer “no”. Nothing was going right for Ptolomaea.

And to top it off, now he had a bunch of confused half-beast people living down in his sewer household, telling him none of this is how it was supposed to be. Sure it wasn’t. He agreed, but did they have to crash at his place for it? He didn’t think so. One of them was even a male! Ptolomaea had only let him live since he came with a female who vouched for him. Bastard.

Hm. Maybe he could do something with this?

Whether Antenora was dead or alive, he shouldn’t be able to defeat a couple dozen half-beast half-humans if they came at him all at once, right?

And so, Ptolomaea formed the basics of “Half-Beast Help Group”, an organization most would deem to be pretty darn evil.

But it wouldn’t come into effect just yet.

Right now, Ptolomaea wasn’t the chairman of a great big evil organization.

At least, not just yet.

Not yet.

Soon.