Rita had found her nemesis.

Unexpectedly, it wasn’t kilometer high eldritch trees, bigoted, religious nutters or crazy, overly-powerful wizards who had difficulty with personal boundaries.

No, it was the humble staircase.

“Rita? Did you hear me?” Timothy called out from below for the second time. “You can come down. You don’t have to be afraid, Ixxy won’t hurt you.”

Rita scoffed. Like she would be afraid of anything named ‘Ixxy’. It sounded like an under-aged stripper.

“I’m fine! I’m coming down! Just… give me a moment…” she yelled back.

No, the reason she was stuck at the top of the stairs, hesitating with her front feet on the first steps while Samual gave her a questioning look from the side was because she wasn’t actually sure how to get down without falling on her face.

She’d used stairways before, of course. The narrow stairway inside the Nightmare Tree had been almost claustrophobic, but its very claustrophobic nature had meant she could brace herself against the sides. The massive stairwell going all the way to the top of Triskellion had been an annoying climb, but it had both had hand-holds on either side and enough room to spread her legs a little.

She’d even climbed this very same staircase just a short time before when Timothy and Gora had suggested she and Samual wait out of sight while the summoning and negotiations were concluded.

But that had been going up the stairs.

The problem was, the staircase in Gora’s home was so narrow that she had to pause to wonder how Gora herself managed to climb it safely. It also had absolutely no guardrail or anything else to prevent someone from toppling off the side. It was just a series of stone steps, just barely wider than a normal person, melded directly into the wall of the apartment.

To get up, she’d had to do a kind of knee-walk with her legs, pinching the front four forwards and the back four backwards all together to make herself as narrow as possible, then crawling forward moving her legs only from the second joint onwards. It had been awkward, uncomfortable and a little bit slow, but had been quite doable going upwards as long as she leant forwards due to the way her body weight was distributed between her legs when her body was slanted.

Going downwards was a complelely different kettle of fish, however. All of the weight from her torso was on her front legs, as well as the bulk of the weight from the rest of her arachnid body. Normally that wouldn’t be much of an issue, they could hold the weight, no problem. But she was also going to be having to squeeze herself against the wall of a narrow staircase at the same time, one with no railing, all while trying not to topple off sideways. That was what just felt a teensy bit risky.

“Do you need some help getting down the stairs?” Samual asked calmly from the side.

“No,” Rita replied firmly. “I can do it. Just gotta figure out…”

Gora’s horned head reappeared at the bottom of the stairway. She’d insisted on going down first to check on Timothy and make sure the demon hadn’t ‘poisoned his mind through his dick’.

They’d all sat upstairs in Gora’s rather cramped loft bedroom, listening in on snippets of the conversation between Timothy and the demon. Not that they were intentionally eavesdropping or anything, of course, it was just that from upstairs you could hardly help but overhear bits and pieces here and there. Especially since they had been staying deathly quiet so they could hear better.

“Hey, need me to carry you down the stairs?” she shouted up and Rita felt her face flush. She wasn’t some invalid, damn it!

“No, I’m fine!” she called back, scowling.

Stupid, narrow staircase. A flat wall would almost have been better. It wasn’t that far down and with her sharp toes and numerous legs, her body was far better suited to scaling one of those than a narrow staircase…

Oh, right.

Duh.

Dabbing a thread of silk on the wall just in case, Rita confidently took her first step down the staircase. Instead of putting her front foot on the first step, however, she stepped over it, over the side of the stairway, and hooked her small, sharp toe-claws into the shaped stone on its side.

Instead of going down the narrow path of the stairway itself as she would have had to do had she been human, she simply leaned back her torso to clear the stairwell opening in the floor, took a right turn off the side of the staircase and followed the most direct route to the ground below.

It wasn’t completely unlike scaling a sheer wall, and considering that the floors were close enough together that she could hold onto the top of the staircase with her rear-most legs and at the same time reach the ground with her front legs, it wasn’t a particularly challenging climb either.

All in all, she reached the ground floor with only a single slight stumble when one of her toes slipped from its grip, but with seven other legs, not enough to send her tumbling down in a heap.

“See?” she called out smugly over her shoulder to Gora once she was down on the ground floor with all eight legs. Then she turned back and froze.

Sitting at the table across from Timothy was the demon.

She was beautiful. There was no denying that. Just like the demons that she’d seen when she’d first entered Grailmane, her face looked like it would have effortlessly been at home on the cover of a beauty magazine, if it wasn’t for the the red skin and spiraling, dark horns protruding from a mane of black hair cascading onto her shoulders.

She was slightly more slender than the last demons had been, but it was exceedingly clear that she did not lack in the curves department, despite Gora’s over-sized shirt artfully draped around her frame. If anything, she made the shirt, barely coming down to her upper thighs and with a neckline wide enough for one smooth, unblemished shoulder to poke through, look like a fashion statement.

She was staring at Rita with a look of surprise on her face.

When the first spider leg stepped down from the upper floor, Ixxy had had no idea what she was even looking at.

She’d managed to pick up that there was something weird about the cambion’s so-called ‘friend’, that there was something they were very specifically not telling Ixxy about her. Personally, her money had been on that she and the cambion were secretly lovers and not simply ‘friends’. Not that that would have made any difference, or even would have been particularly interesting from her perspective. It was the kind of boring detail that mortals seemed to consider extremely important.

Her second thought had been that the friend was a cambion as well and that they’d simply lied to her — not inconceivable, they were as much bound to truthfulness as she was at this moment — in which case Ixxy would have had a difficult decision to make on whether she was willing to go through with the deal anyway, despite the lie.

That still left her utterly mesmerized as the strange, spider-like woman seemed to scuttle her way down the side of the stairs.

“See?” she called out smugly to the cambion who was still standing by the foot of the stairs, before turning and freezing as she locked eyes with Ixxy.

For a few moments, they just stared at each other in silence.

From the waist up, she was a fairly normal, if vaguely pretty-looking human woman with short, brown hair and a shy, almost awkward demeanor. From the waist down, however, she had the body of a massive, milky-white spider with a leg-span close to two metres across.

And Ixxy had no idea what she was.

To put this in context, up until now, whenever she’d seen or heard about something new, the brain bank of knowledge in her fleshy head would vomit out a torrent of information about the thing, right into her mind and memories. It was a clever little trick the folks at Infertec had developed to ensure that demons always had necessary information about the various aspects of the world they were in without being overwhelmed by an absolute deluge of information being force-fed directly into their minds all at once.

Now, true, it had its limitations. The only information it could pass her was what was pre-programmed into it by Infertec and, as she’d discovered, that was at least a couple of decades out of date. But those memory packages weren’t just based on this city. They were based on everything that Infertec had been able to learn over the course of their entire history with this plane of existence, which dated from even before the Great Purge.

But this creature? This… spider-woman? Ixxy’s brain had nothing. And that meant only one thing.

This was something never before encountered by demon-kind in this world.

That thought alone was enough to make Ixxy hungry for a taste, and not in the carnal sense. Well, in the carnal sense too, obviously, but that was different. And obviously not after she’d had a taste in the more literal sense, that was a little too kinky even for her.

“Hello, you must be my new client,” Ixxy greeted, shelving that line of thought and getting to her feet. She flashed the new arrival her widest, friendliest smile.

“Er… hello,” the strange spider-girl replied, but made no move to approach. Instead, she awkwardly clenched her arms around her chest. “Maybe? It depends, I guess.”

“You… guess?” Ixxy asked carefully, letting a slight hint of confusion creep into her voice. The spider-woman just shrugged.

Interesting. It seemed Timothy had been playing a little loose with the truth after all. He’d made it sound like the contract was pretty much in the bag and all she had to do was accept it, but clearly he’d understated just how tenuous the whole thing still really was.

She cast a quick glare down towards the little squirt sitting at the other end of the table, intending to flash him a brief, dirty look. But Timothy was already turned around, staring at the eight-legged woman, frozen in place with a look of pure terror on his face.

What?

“Uh, Gora?” the arachnid woman finally spoke up, also having noticed Timothy’s reaction. “I don’t think we thought this part through very well. Timothy…”

“Yeah, I see,” the beefy cambion replied with a sigh, uncrossing her arms where she’d been standing by the foot of the stairs and stomping over. “Don’t worry, I got you, Cuz.”

As she lifted the young mage out of his chair, he suddenly began flailing and screaming in panic, but she just ignored his antics and forcibly pressed his head into her shoulder like a baby. Immediately, he grew still again.

What?

“I’m going to take him upstairs until he calms down,” she told the spider-woman who moved too give her as wide a berth as possible as she headed back to the staircase. “I think he finished his part anyway. You going to be okay to handle this on your own?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye,” a new voice spoke up, and a young human man climbed down the narrow stairs and took up position next to the spider.

He was lean and muscular and clearly used to physical activity. If Ixxy wasn’t mistaken, the sword at his hip was also very much not just for show.

What really drew her attention, however, were his dark brown eyes. They were intense and analytical, and she couldn’t help but notice that they only flicked to her chest for a moment before shifting to her hands and fingers, watching for threats.

How interestingly scrumptious.

The cambion snorted. “Somehow, I think Rita’s the one less likely to do something stupid when it comes to this one. But fine, I’ll be back soon.” Then she headed up the stairs, Timothy still in her arms. “Don’t sign anything without me!” she called over her shoulder.

After a few moments of awkward silence, except for the sound of Gora’s heavy footsteps disappearing up the stairs, Ixxy couldn’t control her curiousity anymore.

“What just happened?” she asked, a little unsettled.

“Arachnophobia,” the spider-woman explained apologetically. “Timothy’s deathly terrified of spiders and I set it it off, it seems. It’s probably the legs.”

Ixxy looked down at the eight long, multi-jointed legs she stood on. “No kidding. So, your name’s Rita? I’m Ixxy.”

“Ixxy?” the spider-woman asked, cautiously scuttling a few steps closer. “And you’re a demon, right? Like, a full-blooded one? Not like Gora?”

The idea of being compared to a cambion irked Ixxy, but she clamped down on her instinctive reaction to snap at the insult. It was fine. Rita didn’t know. And she could very well scare her client off if she was touchy about it now.

“Yup!” she instead replied cheerily, flicking her horn. “One hundred percent Abyss-grown demon! As demon as they come, I assure you.”

“Okay. Sorry. Ixxy just doesn’t sound like a very demonic name, that’s all,” Rita said, shrugging.

Ixxy pursed her lips. “Would you prefer to call me ‘Ixilis-Divzalex-Zulgarinos-Proxalix?’”

Rita blinked. “That’s your real name?”

Ixilis shook her head. “Not even half of it. But it’s bit you might be able to pronounce.”

Rita swallowed. “Uh, Ixxy’s fine then, I suppose.”

“Great!” Ixxy exclaimed, forcing a friendly smile back on her face and gesturing towards the seat that Timothy had just vacated. “Why don’t you come have a seat and we can discuss what seems to be the problem?”

Then her eyes darted to Rita’s lower half.

“Or whatever is comfortable for you when it comes to tables. Maybe ask the cambion to bring you a pillow from upstairs?”

“… and she hasn’t gotten any better. Like, at all. The doctor at Triskellion said that I should probably have started seeing some indications of recovery almost immediately if she was going to. It’s been almost three weeks, I think, and there’s just nothing. She still looks exactly the same.”

“Okay, okay, hold on,” the supermodel-looking demoness, Ixxy, interrupted, holding up a hand. “Let’s just back up a few steps here. You’re saying you have someone inside your head?”

They were sitting at Timothy’s table. Rita had flipped the chair around, resting her arms on the backrest while the ‘hinge’ of her body rested on the seat of the chair. Meanwhile, Ixxy was lounging on the chair. Even sitting at a table she looked like she could have been posing for a bloody photo shoot. It wasn’t fair.

She’d spent the last few minutes doing her best to describe what she needed Ixxy to help with in a way that didn’t sound completely insane, to middling success.

“Yes!” Rita exclaimed. “Like I told you, her name’s Alice.”

“Uh huh,” Ixxy replied sceptically. “And you think your soul is the one that’s damaged, somehow? Not your brain?”

Rita grit her teeth and folder her arms across her chest. “I’m not crazy,” she stated flatly. “Do you think I haven’t considered that? But if I was, why is she still hurt? If she was a figment of my imagination, why haven’t I been able to just imagine her healthy again?”

The demoness shrugged, the over-sized shirt just barely not slipping over her other shoulder as well.

“I’m not saying you’re crazy,” she said placatingly, “I’m just wondering if you’ve properly considered all of the other possibilities other than that your soul’s got something wrong with it that I can fix somehow.”

“It’s not my soul that got hurt,” Rita corrected her. “It was hers. Alice’s soul was the one that got shredded by the Nightmare Tree.”

“I’m sorry, the what?”

“The Nightmare Tree. The big spire-thing near Triskellion…” Rita began.

“Okay, I know what the Nightmare Tree is, sort of,” Ixxy interrupted, looking oddly confused. She blinked a few times, like she was processing a thought, before continuing: “I’m just not sure how the person in your head would be able to get their soul shredded by what is, for all intents and purposes, an inanimate object nearly thirty kilometres away.”

“Look, it’s a long story. But what happened was…”

Ixxy held up a hand. “Hold on, before you start with your life story, I’m afraid I don’t really have the time. I only have fifteen minutes or so left before my summoning ends, and I figure I’m going to have to take a look at you as well, so can you give me the really, really short version?”

Rita took a deep breath. How to summarize the most bizarre experience of her life — both this one and the previous one she still remembered from Earth — in a few short sentences?

“I was inside the Nightmare Tree for… reasons related to these people,” she tried, gesturing towards Samual, who still hadn’t moved from his position by the stairwell, and Gora, who’d come back down the stairs by this time and was leaning against the wall next to him. “Apparently that’s a thing that you can do. Yes, it was a surprise to me too.”

Then she started rambling. “It was all surreal and shit and Alice had her own body. We got to the core or the heart of the Tree or whatever, and it had these long tentacle things. It told me I was broken and began… I don’t know, peeling Alice apart or something. But I stabbed it with a broken pole, then bit it and then everything went white and we got kicked out, but Alice still had pieces missing where the thing had torn her apart. In my head, I mean. She was back in my head at this point.

“She was also conscious, but in a lot of pain. So I did… I don’t know. Something. Pulled some white stuff out of me and gave it to her and that sort of made things better? I think? She quieted down and went to sleep and she hasn’t woken up or gotten any different since.”

When Rita finished her story, Ixxy just sat and blinked at her for a few moments.

“Right,” she finally said, leaning forward in her chair. “Not sure if I followed all that, but if you want my professional opinion, your problem is that you’re a couple of wheels short of a wagon.”

“But,” she went on when Rita tried to open her mouth to protest again, “I’ll check you out regardless, just in case I’m wrong and there really is something wrong with your soul. Or ‘Alice’s soul, whatever.”

Rita let out a sigh of relief.

“Hold on, I’m not saying I’ll be able to fix you. Her. Whatever,” the demoness added. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told Timothy. I probably won’t be able to fix you, even if I could figure out what was wrong, so don’t get your hopes up quite yet. But I’ll take a look and see what I can find, okay?”

Rita nodded solemnly, but inside, her heart soared. She nearly wanted to cry with relief. All the stress and worry about Alice that she hadn’t even realized had built up over the past weeks came cascading out all at once.

Even if Ixxy couldn’t fix Alice, even if she couldn’t even tell Rita what was wrong with her, at least Rita could rest easier knowing that she had done literally all that she could.

Phew. It had taken some work, but Ixxy felt that she’d done a fairly good job setting the bait, even if she had to say so herself.

When she’d sat down with Rita at the table, the arachnid woman had been wary to the point of paranoia, clearly having second thoughts about contracting with a demon. She’d been hesitant to even talk, much less discuss any kind of contractual agreement. It had taken a bit of gentle prodding before she’d even opened up about what exactly the problem was.

Yet the result of Ixxy’s efforts could not be denied. Right at the end, she’d spotted a flicker of relief when Ixxy agreed to take a look at her soul.

And the two idiots ‘keeping an eye’ hadn’t noticed a thing.

In a way, Ixxy was lucky that Timothy wasn’t there. He might have noticed the way she kept egging Rita on to say more by questioning her sanity, or the way she was subtly diminishing her hopes by repeating how likely it was that she wouldn’t be able to help her. Not that he was guaranteed to have realized what she was doing, but there would have been a risk. He was a trained Diabolist, after all. Surely they got taught something about social manipulation.

“So how about we take a look and see if I can see what’s wrong with you?” Ixxy suggested gently, finally taking things to the next step. To her relief, Rita nodded.

That was fantastic. The hook had landed successfully. Now, all that was left for Ixxy to do was to reel her in. This part of Ixxy’s plan, such as it was, was simple. As long as she could find something, anything at all, that potentially could have caused the issue in her soul that was conveniently easy to fix, she would be set. Rita would be so relieved at there being a possible solution for whatever she believed was wrong with her, that she’d jump at Ixxy’s contract.

At least, that was the hope. It was hardly a foolproof plan, but at the end of the day all you could do was stack the deck as best you could in your favour and hope for the best. And she needed Rita to accept this contract if her trap was to work.

“Alright,” she smiled, holding out her arm. “Then all I need is your hand.”