Searching for the angels.

An hour after you'd returned to your room, and fifteen minutes after a cold shower to finish cooling down, you sat back down to your laptop again. Because you did still have homework - just, not the sort that Taylor had mentioned. At least, none that couldn't wait.

Instead, you needed to work out how to crack this deal for good. But unlike what Taylor had suggested... You decided to continue down this "angelic lawyers" route. It was true that Ashley probably knew about them already, and that perhaps other demons might have found a way to shut them down... There was a reason that their contact information was a series of cryptic clues, after all. But if a higher power was on their side, then they probably had the power to cut through whatever shields Ashley might try to put up. Maybe Ashley could protect her tail from you, but being able to ward herself against a proper smiting went against everything you knew about theology.

More importantly, though... Taylor's behavior was worrying you. You didn't think she'd ever sell you out or anything, not as long as Ashley upheld her word and left Taylor's soul alone. But if Taylor started to find all of this "fun" and got into the spirit of things... Well, you doubted that you'd be able to hold out either. Maybe you could make it to the end of the week without being overwhelmed by succubae influence, but what did that matter if your sense of right and wrong were so distorted that you started thinking of Ashley as a "cool professor" instead of a "total travesty of a professor"? Because Taylor had taught you something you hadn't noticed; Ashley didn't need to make you a brainwashed servant in order to "win". She just needed to establish herself as sufficiently "not that bad" that you don't take things to the Dean.

You'd thought of those two as synonymous up until this point, because her behavior had been so far beyond the pale that you couldn't imagine yourself not doing that... But the revelations of the last few days had called that into question. If you were given the option of just walking away, of deciding that Comparative Theology was just a class for sluts now and none of your concern... Could you really say you wouldn't take it? That you wouldn't decide that taking the evidence to the Dean was too dangerous, and that seeing more attractive guys around the school was a nice bonus?

Being able to solve this problem a few days earlier... It might matter. And getting someone truly and plainly on the side of Good, who could help keep you on the straight and narrow... If Taylor couldn't fill that role, maybe a lawyer could.

So bringing up the notes you'd copied from Killing Satan's Bitches before you'd erased the PDF... You started piecing together the clues to start chasing them down. The first clue was just a simple numerological cypher working with bible verses, so you had confidence that you could crack this one fairly easily.