* "We'd Have To Do That Anyway." *

"We'd have to do that anyway. Luce and Maz only do business in person, especially if handing out Pokemon teams is involved, double especially if it's going to be permanently, as ours definitely will be. Besides, unlike Yolanda here, I still remember why you hate her, and no, I won't tell her if you don't, and", Takeshi turns to you now, "believe me, Yolanda, you're better off without those memories, let them stay buried. Besides, I think if we play our cards right, Luce can fix it so none of us either has, wants, or is capable of ever remembering that whole year long emotional disastrophy eeeever happened."

"Okay, first, that was fucking-creepy-as-all-Hell. Second, what on earth is this guy that you think he could just edit your memories like that? The Devil Himself?" You ask, and immediately regret it when Misty answers you perfectly matter-of-factly...

"Whoh, you DO have Amnesia, or you're VERY good at faking it, because, yeah, that's EXACTLY what Luce is. One of his incarnations, anyway..." She says, smiling and opening a package of Chilly-flavor Pocky.

"Whoh, hold up, I thought Arceus was, kinda, GOD?"

"Ok, WOW, where have you been since I was, like, twelve? People used to think that, yeah, but really Arceus was God's, like, Pet Dog, and he, God that is, got SUPER PISSED when some dumbass tween with a Master Ball essentially dognapped it. So, apparently, God is unutterably busy with running multiple universes and stuff, he noticed Little Arci wasn't in his dog run anymore and sent someone to investigate, they heard about the "Taming of God" and scrambled a minor league celestial invasion just in time for an Alpha Chronicler to avert World War III with her weird time slowing down powers. Unfortunately, this was a violation of the demilitarized zone treaty between Hell and Heaven regarding Earth so Hell staged a not-so-minor counter-invasion to 'protect their investments in the zone of conflict', and boy, didn't it piss off the Americans to hear that phrase being used as a 'Cassius belie' by daemons!" Misty begins, then Takeshi takes up the story.

"This is the part most people don't know and I'd prefer it stayed that way, I ended the war by stealing Arceus back from that dumbass kid with a God complex and turning him over to an incarnation of Lucifer. That's why he owes me that much of a favor, I literally saved the world, and much as Luce is a badass and the prince of darkness and all that stuff, first and foremost, he is a businessman, and giant planet-wrecking wars among angels and daemons are bad for buisness. You see, Luce doesn't want to make everything suffer, just everything vicious, lazy, stupid, or cowardly, and as far as he's concerned, following centuries-old rules of behavior in hopes of getting into heaven is a form of not only cowardice, laziness, and stupidity, but with viciousness thrown in sometimes too if it is taken to extremes. He is the Incarnation of Freedom: freedom of speech, expression, religion, the press, if you can think of a civil right, Luce is for it: and I mean 'ah-la lantern!', 'Madam Guillotine', Blood-in-the-streets, literally-cannibalistic when he says 'eat the rich', levels of for it. A lot of fascists used to worship Luce, till he and Maz started crashing their little secret cult meetings where they were waiving swastika around and chanting 'Hail Satan' and 'Heil Hitler' in the same breath: then personally making each and every one of them experience the last seven days of a concentration camp victim as though it were their own life over the course of seven minutes. Interestingly, 4/5ths of the time only the females survived the experience, the male NAZIs just couldn't take the pain, their hearts gave out about five minutes in. So, to sum up, Arceus has a new dog-run on a nice uninhabited Terran class world somewhere in Andromeda now, and there are both angels and demons wandering around Earth to prevent any OTHER stupid tweens from kidnapping major Kame, sometimes as mixed-side pairs." Takeshi whispers in your ear at length.

"Ok, so, angels and demons, on earth, living amongst us, but how can we trust Lucifer to mess with our memories?" You ask.

"First, when you meet him, don't call him Lucifer, its a sign of weakness, call him Luce. Second, Luce has his own code, it's weird, and a bit twisted, but he sticks to it like a religion, though he is always evolving and developing it. Third: one of the most important and stable parts of his code is he never lies by commission, he'll lie by omission till the sun burns out but if he says something to you out loud to your face, in words or math, (or in writing, as long as he wrote it with his own hands and a stylus of some sort, not some machine), its the truth as he understands it, and his intellect and knowledge are both vast. As long as we make an iron-clad Deal with Luce we can trust him to uphold his end of it." Takeshi explains.

"Right, so we're going to literally make a deal with the Devil..." You say, and, surprisingly feel only mildly uncomfortable with that statement.

"It's not like he's going to try to buy your soul, Yolanda," Misty says, rolling her eyes. "Luce is so far above those sorts of things that it is frankly insulting to even mention them in his presence, and a good way to get yourself kicked out of the meeting. Besides, Hell isn't actually competing with Heaven for souls: they are incidental to the real disagreement between Luce and his 'dearly delinquent Dad', (oh, another pro-tip, don't mention God/heaven in his presence, at least, so I hear)", Misty says and looks to Takeshi.

"It's true, don't mention God, Heaven, Hell, Angels, and/or Demons around him if you can help it: unless referencing a specific individual who is directly involved in the situation under discussion or physically present in the area where you are actualy having the discussion," Takeshi confirms, and Misty continues.

"As I was saying, since you seem to not remember Neo-Theology 101, Heaven and Hell are both on the side of 'GOOD' they just disagree on what will promote the greatest good for the general public: Hell is firmly in the 'let them sort out their own problems' camp: every man for himself, no limits on personal freedom, lassie-fair capitalism, personal responsibility, no taxes on anything: and ipso-facto no services: no fire-fighters, no schools, no road maintenance, no food safety, no armed forces, no actual government of any kind: anarchy, basically."

"Heaven is the polar opposite. Rules for everything. Rules for how to sit, how to stand, how to walk, how to breathe, everything. The thing is, Heaven is off-kilter and has been for Millennia. Humans can't even follow the most basic set of rules. You give them just ten, TEN, and Phagh! And we are talking really basic rules, 'don't murder each other', 'don't steal each other's stuff', 'don't worship random statuary', and things like that and we completely failed."

"Looks like we can chalk it up as a win for Hell, right? Not so fast, because, see, for all their dearest trying, anarchy is an utter failure as well. Humans and almost all other known species of sapients (except angels and demons) seem to need what Luce calls 'the third form', a middle ground between Heaven's all-encompassing 'we-have-a-rule-for-that' approach and Hell's 'Rules? Where we're going
we don't need RULES...' attitude." She finished.

"We have free-will, and we use it, basically," You reply.

"Yes, in essence," Takeshi says.

While you've been talking you've moved into Misty's room and closed the door, now helping her pack, already having packed up your own dorm room for the most part. It seems Misty didn't have a roommate, which is odd, but you take it in stride and get to packaging up all of your possessions. Takeshi, meanwhile, arranges the meeting: a specific warehouse down by the docks at 03:33 Sharp tomorrow morning. It takes you most of the time till then to get everything packed and find a safe place to store it all for a few days. (One of Misty's contacts this time, he works as the night watchman at a self-storage facility and let you park the u-haul in the parking lot until they opened tomorrow and you could rent a unit. You find yourself wondering if you used to have contacts and people who owed you favors before the new 'you' was dropped into this world...)

"So, how are we going to get to this shindig with Luce?" Misty asks after you hand over the keys to the U-Haul...