"Everybody ready to be Makkata's jilted puppygirl harem?" Vozdrammar asks, giving the gaggle of succubi a quick once-over.
"Awoo!" Pamnaxxa says happily, and Jurhazo shoves her shoulder, scowling.
"Voz, she's doing it again!" she complains.
"I wanted to hold everyone else's leashes," Lorgrax pouts. "You always get to do that."
"That's because I can cry on demand," Vozdrammar says smugly. "I can crash weddings as Abandoned Lover convincingly. Can you cry on demand?"
Lorgrax says something sulky and indistinct.
"You can do the next one," Vozdrammar relents. "We'll mix it up, do angry jilted instead of weepy."
"Okay." Lorgrax kicks at the ground. "...But if we get thrown out without cake this time, I want to go topside for McDonalds."
"You're not allowed topside outside of a summoning circle after you set fire to all those cars!" Pamnaxxa says.
"Fuck you, I'll be supervised, won't I? You saying you can't be trusted to supervise me?"
"You have very poor impulse control," Pamnaxxa says serenely.
"If we get thrown out, you can just take the gimp mask off and nobody will recognise you," Jurhazo says. "You can sneak back and get cake."
"Oh yeah," Lorgrax says sarcastically. "I'll just sneak back in as the totally not suspicious succubus who's nothing to do with those other ones who were just here, in a wedding full of demons from — where's Maks marrying into, again?"
"War."
They unite briefly in head-shaking silence.
"Maks could do better," Lorgrax says. "War, honestly. Hey, d'you think that's where they dug up Mawgull from?"
"Don't be daft," Pamnaxxa says. "Mawgull doesn't have the biceps for War. She's gotta be from somewhere insidious like Establishing Economics As A Serious Science."
"Speaking of work," Vozdrammar says, "everyone remembered to turn on out-of-office summoning autodivert, right?"
Lorgrax cheers up immediately. "I hacked mine," she says proudly.
"You can't hack, Grax," Jurhazo tells her crushingly.
"I did! Well, anyway, one of the girls from Vore (Tops) found a documentation page about configuring it and I made it do something funny—"
"That's not hacking."
"S'what I'll get in trouble for when they catch me," Lorgrax says.
"Put it back how you found it as soon as we're back in the office," Vozdrammar says sternly. "...What did you make it do, anyway?"
"You know those big guys with the bony heads who run round on the fields of burning coal for ever, headbutting each other and chasing souls around?"
"Shitting heck, Grax, what if a client summon gets through for you!"
"It'll be really funny," Lorgrax says, waving her off. "Anyway, we're all on booked holiday, nobody's gonna summon us."
Traditional War weddings seem to invove a lot of leather and screaming and beating on shields, so they take their best guess at timing, sneak in past the caterers, and burst out from behind a viscera-embroidered banner at a dramatic-seeming juncture to fling themselves into a heap on top of Makkata, rending at clothing and wailing.
"We miss youuuuu!"
"How could you leave me like this with three puppygirls to satisfy all on my own!"
"Fisting night isn't the same without your cruel haaaands!"
"Awoo!"
Makkata's spouse-to-be — ten feet tall, with arms the size of quarterbacks, only rage-red flickers visible in the darkness inside her helm of rust and spikes — looks down at them with hands on her hips. "These are the traditional succubus shenanigans, mhm?" she says dryly to Makkata.
"Yes," Makkata says, kicking Jurhazo sharply in the stomach with the leg that Pamnaxxa isn't immovably twined around.
The War demon unceremoniously scruffs Vozdrammar to her feet. "Hello," she says. "How do you do. I am getting married today to Makkata. Fuck off out of the way, mhm?"
"Ooh, Maks, biceps," Vozdrammar mutters over her shoulder.
"I know," Makkata says smugly, and sinks her teeth into Pamnaxxa's clutching hand.
"Little thing," the war demon says kindly. "In my circle of hell, we make demons so small as you into little puppy hunting hounds. Fanged masks of black metal, forged in furnaces of hate, quenched in rivers of blood, nailed to faces with red-hot barbed spikes. Ghosts trapped in the metal screaming the noise of battle direct into your brain until you can think nothing else, only run and bite and scream for ever."
"Hardcore," Vozdrammar says, snakes a whip-fast hand under the great spiked helm to crook her little finger through the faint glint of a nose ring, and sharply drags the other demon's face down to her own eye level. "We know your sort, up in Lust," she says, quiet and sharp. "We break your sort, up in Lust, baby bunny. Maks is one of ours; she's small and soft and she takes your big stupid head on her chest and calls you her big brave butch and her good, good girl and strokes your hair and she takes you the fuck to pieces whenever she wants. You kneel for her. You weep for her." She lets go, and flicks a contemptuous finger on the helmet's forehead. "Don't yap at the big dogs, slick."
"I am being given...shovel talk?" the War demon says hesitantly, and Vozdrammar snorts.
"If you hurt Makkata," she says, "you gotta survive being married to pissed-off Makkata. What worse d'you think we've got? We're just here to troll Maks and steal some cake. It's traditional."
"Cake is over there!" the War demon says, pointing.
"Smart choice," Vozdrammar says, turns, and widens her eyes at Makkata, still on the floor trying to prise off Pamnaxxa. "Biceps, Maks!" she stage whispers.
"I know!" Makkata crows, attempting to lever Pamnaxxa away by a fistful of hair.
"...Where's Grax?"
"Went thataway with the bridesmaids," Jurhazo says.
"What, the big ones with the axes?"
"Yeah."
"Like...fourteen of them?"
"Yeah."
"We're gonna have to carry her out with an ice pack in her knickers again," Vozdrammar sighs. "Grats, Maks! Have a nice honeymoon! Let go of her leg before she has your eye out, Pam, it's cake time—"






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