So, here is my first try at a longer story. While I have an idea where I´m going, I´m very interested at how I will get there and hoping my subconscious does have a masterplan. If it has, I will try to update once a week. Anyway, enjoy :)

The Trickster loves One Night Stands. Alright, prostitutes can be fine sometimes, but having to pay them always destroys the mood, as well as knowing the whole time they are only doing this for money. With self created illusions it´s about the same thing. Yes, they can be fine and fun sometimes, but you always know they are just illusions and that really destroys the mood, because you know it´s just fancy masturbation. Real relationship on the other hand are way to messy and complicated and to be avoided at all costs.

That leaves One Night Stands. Real persons, both sides want to have sex and the chance of it evolving into a real relationship almost zero. Perfect. The only problem the Trickster has with One Night Stands is them tending to be Half Night Stands.

The woman to his side has fallen asleep already and it is only two am. He can´t remember her name, but on the other hand she has called him two different names during sex, one of them very clearly her ex, so he doesn´t exactly feel bad about it.

Following his way too explicit One Night Stand rules, he starts counting backwards from hundred to zero in Hebrew, Latin and French (messing up French again and frustrated replacing it with English) Reaching zero he looks over to the woman and finds her still asleep. So no second round, he has given her the chance. Time to go.

He swings himself out of bed, fishing for his clothes. Yes, of course he doesn´t need to do either of those things, being able to just let clothes appear on his body and move to a parallel dimension to vanish from human view, but behaving human till having left the motel is actually part of his rules. Over the years his One Night Stands have three or four times woken up while he was doing something not humanly possible and nothing destroys the memory of an evening as much as having to perform brainwashing at the end of it.

Or forgetting about it and then reading a week later about that woman claiming to have had sex with a ghost. A ghost! That was just humiliating.

He is searching for his socks, when the profound feeling of something being wrong hits him like a train.

It´s like washing your hands in the bathroom, just to suddenly spot a figure in the mirror and have your head crushed into the sink, before your brain even realizes what is happening.

(Talk about regrettable life experiences)

(He was stoned)

(They were demons)

(He put them into a pocket universe, where they spent three weeks running from drunken purple dinosaurs, who spit water for some reason, unable to leave their meat suits, till he remembered them and killed them all)

(No shame in that story)

(None at all)

(At least the music had been nice)

The Trickster looks up frowning. Nothing has attacked him yet, which somehow feels… wrong. Something is there, almost sitting in his neck and it´s maddening. Screwing the no-unhuman-things-on-One-Night-Stands-Rule, he quickly checks the room. Nothing. The woman is entirely human, not possessed, nothing and no one is hidden. But for an alarm signal to be that strong it has to be close.

Screw it, a huge part of him screams. Just go and ignore it, like you always do! Go to India and get a new girl! Steal a car! No better, turn people who love their cars too much into cars! Oh, and get new chocolate bars, you are almost out of real ones and the illusions are just not the same! Just go!

He almost listens to that part of him (It makes up the majority of his thinking anyway) He almost vanishes and prevents all of the events that will come out of that one strange night from happening. But the moment he wants to disappear it suddenly hits him. The feeling isn´t strong because it is near. It is just… really fucking strong. And miles away. Something global. Something bigger than global.

Some idiot has opened up hell.

The next moment he is out of the shitty motel room, walking down the main street of somewhere-he-has-already-forgotten Wyoming, gnawing his last real chocolate bar. They air seems to be bristling with demons, but it is all very uncoordinated, none of them has yet seemed to spot that they are out of hell and able to possess people. Or the holy neon signal that is currently walking down the street eating a chocolate bar for that matter.

Just looking, he tells himself. Just keeping myself updated about heaven and hell. Why would demons attack a Trickster anyway. The more reasonable part of his mind, like so often, doesn´t even bother answering. It has probably given up and died ages ago.

The street is empty, apart from a man walking down the opposite walkway, who the Trickster has been ignoring since having made sure it´s no demon. His nervousness grows anyway, his hand tightening around his ang… that blade. Why would demons want to attack a Trickster anyway?

"Gabriel?"

At first the Trickster doesn´t react at all. It is impossible that the man means him and besides there are other people called Gabriel, so no reason to react at all. It´s simply not possible that the man does mean him.

Only…

They are alone on a forsaken road in absolutely-forgettable Wyoming at two am, with a gate of hell open nearby. No one else around. And...he, he being so occupied by looking for demons, how does he only realize that now?… the man isn´t a man at all! He is a vessel! A vessel covering himself up incredibly well, but a vessel still. Shit, shit, shit!

"Gabriel!"

No, that isn´t possible, he hasn´t met an angel for centuries and now it has to be THAT angel, this HAS to be someone tricking him for vengeance, shit, shit, shit, this…

This is just like his luck.

For one moment they are just standing there on opposite sides of the empty road, starring at each other. The road between them of course means absolutely nothing, they could reach each other in the blink of an eye, but no one dares to move.

It is unreal, absolutely unreal and all Gabriel can do is stand and stare, like a rabbit in front of a car, while being overwhelmed with a wave of images, memories and emotions and feeling that the other is also overwhelmed, unable to believe.

"Gabriel?"

That´s when he panics and zaps himself to Australia.