Essential™
Hey, the idea
was sound.
There's a very good reason why Vaputech's
Department of Advertising, Memetic Theory, and
Suicide Prevention Prevention (motto: "You only
think that you think that thought you just thought. We thought that thought that you just thought
that you thought for you, so if you think that you can think any thought that
you think that you might want to think, well, think again. Or... don't, because we think that we'll do a
much better job doing your thinking for you from now on, don't you think?
So they did. This
was widely considered to be impossible - but hold on for a second: what,
precisely, is Essence? Yes, yes, "the energy of life," a
very pretty idea, and one almost certainly not ripped off from a certain
classic space opera. But what does that mean?
Don't feel bad if you don't know. DAMTSPP's staff
didn't have a clue, either. What they did know was that you could use Essence
for fueling Songs, supernatural abilities, and affecting random
probability. So all they needed to do
was find something that could do all of that, preferably reliably, possibly
better, definitely cheaply. What they
came up with was a compound of several elements that are only found in
Hell. The exact proportions are still
secret (more accurately, every demon known to know the proportions is dead, and
if any Demon Prince knows what it is, he, she, or it isn't talking), and the
stuff is impossible to analyze when active and dissipates once used. But it was reliable and it was cheap, so DAMTSPP was certain that they had a winner on their
hands. They happily marketed it as
Essential™, gave out a bunch of free samples, and watched as every demon in
Hell clamored for it.
Now, Servitors of Trade would be laughing at this
point and making snide comments about what happened to the Spanish Empire once they dumped two continents' worth of gold
and silver into one smallish country's economic ecosystem, but what actually
happened was possibly even more amusing.
Essence, while a currency (more or less), is also a commodity, which
means that people will eventually use it.
People will use it for things like Songs or probability manipulation,
which meant that eventually people would be using it for actions known to
occasionally trigger either a Divine or an Infernal Intervention.
And apparently, neither God nor Lucifer approves of
Essential™.
The bad things didn't happen at first, mind - but
after a certain number of Interventions took place the universal disapproval of
Essential™ by the Powers That Be became clear.
Any Intervention that affects
a demon that either spent a note of Essential™ (or even has absorbed one) will
immediately destroy him, her or it.
There have been no exceptions to this below the level of Prince - and
the one Prince who was hit with this problem was emphatically not happy about
it afterwards, which is not coincidentally why none of the original demons who
knew how to make this stuff are around anymore.
Presumably an angel would be likewise affected; however, between Marc
and Dominic (Servitors of the latter have discovered that their training video
of this particular Don't Let This Happen To You is
actually the ticket to certain party invitations, these days) it's a rare angel
that isn't clued-in to how dangerous this stuff is. Besides, Essential™ just
feels... wrong, to an angel. Slimy. Diseased. Ticking.
Interestingly, Essential™ is still being made. All of the above discusses what happens to
celestials who attract Interventions while using the
stuff (ethereals have the same problem, although it's
harder to assess the toughness of entities that implode if an anthropologist
looks at them too closely). Mortals - usually, damned souls - aren't affected
as badly by the Intervention problem.
All that happens to them is that they lose whatever Essence they have
and get knocked out for a few hours.
There are damned souls that would cheerfully pay for that particular
privilege right there - but somehow
the knowledge on how to make Essential™ got out into General Population, and
now it is becoming a true underground currency in Shal-Mari,
Stygia and (just recently) Hades. It's mostly traded among damned souls, which
makes things even more problematic. Any
damned soul of six Forces can learn Songs, after all: and with enough
Essential™, he or she will be able to actually pay somebody to teach him or her.
Five Force damned souls will just pay for the desired Song,
instead. And there are a lot of damned souls in Hell, and not
enough demons to keep every one of them under full observation, so there's the
possibility of quite a little black market, there. The aforementioned laughing Servitors of
Trade are looking forward to seeing whether