Work Text:
“Have you seen Terror today?” David asked as he emerged from the basement, a box full of stuff in his arms.
“Ye…” Sarah opened her mouth, then shut it. “Actually, now that I think about it, no.”
“Just realized I haven’t seen him in two days,” David added, plopping the box down on the kitchen table. “I’m worried he’s got eaten by a coyote.”
“I doubt it,” Sarah remarked. “He’s… well, you know what he can do.”
“Yes, but coyotes can be crafty buggers, and they have their own powers. We lost our share of pets to them when I was a kid. Dogs and cats both.”
“I don’t think that’s what’s happened to Terror. Knowing him he’s probably asleep under the couch and we just haven’t seen him when he got up.
David gave her a look that said he clearly didn’t believe her, but let it pass with only a muttered, “I hope you’re right.”
“Besides,” Sarah added. “We can worry about Terror later. There’s other things we need to focus on now. It’s that time of the year again.”
“True enough,” David agreed, reaching into the box and removed Sarah’s battered shotgun. “True enough.”
---
Dr. Herbert Malier stared down at the fluffy brown tabby cat sitting in the middle of his summoning circle. He had been sure this summoning was a dud. “Khazarak the Desecrate?” he asked cautiously.
The cat cocked its head and cast him a look that all but screamed, “are you stupid?”
The problem with summoning demons, is that you were never really sure what you would get. While no other demon was as bad as Alcor, it was not unheard to get familiars, minions, or even the demon themselves in disguise. The even bigger problem, was that it was often very hard to determine which one you had gotten.
Herbert carefully nudged one of the offerings with his foot. Khazarak the Desecrate preferred the unclean entrails of forgotten animals, shredded and desecrated. Canned cat food fit the bill perfectly.
The cat perked up, trotted unopposed over three layers of binding circle, and let out of loud warm purr as it gobbled down the cat food.
Herbert spent the next hour asking the cat questions, to try and determine what exactly he had summoned. The cat more or less ignored him, even laying down for a fifteen-minute nap in the middle of it. The only reaction he got occurred when he produced a second can of cat food, which the cat gladly gobbled down.
When none of his supernatural spectrometers detected any kind of demonic energy, he decided to lock the cat in his office with a bowl of water and food, a catnip toy, and a borrowed litter box. At least until he could determine what exactly had happened with that summoning.
The cat was waiting on the passenger seat of his car when he opened the door.
---
David and Sarah had made an enemy out of Necalitz not long after they had moved to Gravity Falls. They had been prowling around rural Colorado at the time, looking for people that might have old junk they were willing to sell. The farmhouse in particular had looked promising, with its three sheds covered in old gas station signs and the plethora of old rusted out farm equipment scattered around.
What they didn’t know, was that at that very moment a secret demonic cult was gathered in the basement of that house about to summon a demon. In turn, what the cult didn’t know, was that their binding circle had several critical flaws in it.
Necalitz had been quick to point this out, and after devouring the cult, had decided that the two pickers who had just knocked on the door would round off his meal nicely.
Fortunately for David and Sarah, David had heard the summoning with his aurial version of The Sight. Which gave them just enough to time to make it to their car before Necalitz burst through the front door of the house.
The lightning bolt and the flask of holy water had slowed him down enough that Sarah had time to slap a hastily made sealing ward on him. The ward was crudely done and not very strong. It would have held a minor demon like Necalitz for only a couple of minutes.
Thankfully, a couple of minutes was all it took for David to beat Necalitz back to the mindscape with a cursed golden idol in the shape of Bill Cipher.
In truth, David and Sarah had half-forgotten about the incident by the time they made it back home. When placed alongside the list of everything else that had happened on that particular trip, nearly being devoured by a demon was just another bullet point.
Necalitz however had forgotten nothing, and he certainly had not forgiven David and Sarah for the humiliation they had inflicted on him. He wanted revenge. But he could do nothing until he regained enough energy to manifest on the material plane for any significant length of time. So he stewed in his anger for a whole year, before he finally gathered enough energy to enact his revenge.
His timing and his tactics left a lot to be desired. He basically forced his way onto the material plane, and then made a bee-line for David and Sarah.
Who were browsing the stalls at the Indiana Demon Hunters Convention.
---
Now David and Sarah had been fortunate in several ways. The first, was that Necalitz was not a particularly powerful demon. Even among minor demons his power levels were on the low side. But even a minor demon was more than a match for the average human.
But Necalitz was also not the brightest of demons. While he could sniff out loopholes in a deal as easily as most of his kind, even by human standards he was a dim bulb. He was certainly no Alcor the Dreambender, blessed with access to omniscient knowledge. More to the point, he was predictable.
All it took was a half dozen peach-lime pies and a favor from, shall we say, a relative of Sarah’s, for David and Sarah to acquire a fairly detailed time-table of when Necalitz would next be able to manifest in the corporeal world. When Necalitz once again returned to seek his revenge, he discovered that David and Sarah had marked his return on their calendar and were ready for him.
Not that it stopped him from trying anyway, or from making a fourth attempt. (And a fifth, and a sixth, and…)
Over the years, David and Sarah had even developed a simple three-step template for dealing with Necalitz when he reappeared. Step one, was to make him mad. This ran contrary to every bit of conventional wisdom when it came to dealing with demons, but for them there was a logic to it. First, Necalitz already wanted to rip their entrails out through their urinary tract and devour their souls. Making him even more pissed off at them would make nothing worse.
More to the point, the madder Necalitz got, the more single-minded and focused he became. As he got more and more enraged, the demon’s world narrowed until all he cared about was ripping David and Sarah to shreds. Which meant in turn, that he was not paying attention to things such as runic lines, binding circles, silvered bear traps, contract demon hunters waiting in ambush, or the fact he had just charged head-first into a mosque.
Step two was to lure him into some trap or ambush that had been set up ahead of time. This was also pretty easy as David and Sarah’s continued existence was as powerful a lure as anything. If they were there, Necalitz would home in on them, and if they had made him mad enough, he would be utterly oblivious to the array of traps they had prepared ahead of time.
Once Necalitz was then trapped, step three was to beat him back to the mindscape with whatever weapon was most readily at hand. Over the years this list had included such things as baseball bats, knives, walking sticks, hockey sticks, pewter candlesticks, a crystal candelabra from a church, antique swords, modern swords, sledgehammers, a bottle of sanctified wine, high voltage power cables, a dump-truck full of cabbages, an entire setting of blessed silverware, their car, and a high-speed freight train bound for Baltimore.
So far it had been a surprisingly effective system. Though more credit went to Necalitz for being stupid enough to fall for it every time.
---
Necalitz could scarcely believe it when he felt the summoning. The timing was perfect. He had just amassed enough energy to manifest long enough to rip Keeler and Pines to shreds. A summoning now would allow him to save that energy. More time to enjoy shredding their flesh.
He surged through the opening in this world created by the summoning.
”WHO DARES DISTURBE ME?” He snarled standing up on his hind legs to loom over the summoner. ”SPEAK!”
Nothing.
Necalitz looked around in confusion. There was no one there. No summoners to devour, no offerings to filch. No one.
”WHAT IS THIS? WHO DARES…!?”
Then he glanced down. A small music player, with a swatch of blood smeared across it, was playing his summoning incantation on a loop.
Them. They had done this. He could smell their blood on the music player. Keeler’s this time. They were here. A clawed hand smashed the music player to bits. Rage bubbled up in his mind. He could sense them, smell them. They were not far away.
With an eldritch howl of fury Necalitz took off in their direction, loping through the trees.
---
Now, David and Sarah had always chosen the location of their traps carefully. Usually in relation to things like leylines, sacred sites, and access to high voltage electrical current. While a leyline did run straight through the area, it was strong enough that the location of David and Sarah’s ambush didn’t matter too much. Nor did the location they had remotely summoned Necalitz to. What was important however, was their relevance to each other. Specifically, it was what was between those two points that mattered most.
The Sons of Adam were a heavily armed anti-supernatural, human supremacy group. The core of their belief was that one day the supernatural world would move to destroy humanity, and that they had to be ready for it.
When they heard Necalitz’s howl of rage, they knew at once what had happened. This was what they knew would happen. They had trained for this moment. They were prepared.
Thankfully for the rest of the world, they were not as prepared as they believed themselves to be.
---
Necalizt was furious. Blindingly furious. The burn from the silver bullets lodged in his flesh merely added fire to his fury. How dare they. How dare they keep him from his revenge! All those pathetic mortals and their guns with the silver and their pathetic little symbols so saturated with hate they weren’t even worth the wood they were made of. He should have killed them slowly. Savored the taste of their souls and the sounds of their screams. But no, not now, not when he has revenge to complete.
Every single humiliation David and Sarah had inflicted on him flashed through his mind as he closed in on their presence. His rage built to a burning fire.
”KEELER! PINES!” he howled. ”I WILL HAVE MY…”
In his furry, he didn’t even see the runic line. Or the two layers of binding circle that followed.
---
Gravity Falls was the most magically charged place on the planet. This was not by chance. The fruits of Bill Cipher’s plotting had left a massive hole in the fabric of reality centered right over the entire town. Magical energy poured through the hole and into our world. This energy then flowed out from Gravity Falls in three directions. The least of those, the Pacific Wiggle, twisted it’s way straight across the Pacific Ocean, made a loop around Hawaii, danced a twisted dance through Micronesia, before dispersing into three distinct currents somewhere around New Zealand. The next, the Southwestern Snag, made a straight line for Texas, curving around to avoid Oklahoma in the process, merged with another stream coming north from Mexico, made a left turn at Dallas, then another left at Albuquerque, before it too dispersed. The greatest of them, the Gravity Falls Main Stream, flowed north along the Pacific coast, cut across Alaska, looped around both the magnetic and true north poles, before crossing the Artic Ocean into Norway and Finland, where it too split up into over a dozen different energy streams.
The leyline that was running through this particular area wasn’t just any leyline. It was the main trunk of the Gravity Falls Main Stream, which was indisputably the strongest magical current in the world.
Now this would all mean nothing if David hadn’t developed a very simple and very crude method form drawing on these magical currents using carved wooden poles, which it turn could be used to empower wards and enchantments. Again, it was a crude method, akin to simply putting more electricity into your computer to make it run faster. It had its limits and was largely useless for more complex magic. The plus side, was that very simple wards could be made very powerful with little added strain on the caster.
But Necalitz wasn’t a powerful demon. He didn’t have the power to brush aside simple wards, and only needed relatively simple bindings to control him. While Sarah had been setting up the wards in preparation for their trap, David had been going through the woods with his carved wooden poles, siphoning energy off the Gravity Falls Main Stream. Knowing full well that their carcasses would be turned into decorative lampshades if Necalitz ever got his claws on them, he had erred on the side of caution when deciding how much energy to channel into their trap.
He couldn’t say exactly how much energy was being channeled, but it was definitely a lot.
---
The wards slammed into Necalitz with all the force of a runaway glacier. His entire body seized up and he crashed into the ground with a spray of dirt. He tried to move. He couldn’t move. All his senses seemed to be stuffed with wool. He couldn’t even move his eyes to see. They were here, he knew that, if he could just move…
And then David and Sarah were beating him with sledgehammers.
There was no argument that it was rather unsporting to beat someone with a sledgehammer. Even more so if they couldn’t even move. But, Sarah hated sports and David only watched hockey out of a sense of patriotism, and even then only half-heartedly. They didn’t care about being sporting, and to be fair neither did Necalitz. They wanted to beat him back to the mindscape as fast as possible, and he wanted to kill them in horrible ways.
Even as they pounded him, he was straining against the wards, trying to find some way to break free so that he could rip the two of them apart. It was hard to think through all the pain and the rage. All he could really focus on was his furry at once again being humiliated by those two. Other demons…
And then he felt it. A summoning. All at once, a plan sprang to his mind. Escape now, get more power from the summoners, then come back and get revenge! It was brilliant. No need to wait another year until he could manifest, he could come back right away and kill the two of them. They couldn’t set up another trap that quickly! He seized the calling, pulling himself after the summoning with every bit of energy he could muster. The wards resisted, but he pushed through, surging after the call.
What he didn’t realize was that in his haste to escape he not only dragged the binding wards through the summoning with him, but also David and Sarah, who continued to beat him with the sledgehammers, and a large chunk of the energy they had been channeling into the wards.
---
The cat was waiting for Dr. Malier when he stepped through the front door of his house. How it got from the car to his house without him noticing, he wasn’t entirely sure. But he suspected teleportation was somehow involved.
He spent the rest of the evening deflecting questions from both his wife and daughter. The former, who wanted to know where exactly this cat had come from and why it was in their house, and the latter who was pleading with him to let her keep it, on the grounds that it was so soft and fluffy.
It was also waiting for him in the car the next morning as he headed out to work. He still didn’t know exactly what or who this cat was, but he was not surprised when he showed up at the lecture hall for his first class of the day, to find the cat perched on the podium looking at him expectantly.
The best solution he figured, was to ignore it, at least for now. He could find out more when the lecture was done and he could go up to his lab to do some more tests. He was pretty sure the cat wasn’t a demon, but beyond that, who could really say. So he deflected his students’ questions as they why there was a cat in the lecture theater and got down to teaching.
“Now, Necalitz is a perfect example of what you would call an unspecialized or generalist demon.” He explained, waving a hand over the summoning circle. “He makes no claim over a specific domain, nor does his powers appear to have any particular bent. Note the lack of any title or moniker. Now for this summoning, we have prepared a general offering of raw beef liver, which we will then exchange for a single scale from his skin. Note what he does and doesn’t offer as part of the negotiation.”
He pricked his finger with a sterilized needle, and spoke the incantation.
Dr. Malier had summoned Necalitz before. He was expecting a glob of blood to rise from the ground and take the shape of the demon. He was not expecting the deafening boom and the shockwave which knocked him off his feet.
No one actually saw what happened. The bright burst of light from the center of the circle had all blinded them, and the loud boom had rendered everyone deaf. But they had all felt the wind. It blasted through the summoning lab, sending loose papers and furniture flying and blowing out all the windows in a shower of blunted safety glass.
As everyone’s hearing began to return they became aware of the sound of metal hitting flesh, and a loud eldritch scream.
”NO! NO! NOT THE FACE! NOT THE FACE!”
As the spots faded from everyone’s eyes they began to see what had come through the summoning. What they saw was two humanoid figures beating a large scaled and horned figure with sledgehammers. The summoning and binding circles in the center of the laboratory were glowing white. Smoke was wafting into the air from where the glowing lines were scorching the floor.
Now, David and Sarah had been in their share of unexpected and strange situations. As they became aware of the fact that they were no longer in the woods, and in front of an entire class of confused and stunned demonology students, they fell back on their tried and true strategy.
Feign confidence and bullshit.
“What?” Sarah snapped, leaning against her hammer. “Can’t you see we’re busy?”
The entire classroom just stared in shock as they tried to gather their wits. Suddenly, David caught something out of the corner of his eye.
“Terror?”
The cat let out a happy meow, jumped off the podium, and strode confidently up to the edge of the summoning circle, purring loudly.
“Oh for crying out loud,” David muttered. “We’ve been looking for you for days. Come here you stupid cat.”
A shocked gasp ran through the room as David effortlessly crossed five layers of binding circles and containment wards, and scooped Terror up in his arms.
It was then Dr. Melier finally got a grasp on his wits. “You know him?”
“He’s one of our cats,” David answered with a raised eyebrow. “Of course we know him.”
Necalitz suddenly stirred. ”You… You, will pay… both of…”
“No one said you could speak!” David snapped. A lightning bolt arced from his fingers, striking Necalitz.
”YOU…!”
“Quiet!” Sarah shot back, and delivered a great overhead swing with her hammer. Necalitz let out of wail of anguish as his corporeal form dissolved into black ether and he lost his hold on the material world. Banished back to the mindscape. “He’s a pain in the ass,” Sarah explained to the stunned classroom. “We go through this shit every year.”
“We need to think about getting home,” David added before Dr. Malier could open his mouth. He strode back to the center of the circle. Once again passing over the warding lines with no resistance. “Now that that particular pain in the ass is out of the way for another year.”
“Right,” Sarah nodded. “We still need to…”
And then the both of them, Terror included, just vanished.
---
Both David and Sarah blinked in surprise as they suddenly found themselves standing in their living room. Terror let out a contented mewl and leapt out of David’s hands to settle himself down on his favorite spot on the couch.
“I hope I never get used to that,” Sarah declared. “Where the hell were we anyway?”
“I don’t know,” David shrugged in confusion. “But I suppose it’s at least quicker than driving back. Here.” He held out his hand. “I can take the hammers back to the shed.”
“Thanks,” Sarah replied, handing her sledgehammer over. “By the way, did he bring the car back this time as well?”
David learned to peer out the front door. “Yup.”
“Well, at least it saves us some explaining.” Sarah shrugged.
---
Explanations it seemed, could wait until about two months later, when Sarah’s cousin Isa called them from the library to inform them that the new demonology journals were in, and that David and Sarah were now apparently classified as “demons of unknown abilities and power.”
---
Alcor the Dreambender, the most powerful demon in the world, stared down at the fluffy brown tabby cat seated at his feet.
“Alright,” he conceded. “I will admit, that was well played.”