9Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea ~ "The Devil in the Details"
by Dash O'Pepper
Author's Notes: Based on the third season episode "Day of Evil" (#3.06) by William Welch.
• While this story may be read as a stand-alone, familiarity with C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters is recommended.
• This story was originally posted for a "Monster Challenge" under a different pseudonym on a site that no longer exists.
• This story may also be found on AO3.
My Dear Wormwood,
It never ceases to amaze me: the hubris of young dæmons like yourself. Is it merely the curriculum of Iberot, growing stale with the passage of millennia, or are you truly so filled with your own pomposity at the correctness of your position that you fail to realise that as far as these bipedal animals are concerned there is nothing that our infernal ministers haven't already attempted?
Despite your failure during your last manifestation on that accursed planet and your subsequent remediation, at my urging you were assigned to what should have been a relatively easy post: the SSRN Seaview, whose berth, I might add, is only a short distance from a city we have held under our thrall for close to a century.
And what have you suggested? What has your recent communiqué been? More of the same; more of the same.
Nephew, that you would even undertake such a foolish gambit, puts me in, shall we say, an indelicate position.
At least your time in the re-education level has made you realise that these two-legged animals have long since evolved beyond accepting us as reptilian, flying beasts with snarling jaws and dripping fangs. That was passé by the Age of Enlightenment. Our manifestations have been far more mundane during the last half-century…from an innocuous paper hanger to a scholarly man of letters who would topple a dynasty: we have merely reflected their society's ills back upon them. Pity that their simple minds cannot comprehend our true forms or natures until that day when they are inexorably ours, but their base character is such that they are mindless fools and lemmings unable to grasp the simplest of concepts.
Your decision to appear to the hu-man named Nelson as a distorted illusion of himself was well conceived. There is none so blind, as he who cannot view his own faults. However, your whole premise was flawed. It is not within our power to stack the deck, as it were, against them. Nephew, you caused the damage in their puny reactor room; it was not their own incompetence in handling powers for which they have no understanding. By that one wilful decision, you negated years of careful preparation by those of our legions who have gone before.
Did you lay out the terms of the bargain you struck with Nelson? As the law governs our great enemy, we are also governed by laws—laws which we in the nether regions must also obey. Nelson's sacrifice of his soul was selfless, and such offers are useless to us. Your ill-formed conclusion to use him to trigger a nuclear holocaust was wasted, in so far that you created the original situation in the first place: you were putting his soul into the enemy's camp! And because of that mistake, you cost us the soul of the one known as Crane, as well. And his would have been a feast for the ages.
While fear of nuclear war is a tremendous motivating factor for them to come with eyes open into our realms, the actual atomic holocaust itself would secure us nothing. Certainly, our hunger in the present might be assuaged, but it would be only a temporary solution. A dead cinder on the outer rim of Mutter's Spiral, would mean that our own mal-edil would be forced to search for food in other regions. And like all mal-edil, we guard our territories jealously. How much better by far for them to continue building their weapons of mass destruction; polluting their waters and air; gutting their natural resources—we will continually have souls upon souls to play with as their devastation and realisation of all they have lost become apparent.
Your failure, my dear poppin, means that you cannot be trusted with even the simplest of tasks. The council has recommended your immediate withdrawal from Terra, and your superiors will be pleasured by what can only be described as your retooling.
With kindest regards, I remain your most affectionate and ravenous uncle,
Screwtape
~ Finis ~
© 2015 Dash O'Pepper
Disclaimers: The characters of Wormwood and Screwtape are owned by the estate of C.S. Lewis, and have been used in homage to this great English author. Mutter's Spiral is a trademark and copyright of BBC Studios. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is a registered trademark of Twentieth Century-Fox Television Inc., Cambridge Productions Inc., and Irwin Allen Properties LLC. All rights reserved. This work of fanfiction is not meant in any way to infringe on copyrights already held by these companies, their subsidiaries, and/or their estates. The plot of this fanfiction is the property of its author.