impervious — Roleplayer Guild

Andrew lifted up the green sheet to inspect the body. It was a young girl, who’d died in a car crash. It had been a tragic accident, and caused by a drunk driver. All her wounds had been stitched up, and she looked peaceful, as if she was just sleeping.

Sighing, he reached over to the table and got the disinfectant. The techniques of embalming had changed dramatically over the centuries, and he had to say, it was a lot less squeamish now then back in Ancient Egypt. There was no brain scooping for one thing.

Massaging her muscles gently, he felt the tense knots relax. His hands were quick and deft in their movements, and he wondered idly whether he could take on a job as a masseuse if he wanted to. 

He looked up as Hel came in, a smartphone pressed to her ear and a rare anger expressed on her face. Rather than saying anything, she was deathly quiet, placing a stray curly lock behind her ear as she listened patiently for the other to finish. She didn’t bother to even glance at her employee, but rather stalked the room, her heels clacking against the floor and her pencil skirt and button-up looking odd amongst the corpses of the room.

“No, you listen here you douchebag.” Hel finally hissed into the phone, grabbing at the table to lean her weight on as she scowled at whatever the other said. “I will bury you! You hear me? If you even think I’ll let you near my daughter after you slept with that mediocre, bimbo slut than you have another thing coming, Kent. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a job to do, unlike you I actually work instead of getting blown by a goddamn secretary!”

Hel hung up the phone, slamming it onto the table, not even flinching when an audible crack was heard. It was only then that she seemed to notice Anubis’ presence and she straightened herself up, repositioning her blazer and smoothing down the rage-wrinkles on her forehead. As if a switch was flipped, her face went from the revenge-depraved desperation that only a scorned woman could possess to a passive coldness, radiating business and brevity. 

“Andrew,” She said, her voice carefully controlled with neither a quiver nor an influx of volume, “How is the girl? Any complications? The funeral is in a day or two.”

Her eyes glanced around the funeral home. It was a pristinely white room with a perpetual chill, to keep the bodies well preserved, and no decorations except for a kitten hanging from a string with the words “hang in there” could be seen. Hel hated that picture with a passion, but kept it around in order to ease her daughter when she came around. The air was dry and light, and the rather cheap light fixtures that hung from the ceiling on sturdy chains were harsh and bright, like the annoying ones found in hospitals and mentally-unstable homes. The room was occupied with long, thin, silver metal tables in which blue corpses slept. Overall, the room reminded Hel of death, but not the dark cold death that she was used to.

Andrew nodded, face blank but eyes betraying his concern as he looked sideways at Helena. She’d been doing this more often as of late, screaming down her phone and then acting as if nothing had happened. It worried him just how much more tired she looked, when she thought that he wasn’t looking. 

“It’s coming along fine. She’ll be ready for the funeral in no time at all.” Hands gently moving the girls mouth into a neutral expression, he peeled off his gloves and face mask. It was just as he was setting everything back into place when he felt it. It was like a cold wave that washed over him, loss, despair, and the acrid tang of death that lingered in his mouth long after it had passed. 

He stumbled in shock, and looked towards Hel in alarm, mouth agape.

“Did you...did you feel that?” 

Hel’s breath swept out from her and she leaned onto one of the gurneys, her brown hair falling into her blue eyes. Anubis’ words barely registered in her ears, but a vague understanding dawned on her and she nodded, swallowing heavily around the lump in her throat, “Yes.”

He furrowed his brow and tried to pinpoint the source of that sudden swell of power. A god, certainly, but not a minor one. As it dissipated, he chased after last remaining tendrils, and recoiled when he found a void in which there once was knowledge and power and strength.

“It was Odin. Or at least, I think it was. Can you tell?” He was going to start rambling at any minute, he just knew it, and he clamped his mouth shut, chewing on his bottom lip nervously.

“Odin?” Hel muttered, reaching into the depths of her thoughts, trying to remember Odin’s godliness that had been ingrained in her mind since she was a child. She remembered everything about him, to his domineering personality to the stench of war that radiated from him. Hel smiled a terrifying grin, bringing a perfectly manicured nail to her lips and gnawed at the tip. “Yes, yes it is Odin.”

Then, to herself, she mumbled, “Odin’s gone.” The two words were uttered with such relieving glee and horrifying satisfaction.

Anubis frowned at her and hit her arm gently. “Helena! If you’re not going to be sympathetic, at least think about what could have done this. There’s hardly anything that can kill a god, even as a human.”

He knew that she had good reason to hate the god, there was no doubt about that. But it had freaked him out, that sudden wash of death. It was something that he hadn’t felt in a millenia, and it had brought back memories of his time as god, when that feeling had been almost constant. Part of the job description. Feeling it now had immediately set off warning bells in his mind, and he suddenly really wanted a glass of water to wash that taste out of his mouth.
“There isn’t much we can do, Anubis.” Hel said after a moment of silence, crossing her arms over her chest. “Let’s leave it to the other gods...the gods who haven’t moved on to another life. I don’t have time to endanger my children while messing around with a dead godking.”

Anubis sighed, resigned to the fact that she didn’t want any part in anything that might happen. He had just turned back to organising the tools, when the door swung open. Except it wasn’t just the door back into the main area of the funeral home anymore. A large hall could be seen, far too large and grandiose for his tastes, but the aura flooding off it was unmistakeable.

His hushed whisper was disbelieving. “Asgard…?”

Hel nearly startled at the sound of the door opening, but managed to keep the surprise down with the help of instant disdain as the familiarity washed over her. Asgard was never her home - Odin made that perfectly clear - but it belonged to a past life that Hel really did not want to return to. But she knew what the opening of the door meant: she no longer had a choice. Knowing that Odin was dead, she could turn away from it and never give it another thought, except when she needed a nice pick-me-up from a long, exhausting day. Being summoned by the other deities? That was bad news of itself.

“Why can’t we just be left alone?” Hel sighed in resignation, smoothing back her hair as she began to approach the door. She turned to look at her employee, offering a small, reluctant smile. “Well? Are you coming?”

Hurrying to stand at her side, he nodded, fiddling with his shirt. “Yup. All ready to go.” 

And they both walked through into the hall, joining the other gods who were stepping hesitantly out of their own doors. It was exactly as he remembered, reminiscent of a time long since past. His feet carried him towards an empty chair, and he nodded absent mindedly to various faces that he recognised. As he sat, he turned his head to talk to Hel.

“That’s Tyr isn’t it? Been awhile since I saw him around.”

“Hmm.” Hel acknowledged, nodding her head slightly to confirm his suspicions. “Looks like he never replaced his hand, or lack thereof. My brother will be excited to see him...I just hope he won’t start something, today has been exhausting as it is.”

Hel leaned back into her seat, scanning the other deities around the table. She saw some that she recognized, more that she didn’t - or didn’t care to try to know - and Hel smiled smugly, feeling rather superior to the lowlifes that some of them had become. Hel didn’t bother looking for her family, knowing that they would come to her when they felt like it.

The murmurs of the deities around him were hushed as Tyr started to speak. Anubis’ eyes were immediately drawn to the cloaked statue beside him, narrowing with suspicion at what it might be. 

When Janus showed him to be Odin, he was hardly surprised, but his lips tightened. It wasn’t a pretty sight, and he turned back to Tyr to listen to the rest of his speech.
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