We're All Human

No Other Name

He found that if he imparted a true understanding of himself in some target, that they would become similar to him. The first target so converted was his wife, and the next were his children. Each person he converted in turn converted him, sharing with him an understanding of the hybrid nature. With each new person added to the soup, humanity was stretched, reduced to its basest form, and each member became more and more similar to oneanother. He bred and converted and mingled and within three generations there was no more John. There were a mass of people who were all Wareware. When his original body died, the more benign uses of the magic died with it. All that was left was the Pact-- one favor, done for someone in full understanding of the consequences, to replace them with Wareware.

The village of Warewares that sprung from the original was eventually burnt down by people accusing the inhabitants of witchcraft. Most Wareware killed themselves, but a few survived and made their way west over many years.

The invention of the telephone was how the world was to be ended. Previously, Pacts could only be done face to face. But, I suppose in much the way MMori could read thoughts over voice communication, so too could Wareware make Pacts over the phone lines. He expanded rapidly, seeking... to destroy the whole of humanity, replacing it with copies of himself. He hates that there are people who aren't him, who think their own private thoughts. You heard him, the preacher and the heckler in the CoU. He's everywhere. He's American churches, he's Japanese corporations...

He is French charity groups, and that is where Angele steps into this sad, human drama.

She was a woman of infinite grace and forgiveness. A child of a single mother, who worked her way through college, returning to the streets that she had once fled from as an aid worker.

Wareware no longer feels romantic love like a human does. I don't know if it ever did. But at the same time, that twisted psyche is capable of a certain... facination. Many of the best-placed Wareware are the physical bodies of humans Wareware found so fascinating, and Angele was the next on the list. Wareware most often forms Pacts with cultists willing to believe anything-- to subsume themselves in his will without asking a thing-- or else businessmen desperate for money and status more than their own lives-- or else suicides who were headed that way anyway.

Angele was none of those. She was a charitable and selfless person who was perfectly self-assured and perfectly happy. But those are only Wareware's usual victims because they are simple. Angele merely took more effort to crack. Wareware constructed an identity. A poet, I suppose, handsome, charming, kind--

It is not hard to compel a young woman to fall in love, given the accumulated experience of every Wareware victim over the last seven hundred and change years, especially when you are possibly the greatest liar to ever have lived.

And when she did, that is when her life was forfeit. Everything that supported her aside from that charming poet was removed, one by one, seemingly innocuously. Family members died. Friends moved away. Her work with the poor, even, was sabotaged. But the charming poet stayed with her through it all. How could she not fall more and more in love with him?

And then he was sick. I'm not sure if he was actually sick or if that was part of Wareware's  game, too. And on his death bed he told the selfless girl who loved him that there was a way he could survive. She just had to agree to contract with him.

The girl named Angele put off the decision for a full day. When she came back, she managed to convince him to promise her something in advance, without knowing what it was until it was too late. She said that this was how she would know that he spoke truly.

And her wish was this-- that the demon, Wareware, be allowed a chance at a normal life, free from the aeons of accumulated hate and suffering. I suppose that she reasoned that if Wareware could play the part of the charming poet, that she might be able to make that illusion reality. Or... maybe she just wanted... I don't know. I can't know.

Dante's voice broke, choked with tears.

The demon that was born in the girl's body wasn't Wareware. It wasn't the charming poet that she had dreamed about, either. It was me. I was the demon that was born through the girl called Angele's life.

I killed the man who had pretended to be the charming poet, my past self as it was. That is the first act I performed with my new life.

Dante was sobbing now.

I tried to find out how she had... outwitted, Wareware. For a long time. At some point in the day that she had waited, she had made contact with a group. That group needs me. Angele... I think would want me to do this.

I tracked them down to your site. To CASH. To Black Alley Stories.

I was sure that you and your friends would be that group, but you weren't. The boy, Glass, I tried, but now...

"It's over," Dante said. "They're part of Wareware now, I'm sure of it. And with MMori's powers, let alone whatever connections Mud and Vlad can bring to the table, he's unbeatable.