D.E.M.O.N.S: Getting Summoned Weekly isn't so Bad

— Kat —

A bit more discussion revealed that the girls all wanted to get to the bottom of this. It wasn’t about efficiency anymore, it was about sending a message. Of course, while Hedera would never admit it, she was also just happen to do something arguably low stakes. The fact Kat was willing to ‘waste time’ made it easier to be around the demon and Hedera felt herself starting to relax a bit.

The got right back to testing a few more doors. Various forms of shadow ‘enhancement’, different placements of Kat’s hands but nothing seemed to work. They’d even tried layering on a bunch of soaking wet paper as a sort of poor man’s paper mâché. The lack of glue was a bit of a hindrance but things were still going wrong… until Hedera gave a suggestion. It was spoken softly, almost as if she wasn’t sure if she wanted Kat and Lily to hear it… but they were both high Rank and right next to her so the whispers were quite audible. “What if we use the broken doors?”

“What do you mean?” asked Kat.

“Well… I mean…” Hedera sucked in a deep breath and raised her voice. “Why are we relying on… no offense Lily, but paper of somewhat questionable strength. The doors are prone to falling apart sure but can’t we simply… put them together somehow? I worry they might still be prone to falling off the wall with the extra weight… but a second layer of wood, or two or three layers would all help stop the door itself from falling apart,”

“I don’t see why not…” started Kat.

“Though let’s see if adding nails to the door will break it first,” cut in Lily. “No sense in doing anything fancy if the door will break at the first nail introduced.” Kat gave Lily a nod and a salute before running back down the hallway to gather one of the previously broken doors.

It didn’t take long for Kat to pick up the scraps and make it to the next door they were going to test. Kat picked out one of the hinges and pulled the nail from its place resting in the metal brace. From there she gently placed it on the wood… before slamming it into the door with the palm of her hand. Once it was in, Kat glanced over at Lily. “Did that work?”

“Um… well I didn’t FEEL anything weird,” said Lily after a second of double checking. “The door seems to still be in place and I didn’t notice any pieces of space shift at all… so I’m going to say this DID work,”

“Alright so what’s the plan?” asked Kat. “I can run off and grab a bunch of the old doors… but what exactly are we doing here? Too much weight on the main door is still a potential issue that we’ll need to deal with,”

“Um… I’m not sure I’m strong enough to just… hammer the nails right in so it might be best if I just go grab stuff?” said Hedera a bit uncertain.

“I can handle that part,” said Lily. “My shadows are certainly strong enough for it even if my hands aren’t… which I haven’t checked. Anyway… I think we need something over the hinges as well. Not sure if we want one big plank or two smaller ones just over the hinges on the wall. Do we want to cover the hinges on the doors as well?”

“Probably should,” added Kat. “Anyway, you two work on that and I’ll be back,”

Hedera reached out towards Kat for a moment as she sprinted away before aborting the motion halfway through and looking to Lily. “Um… right… so… do you need me to hold something in place?”

“I think we need to figure out what we’re doing first,” admitted Lily with a sigh. “The way I see it, we could use minimal wood. Stuff just around the handle and the hinges and hope that’s enough. Alternatively we could cover the whole door… I’m also wondering if we want to have slithers of wood at the bottom to ‘support’ the door. The worry is that if we do that it’ll pop the door upwards and break things… but the worry is that if we don’t do that the door will fall down,”

“Um… well…” Hedera glanced at the tunnel as Kat ran back with more wood. Apparently the ‘two minutes per door’ thing only worked on new doors? Or maybe it helped that they were staying in place because Kat seemed to be making good time by herself.

“Here’s the first four doors I found,” said Kat, shocking Hedera and Lily. That was… much more than they’d thought. They both glanced at the pile of wood in Kat’s arms only for her to drop it alongside two more doors from her bracelet.

“Ah, I thought you weren’t carrying enough,” said Lily as she watched this. “Still… should be enough to get started. How much more are you grabbing?”

“Eh… probably just one more set for the moment?” answered Kat before she sprinted off again and Lily sighed.

“I bet she just doesn’t want to help with this…” Lily groaned. “Whatever. How careful should we be about the weight? Should we just test it out light and work our way up if things don’t work out?”

“Um… I think adding the little bits of wood at the bottom are a good idea but still going light on to start otherwise,” said Hedera.

“Alright, I can agree with that let’s get started,” agreed Lily. Soon things were going smoothly. Lily would first position the wood with one of her many shadow hands, before getting Hedera to hold the wood in place and then slamming a nail into place.

When Kat returned and Lily was fixing everything up, the Memphis pondered out loud. “I think this might be the intended solution… or if not THE intended solution then one of them,”

“Why is that?” asked Hedera. “It seems… a bit… questionable honestly,”

“Wasn’t this your idea?” retorted Kat.

“I mean it was,” said Hedera nervously, nearly letting go of the bit of wood in her hand before correct it swiftly. “But… well I only had the idea because Lily thought to use paper. I didn’t think it would actually work but I… well it just seemed like the next step I suppose? So um…” Hedera glanced at Lily as she hammered the nail in place. “I’m wondering why you think this is intended…”

“The nails are too long,” said Lily.

“What?” asked Hedera.

Lily pulled the nails from the pile Kat had left them and showed off two of them side by side. One set of nails were short, stubby and perhaps a bit shorter than thumb length. The other was massive and was about the size of Hedera’s whole hand, middle finger to palm base.

“You see,” Lily began. “There is no real reason for these nails to be as long as they are. At least, with the standard door construction. The shorter ones are so they don’t poke out of the back of the door… but the ones set into the wall? These are EXCESSIVE. Especially considering how easy the wall let them go when the door is disrupted.

“That implies to me these are meant to be used to hammer other bits of wood onto the door, or at least, that they CAN. I don’t think it’s a particularly fair test, and I have no idea who would notice something like this… but because of your suggestion it became sort of obvious.

“My original plan was to sort of… hit the nails in halfway? Like hit them in from the outside at an angle. It wouldn’t be perfect but I had assumed, clearly falsely, that the nails wouldn’t be long enough. The fact that they are is weird,”

“I can confirm that,” added Kat. “I wasn’t thinking about it before but I did enough repairs at the orphanage when I was growing up to realise Lily is right. It’s really weird for those nails to be so long when they’re just for a door,”

“Wait… you grew up in an orphanage?” asked Hedera as she placed another bit of wood against the door. This one was situated over the doorknob, making sure it pressed the metal up against the rest of the wood and Lily had made sure it was somewhat oversized.

“Yup,” acknowledged Kat. “I was there for as long as I can remember… and I was one of the people that never quite found a chance to get adopted,”

“Oh… um… I’m sorry?” said Hedera a little uncertainly.

Kat shrugged. “Eh, I don’t remember ever being too upset by it and I’m plenty happy with how things turned out. Getting past over a bunch of times might have hurt when I was younger… but technically I wasn’t.

“Gramps tried to keep kids… ‘flowing’ through the orphanage. Help them come to terms with things as best he could and then help the kids find a new home before the orphanage became home you know? Of course, sometimes it happens and I was, or I guess still am depending on how you look at it, the longest resident of the place if you exclude Gramps,”

“Huh…” mumbled Hedera not really sure what to say about learning that.

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