Dead X Rising

"Um, sir?" Cardea said. "The number of the dead just went down."

"Yeah, that happens sometimes." Pluto grunted, not bothering to look up from his spreadsheet. "CPR, usually."

"No, I mean it just went down a *lot*."

"Alright, I'll take a look." Pluto sighed, turning his chair around to face Cardea's screen as he took a sip of coffee. "But how much could it have possibly-"

Cardea created a clump of hawthorn leaves to shield herself as Pluto performed a sudden spit-take.

"WHAT THE FUCK?!"

"Okay, cool, but why are you assuming I had anything to do with it?" Isaac tsked.

"It was your fault the last time something like this happened!" Pluto pointed out with a hiss.

"Accidentally leaving a creature that can tear open holes to the spirit world alive and making hundreds of human souls go "poof" seem like two very different things!" Isaac snapped back.

"Well, if it wasn't you, then who was it?!"

"Would the devil be able to do something like that?" Napoleon piped in from the back.

"Maybe, but the pretentious fuck hasn't shown up to work for a while now." Pluto grunted. "Why?"

"YOU!"

Lucius looked up from his paperwork to find Pluto barging into his office with Svelte politely yet unsuccessfully attempting to stop him.

"Is it really that difficult for people to knock?" Lucius remarked dryly.

"Cut the crap, Lucifer, I want answers!" Pluto slammed a fist down on his desk. "What in your God's name are you doing?!"

Lucius glanced between Pluto and his paperwork with a flat expression.

"Are you blind or is that a trick question?" He paused for a moment. "As an aside, did you just refer to me as "Lucifer"?"

"This is Pluto, the Greco-Roman god of death, sir." Svelte walked up to the desk next to Pluto, gesturing at the incensed deity. "I believe he is only familiar with your pre-human incarnation."

"I see." Lucius squinted at him. "How exactly do you know that, Svelte?"

"We've met before, sir."

"...I'm going to put a pin in that for now, but I'll certainly be asking you for more details when we get the time." Lucius turned his attention back to Pluto. "As for you, I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about."

"Gee, I don't know, maybe the *hundreds of souls that just vanished from the afterlife!*" Pluto snapped. "You're in charge of *hell*, how could you have possibly not noticed anything?!"

"If I may, Pluto, the summoning ritual that incarnated Lucifer as Lucius stripped him of his memories and left him mentally no more than a human." Svelte interjected. "He has yet to regain full control of his abilities."

"...You've got to be kidding me." Pluto pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration. "So now you're useless and I'm back at square one."

"I'd recommend against writing me off that quickly." Lucius stated. "I still hold a fair amount of power in the mortal realm. Do have any ideas as to where the vanished souls may have gone?"

"Unfortunately, no." Pluto grunted. "They're not in anyone else's afterlife and I'd be able to detect their presence if they ended up lost somewhere else in the spirit realm. It's as if they were all somehow resurrected at once."

"Is that a possibility?"

"Shouldn't be." Pluto said. "Truly bringing someone back from the dead is only possible if their soul hasn't properly moved on yet. Short of a massive cataclysm that immediately gets reversed, mass revival simply isn't accomplishable by anything in the mortal realm."

"Have you checked with the other gods to see if any of them were behind it?" Svelte asked.

"First thing I did, though I guess there's no way to know if any of them were lying to me or not." Pluto tsked.