Perhaps one of the hardest parts of adjusting to this new form of mine was that I could no longer buy cigarettes.
 
Before and after each task Puchuu would send me and my sisters on, I would inevitably find myself rifling through my pockets for that telltale packet of sweet, carcinogenic release. It had been a habit, in a past life, to deal with the tribulations of the daily grind with an occasional smoke. Filthy habit, to be sure. But it turned out to be true what they said about the mortality of old habits. It seemed my need to feed was as eternal and undying as this new, young and lithe body I’d found myself in.
 
“Jesus, will you calm down already Helene?” Eileen snarled at me. A fierce young woman built like a small, red-headed and hot-tempered tank: currently sitting on a discarded tire and tightening the boxing tape about her cream-toned hands. She looked up and offered me a crooked grin. “It’s all mental! You’re new body doesn’t want nicotine: you old brain just thinks it does.” I stick my tongue out at her in response and stuff my hands in my pockets, kicking disconsolately at the concrete. While memories of my old life were fuzzy at the best of times, the old subconscious still existed—with all its taboos and kinks. Miss Eileen, Miss ‘Clean Living’, Miss ‘Wake me up at four to go jogging’… not that I objected: the results were all-too-noticeable.
 
“So who’s the perp tonight, Audrey?” I ask our third and final team mate without turning towards her. The reedy bespectacled blonde was leaning against a dumpster further into the alley, seeming to be mesmerizing herself with her own pocket watch. So entranced was she that she apparently didn’t hear me. I turn back and, seeing the resident chronomancer close to full-blown hypnosis, sight and wheel about. Snapping my fingers sharply in her face brings her back to terra firma. “Hi, thanks for joining us.” I deadpan. “Now about the John tonight?” Audrey blinks twice, before silently reaching in to the breast-pocket of her blouse. She pulls free a small pocketbook and flips about expertly within. “Name, ‘Rava’. Hindu demon fresh off the b-“
 
“Hang on, *THE* Rava?”
 
“No, just a fan..” She continues. “This one is fairly minor, but he’s proving troublesome. Something about possessing an elephant at the Metro Zoo. Attacked a handler during a cleaning..”
 
“Ooh, that’s twisted!” Eileen quipped with a snarky chuckle. I glance back at her and roll my eyes. “Puchuu thinks we’re out of the bush-leagues, he’s sending us up against mad elephants and grabby demons, now. I wished I’d known about this before, some homework might have done us good.”
 
“Well no use crying about it, now!” Eileen laughed as she hopped to her feet. She threw a few experimental shadow-punches, each spouting a small gout of flame. Ever the show-off, our Eileen. She turned to the both of us and beamed, clearly excited. “Let’s go hunt a demon, ladies!”
 
The crosstown was uneventful: though three teenaged girls riding a subway in the middle of the night did garner some odd looks. Not that any of us minded—Eileen would meet each ugly sneer with her own cavalier half-cocked rictus, and Audrey was simply too engrossed in her notes to care. I was, as well: looking into what Google might have to say about our soon-to-be friend. “Rava, short for ‘Ravana Dasamukha’…enemy of Rama in the ‘Ramayana—‘
 
“Hey!” Eileen whistled as she bopped her fists against one another idly. “Is it just me, or are hindu names all really repetitive? Rava-yama-hama-lama-dingdong..”
 
Audrey withered her to silence with a sidelong glance, before picking up where I’d left off. “This one isn’t a brickhouse demon-king though, Helene. He’s actually a bit of a chump, if he’s content to play with animals. Still..” She looked up from her phone, giving us each an anxious look. *That* was worrying. “This is far outside the norm for a demon: especially a Hindu one. They’re generally a bit more subtle than this.”
 
I glance to her, biting her lip and giving me a look like a girl who’d just heard a noise under a bed. Then back to Eileen, busily tying copper tumble of locks back into a loose ponytail. Neither hid their anxiety particularly well: Eileen only got chatty and jittery like this when she was nervous, and Audrey looked about to wet her panties. I sighed, rubbing my temples lightly with the balls of my forefingers. “Ladies,” I begin calmly. “I know this is a bit outside out ken. But I’m sure Puchuu wouldn’t have given us this job if He didn’t think we were up to it. So what if we’ve got a demon who can possess man-killing elephants and who-know-what else? It’s not like we haven’t fought worse, right?” The two of them don’t seem as enthused as I am, but at least smile and nod in agreement.
 
We reach the Zoo and scale the brick enclosure. The merely-decorative brick wall would have been a mere hurdle to a rampaging elephant, I uncomfortably muse, but decide to keep that particular thought to myself. Surprisingly, we saw little in the way of security. A few roaming guards, and one sleepy-looking fellow sitting in a overlook above the elephants paddock. He didn’t even seem to notice the three teenaged girls slipping in to the steel-barred pen and wandering about the forms of sleeping behemoths. Elephants, as a rule, were social herd-animals. But rogue bulls shunned the company of others. Even so, it did not take a genius to deduce the snorting and stamping lone bull, separated from the rest of the herd, was probably the culprit. He eyed us beadily as we approached his caged-off region, coolly appraising with tiny black-marble eyes. “Well?” Eileen mused aloud, flexing her fingers and eyeing him back in turn. “We could just blast him here, but that doesn’t seem sporting.”
 
“That doesn’t matter; let’s just get this over with.” I mutter. I swagger back a step and shout aloud “Reighten Mein Sturm! Kyaaa!” as energy crackles around me. Blue and purple arcs bound between my hands, and my hair wildly stands on end: all while the raw ether coalesces into the form of a long, thin and blunt-edged beidenhander. Having gathered my energies and called forth Donnerschlag, I point the weapon at the ground-pawing elephant and grunt. “Drop!” Together Eileen and I blasted him through the cage.
 
It might have worked, but the monstrous elephant reared it’s trunk and inhaled loudly in a sound like an inverted wind tunnel. Our attack was rendered completely moot. Eileen swore, “Mother of—“
 
“[YOUR MOTHER CANNOT HELP YOU, MORTAL]” roared the beast in a soul-shaking baritone. “[YOU ARE IN THE GRIP OF MIGHTY RAVA, NOW.]” Lumbering forward the beast ripped the bars of it’s cage away, scattering us like leaves. Audrey muttered a brief incantation and held her watch aloft, encapsulating it into a chrono-lock. But it was a costly maneuver, magic-wise. “G-get him *out* of there!” She growled, sweating from the exertion of maintaining the spell. Neither of us needed any more invitation. Eileen uttered an ululating battlecry and fell upon the elephant with a brutal knee-drop, while I leapt upon its skull with the point of my blade aimed center of it’s skull. The full force of the twin-assault crumpled the dumb brute: it fell to its knees and trumpeted piteously in a final death-rattle.
 
Audrey sighed and slumped visibly, and Eileen was in the process of whooping loudly, when the carcass of the brute deflated before our eyes. From it’s trunk slid an filthy unguent, growing and rippling as it grew in the form of a broad-shouldered mammoth with many heads and arms. “[YOU FORCE ME TO TAKE THIS FORM]” it rumbled, twelve eyes flaring angrily at our small trio. “[I’LL BREAK YOU FOR YOUR INSOLENCE.]” It stomped forward and swung a first at Eileen, who dodged the swing and countered with a barrage of savage jabs. Rava howled for his singed fur, responding to her blows with a furious blind backhand. Eileen flew back with a cry, and would have been ended there by his wild stomping had I not intervened. Sliding forward I parried his crushing footfall and, with a mighty heave, threw his foot away. “Back to Hell with you!” I scream as I leap up and snatch at the fur on his chest. Stabbing into the knotted muscled abdomen of the thuggish creature I cry to the Heaven, bringing the point through Rava twice, thrice and once more for effect. It only seemed to make him mad”, though. Rava casually tossed me aside, bellowing in a furor at our continued existence.
 
“Big Hoss..” Eileen coughed as she crawled towards me. Audrey quickly followed, panic in her eyes. “We can’t beat him!  He’s just throwing our magic back!” Her sobbing was throwing all three of our nerves to jumbles; making it hard to concentrate. “Think.. Think!” I mutter to myself, when an idea strikes me. “Audrey, focus your chronomancy on a bubble, just around Rava’s head accelerate the time as fast as you can!” Gesturing to Eileen I make a circular motion with my fingers  I point at the ground around him  and slam my fist down in the palm. “I need a cage on this guy, Eileen, if you think you can manage it!”
 
They seemed to grasp the gist of the plan. Eileen leapt forward and slammed a fist in to the ground, conjuring a ring of flames about the demon. Audrey closed her eyes and spun her watch about in a whirlwind-arc to encapsulate Rava’s pendulous center-right dome in a barely-shimmering globe of time. He roared in fury, but could not cross to avenge himself on us for the flames. And as he roared, his voice from within the globe grew weaker: the fur about his muzzle grayer and longer, the flesh more shriveled. His eyes sank in the great sockets of that skull. The roar turned to a wail, then a whimper, then silence. The skull crumbled from Rava’s trunk of a body, and the remaining five skulls shrieked a cacophonic paean of Loss. “Even Demons feel pain, it seems,” Audrey observed as she pushed up her glasses.
 
“If he can feel pain, maybe he can feel fear. C’mon, Helene!” Eileen gave a terrible banshee-wail and leapt the wall of fire, driving her fist into the hanging left-most jaw. The force exploded in a nimbus of smoke and flame, sending the demon-mammoth reeling across the threshold she had laid. A heartbeat later I came behind, diving from above and burying the point of Donnerschlag hilt-deep into the eye of the right-most visage. It was true, it seemed, that demons could fear, for Rava’s bellows of wrath turned to pleas for mercy on his tongue. “[MERCY]” he cried from his two remaining mouths, falling back on and raising six hubcap-sized palms in penance. “[HAVE MERCY ON A LOST SOUL]”
 
“Sorry, fresh out!” Eileen laughed in triumph. She raised her balled fists high and brought them low on his chest to erupt once more on a halo of fire. The two of us flew back from the concussive force, landing in a heap at Audrey’s feet. Coolly she removed her glasses and wiped them clean. “That went better than expected. Good job.” Kneeling down she helped us both to our feet: Eileen bruised and singed, myself already mending from the blow. We look over to Rava—what remained of Him—and slumped against the wall in exhaustion.  Eileen blew a raspberry and rolled her stiff neck, “Puchuu had better appreciate this. We could all be demon-chow right now!” I glance at her and groan tiredly, sinking my hands into my pockets..
 
“Still no cigarettes.”