climb my ribcage to the replays run for you Who: Apep and Set What: He comes. When: Friday night Where: Apep's apartment in Washington, DC Warnings: Possible language, references to violence, Apep and Set.
It is a hard thing, for a serpent to strike slowly.
In nature, they hide in shadows and dark places awaiting their prey until something perfect crosses their path: utter stillness for hours, not a muscle moving, until a lightning-quick strike. But when a snake strikes like lightning every night after the unworthy sun sets and is every night thwarted or gutted like the meanest fish, something happens.
When long years rob the serpent of his power and even his infamy and only the dead will have him, when weakness and failure are what sustains his memory and follow him for all his thousands of years, something amazing happens. The patterns begin to change, and even the serpent learns.
Some hundred years ago he had struck for the last time, and been cast brutally into Duat. It was nearly a century before he clawed his way to the living plane again, and with a newfound sense of self-preservation. A new impulse seized him: to play a different game, the long game, and so he learned patience. Patience taught by repeated, brutal and bloody failure and the promise of impending oblivion. The spitting cobra taught itself to constrict, and the years wore on.
Centuries later, when the rivers ran black with filth and the very sun was a pollution, Apoph of ifset found a glass eye. It was beautiful, a blankly staring thing that made a small child in the store cry, surrounded by silver hands that seemed to grasp as the serpent himself did for something unattainable. Forty dollars made it his, and that night he pushed the smallest lick of power into it. Just a hair, barely enough to sneeze at, but there it was. The smallest amount he could give without exhausting himself in these weaker days. The next day, he did the same thing.
Ten years of nightly prayer and ritual, ten years of pushing a bit of himself into this thing. Ten years, and for five of them he prayed over the crafted eye in his own falsely-made temple, the first place he ever had all to himself, and could be all the stronger in his workings. After ten years, it was no longer a mere piece of misguided artwork- it thrummed with such power that even the dullest mortal would get shivers just looking at it, and burnt skin from touching it.
Ten and so many more years of plans and machinations unfurled before him, and now it all came down to an eye in a box.
He-who-was-slewn-in-evil sat patiently (oh so patiently, now) in his beautiful, meaningless apartment in the capital of a young, bloated country, and waited. The Chaos-child would find a plane ticket on the front seat of his new Ferrari, and in the airport in DC a man with a limo would be waiting for "Sutekh-Apoph." The whole journey would take three hours at the most.