‘Goddammit Ez.’

Things were going so well, they were really managing to get through this with only negligible problems. His friends weren’t suspicious so much as they were curious and both he and Ezraphel managed to field the hard questions. At least he assumed as much, the story of her coming from an isolated village reminiscent of the Amish was last minute (as most of his brilliant ideas usually are). The problem Stanley had with thinking of a background for Ezraphel before was that he thought she would have to be part of modern society.

It was only when they were listening to a pair of radio hosts talking about one of his favorite comedians Dave Chappelle being attacked at one of his shows that the idea eventually struck him. In one of his recent Netflix special Dave did a joke about the Amish and how they didn’t use technology. That’s when the idea struck him: Ezraphel didn’t have to be part of modern society in the first place. So pulling over the side of the road for a bit he started doing some last minute research into the Amish and other communities like them.

He ended up coming across the term ‘Plain People’ which is a term used to describe communities that are characterized by their simple living and nonconformity to the modern world. Think 19^th century farmers in the modern era. The most recognized of these groups are the Amish but there are a bunch of other communities like that all over and they are something of a protected group as well. Some of them don’t even use national IDs and the government has to pass special inclusive policies just for them that don’t infringe on their rights.

It was freaking perfect and the more he thought about it the more it would make sense for Ezraphel to be part of this kind of community. Not necessarily the Amish but an isolated community of ‘Plain People’ so far off the grid it would be like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. Ezraphel had gotten acclimated to modern earth well enough to point where she doesn’t look at everything like it’s foreign but Stanley can admit that there was something about the way she acted, spoke and generally interact with people in public that was a little uncanny.

Her values, attitude, speech pattern and overall behavior were still at odds with most people’s modern sensibilities making her seem strange or eccentric at best and suspicious at worst like someone putting on an act. At least the latter would be true if people assumed she was a person raised in normal society. But if she came from some random community isolated and separated from modern society then her quirks would be more easily accepted.

Now crafting Ezraphel’s background from this was the easy part, the hard part was getting Ezraphel from this hypothetical place to his backyard. And it had to be this way because his friends know him too well to think that he would willingly bring some random woman into his house. Stan knew for a fact that if Ezraphel hadn’t been passed out in his backyard she wouldn’t have made it into his house without strong opposition.

This was where the cracks started to show in the story.

Ezraphel running away from home to explore the wider world was plausible as well as her getting to Stanley’s city. The sequence of events that led her to stumbling drunk into his yard was less plausible but conveniently she didn’t have to know how she stumbled into his yard since she was blackout drunk. All that mattered was that when she woke up she was in his living room and the rest was an abridged history.

…does it need to be mentioned that Ezraphel was using her charm magic to make them believe the story?

Stanley still felt a bit skeevy about it but at least they had a good enough foundation for it to work on even if said foundation was essentially the plot to a TV show. The point was that everything was going great so naturally the universe decided to balance the karmic scales. Ezraphel in true Ezraphel fashion went and ruined it by prioritizing his health over the plan.

Why? Why would she do this?

Because she’s a decent person who cares for his well being?

As flattering and adorable as that is it was also creating unnecessary drama. Plus it’s not like a single weekend of having takeout meals was going to do anything to him. Ezraphel once boasted that he could literally chug a bottle of deadly poison and it wouldn’t affect him in the slightest. He wasn’t just an Incubus he was a Lilim’s Incubus and that meant something. In addition to being the perfect embodiment of the male form in a compact package Stan was functionally immortal and virtually invincible with Ezraphel around.

Fucking takeout food wasn’t going to crack that!

Of course Ezraphel was very much aware of this and it took a single sentence for Stanley to realize what her play was and he didn’t like it. Part of the reason why was because of the aforementioned unnecessary drama but the other part was because it brought more attention to them (her in particular) than needed. Most importantly now they had to drive to the local Wal-Mart to shop for ingredients. Since it was Ezraphel’s idea and she was the only quasi-professional chef among them she had to go with. Stanley was unfortunately the only one with a car plus he didn’t trust Ezraphel alone in any shopping center so he too had to go.

That should have been it but shockingly Jamie and Kendall volunteered to go as well.

Why?

He had no idea but it was both a blessing and a curse because while the two were the closest to him out of everyone in the group now he couldn’t properly scold Ezraphel. It was a problem that wasn’t being helped by the ‘innocent’ self satisfied smile she was sporting.

How dare she smile like that while creating problems for him!?

“So how long have you two known my Stanley?”

If he wasn’t currently driving Stanley’s head would have hit the steering wheel in exasperation.

‘This woman is determined to fuck everything up isn’t she?’

“About four years now. Jamie’s known him longer, he introduced us.”

“Oh?” Ezraphel positioned herself to look over the back of the car seat to Jamie who met her gaze blandly “and how did you meet my Stanley?”

…
Technically Jamie knew Stan for far longer than they’ve interacted with each other. Specifically he’s known Stan for over a decade now through his YouTube channel AwesomeEpicGaming. Stan is one of the most prolific gaming content creators on YouTube having started uploading since the early years of the site and is one of the few lucky ones from that early generation to maintain their relevancy in these modern times. Jamie has been a fan of Stan’s channel since middle school, in fact Stan was one of the major inspirations for him starting his own channel. Of course things have changed and he’s grown from a fledgling gaming channel to a variety channel that offers more than just gaming content in general.

As for how he got to actually meet Stan it was a funny story actually.

As a content creator Jamie has differentiated himself from most by putting out some truly niche content and was always looking out for things that caught his eye. One day while playing an old FPS shooter on Twitch he got into conversation with his audience through chat as he always did and something was brought to his attention. See aside from this particular game being very popular and a major part of the childhood for a lot of gamers as well as being an important part of gaming history it was also notorious for its difficulty.

In fact the game was so difficult there existed to date not a single online documentation of a person that was able to beat the game at its highest difficulty in a single playthrough. That did not sit right with Jamie and so using the power of his clout and bank account he issued a challenge to gamers far and wide: complete the campaign of this game at the highest difficulty in a single playthrough without any deaths. It has to be live streamed, there can be no third party cheats implemented only glitches and bugs already present in the game and you can’t abuse the autosave feature.

The prize for this challenge was initially $5000 however it soon became clear that he underestimated just how difficult the challenge really was. No one could get past the first level, Jamie himself couldn’t even get past the second area of the first level. So he quadrupled the bounty to $20,000 both as an acknowledgement of the difficulty as well as to get more people interested. It turned out to be the best decision he’s made that year as hundreds of people doing thousands of streams attempted the challenge.

It even got media attention with articles written in game journals, small news coverage and was the hot topic for a week on the internet. The game franchise saw a resurgence with sales increasing as people bought digital copies to try their hand at winning $20,000. Most of them amounted to nothing but the real content came from the speed running circuit. It was less about the money for them and more about proving who was the best and cement themselves as legends.

Funny thing about it was none of the big YouTube and Twitch gamers counted among the top contenders. Almost everyone who made significant progress were speed runners and glitch hunters relatively unknown to mainstream. Amusingly enough there were quite a few people who have never even done live streams until just then rising to prominence based on the skill shown in their attempts at the game.

This wasn’t shocking to Jamie in fact it was totally expected because he knew that most big gaming content creators and streamers weren’t prominent because of their gaming skills as much as their ability to entertain the masses. So imagine his surprise when a familiar name came up in conversation in regards to the challenge. The channel was AwesomeEpicGaming and it made an announcement that it would be attempting the challenge.

Now this was actually a pretty big deal for Jamie not just because he’s been a fan of AwesomeEpicGaming since he was in middle school but because it was also the first time the person behind the channel was doing a livestream. Needless to say he wasn’t the only ‘old head’ to watch it and the man didn’t disappoint. Sure he didn’t show his face and made a bunch of mistakes expected of a first time streamer but it was all made up by his playthrough.

Stan didn’t just beat the challenge he slaughtered it, paraded its corpse across the internet like a trophy and hung it up as a monument to further cement his greatness. It was absolutely nuts and it left Jamie near speechless with how beautifully he completed the challenge. Of course given the seeming ease with which he did it there were naysayers. So for the rest of the stream and in the coming days he proceeded to beat it on each available platform to him going so far as to crank out ye old X-Box 360 doing both the original and remastered versions.

It was the greatest thing Jamie has ever witnessed and gameplay aside the man himself despite keeping his face hidden with masks and blind camera angles was quite entertaining. He explained each and every method of approach, every known and unknown bugs and every exploitable glitch than can be utilized to complete the challenge as smoothly and quickly as possible. When he wasn’t being a gaming god he entertained chat with his clever wit that has been deliberately censored due to him not wanting to be banned before he could get the job done.

Jamie knew from the first stream he wanted to be friends with him and it just so happened that Stan was a fan of Jamie’s content and dry wit. After Jamie forked over his money AEG proceeded to donate it all in installments to the streamers who completed the challenge after him. That only increased Jamie’s respect and after reaching out the two would continue communications through private Discord chats. Before long Jamie learned his real name and the two would do collaborations together every once in a while. Stan even made some guest appearances on Jamie’s podcast.

…

“…and we’ve been friends ever since” Jamie finished his tale.

Immediately after Jamie finished Ezraphel swatted at Stan.

“Ow?”

“Why didn’t you tell me you had a friend?” she accused.

“Why did you assume I didn’t?” he shot back.

Her eyes narrowed “you know why.”

He rolled his eyes “I didn’t say anything because you’d want to meet him and you wouldn’t be satisfied with face time so you’d pester me about an irl meeting and I did not want to bother Jamie.”

“I wouldn’t mind” Jamie shrugged.

“Shut up Jamie you’re not involved in this.”

“I’m feeling pretty involved.”

“Oh look at that we’re here” Kendall informed as they turned into the Wal-Mart parking lot.

“This conversation isn’t over Stanley” Ezraphel huffed.

“It never is” he muttered in response.

Jamie and Kendall shared a look with the former commenting “I think we might be witnesses to a domestic incident.”

“Uh huh” Kendall muttered before they left the car.