Eau de Mauvais Choix
Eau de Mauvais Choix is the première Infernal perfume. It’s distilled from only the finest, most refined souls whose poor life choices rebounded in a manner that managed to wreck everybody else’s lives around them, too. Hell’s Le Nez won’t even look at a prospective soul as possible raw materials unless it managed to drag at least twenty other mortals down with it when its mortal comeuppance finally came. And, at that, ninety-nine percent of the souls are permanently used up in the process.
But the haut monde consider the end result worth it — even for the barbarically astronomical price that a bottle of Mauvais typically goes for. Demons universally find the scent sutbly intoxicating. Even affirming. It certainly feeds into the demonic self-image of being, at the end of the day, simply superior to those detestable talking monkeys. And never mind what He says.
So it’s amazing that a case of the stuff ended up on Earth. ‘Case’ meaning ‘six bottles,’ mind you — and also mind that Mauvais is simply not designed to function in our physics. On Earth, getting a dose of the stuff acts as a giant jinx: everybody within scent range will start having a run of steadily-increasing bad luck, except for any people who have actually been dosed. The effect lasts for only eight hours or so at a time, and the luck resets every time that Mauvais is reapplied, so nobody’s died from it. Yet. But it’s going to happen.
Obviously, anybody aligned with Heaven will have a straightforward job; find the remaining Mauvais, confiscate it, and keep it out of the reach of humans. Meanwhile, those forces aligned with Hell will instead be ordered to — find the remaining Mauvais, confiscate it, and keep it out of the reach of humans. Obviously.
What? Well, yes, it’s fun to watch humans get messed up from this stuff. But it’s just too expensive. You can buy a demon with a bottle of Mauvais. And not one of the trash sort of demons, either. This stuff is simply too dear to use frivolously, and the definition of ‘frivolously’ in this context is not up to the demons who have been blessed/cursed with mortal field duty. Mind you, it’s those same field demons who get to say how much Mauvais survived…