Hell's Helping Hands

Down the road into the forest, Chloe's caravan approached a gate with a sign over it. "Maro's Children's Home," it read. Chloe was pleasantly surprised that this sign hadn't been destroyed yet; she wondered how long this one had been here.

Chloe's car was at the front. While her chauffer stopped by the little guard booth at the entrance, she got out and told the guards why they were there. The Demonic Student Union was this weekend's community service team for Maro's Children's Home. Maro's Children's Home had a reputation for taking in those orphaned children with some of the most dangerous and uncontrollable powers. They had a close relationship with Starlight Academy, and most of the children in their care (these being the ones who wouldn't cause too much property damage to the school) were students there. But because of how volatile their children were, property damage was a constant concern. The main building that housed the children was a living thing that could magically self-repair, given enough time, but that wasn't the only thing that could get destroyed, and they didn't have enough time and money to keep cleaning up after all the children's little catastrophes.

Lots of different organizations included Maro's as one of their philanthropic ventures, and it happily accepted all the help it could get. Chloe had decided to add the DSU to that list - any sort of philanthropic event they could get involved in was good for their PR, and one of the DSU's main goals was effectively PR for demonkind.

The guards let Chloe and her caravan through the gates. Once the cars were all parked and everyone had gotten out, a big bear of a man came out to talk to them. He shared a few pleasantries with Chloe before calling everyone together.

"Hello everyone! Thank you so much for coming out and offering us a hand today. I'm Nikolay, and I'm the guy who would have to do all this stuff by himself for the next few weeks if you weren't here."

A few chuckles emerged from the crowd and from Nikolay himself.

"We have three major tasks for you today. Someone gave Terry coffee, so there's a partially-vaporized fence that needs re-building. Katie sneezed in the general direction of the gazeebo, ending its run as the now third-longest-lasting gazeebo on our property, but we still need to clean up after its remains. Oh, and the blades of grass in part of the lawn are now made of some kind of, ah, hard material that can cut through your foot like an actual blade. I have no idea how that happened, but we need to replace that with normal grass. So!" He clapped his hands together, "who wants to do what? We'll start with the fence and the gazeebo, and we'll move on to the grass thing if we have time. Gazeebo people group up over there, fence over there."

Chloe joined the gazeebo team; her more-than-human strength would probably help for moving the bigger pieces of the gazeebo out of the way.

"Any questions before we start?" he asked.

And so they all got to work. After putting on some gloves, Chloe hoisted one of the big mostly-intact support beams over her head, carrying it towars the pile of wood in Nikolay's trailer. Nikolay was making sure they all knew to watch out for nails, wear gloves, and be safe. He didn't want anyone getting hurt, he said.
Later, Nikolay would probably be telling Dorian about how there were certain kinds of things wards couldn't stop, and that they could only stop so many cataclysmic events before wearing off. They were looking into techniques to see when wards should be replaced.

Chloe was a little surprised to see Aedan here. Maybe something his boss Cecil said rubbed off on him, or maybe it was some sort of interest in the actual orphans who lived here. Either way, it was a pleasant surprise. The Shay-and-Dorian tag team was almost expected, though, with their interests.

The rest of the turnout from the demon members of the DSU was also sparse, as it had been last year. Not a lot of people could swing the time in their schedule, nor did they really care. There were perhaps seven of them this time, not including Chloe, which was honestly more than she had expected going in. Pretty solid, all told. One of the other demons on the Gazeebo crew was a big horned boy named Jesus, with the 'J' sounding like an 'H.' He stopped that big support beam from sliding out of the trailer after Chloe put it in, to which Chloe said, "Hey, nice save. Jesus saves, guys."

These sorts of comments would continue for the rest of the task, including "I'm really glad that I accepted Jesus into my life." Jesus would just laugh.