Chapter 2: Weren’t We Fighting a Snake?
Apep, the snake-like god of Evil, for his part, sat utterly confused by the recent explosion of his lunch. Here he was, with an appetite the size of a planet, his breakfast of the day (that is to say, his breakfast, which was the day) a faint memory, and the lovely lump of plasma he’d had his eye on hadn’t had the decency to stay unexploded for another few minutes! Well, he was not going to take this sitting down. Not least because he was serpentine and thus had no distinction between sitting and standing. No legs and all.
"Right," he muttered to himself in a voice that echoed with madness, terror, and other such ominous reverberations. "Whom do I sssee about thissss?"
At which point Discord appeared out of the snake’s non-existent ear. "Managing. We can file you for an appointment in roughly six thousand years, give or take a century. Or we could just go play poker with some friends and see how this turns out."
"Queen of Marksssssbury rulesss?" replied Apep without a moment of hesitation.
"No, Texas Hold-Em."
Apep furrowed his scaled brow. "Doesss thisss universssssse even have a Texassssss?"
Discord shrugged. "I don’t know, but we’re cosmic entities—does it matter?"
"I ssssssuppossse not." The fell god’s eternally churning stomachs made an especially loud rumble. "Will there be ssssnackss?"
"But of course! Only the finest junk food in all the cosmos, don’tcha know."
The Gates of Yog-Sothoth opened, and the two entered into Cthulhu’s poker room, sat down, and began seeing how the rest of the day would play out.