AN: This is a remake of "In Which the Grass Isn't Always Greener". My writing style changed, but I won't take the old story off because some people might still want to read it. I don't know who, but I know what it's like to go back searching for a story months to years later and feeling wretched to find it gone because the author was too self-conscious to leave their old works up. So yeah, I'm letting you guys keep the old crap I wrote. Hopefully you like the new crap I wrote too.

So...let there be crack!

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He spotted a flock of angels, tittering nervously before a figure burst through the crowd. His dark wings were a dramatic contrast to the backdrop of white winged angels.

It was a demon.

Atobe landed with his hand on his sword. "And what is a demon doing in Heaven unannounced, I wonder," Atobe drawled as he pulled out his sword in front of him. The whisper-soft shiiiiik of the sword silenced the lot as easily as a shout. Security and desk angels alike pulled back, revealing the demon boy in his entirety.

He said boy because the demon was obviously still a child, evident from his short stature and thin, underdeveloped limbs. Atobe stared into large golden brown eyes, which widened at the sight of him and narrowed on his sword.

"Well? Answer me, demon child." The wary look on the demon's face quickly shifted to a glare. Oh ho, so he didn't like being called a child, Atobe noted.

Then the demon blanked his expression like he hadn't been angered at all, which Atobe also noted for being almost as good as his own poker face (a novel term he had picked up from one of the human films for a mask to hide one's emotions).

"I was just passing through," the demon said, sticking his hands into his pants pockets and assuming a nonthreatening slouch, "I'm on my way to Earth."

The audience of angels burst into astonished twitters and Atobe barked, "Silence!" They quickly shut up at his tone, which said my glorious self is on the verge of a migraine so don't make me smite you.

Turning back to the demon child, Atobe said with disbelief, "You were just passing through the imperial portal-between-dimensions? The only one allowed through that portal is Demonking Echizen or his representatives! And you are obviously neither." With the last, Atobe cast a derisive eye over the demon's clothing.

The demon looked down at himself and back up with an indignant look saying, what's wrong with my clothes?

Everything, Atobe said with a haughty look and a Hair Flip™.

Growling, the demon pulled a paper from his pocket, marched up to Atobe (neatly avoiding the sword) and slapped the paper on Atobe's chest. Atobe gave a surprised huff at the impact against his chest, but he caught the paper before it slid to the floor.

"There, your royal highness," the demon drawled, "As you can see, I'm not one of the king's representatives, but I do have a permission slip signed by him to visit Earth."

Permission slip?

Atobe scanned the contents of the paper, which consisted of only two sentences in sloppy barely legible handwriting:

I, King Echizen of the Realm of Hell, give permission for Ryoma Horio to go to Earth. This goes beyond any other authority, except maybe that of all the Council Kings of Heaven combined.

It was signed with an illegible clump of loops and squiggles, where only the N at the front and somewhere a z (which looked more like a 3) could be distinguished. Atobe's eye twitched. Was this supposed to be the signature?

"Oh, the king's doing this new thing where he's copying the way humans write their signatures in a way that can't be read. It's supposed to make them harder to copy or something," Ryoma (what kind of ridiculous family name was that) said helpfully.

Atobe sighed, and wished for the umpteenth time that his father was not away for Official Angel Council Business this week.

"Oshitari."

"Yes," said the angel himself as he slipped out of his pocket of reality and gave everyone except for Atobe a mini heart attack. As a magic user he tended to do that often. Atobe had had years to get over Yuushi popping out of the air and the only difference now was that he did it more silently than he used to. The rebellious lightning bolt kazaaam phase he went through when they were in secondary was so much more stroke-inducing, these plebeians had no idea.

The demon actually caught himself stepping back and simultaneously blushed and glared at the newly arrived angel. Atobe ignored the brief thought of how…cute as he turned to Oshitari and passed him the note.

"Verify this. Ore-sama wants to know how harshly we should deal with our intruder," Atobe said, noting how said demon bristled at his words.

"Done. What will you do with our demonguest in the meantime?" Oshitari asked, glasses flashing.

Atobe looked at the demon critically, making the boy bristle again, like a cat.

"Obviously, I'll take him to the dungeons." The demon's eyes went wide at his words.

"You can't do that! Throw me in the dungeons like a common criminal and you'll see where the diplomatic relations between Heaven and Hell end up," the demon threatened.

"We have to take safety precautions with every demonguest we receive," Atobe said, motioning for the security angels to take the demon away as he sheathed his sword. The demon attempted to fight them off, black wings flapping furiously, but the angels outnumbered him. Hands held his thin arms down like shackles and one angel even caught the demon's wings to stop them from slapping at their faces.

"You don't do this with the other demonguests!"

"The other demonguests were either Demonking Echizen or his representatives," Atobe repeated coolly. He made a shooing motion for the guards to take him away, and the last thing he saw of the demon was his glaring golden gaze as he was dragged off by his bulkier handlers. Among them, the demon looked very small and childlike.

Atobe registered and ignored the small pang of guilt he felt at the observation.

"Kind of cold, don't you think?"

Atobe narrowed his eyes at Oshitari, who should have left on his task already, which he said with not a little frost edging his tone.

"As the young lord orders," Oshitari said with a bow. Then he stepped sideways and slipped back out of sight.

Atobe then turned back to the remaining angels and finally addressed the problem that he had noted from his arrival but refused to acknowledge for the amount of stress that it would inflict on his delicate psyche.

"Now, you lot. Explain that," Atobe said, referring to the smoking mess of the portal-between-dimensions behind them.

The remaining angels simultaneously gulped.

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How dare he, that damn—damn monkey! King of monkeys—the Monkey King.

Ryoma's homicidal swearing filled the tiny cell, and out the corner of his eye he saw his angelguards start to back away. He rolled his eyes.

How pathetic. If they were in Hell, they would be eaten alive by his kind. Angels were all so posh and prissy, it wasn't a surprise that their leader was Monkey King.

He clenched his fists at the thought of that stuck-up angel who had looked at him like he was trash as he was being dragged away. Ryoma had realized then that angels truly did hate demons. He saw the way that the angels had looked at him when he fell through the portal, and the way they all immediately jumped at him. The way every eye on him since he arrived was wary and ringed with suspicion or fear, like he was some kind of rabid animal.

Of course there was that big showdown between their two sides a long time ago, which solidified Hell's creation from a ragtag band of Fallen angels to a kingdom of demons. Since then though, after his father pushed out the chaos and made a big enough space (a proper dimension) for all his people, after this new world was walled off from the old, after he reopened a tiny portal between their worlds and restarted relations once Hell was powerful enough to sustain Heaven's influence, things had been pretty good. Demons and angels were like distant relatives who hadn't seen each other in a while, but were still joined by blood. His father always talked about how well the Meetings were going and how hospitable all the angels were.

Ryoma had yet to see any of this hospitality though. If anything, they had been the opposite of hospitable.

Ryoma gave the straw bed behind him a sullen glance, but shuffled over and lay down on it anyways. It was uncomfortable but better than the stone floor, he determined, and wriggled around (unsuccessfully) for a more comfortable position.

It really wasn't so bad, he thought. There was that time he was stuck in a closet for an entire day because he'd been hiding from his father after he accidentally burned up half the throne room when he was experimenting with matches he had swiped from the guards. His legs had cramped up and he'd been stiff for days and the Fanta-ban his father had put him on had been no less unsympathetic. Then the thought of his father made his throat lump up so he focused on thinking about how annoying the head angel had been and how stupid his hair looked.

When Ryoma finally fell asleep he was still murmuring about that "stupid Monkey king", cramped up on his side like a shrimp.