Big things happen in threes, but I don’t like where this is going.

http://www.robandelliot.cycomics.com/archive.php?id=120
http://www.xkcd.com/346/

Everyone knows Mikey briefly had omnipotent power, and used it to unmake all existence for a few years. What’s not so well-known is how a child, unexceptional except for his unfocused loathing, managed to survive the process of hunting down that kind of authority.

The answer is, of course, that he didn’t. One of Mikey’s first discoveries was an astonishingly simple and reliable ritual for restoring a demon to life in an accurate reconstruction of their original body.

There are, of course, a few minor sticking-points.

1) It only works on folks who originally died by a corresponding ritual, which is equivalently easy to set up but has no unnatural effects other than amplifiying a chemical reaction which would not otherwise be fatal.

2) One of the props from the original ritual must be retrieved and refilled, at the original factory. If the bottle is no longer capable of holding pressurized soda, it’s unusable and the person stays dead. Pinhole leaks might be patchable, but melting or damage to the part that interlocks with the cap mean the poor bastard has to find another way back.

3) Another life must be given up. Not killed; destroyed. There must be a skeptic present, a “muggle,” a hair off the tiger’s back. That person’s life as a normal human being must be ended, and their new life as a member of the Occult Underground commenced. Sometimes, witnessing the results of the ritual is itself a sufficient trigger event, but don’t count on it; for best results, find someone who was on the verge of figuring it all out anyway.