"Um, breaking news from Tokyo. Breaking news. Terrifically bad news, that's good for ratings right?" The demon 'newscaster' wasn't doing too well. Bad news did indeed get good ratings from the audience, but it tended to get bad ratings from Nybbas. He could get "cancelled", even if he was the demon who engineered a pact with an entire nation of ethereal gods. Nybbas watched impassively, doling out figurative rope for the Impudite to figuratively hang himself with...or not so figuratively. "Nothing new to report sir."
"That's bad," said Nybbas without irony. "Last I heard things weren't going so well with the kami."
"They're going quite well actually. Manga is all over the world. Books may not be our favorite medium, but they lead to movies, anime, magazines, even J-pop on YouTube. People are buying multi-region video players just to watch this stuff. Reading subtitles just to hear about those gods. Sure there's been a slump, you know that, our way of letting the kami know we can take away as well as give. But the books are still even m'lord. To the very last shred of Essence, in the black."
"They haven't tried to rip us off, and we haven't managed to rip them off."
"And they're still getting Essence from all over the world, even with uneven images. Even with some," the newscaster hesitated, tried rephrasing, "winged-supernatural-people images."
"Angels. The Japanese are sending Essence to angels, on my dime. See if you can bag a Tradesman for some information--I smell Marc in this."
"I have, my lord. They know nothing."
"End our contract. Refresh the stereotype in the rest of the world about how only people of a certain religion have any morals, vary that religion by region. Throw some kind of distraction out there until I can figure out how to spin this so they look like the bad guys. How I can paint a scrupulously fair deal that happened to work out well for them, as somehow an outrage...I'll get some guys on it."
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