1 Arriving In Hell... And It's Surprisingly Okay--But Wait, There's More!

Pain. That's all I felt at first. A deep and dull ache that wracked it's way through my body, telling me I was either still alive or...there was an afterlife, after all.

The next sensation I felt, other than the pain, was a sinking feeling. Like I was on a rollercoaster that didn't exactly follow safety regulations on how fast it went and how many inversions it had. It felt like my stomach had come to life and was doing flips in my head - how was it up there? Your guess is as good as mine, buddy.

My vision was switching between blinding white, pitch black and a fiery red. Then it started to get hot.

...Figures. The afterlife exists and I'm not welcome at the pearly gates. I mean, what can a murdering piece of shit like me expect? Worst of all, I'm the sort of murdering piece of shit that killed not because he had to but because he wanted to. Because he couldn't stop punching or kicking a downed opponent. I guess what's really sending me down to the fiery pits is the fact that I don't feel any remorse for all those lives I either extinguished or ruined.

I liked fighting. Maybe a little too much. Still, I at least understand I'm a bad guy. I'll admit that much. That makes me better than the psychos who think they're completely fine when in fact they're completely wacky in the mental department.

Though, if I'm off to Hell...won't people like that be the only people I'm around for the rest of eternity? Ah, that sucks pretty bad.

...Well, I can at least beat the shit out of them. That is if I'm not in some boiling pot of oil.

It really makes you wonder - how much of the bible was right? Or just pieces of media about Hell in general? Are there multiple circles in Hell? Is Lucifer down there? Does that mean that Angels are real? God, as well? Man, it really does open up a whole new can of worms. Makes me wonder how strong Demons are. Could I try and fight one if they're my torturer? Food for though, I guess.

So, uh, what's the list of sensations so far? Pain, nausea/sinking, flashing vision and heat? Let's add body horror to that. What do I mean by body horror? Well, I'm only really using that word because I'm lacking a better one.

I can feel my body...changing. More pain. Skin stretching, ripping, healing back, muscles tearing and snapping, growing back, stretching over a rapidly growing skeleton.

You ever had growing pains during puberty? I went through a rather aggressive last for year in puberty. Over the last few months before my 18th birthday, I grew about 15cm or about 6 inches. Bones grow slowly even when you have massive growth spurts. But even when it's slow, it really hurts. It's a natural process as well, which means there's no real way to combat it outside of painkillers.

And if you do that, you'd probably get hooked on narcotics, so it's best to just buck up and deal with the pain, honestly.

But right now? I'd chug a pint of morphine. Growing pains but multiplied by a thousand.

Growth that would take months if it were natural...was taking place in seconds instead.

My body wasn't just growing, either. It seemed to be morphing new parts. I felt something burst out of my lower back, along with a popping sensation around the same area. As if something had just connected to my nervous system - and it really fucking hurt. Like my entire spinal cord was just filled with battery acid.

I would've convulsed and lashed out with my limbs - but I couldn't. My body was still experiencing this supernatural (and very painful) growth and that seemed to impede my control over my body.

Which meant I was forced to suffer in silence and without the ability to even take my frustrations out on my surroundings.

...Whatever those surroundings were. Because aside from the sinking feeling, I couldn't feel anything else. No dirt, no air--nothing. It was like I was falling through a vacuum. There was just a big load of nothingness that I was falling through. Meaning even if I could move, I'd have nothing to fucking hit.

And so the cycle continued. Bones snapping, grinding and growing, muscles stretching and ripping, skin mimicking the muscles--and let's not forget the fact my nervous system seemed to be hooked up to a car battery. Oh, and the heat now felt like I was in an oven.

All of it continued to climb. Maddeningly so.

Pain became utter agony. Quicker growth. More invasive changes. Organs reorganizing themselves, battering into one another just for the fun of it.

And then it ended. I was met by nicer sensations. The heat was still there but it felt much more bearable because I could feel air around me now - it whipped around me, cooling me down. The sinking feeling was still there as well, but much more bearable just like the heat was. It felt more like a car going up a hill and then down a hill in a rapid manner. So, it was miles better than the rollercoaster it was before.

I also felt like I could control my body. Though it felt more...complicated than before. More moving parts. More power behind each part that made every movement much more of a hassle for me. Yet, despite that, I managed to get my eyes opened.

Which is when I saw the tarmac for some sort of road. About two meters away from my face.

It'd be safe to say I hit the road at incredibly fast speeds. The sound of crashing and cracking echoing in my ears, pain surging through my body--yet the pain felt hollow.

I mean, I FELT it. But I also felt like it hadn't actually done any lasting damage. It was like I didn't need to worry about such pain anymore. Waning survival instincts aside, I still felt that blistering heat on my back and I pressed up off the boiling hot tarmac and looked up at the sky - a vast redness was what greeted me.

Red sky, red clouds, red sun--everything was a shade of red.

How very...hellish.

Smirking at my internal attempt to lighten my mood, I slowly looked around this new place. Weirdly enough, I was in the middle of some street. Shops and bars lined the street, horned women and men walking the corners while dressed very provocatively and in each of the alleyways there were vending machines filled with all sorts of illicit substances.

Some of the very obvious prostitutes had seen my fall and looked over at me, blowing kisses as if to welcome me - some part of me wanted to go over there - but I shook my head and looked away from them as I forced myself to come to terms with the situation.

I was in Hell...and apparently Hell had a bunch of hookers and drugs.

I felt a small smile stretching it's way across my face. Hell seems like more fun than I expected. "Now, what the fuck do I do now...?" I wondered aloud. It was all fun and games having drugs and fucking hookers but I kinda wanna know what to do down here. Do I just wonder about or do I have to get a job?

Before I could continued to ponder on the economy and how society works in Hell, I heard a horn peeping shortly before a massive limo appeared in my view. It moved...extremely quickly.

So quickly, in fact, that I couldn't really react to it. I could barely even flinch before it hit me.

Except nothing really happened to me. If anything, the thing that got impacted by the collision...was most definitely the limo. It's bumper and grill were both curved and wrapped around me like I was a tree or something. My feet had barely even moved from where they'd just been apart from a minor amount of distance that I'd been forced to skid.

It was a surreal experience. I felt like Superman.

With the car coming to a stop with it's engine block crushed and wrapped around my frame, the next thing that happened was the limo's door slamming open. What came out was a small but obscenely muscular red person.

He had long, muscular limbs, short stubby legs, a human-ish sized torso and head, and a pair of black horns that came out the top of his forehead and stretched backward over his head.

His eyes, which were a sickly yellow that spread across where both the iris and sclera would be, narrowed as his pupil did the same, becoming snake-like.

"Oi! You motherfucker!" he started, his voice deep and raspy for his diminutive size, "Why the Hell are you standing in the middle of the fucking road?! This," he gestured to the road below us, "Is where CARS drive! Not where Demons walk, you fucking idiot!" he looked up at me, his yellow eyes burning in annoyance but honestly? All I could think about was how much I'd seemed to have grown.

I must've been pretty close to seven feet tall. My body was just as muscular when I was alive but the skin was...wildly different. It was chalk white. Like there was no blood in my veins anymore. Yet a quick touch of my wrist told me I had a pulse of 'something'.

Which is why I wondered where this little Imp got his confidence from.

I was easily three feet taller than him and even though he was obscenely bulky, I still had more muscle mass due to my superior size even if my muscles were more like a sprinter's than a bodybuilder's - which is what this red thing looked like. A bodybuilder Imp.

Or at least, that's what I think he is. An Imp, I mean. He did say Demon earlier, though. Maybe I'm jumping the gun?

"Hey! Are you listening to me you big lug or what?!" he shouted, snapping his fingers and bringing my attention back to him. He looked exceptionally more pissed than before. He walked around to the front of the car and looked straight up at me, our height difference forcing him to do so before he seemed to smell something on me, "...Ah, you're a Sinner, huh? New arrival to Hell or something?" his anger seemed to dissipate in an instance, going from anger to pity within a heartbeat.

...Jesus Christ. Talk about emotional whiplash.

"Well, I'll let you off this time but if my boss comes looking for you after I show him the damages, the best thing you can do is make a deal of servitude to pay back the damages," he explained, suddenly becoming some sort of friendly stranger opposed to his earlier attitude, "But what can you do - this is Hell, you know. It's made to be shitty. Besides, a few decades of servitude is a pretty short time when you compare it to the eternity you'll be spending here!"

Then he went to walk away, except I had a few questions, "Hey, wait up," my voice was deeper and more smooth than before but I ignored such things as I reached out and grabbed the Imp's shoulder.

I'd meant to stop him. I had questions to ask.

I hadn't meant to crush his fucking shoulder, however. He dropped to the floor, screaming and rolling in pain, his left arm following limply because the shoulder it was attached to was shattered.

"Ah," I got out awkwardly, looking down at my hand and the bone-crushing strength it seemed to hold. Though the Imp's screaming soon brought me out of that thought. I kneeled down next to the Imp and frowned, "I'm sorry, man. Seems like I'm stronger down here than I was up there," I gestured upward as I forcibly kept the screaming Imp still with my hands. Except this time I used a lot less strength than last time.

It was like holding jelly. The difference between holding jelly in your hand and crushing it was such a small one. It seemed the difference between touching someone and crushing their shoulder was a small one with this new demonic body of mine.

"Y-You fucker! You've c-crushed my goddamn shoulder--ARGH!" he screamed, tears pooling from his eyes.

Giving him a somewhat apologetic smile, "Yeah, that's on me, man," I nodded, "Sorry about that anyhow. If it makes it any better, I really wasn't aiming to crush your shoulder," blood was oozing out of the dirty black suit around the shoulder area. That wasn't good. Prodding the area with my finger, I quickly found out this guy was very sensitive to pain but also that the bone was completely crushed and the flesh seemed to have popped like a water balloon. "Uhhh..." I looked down at the injured Imp and felt like this situation was already beyond awkward, "So, you gonna die or something? Any last words, maybe?" I decided to at least try and seem apologetic but his snake-like yellow eyes just looked at me with anger again.

"Die?" he asked mockingly, "How in the fuck am I going to die?! We're in Hell! You can't--Argh, fuck! Nevermind, just go get me some coke, will ya? Make yourself useful!" he took his good arm and reached into his pulled taut blazer and pulled out what looked suspiciously like an American dollar. Except instead of the useful faces you'd see, there was some portrait of an anthropomorphic goat-man on it.

He pushed the note into my hand and I lightly grasped it between two fingers as I brought it up to look at it. The goat-man was smiling rather demonically and the pupils of his eyes were actually dollar signs.

...Huh.

Either way, I decided that I owed the dude this much. He hit me with his limo but it didn't really do anything to me. In return for not damaging me, I crushed his shoulder. On accident, sure, but that's besides the point because technically he wasn't aiming to run me over either. From what I gather, I just fell out of the sky onto some road.

Figures.

Standing up, I turned around and located the nearest drug vending machine - a weird phrase to say when I'd just come from a country that had only just legalized Marijuana. Yet in this vending machine, I could easily see packets of cocain, heroine, crack, meth--all sorts of highly illegal drugs.

Man, who knew Hell would be such a fucking nice play. You can't die, there's sexy Succubi on nearly every street corner and you can get drugs from vending machines.

So, I guess you could say that Hell is a sinner's Heaven. Well, at least it seems like it anyway.

Though as I walked over to the vending machine (checking both left and right on the road this time), I couldn't shake a feeling of familiarity with this vista. The streets, the sky, the vending machines, the odd anthropomorphic animal person I saw walking around--Everything struck me as something I'd seen before.

And with that feeling, I arrived in front of the vending machine. Feeding the Hell Dollar into it's intended slot, I scratched my neck as I looked through the options before my eyes finally landed on a button which said 'Cocain!' in some weird Zodiac Killer font.

Rolling my eyes, I pressed the button and bent down to pick the small baggy that dropped into the bottom part of the vending machine. Bringing the baggy closer to my face, I realized I'd have to put some of my biases aside when I looked at how pure this coke was. Despite the neighborhood looking incredibly seedy and poor, the coke in this baggy was the type rich white guys use. It'd be exceptionally expensive back on Earth, yet in Hell it's worth around 10-whatevers? Hell Dollars?

"Business must be booming with how many people down here who know how to make all these sorts of things," I mused nonchalantly as I turned around. Only to be face to face with someone.

He was of a similar height to how I was before I died - so he was about 6'4". Except unlike my well-muscled physique, this dude was built like a sumo wrestler. Which meant he looked fat but it was pretty easy to see that fat covered very bulky muscle.

He didn't have a nose nor ears and his eyes were beady little black things that lacked any discernible sclera and were just pure black. His skin was a deep blue and looked very heavily scarred in places.

"Can I help you?" I asked, looking down my nose at the guy. It was becoming more and more clear to me that my new physique was imposingly big. Despite not being bulky or like a bodybuilder in terms of muscle mass, my overall size meant that I was just naturally bigger than even big and bulky guys like the one in front of me.

He looked me up and down, his eyes lingering on the baggy in my hand before he looked up at me and gave a lopsided smile, showcasing his shark-like teeth, "Give me those drugs, boy," he spoke in a very strong southern drawl and he lifted a finger and poked against my chest, "Or I'm gonna eat you alive from the feet up."

I nearly burst out laughing at that. I don't know if my new strength is the usual amount for Demons or if I'm unique - but what I do know is that even if I'm outmatched, I'm still quite confident in my ability to just run away.

But then I really thought about this.

I have the ability to get away whenever I want...so why not try and figure out the strength of the average lowlife down here in Hell?

Deciding on doing just that, I smirked and continued looking down at the blue man, "Fuck you, baldie," I snorted, making my disdain heavily obvious. And that was all that was needed as he burst into action.

The first thing I noticed...was that he was slow. Extremely slow.

That Imp's limo had caught me off guard. But right now, as I was feeling ready, the sloppy haymaker this guy was throwing at me was just...too slow.

I also decided at that moment that I was gonna try and put some oomph into my attack. Not 100% but more than 10% at least. I wanted to know what damage I could do - and on the off chance this dude was more durable than he was quick, I didn't want to hit him with a tap that would barely even stun him.

...Turns out I put too much into it.

My hand blurred, even to my eyes, cutting through the air with a harsh whistle like a blade. I sent a back fist at the side of his face and when my knuckles collided with his face his head just...exploded.

A wave of gore covered my fist, splattered against my face and my bullet-hole ridden dress shirt. I just kind of stood there, even after the guy's body dropped to the ground. I was just kind of shocked.

I'd assumed I'd win. If there was one thing I was good at back on Earth, it'd be fighting. I was born physically gifted. Strong. But had I ever exploded a man's fucking head with a back fist before?--Then again, have I ever survived a head-on collision with a limousine before? The answer would be no, for reference.

But the difference here is that I thought I was strong because I'd been turned into a Demon or whatever. Yet right now, it seems more like I'm the exception, not the rule.

Shaking off the blood that covered my fist, I began walking back to the Imp who was still on the floor. Though as I walked back over to him, I looked left. For some reason, anyway. It wasn't to check for cars or anything. I just felt like I should look left at that moment. Like my instincts were telling me to look at something.

And that's when I saw it. A hotel sign far off in the distance, barely peaking over the buildings on this street.

Throwing the baggy to the downed Imp, I turned back to the vending machine and charged at it.

I burst force, putting all this new strength to use as I cracked the pavement below my feet. I practically blasted into action, dozens of times quicker than I was back on Earth. Maybe even quicker.

Using this new body was becoming easier and easier, like there was instinctive knowledge on how to do so* and I adequately controlled my strength as I hopped up just in time to bring my leg down on top of the vending machine. With a heave, I flexed my leg and shot up the side of the building. I overshot the building a little bit but I reached out and grabbed the side of the building I could barely reach, causing my body to swing into the top of the building instead of continuing to soar upward.

(*A/N - There must be some sort of instinctive knowledge on how to use whatever power is given to you because Alastor became an Overlord overnight. A single night was all it took for him to upheave ultra-powerful Demons. Even with innate power, you'd need to know how to use it. Hence the instinctive knowledge on how to use it and whatnot.)

I hit the roof with a dull bang, all my superhuman momentum being cancelled out through the motion I'd just done but it barely even fazed me as I stood up and looked in the direction of that sign again.

At the back of my mind, I was kind of thinking I was wrong. That I couldn't possibly be 'here'. That 'that' couldn't exist.

But the sign said all it needed to say.

'Happy Hotel'...That's what that sign says. This is Hell, yes, but it's the Hell from 'Hazbin Hotel'. Ah shit.