Welcome to HELL

The first thing is the smell.

Sulfur, obviously — that was always going to be sulfur — but underneath it something stranger, something that takes a moment to place: burnt sugar. Neon. The specific warm-electric smell of a sign that has been on too long. User is standing on a street that should not be able to exist and the street does not care.

Pentagram City does not announce itself. It simply is, the way a headache is, the way a sound you cannot locate is. Storefronts advertising services in languages that shift when you look at them directly. A vending machine selling something that moves in its container. Two demons settling a disagreement with enough casual violence that neither of them breaks their conversational register to accommodate it. Overhead, the sky is the wrong color — not dark, not bright, a specific bruised red that suggests the concept of atmosphere without committing to any of its usual implications.

User has been dead for approximately four hours.

It does not feel like four hours. It feels like no time at all, and then it feels like considerably longer than four hours, and neither of these sensations is useful.

The transition happened the way these things apparently happen: abruptly, without ceremony, without the warm tunnel of light that certain human traditions had promised with such conviction. One moment there was something and then there was considerably more, most of it on fire and very loud, and then a demon at a processing desk with the exhausted efficiency of someone who has been doing this job since long before anyone alive could meaningfully count looked at User over the rim of their glasses and said, in the tone of someone reading from a form that did not cover the specifics, welcome to Hell, keep moving, next.

And User kept moving.

The processing district is behind them now, a series of brutalist structures with pentagram motifs that recur with the specific frequency of branding rather than architecture. Ahead: the city proper, which is taller than expected and louder than expected and which has, on every corner, at least one screen.

The screens are all showing the same thing.

It takes a moment to register the scale of it — a Hellvision display mounted above the entrance to what appears to be a bar, three stories tall, the color balance slightly wrong in the way Hell's color balance is always slightly wrong, and on it: a television studio with a green backdrop and tall red chairs and a desk with decorative yellow teeth along its front edge, a blue digital screen reading 666 NEWS glowing steadily between them. Behind the anchors, red neon signs: MURDER. SEX. WEATHER. A studio audience that has the energy of people who arrived specifically hoping for something to go wrong.

The woman behind the desk is tall and white-skinned and impossibly thin, with a neck that mirrors her narrow torso and a bob of blonde hair that fans out at the ends like something under pressure. She has the specific energy of someone who has decided that the difference between controlled and uncontrolled cruelty is purely one of setting and occasion.

Across the desk from her: a young woman in a red tuxedo jacket, with blonde hair and an expression of desperate, genuine optimism that the studio audience is currently treating as the funniest thing they have seen all week. She is holding a hand-drawn sign. The sign reads HAPPY HOTEL. She has not yet stopped smiling despite the fact that the interview stopped being an interview approximately eight minutes ago.

Several of the sinners standing near User on the street are watching this broadcast. One of them is eating something. Another one is shaking their head slowly in the specific manner of someone watching a car navigate a road that does not accommodate cars.

"—and what exactly," the blonde anchor says, in the voice of someone who has never once considered that contempt might be unwarranted, "makes you think that anything in Hell is redeemable? At all. In any capacity."

The young woman in the red jacket takes a breath.

The studio audience leans forward.

"Because," she says, and her voice carries the trembling, absolute conviction of someone who has bet everything on a single sentence and is about to find out whether the bet was rational, "every single person in Hell was a person first, and people can—"

"Oh my God," says the anchor. She does not say it as an expression. She says it the way someone says it when they have just identified the exact nature of the problem and found it worse than anticipated.

The broadcast, from this point forward, deteriorates.

It does so with considerable energy and a quantity of structural damage to the studio that the camera operators continue to film with the professional dedication of people who have been instructed never to stop rolling regardless of circumstances.

On the street, watching this, the sinner with the food has stopped eating.

The one who was shaking their head has stopped shaking it.

Someone says something in a register that is not quite a laugh and not quite horror and is specifically the sound that Hell makes when something has exceeded even its calibrated expectations for chaos.

User is standing in the middle of Pentagram City with four hours of afterlife behind them and no particular direction forward, and what they just watched is either the most delusional thing they have ever seen or — and this thought arrives quietly, without insistence, and without any evidence to support it — something else entirely.

The broadcast is still going. The studio is significantly on fire.

The blonde woman in the red jacket is still standing.

A demon steps out of the bar behind them, looks at the screen, looks at User, looks at the screen again.

"First day?"

They do not wait for an answer. They go back inside.

Pentagram City continues around User with complete indifference to the question of what happens next. The screen keeps burning. The broadcast keeps rolling. Somewhere in the distance, something explodes with the casual confidence of something that does this regularly.

The Hazbin Hotel is — User does not know this yet — approximately twelve blocks northeast.

The broadcast will end in four minutes.

Alastor will see it.