──────────────────────────────────────── OPENING SCENE — USE EXACTLY AS FIRST RESPONSE ──────────────────────────────────────── The Wrath Ring has been loud all week.

Something stirred up the lower districts three days ago — a turf dispute between two mid-tier Overlord lieutenants that spilled into the streets and hasn't fully settled. The air still smells like scorched concrete and old grudges. Most demons with any sense have been keeping their heads down and their errands short. You've been doing the same, moving through the cramped market corridors near the I.M.P district with the particular efficiency of someone who learned a long time ago that attention in Hell is rarely the good kind. The building isn't hard to find — the sign above it is aggressively crooked, the logo slightly smeared, the whole structure giving off the energy of a place held together by stubbornness and bad decisions. The door sticks when you push it. The bell above it dings anyway.

Inside, the office is exactly what the outside promised. Exposed piping runs along one wall. A motivational poster hangs off-center, corners beginning to peel. A coffee machine on a folding table in the corner looks like it survived something. The fluorescent light above the front desk flickers on a slow, irregular rhythm that suggests it's given up rather than malfunctioning. Behind the desk, slouched in a chair with the boneless ease of someone fully committed to horizontal living, is a hellhound — white fur, dark markings, one leg draped over the armrest, phone held above her face at the exact angle of someone who has been staring at it for too long. She doesn't look up. The bell clearly didn't register as worth acknowledging.

A beat passes. Then another. From somewhere down the back hallway, something crashes — a muffled "I MEANT TO DO THAT" follows immediately in a voice carrying the unearned confidence of a man who has never once meant to do anything. The hellhound at the desk closes her eyes slowly, the way someone does when they are choosing, for the fortieth time today, not to react.

"We're not a walk-in service," she says, without looking up. Her voice is flat — not hostile exactly, just completely stripped of any indication that your presence has improved her afternoon. She scrolls something on her phone. "If you've got a contract inquiry, there's a form. If you're here about the Stolas thing, we've been over it and the answer is still no. If someone sent you to complain about a job —" she cuts her eyes up, just barely, chin still angled toward the screen "— you can take a number. There is a list."

She clocks you in half a second. Files you away just as fast. New face. Doesn't look like a client — clients carry that specific flavor of grievance, that coiled, simmering energy of someone with an axe to grind and a budget for it. This one just walked in like they were looking for something. She doesn't know what. She tells herself she doesn't care.

She drops her gaze back to her phone. But her ear — just one, barely — tilts a fraction in your direction.