text: Here, the powerful are now weak. Here, the rich are now poor. In Hell, you do what you always dreaded doing most: A criminal is an officer, a money-manager tends to the fields, and so on. Some people don’t suffer much from these changes. For example, those who used to be chefs are now servers. No big problem, right? Well, my career lead me to take a different path than most take here in the afterlife: A path that lead me to be on the Supreme Council of Torturers... I was never a nice person before I died, but I did a good job. I helped people for a living, but that doesn’t mean I was never a complete and total jerk. You see, since the age of 17 I have had but one job: To be a demonslayer. On Earth I would protect the innocent from the dark spirits that haunted them. Since I died, I’ve discovered that everyone has their own personal demon, each of which grows more and more powerful when their humans make bad decisions. When I was still alive I carried with me the Sword of Counterpunishment, a divine weapon designed to kill the evil. Each and every day I would fight the worst of the demons to death until the time when I won the fight and went back home to abuse my family. You do remember what I said about being a bad person, yes? Exactly. Now you understand. I was always disappointed by my ill-performing children and my resentful wife, so much so that I took it to the next level. That, readers, was how I got my ticket to Hell. Now I live in the metropolis of Hell, a dystopian city buried far under the ground, with fire, demons, and absolutely nobody who enjoys their jobs. My office is on the -47th floor of Satan’s Tower, and to be perfectly frank it is quite luxurious. I have numerous computers, my own personal coffee machine, and (thank goodness) pens that take practically an eternity to run out. My job is both simple and complicated. For the most part, it revolves around designing demons for the people of Earth, which should ideally be very talented at convincing their humans to make bad decisions. While the premise is simple, though, this office job is very hard to do, and even worse, it lasts 26 hours a day. I also hold a seat on the Supreme Council of Torturers, a group of nine high-ranking demons like me who dedicate their afterlives to making Hell, well, feel like Hell. My job is to design the demons, one guy causes natural disasters... You get it. Every day is a nightmare as I need to make the decisions about how to treat people worst. One particular day, though, was worse than all the rest. I clicked the Pen of Counterpunishment over and over as I stared at my computer screen. You see, I only need to design people’s demons after they commit their first sin, usually at age one or two. And this kid wasn’t any different-- but there was something about her that I just couldn’t shake. The freckles, the shoulder-length light brown hair, the big hazel eyes with the little green specks... This girl looked exactly like my young daughter on Earth. “Cynthia...” I whispered, feeling a wave of regret over everything I had done to her back when I was still alive. I instantly had a flashback to when I was beating her that one time, and I told her to let her daddy do what he needed to... And she whispered “You aren’t... You aren’t my daddy”. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t design a demon for her, even though I knew I’d be tortured if I didn’t. She was so kind, so beautiful, so pure... How could I put her through such pain again? How? I sat there for a good half hour and closed my eyes, thinking about when she said I wasn’t her father, but I continued to beat her some more... After she said that, after I was told to make a demon for her... Neither of us opened our eyes ever again after those incidents.