Hello, I am being forced to tell you a story. This one is about the devil making friends with one of his subjects, a fine cool guy named Peter.
I understand this sounds somewhat unremarkable, so I'll explain - The Devil is a big, buff, red adult man with horns who is the main king of Hell, and Hell is the place where people get sent when they commit to doing a lot of "wrong" actions. What's wrong? Nobody really knows. That's a theological discussion, not really the point of this story, and is outside of the scope of our research. Who is us? Why, the Casual Ontario Northern Demonology Or Motorboating Society, of course.
So the Devil lives down in Hell. It's important for him to run a tight ship and go inspect the various tortures he's subjecting people to. What a lot of non-demonologists don't know is that the Devil actually has to make rent and can't afford to be fired. There is nobody to fire him, God isn't real, there does not appear to be anybody he answers to, but he is anxious about this nonetheless. Our learned suspicion: this is a light psychosis brought on by renting an apartment on the UES without having rich parents to help.
Regardless of the cause, it was just another day in Hell, and he figured he had some work to do. He began by walking through one of his nearly infinite torture halls. There are torsion ones, there are burny ones, there are other ones that are like pokey-stabby-bleeding-type ones for guys (men only), there's a women's-only section too (no men allowed), like when you go to the spa, so that people can have their boobs out without some random weirdo pounding off to them. You can't really pound off in Hell, because that defeats part of the purpose. Ironically enough, you can't pound off in heaven either, which is also real, and you know what that means: pound off on Earth as much as possible, because there's going to be very limited opportunity to do it afterward. That's the moral of this story, by the way. You don't have to wait till the ending to hear it.
Anyway, so the devil was walking down his torsion torture hallway and passed by one guy getting twisted up badly on an elevated rack made out of old brains. The guy was screaming and moaning, and the devil took a little monocle out of his pocket and held it up over his eye, inspecting the fine torture work. Pleased, he moved on to the next guy.
This guy was bolted onto a metal chair by thick rivets going through his thighs and biceps. There were some automatic drills with the bits duct-taped to the guy's fingers, big wide flat bits. Every once in a while, the drills would turn on and spin the guy's fingers around too much in a way that definitely sucks. The devil drew out his monocle and inspected the man in the chair.
The guy was not screaming. He was actually asleep instead. Reason: it turns out you can really only spin somebody's fingers off kind of once, then you have to spin them back the other way and wait there for a long time for them to heal back on before you can spin them off again. I think that's how it works, I don't know, I'm not a doctor.
This obviously would not do. This guy is bored and asleep! So the devil was like "I need to make this worse somehow," and he pulled out a Casio tape-cassette boombox from the '90s and put in a tape from The Carpenters. What a lot of people don't know about the Carpenters is more than one or two of their songs. I can tell you, if you're not into that type of music, it's really not something you'd ever put on, more so than other stuff that is not your type of music. So he set the little boombox down on the floor under the guy's metal chair, hit play, and moved on to the next person, satisfied that he had made the situation a little bit worse.
The next guy he found in his torsion torture hallway was up on the wall on a big X made out of snake ribs. This X would turn in on itself and fold the victim in crappy ways. The guy up on that X, wearing a t-shirt that said Peter on the front, was saying "ow" a lot, but he was not screaming that much. He looked at the devil as he walked up and said, "One count of murder. One count of arson. One count...of Sesame Street Fame. These are the things you're allowed to be found guilty of in the spring. If you're found guilty of any other things during the spring, you're going to get in so much trouble."
The devil said, "what are you, working on your stand up?"
"Yeah, actually." Peter replied.
Our friend the devil was like, "alright that was pretty funny, I like it, let's get you off of that fuckin upside-down X made of snake ribs."
Peter's joints popped and crackled and he slipped down off the big X. He complained lightly with a laugh through a smile and a look as if to say, "this is ridiculous". The Devil liked that attitude. Yeah, it hurts, but what are you gonna do? Taking it is really the only option. Are you gonna let it swallow your personality too?
"Man, you really take it in stride, huh? The big X made out of snake ribs was one of my first torture devices, back when I was just an intern here. There was no boss, and like eight people came to Hell. I've seen it do lots of crazy shit to people."
Peter looked excited and said "Oh shit do you have video of that?"
The Devil's smile, which I forgot to tell you about, went away, and he said "Oh shit, yes I do, I have video of everything down here!"
"Oh shit!" Peter said, louder.
"Oh shit!" the Devil said, loud enough to cause an echo down the torsion torture hallway.
Fast-forward a few hours, and their conjoined laughter could be heard coming out of a small shed next to a river of black bile with feet floating in it.
"Look at this one, the guy shits and then calls it funk logs!" the Devil bellowed at a volume that easily disregarded the thin aluminum shed walls, immediately followed by a low recorded playback voice sadly groaning "...oh no, funk logs."
The two laughed loudly again, and the scene faded out.
Fade back in a couple of hours later. The Devil and Peter were hanging out still in some other part of Hell, still laughing and having a good time. The Devil got serious for a second, looked at Peter, and said, "Peter, I'm gonna get serious for a second. You're a cool guy, what did you do to get sent down here?"
"I have nooooo clue!" Peter said back. "Nobody tells you. You just die up there, in a funny way or a serious way, and the next thing you know you're in a waiting room, sitting down with other confused people. When I was there, everybody was saying, 'I'm young! I'm young again!' I guess because they died of old age. For the record, I did not. I got thrown into a trash compactor during an argument with some Puerto Rican garbage men. Anyway, I figured I was waiting to be judged, my name was called over a loudspeaker, and I went to get up. The second my ass left the chair, I was strapped to your fuckin X thing. No reason given, I didn't even see anybody to ask."
"Wow, nobody told me it was like that." The Devil replied, looking perplexed. "As a matter of fact, some of the other people I spoke to had completely different stories about how they got here, one guy said he was on a boat for twelve years. It gets weird, and nobody has any answers." The Devil Paused. "Wait a second. Didn't you say something about being found guilty of murder and arson during the spring?"
"Oh yeah! Yeah that also happened. But like I said, pretty sure you're ALLOWED to be found guilty of those things in the spring."
"Peter," the devil said, eyes narrowed and grinning, "I think you're probably actually not allowed to be found guilty of those things in the Spring and maybe in the other seasons also."
"Oh!" Said Peter, playing along, almost laughing. "Well I guess, like...fuck!"
The two laughed again for a long time.
"Well, anyway," The Devil managed to eek when the laughter was dying down, "every once in a while I take somebody down off the racks to hang out with, and this has been a great use of my time. I've been having so much fun that I'd like to give you a place to be down here. I have an opening in the Spring Gardens section."
He seemed extremely pleased with this ironic introduction of information.
"You have a Spring Gardens section in Hell?"
"Oh, of course I do, for the people with allergies!" The Devil said with a huge open-mouthed mischievous smile for an exclamation point. The two laughed together again.
It's been about two years since Peter and the Devil became friends. Peter gets visited by the Devil frequently, sometimes tortured a little, but never that badly, and he understands it's all part of the situation. He does his best to make his reactions funny, and the Devil really appreciates it. They do get to hang out from time to time.
Peter still does not get to pound off, though. His dick becomes transparent if he tries to touch it and his hand goes right through. That's it, please make sure to let everybody know.