Chapter 7

The Devil climbed to the top of a small hill overlooking the Ninth and Final Circle of Hell, and waited for Gaz to catch up to him. And waited.

And waited.

Finally, panting and red-faced from the lead weighing down her clothes, she was standing on top of the same hill.

The Devil said nothing, merely stood gazing out over the Ninth Circle of Hell.

Gaz didn't have much else to do as she waited for her breath to come back but to look around at what lay ahead, and her perch atop the cliff gave her an ample view. As horrifying as the other circles were, this was the bleakest, most forbidding of them all.

It was icy cold here, a cold that sank into one's bones, and it looked every bit as cold as it felt. The mist was now a frost that lay thickly all over everything. From the foot of the hill, long ridges of slightly bumpy gray ice stretched as far as the eye could see. A dull grey sky hung low enough over it all to suggest a mine vault. The ice and the sky were exactly the same color, obscuring the horizon and creating an unnerving sensation of claustrophobia. The monotony was relieved only by distant mountains that looked to be solid ice as well dotting the sides of the vast ice sheet. No wind reached the hill, but a faint wailing sound, rising and falling, suggested a very distant wind that could come no closer as if the very air here was frozen. After this, the Antarctic night would look positively inviting.

The Devil gestured with his chin to the ice fields below, and spoke at last. "Hell froze over."

Then Gaz realized why the ice looked bumpy, and where the sound was coming from. "Who's down there?" she asked, with just a hint of trepidation in her voice.

The Devil came around to face Gaz and paused a moment to let the frozen atmosphere grip her more firmly before answering the question.

"Traitors."

Gaz squared her shoulders, narrowed her eyes, and glared at the Devil with all the willpower that remained to her. "I never betrayed anybody. It's stupid to get close to people. And everybody knows what to expect from me by now."

"However, other people got close to you... for reasons I can only guess at," the Devil pointed out. "And no one got closer to you than your brother. Even your father wasn't home with you as much as he was."

Her father. Her beloved father... the one person Gaz did actually care about. She twitched at having this uncomfortable truth rubbed in her face.

"You never gave your brother the credit he deserved, Gazlene," the Devil continued. "Not half, no, not even a tenth of it. Besides that, you... well, we'll get to that, believe me.

"Then hurry up," Gaz grunted. Her teeth were beginning to chatter.

"A while back you were eager to see your brother in the Third Circle for eating 'your' food," the Devil reminded her, blowing on his fingers as if telling Gaz to warm hers that way. "You know, for all your outrage over that, it's astounding how very seldom Dib took food that actually WAS yours. One time he did take a slice of pizza you were holding, true, but he genuinely believed you were offering it to him, he regarded you that highly. He clearly said, 'Thanks, Gaz,' so he's off the hook for even that one.

"However, there is no mistaking what you did next. You hunted your brother down and did all you could to make things difficult for him. In spite of that, he somehow made it to the second round of some contest or other. Even then, I could have still overlooked that whole incident had you only called it quits right then."

Gaz had found blowing on her fingers was of no help and had now tucked each hand beneath the opposite arm.

"But you had to go too far, didn't you? Where you really got in trouble was when you gave him the impression you were going to help, but the very next words out of your mouth deliberately fueled the rage of your brother's opponent!" The Devil glared so piercingly into Gaz's eyes that a chill which had nothing to do with the temperature shot up her spine.

"That's been pretty much the pattern. You know, your brother loved you. Despite everything you did to him, he never stopped thinking of you as his little sister. You would truly be surprised how often he put your interests ahead of his own. Okay, he was not perfectly consistent about that, I will admit... oh, but you sure were consistent."

Gaz began stamping her feet to keep warm, but quickly enough remembered the lead.

"Time and again you turned your back on him when he needed your help. You only bothered to do so when it would further your own interests to do so. However, the one event that really damned you more than any other was the Piggy Senses one."

"He put a spell on me!" Gaz stamped this time in outrage. "I couldn't taste anything but pork!"

"Did he do it out of anger or spite? Did he intend to do you harm?" the Devil asked.

Gaz was speechless; the other party's intent had never even been an issue with her, only her own desires.

"That was foolhardy, yes. Rash, yes. Stupid, stupid in the extreme, yes, but not a sin," ruled the Devil. "I will be fair and allow that you did owe him something for all the inconvenience he caused you, but your timing was, to put it mildly, off. Beating up someone the second he sets you free? Really, now." The Devil grimaced with disgust. "If you were again captured and imprisoned, this time by a more malevolent agent, could you blame him for hesitating to let you out this time? No, wait, don't answer that. Of course you would; you blame your brother for everything, Gazlene. Well, did you ever realize this: your brother did not confine you in that containment device.

"Your FATHER did!"

Had her father showed up at that precise second and told Gaz that he did not love her any more, her shock could not have been greater.

"Mm," said the Devil, a smug smirk pulling at his mouth. "You never thought of that, did you? Your brother wanted your FATHER only to remove the curse, or at least restore your sense of taste; he had no way of knowing your FATHER was going to lock you up and make you into a media freak.

"Let me ask you something," said the Devil, when the shock of his revelation had begun to sink in somewhat. "Did you ever ask your brother what he was doing while you were being 'tested,' ha, by the Shadow Hog? He was doing his utmost to gain entrance to the Shadow Hog's lair... to save you. He was certain something terrible was about to be done to you, and even after all that you had done to him, he could still think only of protecting you.

To Gaz's blank face, the Devil continued, "When he finally made it inside he begged forgiveness for you... a forgiveness that, may I point out, you have never even once shown to him... and offered to take your punishment FOR YOU... even after the punishment you had already dealt out yourself.

"But not even this display cut any ice with you. You could not throw your own brother to the wolves fast enough. You even walked out on him, leaving him in a situation that bore a striking resemblance to several of our own accommodations, actually. Do you see why I told you that you already put your brother through hell? Anything I could do to him would be only an anticlimax."

"You're forgetting something," growled Gaz.

The Devil's eyebrows shot up. "You have more to confess?"

"I still want to give MY side of this," said Gaz evenly. "How do I get to where ever I do that? I don't think you're going to be exactly fair with me."

The Devil looked down his long nose at her. "My dear, I am about the only one who has been."

"Look, if you don't want to show me out, I'll just go myself."

"Out? This is the center. Everything leads you here."

"We're at the center of Hell, so that means everything from here on is out."

"Well, there is... technically. Just watch out for something He calls the 'as we forgive those' clause. They'll certainly try to nail you with that one."

"The what?"

"Nothing, never mind. The way out is a hole in that mountain, that one right over there," said the Devil, pointing vaguely at a particularly high, jagged mountain range. "You can go through that hole, go through all circles of Purgatory, and come out in Heaven.

"That's all I need to know." Without another word Gaz went off by herself.

However, the Devil had said "can" in quite a different way than how Gaz took the word to mean. He merely meant that an escape route did exist.

Whether it would work for Gaz was quite a different story.

Gaz managed not to lose her balance on her way to the bottom of the hill, but as she began crossing the ice, it sagged under her feet. As if it was water, Gaz sank through the ice all the way up to her neck, at which it instantly froze solid again. She could turn her head, but that was the only part of her she could move.

Gaz now remembered a particularly icy midwinter morning, the coldest she had ever known. While waiting for the bus, she had found mittens were making it difficult to play her video games, so she did the only logical thing any sensible person would do. As soon as she did so, the bone numbing cold had almost made her heart stop beating.

That had been warm compared to this.

Somehow, even this intense cold could not dull the bee stings, the blush on her face, and the dragging feeling from the lead in her clothes, the latter lending the suffocating sensation that she was constantly sinking still further down through the ice. Outrage seized her when she realized she was stuck fast in the center of hell, not only encased in the ice but bearing the punishments of all the other circles as well.

A shadow loomed over her, and she tilted her head back until the back of her head met the ice. The Devil was looking down on her, and the upside down view made it hard for her to make out his expression from looking at it.

"You chose that spot?" he asked in surprise. "Interesting. Oh well. Welcome to the coolest dormitory in the universe! Just don't turn the heat up too high; we're trying to cut down on fuel costs. Oh, and lights out at ten. No exceptions. Get comfy; it looks like you're going to be our guest for quite a while." The head began to pull back.

"You can't leave me here alone! I'm not the only one! Dib better be coming here too! I only did it to him because he did it to me first!!!" screamed Gaz.

At this, the Devil did a face palm, and had he been near one, would have done a head desk as well. If she hadn't learned the concepts of appropriate punishment, self-control and forgiveness after a hands-on guided tour of Hell, she never would.

"Well not RIGHT here of course," Gaz continued, "I don't want HIM next to me forever!"

The Devil shook his head and rolled his eyes. Even at the very center of Hell, where her abominable treatment of him had ultimately landed her, she still resented Dib.

Gaz began clutching at straws. "Zim! He's evil, he's downright evil to Zim! If you're going to do this to me you HAVE to do worse to him!"

Not much room for worse remained, however. "I used to think I knew what evil was," the Devil mused, more to himself than to her. "I mean, that is my job description, after all. However, since those two began that feud of theirs, even I'm not so sure any more. They try to outdo each other in everything, even in who can be more evil to the other one. The One Upstairs and I will have to find a territory neutral enough to allow us to go through all their files together, item by item. That is one supersized can of worms I am not looking forward to opening.

"Off the top of my head, I could suggest the Vestibule as one possibility for both of them. As I understand it, the green one especially hates bees and such, so if they end up there it's going to make for one interesting show."

Turning on his heel, the Devil began to leave.

"It's not fair!" Gaz raged, sounding like a two year old knowingly receiving an unjust death sentence. "Look at me! Blood! Mud! Bee stings! Everything! You gave everything to me! Nobody else got this! Nobody! Just me! You get back here now or else! You can't do this to me!!!"

Despite her best efforts to keep it out, a note of pleading crept into her voice, and it was this that made the Devil pause. Slowly he turned around and once more leaned over her head in the ice. This time he made sure to face her; she could not mistake his expression, and this time it was dark and grim.

"What most people understand as 'going to hell,' as in simply going to one circle of it and staying there, is about offending God," the Devil began," his face darkening, his voice deepening to a growl. "If you're going to offend either of us, you'd do a lot better to offend God."

The longer the Devil spoke, the more terrifying his face became and the deeper his voice plummeted, past a tiger's roar, past thunder, past even an earthquake.

"If you're really sorry, and He will know if you are, and ask Him to forgive you, He does. He forgives. He's God."

By this time the final vestige of the Devil's urbane Mephistopheles persona had fled.

"But I'm the Devil. And I DON'T!

"'Vengeance is Mine,' saith the Lord, but He outsources it to me because my location lets me do it so much more efficiently. Meting out punishment the way you've been is MY area. And when someone moves in on MY turf... I get mean."

The Devil now looked like one who was monstrously ugly to begin with before contracting smallpox and whose sores were boiling with writhing maggots. His teeth were longer and sharper than a viper's, and his voice was now so loud and low-pitched that the very foundation of hell itself trembled. This was the Beast himself, in his foulest, most terrifying form.

"I mean, MEANERRRRR!"

When Gaz finally dared to open her eyes again, the Devil's oily Mephistopheles visage had returned, and he was indicating the face closest to Gaz's. "Cain, kindly welcome Gaz. Gaz, please say hello to Cain. I leave you here now to get better acquainted." He cast a final glance at the Ninth Circle's newest resident, and the twinkle returned to his eyes. "He doesn't like his brother either."

"Damn you!" Gaz growled, somewhat redundantly. None too perturbed, the Devil began to glide away over the ice.

The first idea Gaz got was that someone who also hated his brother would be a great ally for plotting escape and horrifying vengeance, but Cain would say only that he started trying to do that as soon as he got here and had given up several centuries ago. "Or was it several centuries later? Hmm, let me think... It was sometime after... "

Threats to beat him up if he didn't shut up were of no use whatsoever, so to cover up Cain's boring monologue, Gaz began venting about Dib. Unfortunately, as soon as she began doing this, Cain took it as a cue to whine and bitch and gripe about what a smarmy little suckup Abel could be. He didn't even have the courtesy to listen to Gaz's infinitely MORE justified rants about HER annoying brother!

Now desperate, she next found that discussions about video games were entirely out of the question; Cain wasn't the least bit interested in anything that had happened since Biblical times and only the first couple of chapters of Genesis at that. He couldn't even say what toppings he liked best on his pizza or name his favorite pop because he didn't know what either one was.

"Devil!" Her list of topics completely exhausted, Gaz was immediately bored. "Devil! Give me a new spot. I don't like this one. Get back here now or I will send you to a nightmare world of... " etc.

He heard her, but he was too busy to answer. The Devil had returned to his own place atop the vast glacier at the core of Hell, stuffed a fresh wad of Juicy Judas chewing gum into his mouth, and resumed uploading files to the Infernal Network 4 Transferring Everywhere Remotely New & Enticing Temptations.

The End.

(A/N) Boo! Don't forget to have a Happy Halloween!

I'm not saying Zim IS going to end up in the Vestibule with all those bees, or Dib either for that matter, of course. It would be just like the Devil to think of surrounding anyone with what they like the least.

I would like to thank Zim'sMostLoyalServant for suggesting this idea to me, for reasons that go well beyond the obvious. I just took another look around, and there is just. So. Damn. Much. Here that keeps chewing over and over and over and over and over and over and over how unworthy, worthless, this, that, etc. Dib supposedly is, just for not being the brass knuckle-dragging goon Gaz is and for not having all the exact same one-note obsessions she does. There genuinely does need to be something up here from time to time for the opposing viewpoint.

Yep, this graceless lout's savage abuse of her brother makes her "cool," all right. B-r-r-r-r-r-r-r!!!

Moreover, I have been itching for an opportunity to point out how Gaz's worst humiliations in "Taster of Pork" came not from Dib at all.

"Gaz, it was... your FATHER!"

"NNNOOOOOOOOOOooooooooo!!!"