Let's begin with one of the most treasured and time-honoured roles in Hell, and the very first real step on your journey: your infernal guide.
Now what, you may ask, is an infernal guide? To answer that question, we'll need to delve into exactly what a demon is, how one's formed. Your guide will be more than happy to go into the gory details for you, and I've always been fond of a meaty metaphor, so imagine this: if a human being is an untrimmed steak, then a demon is lean, carved, the sort of cut that would make Gordon Ramsay yawp with joy if you put it in front of him.
(Speaking of Mr. Ramsay, if you're very lucky, you might get him subbing in for your guide on occasion. He volunteers part-time down here. Mutually-beneficial arrangement. He gets to rest his vocal cords, we get to dispose of our failures in a fashion more sophisticated than tossing them to the hounds.)
Or, to use another metaphor, consider Michelangelo's David, or whatever sculpture he was talking about when he said he saw the angel in the marble and carved until he set him free, art history's not my forte - and don't worry, even down here, we're not going to expect you to learn it. Your squishy, shiny human soul, so freshly pulled out of your mangled corpse by our expertly-trained hell hounds, is the marble. The demon you will become is the angel, and given you weren't clever enough to keep yourself from selling your soul, I feel the need to spell out the exquisite ironic humor of that statement for you.
Your infernal guide is Michelangelo, and they can already see your horns, your hooves, your thousand tongues and bleeding eyes and cradling vines of bone and sinew, and they will carve until they set you free. Most of them do so prefer to consider themselves artists. Rather than mallet and chisel, though, their tools tend to be just a bit more…specialized. Flensing knife. Plutonium ingots. Centipedes. Needle and wire. Razor blade. Cheese grater. Eyedropper full of acid, ground glass, boiling oil, pliers, living bamboo, MRSA, metal dentures…
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on this one and assume you get the idea. No need to spell it out any further.
Actually, there probably is, so: your guide's going to torture you until you're a demon. Subtlety is not one of the arts more commonly appreciated by the damned.
Infernal guides have been known by many names over the years. The simple "torturer" was always popular. Inquisitor. High priests of Hell. Picasso with a razor blade (I know you're dead, Alastair, but get the fuck over yourself, there's nothing "refined" or "avant-garde" about sewing peritoneums together and seeding teeth in the sutures, you weren't a visionary, you just had undiagnosed ADHD and got bored too often for anybody's good). Sadistic bloody motherfucking psychopathic bastards capable of roughly half the cruelty of my mother. But, as part of the rebranding associated with my Make Hell Great Again* campaign, I felt that "infernal guide" had a nicer ring to it.
Guides operate in multiple Circles, depending on their various needs and predilections. That's "Circles" as in "of Hell," not "social," because I can already see your soul wrinkling up in confusion. We went over this in the first chapter; wonderful thing about books, you can flip around in them, find different sections. Afraid there's no search function, though. You younger generation will have to figure out how to locate the information you need without clicking and tapping. Bet you regret selling your soul for that iThing now, don't you?
Where was I?
Oh, right - infernal guides. Locations.
Most guides' workshops can be found in the administrative Circle, where our crossroads and customer service departments are also located, among others. They used to be scattered all around Hell, but the grand majority were convinced to relocate once it became clear that their workshops could be designed and/or recreated to their exact specifications, acid bladders and Logan Paul albums included. One of the major benefits of Hell being a living, breathing, fluid, mostly-psychosomatic entity is that if you ask nicely and set the cattle prod to the correct voltage, you can convince it to expand and adapt to fit all your needs. Of course, there's usually a lot of bleeding and gibbering involved, but when isn't there?
Several of the more…particular guides have chosen to remain in their original Circles, a decision I as King of Hell wholeheartedly support because arguing any further with them is a bit like having a wank with a broken-glass-and-holy-water-based lubricant. We have a couple, for example, in the caverns, or the fungal wastes, or the deep freeze, or the large intestine, or on islands in our worst ocean…my sincerest apologies if you happen to wind up with one of the lattermost, by the way. Not much anybody can do about it, though. Paperwork.
Guides are assigned randomly because there are about a million of you coming in at any given time and honestly, who can be arsed chosen very carefully, hand-picked for every individual based on history, personality traits, and specific needs, which we determine based on your answers to the questionnaire at the back of this book. You'll notice it is printed on perforated pages. Please fill it out, tear it free, and hand it in to the nearest demon.
You have my word as your King and sovereign that they will certainly not use it as rolling paper for a blunt of truly inappropriate size. If you should be offered a joint roughly the length and girth of a toddler's arm and covered in what looks quite suspiciously like your handwriting, I can assure you it's a coincidence. But you probably shouldn't accept it anyway. It isn't ganja we smoke down here, and I imagine your infernal guide will be putting you through more than enough already.
Moving on.
Here is a (by no means comprehensive, you can't honestly expect me to remember every single one of these freaks' names) list of some of the guides you may be assigned:
Alastair - Deceased, thank Lucifer. Reminder to self: send Sam Winchester a fruit basket in gratitude for that. Curse half the fruit because of what a pain in the arse it's been to fill the great, gaping hole Alastair's death left in the hierarchy of torture.
Belphegor - Horny little deviant, but a true romantic at heart. Alastair's disciple (one of many), but as likely to date you as he is torture you. Show you the many landmarks of Hell, seeing as he's one of the few demons appallingly aberrant enough to enjoy living here. Take you to our finest restaurants. Of course, you'll be stapled to your chair the entire time and the main course will be your own pulsing offal, still rooted inside you, but he'll be a perfect gentleman the entire time…by infernal standards. Which means he'll pick up the check before he eats your genitals.
Cuddles - The less said, the better.
Forneus - Fond of water. Extremely fond of water. So fond of water, in fact, that it falls into the same class as that special sort of love that, outside of Hell, you can only really expect to find between a Republican senator and his Guatemalan pool boy. Now, that's not so bad, I can hear you saying already. I like water, too. I love pools and beach vacations and all manner of things you never get to do because you're the sole babysitter for ten thousand idiots, Crowley. Well, maybe it'll be fun for you, then. Do keep that in mind on your third or fourth month in the salt tank; you can probably sculpt yourself a lounge chair out of all your sloughed tissue by then. Assuming you've still got hands.
Gremory - Inventor of the infamous frat pledge Hell Week, and quite proud of it. President of our only and most hated fraternity, proud owner of a bedpost that is entirely notches at this point (we don't need to sleep, so it's…just the post), and holder of the record for fastest breaking of a human soul. Would have been promoted into Alastair's position if he could shut up for ten fucking seconds about how much he fucking loves beer pong.
Orias - I imagine most of us, when we were alive, knew a woman with a dismaying level of attachment to her Zodiac sign. Picture her. Now add screaming veins, acid tears, and a spine that has splintered from the ribcage down into a thousand tentacles of nerve and bone, and congratulations, you've just about met Orias. She's a Gemini. Pray to every god you've ever heard of, and any you can come up with on the spot, you aren't a Sagittarius.
Phil
Seven's probably good, right? Right. Look, I even alphabetized them. You're welcome.
(If you want to know more, you can check our census records, meticulously maintained by Crocell for some godforsaken reason, but you have to defeat him in hand-to-hand combat first. Quite protective of his massive pile of useless paper. Be aware he will only fight you in an onsen of extremely uncomfortable temperature, and be careful: he's a biter.)
If you feel the guide you've been assigned isn't a good fit, or if you have anything else you'd like to whinge about for whatever reason, do feel free to call our customer service department. You can find the contact details, by now, engraved quite clearly on your liver; just one of many fun changes we've implemented as part of our 100% customer satisfaction campaign. If you have a legitimate complaint, you won't mind digging the number up…pun entirely and gleefully intended. Wait times are currently averaging roughly six hundred years on the low end. Understand you will be expected to take the representative's place at the end of the call, whether they solve your problem or not.
If you've decided (or had it decided for you, same difference, really, down here) to be a good little piece of meat and surrender to your guide and your fate, you're now in for a real treat. The exact timeline of your infernal transformation, not to mention the content, will depend equally on your guide and yourself; much like a snowflake, every transition is special and unique. The necessary time can range from several hours (begrudging credit, once again, to Gremory) to a few thousand years, and there's simply no way to predict just what you're made of until we cut into you and see.
There is, of course, one exception to the rule - absolutely no one breaks faster than men of the "Kill 'Em All and Let God Sort 'Em Out"-T-shirt-wearing variety. Structural integrity of wet tampons, you lot. Apparently that masculinity really is fragile.
However long it takes for you to begin to come apart, you will, eventually, begin to notice certain changes in your soul…and not just the sort left behind by Orias's healing crystal cat o' nine. Perhaps there will be hair in places you've never had it before. You may notice odd smells emanating from your body. Or you may inspect your genitalia one day only to find that it has been replaced by some ungodly hybrid of mouth and eye.
Congratulations! You have officially taken your first step upon the road to becoming an unhealthy, unhappy adult demon!
Consider this time in your afterlife to be much like puberty. It will last roughly as long as the one you had on earth felt like it did, it will bring with it about the same amount of discomfort, and you will discover a wide variety of shocking and disappointing things about your body in the process. Take heart, though: it won't be nearly as humiliating.
Unless your guide is Paimon. Whose workshop is set up to exactly mimic a secondary school classroom.
During this exciting time, in addition to the physical changes, you may notice many new and unfamiliar urges, such as a craving for the flesh of newborn infants or a deep and unquenchable need to remove someone's entire circulatory system through their ears. Rest assured, these urges are both normal and advantageous in your new role, and your infernal guide is standing by to help you navigate them with all the patience and sympathy of a city council deciding what to do about a homeless encampment.
You're also likely to be unimaginably, indescribably, destructively aroused most of the time. Orgies are at seven on Tuesdays in the admin Circle. BYOB (Bring Your Own Bees).
Transformation from human soul to demon is a process. A journey. A horrible, horrible journey, where the destination isn't so much better than the traveling, but at least when you're finished, you never have to see Forneus or a tasteful water feature ever again. As mentioned before, everyone's timeline is different, and so is everyone's final form. The most tried and true litmus test of whether or not you're finished, of whether or not you have passed through the eye of Lucifer, have joined all the rest of the great legion of the damned in the membrane of suffering that connects every demon, is the presence of the voice of Hell.
It will ring within you, as it does eventually all of us who have shuffled through the Gates. The symphony of an abomination borne of our fallen sire's betrayal and pain. Unmet need. Endless agony. Every broken promise between God and man and everything else on the planet set to the music of torn and throbbing flesh, like a baby left alone in a dark room for eternity, bound forever on that knife-edge between neglected life and the bliss of death. The cord falls off. The placenta rots. And it cries and cries and cries, now only in a futile effort to self-soothe, because it's known since the Beginning that no one is ever coming back.
I recommend tuning it out. Needy fucking bastard.
Now we've covered the process and the thing in charge of it, let's move on to something truly fun: the many different species of demon represented in Hell, and which one you'll be when you grow up!
* That's "MHGA," pronounced exactly as it's spelled. If you're doing it correctly, it should sound like you're clearing bloody phlegm out of infected lungs, which is, coincidentally, something we do a lot of down here. Hats - with a wide variety of horn holes for all your needs - on sale now!