"He-hem! So I have called this hotel staff meeting for the purpose of brainstorming new ideas for redemption exercises," said Charlie as she paced back and forth in front of an audience of Vaggie, Alastor and Lucifer. "As we all know our hotel is busier than ever. We've got Angel Dust and Pentious-"
"Baxter," Vaggie corrected.
"-Baxtious… erm, Baxter as residents now, and Cherri Bomb and Mimsy have decided to stay a couple nights to see if redemption is for them. It's crucial that we come up with better ideas… I'm not sure my ideas are working… they need to be more, ermmm…"
"Entertaining!" said Alastor.
"Yes, they do need to be more entertaining, that's what draws them in… but they also need to work… they need to be edutainment that entertains while at the same time educating them on how to be a good person and why it's better to be good than to be bad…"
Alastor raised his hand. "Ooh! Might I suggest engaging the audience in some educational songs? I've come up with a few that are not only catchy but teach important life skills!"
Vaggie put her hand on her face as though she were having a migraine. "Alastor. We are not singing the 'Family-Friendly' Noose Song."
"And why not? It was a hit when we did it last time! Admit it, you enjoyed it…"
"Well actually I was hoping to brainstorm more ideas for scripts," yapped Charlie. "I don't think my last little sketch went over very well…"
"Which is why I've written a whole new educational sketch just for you!" Alastor whipped out a stack of typewritten papers that he had doodled all over. "It's called 'Little Billy Uses ChatGPT To Do His Math Homework'!"
"It better not be like "Little Sally Uses ChatGPT To Finish Her Essay,'" Vaggie grumbled as Alastor passed a copy to everyone to read. She sighed and groaned and rolled her eyes when she saw how similar its themes were to the last script that Alastor submitted to be used as a redemption exercise.
"Alastor, the world - or the Hell or whatever - is not going to end because of students being allowed to use an electronic calculator to compute logarithms for their homework problems, you abacus-fucking freak from the Stone Age!"
"Ah-ah-ah, get it right Vaggie! I hail from the Dark Ages, not the Stone Age! By my time we were PLENTY civilized, the slide rule had in fact already rendered the abacus obsolete for centuries!"
Alastor brought out a circular slide rule and waved it like a sensu fan. Lucifer began mocking him. "Look at me, I'm not like the other sinners I use a paper calculator I'm so smart so very steampunk…"
"This 'paper calculator' landed men on the Moon." Alaster said with a smug grin and evil-looking eyes.
"Whatever…" Lucifer skimmed the rest of the script. "Oh gimme a break! It's all too transparent that your little sketch here is little more than a thinly veiled polemic against post-circa-1930s technology, I mean I am not absolutely crazy about every new thing that VoxTek craps out to the public either but you're taking it so far as to be an actual fucking Luddite!"
"Oh sure, I try and curb Vox's efforts to rot our brains to the point that we forget how to count and spell when the next Carrington event shuts down all of our electronics and reduces our technology to sticks and stones AHEMandcrystalradiosHEHEM and I'M the Luddite. What say you, Charlie?"
"Alastor… first of all I want to say that I GREATLY appreciate your… creative and inspired efforts to come up with activities to engage sinners in their rehabilitation, but uh… you see, I want our guests to come away with a more… positive message, and your script, I'm afraid, doesn't end on a very positive note…"
"Very well. You know, any script of mine that gets rejected will simply get recycled into one of Niffty's roach puppet shows anyway..."
"Char Char, you know, as much as I hate to agree with Bullwinkle here I think he may have a point with giving it an unhappy ending. The all-positive approach doesn't work with all sinners. Sometimes you gotta scare 'em straight."
"Yeah but it needs to be balanced with positivity and this here is just negativity."
"Ooh Charlie!"Alastor nearly jumped out of his seat at raising his hand. "Do you remember that little homework assignment I gave to you at our last staff meeting?"
Lucifer got up on his chair that he made to look like a Hellish throne, "Homework?! My daughter's been through college, she doesn't need to be given homework assignments by some backwoods swamp goblin in nouveau riche clothing!"
Alastor looked more amused than offended at the insult. "HA ha, think of it as continuing education… postdoc study, if you will…"
"Oh right!" Charlie took out a notebook filled with crayon doodles and notes. "Alastor suggested that I do some research on what the lives of humans on Earth are like, which I was already doing by watching popular Earth sitcoms but apparently not enough I guess so I watched a bunch more popular Earth sitcoms and took notes this time… let's see… Ooh! One trope that I've seen in a lot of Earth sitcoms is when the teacher gives out a class assignment which is to take care of an egg or a sack of flour and pretend it is a real human baby to teach the students responsibility and how to care for a living thing and I drew a big star next to it because I thought it would be a good idea to use for a redemption exercise…I thought hey why not use the Eggboiz but then I remembered that we only have one left…"
The wheels in Alastor's head were visibly turning after Charlie mentioned the trope, and his face lit up and he ran off and was immediately back with a box filled with what looked like fuzzy animatronic owls.
"OOH WHAT ARE THESE THEY ARE ADORABLE!" Charlie squealed. Lucifer smirked while Vaggie sneered.
"Ugh… Honey you know about Furbies?"
"BABY Furbies!" added Alastor. "From my special collection!"
"Let me guess, you were going to invent some other new abomination of a musical instrument out of these?" Lucifer jeered. "Ha ha ha don't think I haven't heard you screwing around with that other Furby contraption in your radio tower during the wee hours of both the morning and the evening!"
"Tough talk from the man who literally invented the Quackenspiel," Alastor retorted. "I was actually going to give one of these as a Sinsmas present to all the hotel guests and staff just so I could take advantage of the crystal radio inside these things to scare everybody's pants off with some top-notch practical jokes after their batteries have run out! Ha ha! Would make a great lesson in electronics you know. But I just got a better idea - how about we have all of the hotel guests and staff care for one of these things just like in those sitcoms Charlie mentioned as a redemption exercise!"
"YES!" shouted Charlie.
"Ugh noooo, these things creep me out," groaned Vaggie.
"Of course, I will first need to, eh, modify their programming a bit to tailor them to such a task," Alastor said, his grin looking particularly mischievous.
"Charlie, are you sure about this? I just know he's gonna pull something sneaky with this…"
"VAGGIE!" Charlie grabbed Vaggie by the shoulders and got in her face. "SHUT UP. WE ARE DOING THIS!"
Vaggie sighed. "Alright. Anything for you honey…"