The term “descended into Hell” didn’t quiet do Foggy’s trip down justice. Neither did “dragged to Hell” really, a classic though it may be.
No, instead imagine the scene from Labyrinth with the hand tunnel where the protagonist falls through a well shaft lined human hands. Now imagine that each of the hands were modeled after the lovechild of Wolverine and Edward Scissorhands and were being manned by very angry, underpaid interns.
OK, so there you have the first half of Foggy’s trip. The more pleasant part.
The second half is best described by the following: burning, crushing, twisting, rending, crunching, shredding, freezing, snapping, ripping, and then finally, just for good measure, whatever adjective you might use to describe the feeling that your insides not entirely living up to their name.
Foggy was genuinely surprised he didn’t pass out sooner on his way down, and also that he later woke up at all, even if it was face down on a concrete floor. Pain lingered in every part of his body (some that he literally didn’t know that could feel pain in, today was full of surprises) and a keening groan was the first thing to leave his lips.
‘Oh, I still have lips. That’s a start.’ The thought was distant, hard to grasp, but still something to cling onto. He had a body, and he should probably see if he could use it to figure out where he was. Though the very thought of moving made Foggy want to cry a little bit, he still gathered his arms below him and hoisted himself up on his elbows.
He almost wished he hadn’t.
For a moment Foggy was convinced that what he heard about Hell being literally on fire 24/7 was true since stretching out around him was just stagnant grey smoke. However there was no sound, the temperature seemed fairly normal, and whatever this stuff was, it didn't burn his lungs like any other smoke he had encountered. Also, it seemed that the smoke that seemed to have… formed lines stretching from one end of his field of vision to the other.
That… OK. That was unsettling. Reaching their limit, Foggy’s arms gave out and he flopped back down to the floor.
Maybe… maybe he should try to sleep this off. Yeah.
Foggy fell unconscious once again. — When Foggy woke up this time, he hurt significantly less than at first. However, that was a low bar so Foggy still felt like he had just gotten mugged three times in a row after completing a triathlon.
Still, it was enough that he could manage to get his wits about him and sit up.
Around him, the smoke around him had turned absolutely turbulent. Whereas before had been neat lines as far as the eye could see, now there was a chaotic sea, churning without order and… not touching him. It was still silent enough to make his ears ring.
Weird.
“The hell?” he whispered.
“Oh, that’s a new one.”
The dry, scathing voice behind him nearly made him jump out of his skin.
Twisting his neck, Foggy was surprised to see a human form slouching perhaps ten feet from him.
The form was a man, old, grizzled, and lanky. He was dressed in jeans and a shirt that looked like they had seen at least four Presidents, maybe five, and perched on his nose were sunglasses. In his hand was a cane, though if Foggy concentrated hard enough on it, it glinted concerningly in the ambient light.
“Death?” Foggy guessed, and the man laughed.
“Close, princess. I’ve got bigger things to worry about.”
“Ok, not concerning at all. Wanna tell me where we are?”
“Not particularly,” the man snorted, “but it might be fun. This-” the man spread his arms wide, gesturing all around him, “is the great mail processing center in the sky. Each mortal soul across the universe comes here and gets sorted into the afterlife for whatever crackpot religion they trusted themselves to when alive.”
Foggy blinked. Blinked again. He shuffled around to face the man, but was too busy processing this information to say anything.
“So, not Hell then,” Foggy finally ventured.
“That’s what I said, dumbass.”
Foggy shot the man a dirty look. “Any reason it’s so…” the human waved his hand, gesturing to the chaos around him.
“You’re gonna have to be more specific.” The man’s voice was so flat you could have used it as a level. Ah, the glasses.
“There looked to be order before. Now it’s all… fog machine convention gone wild.”
“That’s your fault.”
Well at least the man was honest.
“…why?”
“Did’ya notice that you got a meat sack? Yeah, that never happens with mortal souls. Never.” Here, the man’s voice turned downright scornful. “The idiot you made a deal with thought ahead, made sure than when you got here you’d have your vessel ready to go.”
“Come again?”
The man groaned loudly, “Look around you. Most souls don’t get here with a body, they have to form their own vessels as they acclimate to this realm. You,” here, the man pointed the business end of the cane at Foggy, “got a freebie from whoever you dealt with. And that makes you important.”
“OK…” Foggy said slowly, “How does that make… whatever’s happening here my fault?”
“Because whoever likes you so much followed you here,” the man’s voice took a turn from condescending to deathly serious.
“So Matt’s here?”
“Who the fuck is- oh.” The man laughed, a dry, wheezing thing. “Oh, Matt, that is just rich!”
“What’s so—” Before Foggy could finish his question, the man stood right in front of him, leaning way into his personal space. The man took a deep whiff of the air around Foggy (which, hello creepy), before laughing again and turning to walk away.
“Well, Franklin, tell Matt that an old friend says hi. Also,” the man turned to look back over his shoulder, “that he should tell you about Jack Murdock.”
The man then continued to walk away, chuckling to himself as his visible form was swallowed up by the billowing smoke.
Foggy looked after him for awhile, not entirely sure what to think. Finally he sighed, squared his shoulders, and looked around him for any clue as to where he could go from there.
The blank scenery offered him nothing.
Walking aimlessly seemed like his only option, or at least, the only option that didn’t involve becoming a sitting duck for any other assholes hiding around here. So he did. Foggy walked on and on for what could have easily been hours, but nothing gave him any idea for how long this lasted. The roiling fog, the unsettling silence, the sheer mind-numbing blankness of the place plus the fact that his body didn’t seem to be slowing down at all made for a very static experience.
After a while it was driving Foggy more than a bit up a wall; he could swear the smoke was avoiding him and the longer he stayed here the wider the radius around him seemed to get.
Finally, however, another form started to make itself known. Foggy was sure for the first few seconds he saw it that his brain had just conjured it up to have something, anything to look at. However, then the figure started sprinting towards him.
Foggy stumbled back a few steps however before he could turn and make any real headway, the figure slammed into him, almost bringing him to the ground. For a split second limbs went everywhere and oh god it would be so easy to hurt him this close up and being the squishy human he was and to top it off he was a lover not a fighter—
“Foggy,” the relieved gasp caught his attention, as did the almost aggressive press of lips to his temple.
“Matt? That you?”
“Who else?” Matt’s voice was breathless and more of a laugh than anything, and it made Foggy’s arms wrap around him that much tighter in response.
“Aw man, I’m so glad to see you. This place is giving me the creeps.”
“Thought I lost you,” Matt rasped, lips still pressed against Foggy’s temple, “Your book made it through, but I didn’t have as good a grip on you as I thought.”
“It’s fine, I’m OK.” Foggy squeezed a bit harder for emphasis, sensing Matt’s distress. “Let’s go. You have an entire Hell-scape to introduce me to.”
Matt chuckled weakly, “Most people would be avoiding that.”
“Shaddup,” Foggy teased back, “Let’s try this again.”
Without another word, the two blinked out of that certain plane. In their wake, the smoke stopped swirling as tumultuously, and slowly, slowly began drifting back into lines again, not without a few more curious wisps prodding at the spot where they previously stood. — Matt had said that Hell (or at least, Purgatory) was a bit like New York and well, Foggy guessed he could see the resemblance. Cityscape sprawled out for as far as he could see; it was dirty and noisy, and even from way above it, he could see that it was definitely crowded.
However there were a few things that Matt didn’t mention. For instance, the neighborhoods seemed to run into each other and sometimes seemed to be out of different centuries. It actually made for a really interesting look. For instance, down on the south side there was a section where buildings straight out of 1800’s urban London was surrounded by 1600’s Italian architecture and a neighborhood of modern Russian housing. Then there was the obvious sectioning of Purgatory by religion and country which some of these people were born in, but it seemed very lax. Foggy mused that once you were in Hell, your perspective might shift just a little, so this didn’t surprise Foggy greatly.
Ah yes, then there was The Pillar.
Like the rest of Foggy’s life, The Pillar looked to be something straight out of a horror/sci-fi novel and was the biggest landmark that Foggy had seen ever. It stood right in the middle of the sprawling mess that was Purgatory and the base was at least several city blocks square. Its outside looked to be nothing but solid sinew and gore, writhing and pulsing in a way that Foggy never wanted to think about for too long. Foggy wasn’t sure about how far up it went, but he found it safe to assume that it was just as tall as conceivably possible and then some.
Matt’s office was at the top (however high up that was) and it was their first stop in Hell. The space was startlingly bland in comparison to the glimpse of the outside building that Foggy got before landing. The office went past Spartan and was just flat out stark in design with a huge wall of windows looking out over the city; if Foggy didn’t know better he would have suspected it had been set up to intimidate anyone coming in (and since he did know better, he was certain of it).
“Whoa,” was the first word out of Foggy’s mouth, staring out the windows. “This is-?”
“Yep,” Matt popped the ‘p’ on his word and leaned against his huge mahogany monstrosity of a desk, feigning nonchalance like it was second nature. “I’m told it goes as far as the eye can see.”
“Well you were told right,” Foggy said, “It’s so crowded… how do you even concentrate here with your bat-hearing?”
“We’re very high up. Even if we weren’t, I could do something about it. I have complete control over this place.”
“So you’re responsible for the… gore pillar?”
“That, ah, not my fault. I just created and control this plane, I didn’t decorate it.”
“Matt, this building is covered in—”
“Viscera, yes. It’s just the unused vessels of souls on the rack and only on the outside. Think of it like recycling.”
Applied Contract Law, 11/?
No, instead imagine the scene from Labyrinth with the hand tunnel where the protagonist falls through a well shaft lined human hands. Now imagine that each of the hands were modeled after the lovechild of Wolverine and Edward Scissorhands and were being manned by very angry, underpaid interns.
OK, so there you have the first half of Foggy’s trip. The more pleasant part.
The second half is best described by the following: burning, crushing, twisting, rending, crunching, shredding, freezing, snapping, ripping, and then finally, just for good measure, whatever adjective you might use to describe the feeling that your insides not entirely living up to their name.
Foggy was genuinely surprised he didn’t pass out sooner on his way down, and also that he later woke up at all, even if it was face down on a concrete floor. Pain lingered in every part of his body (some that he literally didn’t know that could feel pain in, today was full of surprises) and a keening groan was the first thing to leave his lips.
‘Oh, I still have lips. That’s a start.’ The thought was distant, hard to grasp, but still something to cling onto. He had a body, and he should probably see if he could use it to figure out where he was. Though the very thought of moving made Foggy want to cry a little bit, he still gathered his arms below him and hoisted himself up on his elbows.
He almost wished he hadn’t.
For a moment Foggy was convinced that what he heard about Hell being literally on fire 24/7 was true since stretching out around him was just stagnant grey smoke. However there was no sound, the temperature seemed fairly normal, and whatever this stuff was, it didn't burn his lungs like any other smoke he had encountered. Also, it seemed that the smoke that seemed to have… formed lines stretching from one end of his field of vision to the other.
That… OK. That was unsettling. Reaching their limit, Foggy’s arms gave out and he flopped back down to the floor.
Maybe… maybe he should try to sleep this off. Yeah.
Foggy fell unconscious once again.
—
When Foggy woke up this time, he hurt significantly less than at first. However, that was a low bar so Foggy still felt like he had just gotten mugged three times in a row after completing a triathlon.
Still, it was enough that he could manage to get his wits about him and sit up.
Around him, the smoke around him had turned absolutely turbulent. Whereas before had been neat lines as far as the eye could see, now there was a chaotic sea, churning without order and… not touching him. It was still silent enough to make his ears ring.
Weird.
“The hell?” he whispered.
“Oh, that’s a new one.”
The dry, scathing voice behind him nearly made him jump out of his skin.
Twisting his neck, Foggy was surprised to see a human form slouching perhaps ten feet from him.
The form was a man, old, grizzled, and lanky. He was dressed in jeans and a shirt that looked like they had seen at least four Presidents, maybe five, and perched on his nose were sunglasses. In his hand was a cane, though if Foggy concentrated hard enough on it, it glinted concerningly in the ambient light.
“Death?” Foggy guessed, and the man laughed.
“Close, princess. I’ve got bigger things to worry about.”
“Ok, not concerning at all. Wanna tell me where we are?”
“Not particularly,” the man snorted, “but it might be fun. This-” the man spread his arms wide, gesturing all around him, “is the great mail processing center in the sky. Each mortal soul across the universe comes here and gets sorted into the afterlife for whatever crackpot religion they trusted themselves to when alive.”
Foggy blinked. Blinked again. He shuffled around to face the man, but was too busy processing this information to say anything.
“So, not Hell then,” Foggy finally ventured.
“That’s what I said, dumbass.”
Foggy shot the man a dirty look. “Any reason it’s so…” the human waved his hand, gesturing to the chaos around him.
“You’re gonna have to be more specific.” The man’s voice was so flat you could have used it as a level. Ah, the glasses.
“There looked to be order before. Now it’s all… fog machine convention gone wild.”
“That’s your fault.”
Well at least the man was honest.
“…why?”
“Did’ya notice that you got a meat sack? Yeah, that never happens with mortal souls. Never.” Here, the man’s voice turned downright scornful. “The idiot you made a deal with thought ahead, made sure than when you got here you’d have your vessel ready to go.”
“Come again?”
The man groaned loudly, “Look around you. Most souls don’t get here with a body, they have to form their own vessels as they acclimate to this realm. You,” here, the man pointed the business end of the cane at Foggy, “got a freebie from whoever you dealt with. And that makes you important.”
“OK…” Foggy said slowly, “How does that make… whatever’s happening here my fault?”
“Because whoever likes you so much followed you here,” the man’s voice took a turn from condescending to deathly serious.
“So Matt’s here?”
“Who the fuck is- oh.” The man laughed, a dry, wheezing thing. “Oh, Matt, that is just rich!”
“What’s so—” Before Foggy could finish his question, the man stood right in front of him, leaning way into his personal space. The man took a deep whiff of the air around Foggy (which, hello creepy), before laughing again and turning to walk away.
“Well, Franklin, tell Matt that an old friend says hi. Also,” the man turned to look back over his shoulder, “that he should tell you about Jack Murdock.”
The man then continued to walk away, chuckling to himself as his visible form was swallowed up by the billowing smoke.
Foggy looked after him for awhile, not entirely sure what to think. Finally he sighed, squared his shoulders, and looked around him for any clue as to where he could go from there.
The blank scenery offered him nothing.
Walking aimlessly seemed like his only option, or at least, the only option that didn’t involve becoming a sitting duck for any other assholes hiding around here. So he did. Foggy walked on and on for what could have easily been hours, but nothing gave him any idea for how long this lasted. The roiling fog, the unsettling silence, the sheer mind-numbing blankness of the place plus the fact that his body didn’t seem to be slowing down at all made for a very static experience.
After a while it was driving Foggy more than a bit up a wall; he could swear the smoke was avoiding him and the longer he stayed here the wider the radius around him seemed to get.
Finally, however, another form started to make itself known. Foggy was sure for the first few seconds he saw it that his brain had just conjured it up to have something, anything to look at. However, then the figure started sprinting towards him.
Foggy stumbled back a few steps however before he could turn and make any real headway, the figure slammed into him, almost bringing him to the ground. For a split second limbs went everywhere and oh god it would be so easy to hurt him this close up and being the squishy human he was and to top it off he was a lover not a fighter—
“Foggy,” the relieved gasp caught his attention, as did the almost aggressive press of lips to his temple.
“Matt? That you?”
“Who else?” Matt’s voice was breathless and more of a laugh than anything, and it made Foggy’s arms wrap around him that much tighter in response.
“Aw man, I’m so glad to see you. This place is giving me the creeps.”
“Thought I lost you,” Matt rasped, lips still pressed against Foggy’s temple, “Your book made it through, but I didn’t have as good a grip on you as I thought.”
“It’s fine, I’m OK.” Foggy squeezed a bit harder for emphasis, sensing Matt’s distress. “Let’s go. You have an entire Hell-scape to introduce me to.”
Matt chuckled weakly, “Most people would be avoiding that.”
“Shaddup,” Foggy teased back, “Let’s try this again.”
Without another word, the two blinked out of that certain plane. In their wake, the smoke stopped swirling as tumultuously, and slowly, slowly began drifting back into lines again, not without a few more curious wisps prodding at the spot where they previously stood.
—
Matt had said that Hell (or at least, Purgatory) was a bit like New York and well, Foggy guessed he could see the resemblance. Cityscape sprawled out for as far as he could see; it was dirty and noisy, and even from way above it, he could see that it was definitely crowded.
However there were a few things that Matt didn’t mention. For instance, the neighborhoods seemed to run into each other and sometimes seemed to be out of different centuries. It actually made for a really interesting look. For instance, down on the south side there was a section where buildings straight out of 1800’s urban London was surrounded by 1600’s Italian architecture and a neighborhood of modern Russian housing. Then there was the obvious sectioning of Purgatory by religion and country which some of these people were born in, but it seemed very lax. Foggy mused that once you were in Hell, your perspective might shift just a little, so this didn’t surprise Foggy greatly.
Ah yes, then there was The Pillar.
Like the rest of Foggy’s life, The Pillar looked to be something straight out of a horror/sci-fi novel and was the biggest landmark that Foggy had seen ever. It stood right in the middle of the sprawling mess that was Purgatory and the base was at least several city blocks square. Its outside looked to be nothing but solid sinew and gore, writhing and pulsing in a way that Foggy never wanted to think about for too long. Foggy wasn’t sure about how far up it went, but he found it safe to assume that it was just as tall as conceivably possible and then some.
Matt’s office was at the top (however high up that was) and it was their first stop in Hell. The space was startlingly bland in comparison to the glimpse of the outside building that Foggy got before landing. The office went past Spartan and was just flat out stark in design with a huge wall of windows looking out over the city; if Foggy didn’t know better he would have suspected it had been set up to intimidate anyone coming in (and since he did know better, he was certain of it).
“Whoa,” was the first word out of Foggy’s mouth, staring out the windows. “This is-?”
“Yep,” Matt popped the ‘p’ on his word and leaned against his huge mahogany monstrosity of a desk, feigning nonchalance like it was second nature. “I’m told it goes as far as the eye can see.”
“Well you were told right,” Foggy said, “It’s so crowded… how do you even concentrate here with your bat-hearing?”
“We’re very high up. Even if we weren’t, I could do something about it. I have complete control over this place.”
“So you’re responsible for the… gore pillar?”
“That, ah, not my fault. I just created and control this plane, I didn’t decorate it.”
“Matt, this building is covered in—”
“Viscera, yes. It’s just the unused vessels of souls on the rack and only on the outside. Think of it like recycling.”
Foggy stared at Matt, who just shrugged.
This was off to a good start.
Kind of a short chapter, but I hope you like it!!