Chapter Text
Alastor registered three things when he woke up, and each was worse than the last.
The first being a dull throb on the left side of his face that tugged him out of unconsciousness with a low, miserable groan.
The second was a pile of dust that he inhaled upon turning his head to relieve the pressure on his cheek. He shot up on his hands and knees as the dry, chalky film covered his throat, coughing so hard he was sure one of his lungs had come loose. This wasn’t the cause of his third problem, but they were definitely in cahoots.
He hissed as pain lanced through his head, and he would’ve become reacquainted with the carpet if he hadn’t caught himself on his arms in time. He cursed whatever magic blast Charlie had hit him with, with a louder, more miserable groan. On the one hand, it was nice to see her using her powers beyond casting fireworks and summoning flash cards. On the other, he’d prefer if she aimed a little next time.
He opened his eyes and unclenched his jaw when the pain gradually leveled out into an uncomfortable prickle. Given that he’s been living in the same building as an aristocratic moron who thinks top hats are still in style, headaches weren’t an abnormal experience. But this didn’t feel like a normal headache. The pain wasn’t inside, necessarily. The source was external, like someone had lopped off the top of his skull and was sandblasting his brain.
But there was something familiar about it that he couldn’t place. Like a taste he recognized, but the name of the flavor eluded him.
Wincing, he pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead, and when he could breathe without sounding like Husk hacking up a furball, he slowly sat up on his haunches. It was only then that he noticed the white sheet twisted around his legs, which he delicately kicked off–because moving too fast made the needles in his brain upset–before looking around the room.
He blinked hard. Shook his head. Took a slower, more deliberate look around the room to make sure his possible-concussion wasn’t playing games with his eyes.
Being inside the Hazbin Hotel wasn’t strange. He was there 90% of the time.
In fact, the last thing he remembered, he’d been sitting in the parlor, in his favorite arm-chair, watching Lucifer carefully instruct Charlie on the intricacies of teleportation magic. As glittering red power had coalesced around her hands, KeeKee—who’d been chasing bugs with Niffty—had chosen that moment to pounce on a roach that’d scuttled directly into her line of fire. In a panic, Charlie had redirected her magic by shooting it blindly to the side.
Right at Alastor.
He wasn’t sure where Charlie had been channeling her power. She’d mumbled something about the bar across the room–an easy, obtainable goal–but he was definitely still in the parlor. The armchair he’d been in was nearby, though it was jostled slightly to the left, like it’d been knocked into.
Or like he’d fallen out of it.
He glanced between it and the crumpled sheet by his legs and then around the parlor again. A pit of unease opened in his stomach. Charlie, Lucifer, and the others had constructed the new hotel to look bigger and more sophisticated than the last, but they’d still modeled a few rooms after the old one, such as the bar and the parlor. Not similarly enough in Alastor’s opinion, but he’d made do.
Lucifer had a taste for ostentation. He didn’t know the meaning of the word restraint. If Charlie needed a cup, he gave her a chalice. If she asked for a flowerpot, he made a garden. If she was craving a sandwich, he conjured a buffet. He’d built the hotel with the flashy excessiveness of a preening bird that didn’t know when to pull in its wings.
That was all gone now.
The fancy gold accents that lined the trimmings was now brown splintered wood. Crystal baubled lamps had eroded into moth-bitten lampshades, and the gaudy wallpaper was stripped and peeling. Where once there’d been sparkling fluorescent lights and polished wood floors, there were bulbs covered in cobwebs and a grimy red carpet. Far above him, hanging by a flimsy chain, was a familiar, dust-laden chandelier.
Alastor couldn’t believe his eyes. He’d never expected to see this place again, it’d been decimated by Adam.
But there was no denying where he was.
He was in the old hotel.
Standing slowly, he wiped his hands on his pants and patted his shoulders in a vain attempt to get rid of the dust coating the entire front of his suit, which was as successful as scrubbing a glower off of Husk’s face. He looked down at the perfect outline of his body in the equally dusty carpet and huffed. Lovely.
All of the lobby lights were off, casting a dim darkness in the room that made the sheets strewn over the parlor furniture pop out in dull shades of gray. Alastor tried the parlor light switch, but the sconces hung cold and dead, making the only light source a few reddish-purple rays that made it past the heavy curtains nailed over the windows.
It was all so…still.
And eerily quiet.
His ears swiveled as he stepped out of the parlor, searching for hints of Charlie’s frenzied pacing and Vaggie’s confident march. Husk’s tailfeathers dragging on the carpet. Niffty’s sewing needle jabbing the floor. Hell, even the click-click-click of Angel Dust’s constant texting would do. But all he found were bugs scuttling in the walls and his own quiet breathing. He opened his mouth to call out, but the uneasy pit in his stomach made him hesitate.
This could be a prank, he reasoned.
One big elaborate joke Lucifer was playing on him, that he’d roped the rest of the hotel into participating in. They were all probably snickering behind some magic spell, tickled pink as they watched him wander the place in hopeless confusion. Alastor wouldn’t be surprised and while he soured at being the butt of the joke, he had to admit, it was a funny one.
It’d be a lot funnier if it wasn’t being played on him.
Well! Bunk to that! He wasn’t giving them the satisfaction of a good laugh.
Scooping his cane off the ground, he strode to the double doors at the front of the lobby. Past the curtain, from what little he could see, it looked as though the windows had been boarded up as well. If this was a prank, Lucifer had an impeccable eye for detail, Alastor would give him that. Why, if he put that much effort into mending his relationship with Charlie, they’d be right as rain by Christmas!
His gut squirmed, unconvinced.
Something felt…off.
Not just the dust-caked carpets, covered furniture, and empty halls, but all of it. The odor of mildew and mustiness clinging to the air. The absence of the air-conditioners hum. The lack of protective wards. A sense of unfamiliarity had trespassed into the building, tickling his skin like the breath of a stranger on the back of his neck. The closer he got to the doors, the harsher the prickle in his brain became, almost like it was warning him away.
This is wrong, Alastor’s gut insisted. This was all wrong.
He twisted the doorknob, but the door didn’t budge. He pulled harder, but one look at the rusted hinges told him he’d have better luck prying Charlie and Vaggie apart after a long day of separation. The sappiness they oozed could put a pine tree to shame.
Planting a foot on the other door, Alastor pulled on the knob with all his might until the hinges made a horrible gritty snap and it finally flew open. Boards had been nailed across the entrance too, but that wasn’t what made him take a startled step back as his heart jumped in his throat. For a long moment, all he could was stare out at the city beyond, too stunned to move.
Then, he took a tentative step closer, summoning a large tendril to smash through the boards, but even that felt wrong. The dark matter responded to his power by conjugating into a thick, black serpentine vine, but it seemed confused. It shaped itself with slow uncertainty, and smashed the boards with the hesitance of a child looking over their shoulder. At him. Like he was a stranger.
Swallowing hard, he dropped the spell and the tendril quickly slithered into non-existence. Unease coiled in his intestines as he stepped outside onto the cracked cobblestone walkway of the marquee.
It was like walking out of a safe zone.
Instantly, he was pummeled with a barrage of signals and frequencies that turned the prickle in his brain to a burning rash of itches. He winced, hands shooting up to shield his eyes in a crude attempt to block the assault, but it was as helpful as holding a tattered umbrella in a rainstorm.
Nor did it fix the picture in front of him.
Pentagram City was gone.
Or, the Pentagram City Alastor lived in was gone.
The haggard buildings and barbed-wire fences that once made up the Downtown District were overtaken by an agglomeration of tall, irradiating skyscrapers. Some were high enough to disappear into a canopy of clouds so heavy and bloated they looked in danger of popping themselves on the closest spire. But where they’d usually be a mixture of yellow, brown, and maroon, they were a melting pot of blacks, purples, and pinks, stirred by the myriad of lights pulsing beneath them.
The streets, while normally teeming with sinners, were now completely swollen with thick, milling crowds. Cars were stuck bumper to bumper on the road, bellowing their horns while their drivers leaned out of their windows to yell at the people in front of them. Billboards and jumbotrons flashed in every direction, stuck to the sides of buildings, above stop-lights, and on giant, metal structures that lined the edge of the district in a wall of advertisements, newscasts, talks-shows, and logos. There was so much overlapping noise Alastor couldn’t even tell what they were saying.
While startling, this was a picture he’d seen before, though it was usually contained to a single, manageable district far across the pentagram, where he didn’t have to worry about constantly frying cameras or catching flashes of a cyan smile. It was as if the Media District had become bioactive in the mere hours since Alastor’s glanced at it from the hotel windows, and it had infected the rest of the city with its neon-infested disease the moment his back was turned.
Normally, from up on the hill where the hotel sat, Alastor could’ve seen across the city, to the spiked mountain peaks on the other side of the pentagram. But now, all he saw were skyscrapers that rose higher and higher the farther he looked.
And there, above them all, stood a single sleek, black tower that stretched so far into the clouds Alastor couldn’t even guess where it ended. The only distinguishing detail he could make out were two giant neon blue letters that lit up the side of the building.
VE
A blinding burst of wrongness ripped through the comfortable darkness Alastor shrouded himself in, rooting him to the spot as he frantically adjusted to its sudden light. He was frozen like a deer in headlights, not out of fear, but bafflement. A black streak across the ground broke his paralysis and he looked to the side, where his shadow mirrored his confusion.
“This…is strange,” he agreed.
His shadow pressed an image of Lucifer to his mind and he shook his head. “No. This is a bit extreme, even for him.” He eyed the cityscape again, fighting the urge to adjust his tie, like that would ease his discomfort. Instead, he shot his shadow a wry smile. “I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore. Wouldn’t you agree, Toto?”
His shadow gave him a bland look and Alastor snickered. He gave his cane a little spin and took a hearty step forward.
“Come on, let’s find out which side of the rainbow we’ve landed on.”
His shadow folded its arms and rolled its eyes, unfooled by his theatrics, but followed all the same. Trying to pull the wool over its eyes was like trying to convince a storm cloud it was made of cotton. It was pointless to try, but a good showman always played for an audience, even if that audience was himself, and Alastor was nothing if not a master of his craft.
Besides, however unsettling the cityscape was, a few answers were in order and he wasn’t gonna get them by standing around like a rubbernecking chump.
Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately — he didn’t even have to make it to the bottom of the hill before he got one such answer. There was one thing all these billboards, buildings, and advertisements had in common, and that was a single, simple logo stamped in the corner of each of them. Suddenly it all made sense, even though it left him with more questions than before.
Two letters.
Two words.
VE
Vox Enterprise
Of course, Alastor growled to himself. Who else would turn a perfectly good district of violence and depravity into an over-inflated marketing scheme? This was so typical of Vox. Broadcasting his products enmasse and stuffing the airwaves with so many different signals it was like walking through a swarm of bees. Yet another reason why Alastor rarely visited the Media District. If you’ve ever experienced pins and needles on your feet, try that but on your brain.
The rebranding was weird, though.
Enterprise? Vox prided himself as a ‘man of the future’ but he’d never gone as far as to change his company's name. He was too attached to VoxTek . Had been since he first proposed the idea to Alastor all those years ago. He hadn’t even changed it when Valentino or Velvette joined his brand.
Alastor was only joking earlier, but either he’d been gone for a very long time, or he truly wasn’t in Kansas anymore. The idea sat heavy in his gut, but what else could it be? There was no way the Vee’s could’ve expanded their territory so fast. Even if they tried, the other Overlord’s wouldn’t have allowed it. There would’ve been an all-out territory war and however powerful the Vee’s prided themselves to be, they couldn’t take on the might of the entire council.
A swell of unease bloated Alastor’s stomach and he shot his shadow another look.
“I don’t like it either,” he murmured.
Drumming his nails on top of his cane, he looked up at the lifeless husk that was the Hazbin Hotel–lacking its giant fluorescent sign– then back at the sprawling mess of honking cars and milling crowds, weighing his options.
“Well, we won’t find anything useful up there,” he decided and took a resolute step toward the rusted gate. “Better to pop around town and see what we can scrounge up.”
Another press of unease but his shadow didn’t argue.
The last time Alastor had to sneak through Pentagram City was during his early days in Hell. A wide-eyed, ill at ease sinner fresh from his dirt nap, stalking streets he wasn’t familiar with yet, and taking in the diverse assortment of demons that looked like they’d gone and pulled themselves out of a child’s nightmare. If there was one thing he’d learned growing up in New Orleans, it was that no matter who you were, or what you did, there was always a hierarchy of power. For however chaotic Pentagram City was, it wasn’t total anarchy. There’d been a sense of order about the place, though he hadn’t been sure what it was at the time.
So, just like a child getting thrust into social interaction, or when he’d gotten his first job as a messenger boy at eleven, he kept quiet, stepped back, and watched. He took note of what he could and couldn’t say. What made people curl their nose and brush off their coats, and what made them smile, preen, and flutter their lashes. The best routes for the quickest escapes. How to pick out bigwigs by the way they strutted down the street, and who the hired help was by how they ducked their heads and stepped out of the way.
Unlike his younger self, or even his newly-deceased self, he had the shadows to aid him.
It was a lot easier to stay hidden in neon-lit places than most people assumed. For every flashing light, there was a shadow. The brighter the light, the darker his hiding place would be.
Sneaking around wasn’t the problem.
It was the constant noise.
And the suffocating press of bodies.
And the stench of car exhaust, alleyway garbage, and piss.
And, who could forget the constant assault on his brain, good lord why were there so many advertisements?
He was certain he traveled far enough to make it out of the Downtown District, but it was hard to tell where he was going. There were traces of the old Pentagram City, like its crumbling walls, shamelessly lewd public acts, cracked side-walks littered with gutter water and garbage, and--through the chatter of commercials and talk-shows—a backdrop of gunfire and screaming. He even spotted a pillar of smoke from a building fire in the distance, which made him feel a little more at home. But the shops he frequented, the street-names he’d memorized, were gone. The smell of sulfur, gun-smoke, and decomposition had been choked out by the stench of exhaust fumes, rubber tires, and rotting garbage from overflowing dumpsters.
He was caged in by screens, billboards, and jumbotrons. They were stacked on buildings, hanging on the side of walls, nailed to kiosks, and suspended from wires and metal beams. There was even a surprising number of holograms. Some shone far above the crowds, casting suspended interviews in midair, but smaller ones jumped to life in storefronts as pedestrians walked by, projecting 3D images of scantily clad advertisers showing off their wares.
But worst of all were the cameras.
So.
Many.
Cameras.
Dotting every street corner, embedded in every stoplight, hanging off every building, and watching above every door. Most were out in the open, shamelessly in view of the people it watched. But others were more subtle. Alastor could sense where they’d been stuffed in nooks and crannies, hidden in niches and crevices that went unnoticed by the common demon eye. He felt the shift in their electromagnetic frequency whenever they moved or adjusted their focus, and followed it to whatever target had caught the eye of its peeping tom. None of them lingered for long. They kept moving. Hopping from person to person, following a pattern Alastor couldn’t discern.
Bugs under a microscope. That’s what this was. Hundreds of black, unblinking eyes monitoring the little ants in their glass-encased ant farm, filing away every interaction, conversation, and purchase.
It made Alastor’s skin crawl.
But it was the nagging suspicion that he was missing something that really set his teeth on edge.
It was like he was looking out a window and seeing the entire picture, while knowing that something was hidden in the shadows just out of his line of sight. But the more he looked, the foggier the picture got. It poked at him like an exasperated child with a stick, insisting that he look closer, look harder, that he find the missing jigsaw piece already
Frustrated, he paused in an abandoned alleyway, still coated in shadow, and crept along the wall until he could peer inconspicuously out into the street, searching for the piece eluding him. A few reptiloid demons in scraps of glittery clothing meandered near doorways and alleys, pausing between puffs from their cigarettes to show off their pearly fangs, push out their chests, and beckon over wandering pedestrians who met their eyes. A trio of drunkards were laughing and pushing their way through the crowd, clutching half-empty bottles in their fists that they took swigs of between leering at passersby and intentionally activating store-front holograms.
It was only when an advertisement for a sex toy sprouted into the open that it finally dawned on Alastor what was missing.
Valentino and Velvette.
The Vee’s strutted through their district with more flash than a Goetia peacock. They plastered their faces on every wall, screen, and window. Every business in their territory carried their merchandise, from air fryers and speakers, to toilet paper and dish-rags. Alastor examined the shops nearest to him, looking for the fancy scrawl of Valentino’s name below raunchy posters, or Velvette’s stylized logo stamped onto clothes and jewelry tags.
But there was nothing. All of it had been overtaken by the same blocky logo as before. A single blue V with three red swirls behind it.
Huh. Now that Alastor was looking, Vox was strangely absent too. His branding was smeared all over the place, but he’d yet to see a picture of him.
His mulling was interrupted by the drunkards as they stumbled closer, and he slunk a little farther into the shadows to avoid being detected. The last thing he needed was a group of alcohol-infused looby's with inflated egos trying to intimidate him into a corner. A good laugh most days, but he was trying to stay under the radar.
Which didn’t seem to matter to one of said looby as they stopped, muttered something about needing to piss, and proceeded to step into the alley and unzip their pants. Alastor rolled his eyes and with one push from his shadow, sent the demon stumbling back out onto the street with a startled squawk.
“Wha? Who done that?” they slurred, tottering on their feet to peer skeptically into the alley. Growling, they lumbered inside, holding up their bottle like they were preparing to throw it at the vandalized dumpster against the wall.
Alastor chuckled and the demon perked up, their cat-like ears twitching as they turned and squinted at the shadows.
His smile grew, cutting through the darkness in a glowing slit of teeth as he slowly pulled himself out of the shadows, arms elongating, neck stretching, claws curling as he loomed over the wide-eyed demon.
“You really shouldn’t wander off by yourself,” he said, dripping with serrated static. “You never know what hungry monsters are waiting nearby.”
The demon stared in frozen terror for a few seconds before letting out a shriek. They stumbled away, bottle flying out of their hand, and Alastor watched in amusement as they raced back to their friends on shaky legs. His chuckle became a laugh when they tripped over their feet and stumbled onto the road, right in front of a speeding car.
Turning, he wiped at his eye with a contented sigh. Ah, at least some things in Hell never changed.
Humming cheerfully, he stepped back into the shadows and was gone before the next curious bystander could peer into the alley.
He made his way toward the middle of the pentagram, where he could get a full scope of this new, foreign terrain. The only thing that told him he was going in the right direction was the giant tower he saw from atop the hill. It loomed like a monument, staring down its nose at the rest of the city, its giant glowing V like a self-satisfied smile.
It took longer than he liked getting there, but finally, the buildings opened up to a massive plaza. The crowds here were so thick it was hard to tell the difference between street vendors and passersby. Giant jumbotrons, of various shapes and sizes, sat on the buildings lining the plaza, stationed like sentinels that lit up the square better than the carefully placed street-lamps littered throughout. Large barbed trees dotted the plaza, accented by simple, black bushes with raspberry red blooms nestled in its leaves.The sweet, sickly scent of their poisonous fumes was strong enough to rise above the smell of body odor, exhaust, and vendor-food.
But the real crown jewel was the massive tower looming in its center, lit up in blue lights that reflected off its long, glass panes. Alastor expected to find it–it wasn’t exactly hard to miss–but what he wasn’t expecting was the building it’d been built over.
The Heaven Embassy was a staple of Pentagram City, but it’d been strange to see a church steeple in Hell when he’d initially arrived. Its pearly white walls and gold trimmings popped out from the red hue of the Pride Ring, like a giant spot of pus on an open wound. But overtime, it’d just become another facet in the background. A landmark to tell you which side of the pentagram you were on depending on which face of the gigantic clock you could see.
But this…
Alastor could still make out the outline of the church and its hourglass in the structure of the tower– it’d been built around–not over, so its white and gold walls weren’t hidden, but encased. The steps leading to the Heaven Embassy were steeped with sinners rushing too and fro, but none of them approached its large golden double doors. Rather, they entered the tower itself through a handful of rotating doors on the sides of it, bypassing the Embassy altogether, like it was nothing by a wall decoration they’d seen too many times to be fascinated by.
The signals were stronger here, their incessant buzz drilling into Alastor’s brain like acupuncture needles, but there was something else to them. A detail he hadn’t picked up on until he’d reached their source.
A strong, underlying current hummed beneath the city’s frequencies. The closer Alastor got to the tower, the beating heart of this alien creature, the stronger the signals had become–and the more he noticed the way they were all synced together. He felt their connection rushing through wires like blood in veins. Felt it thrumming from screens and emanating from cameras like body-heat. Breathing life to every hologram and phone. Millions upon millions of strings all linked together, woven into a complex network of energy and airwaves that spanned the entire city like a giant, elaborate web.
And in the center of this web: VE tower.
Now that Alastor was here, in the nexus of it, the familiarity of the main frequency, the flavor he couldn’t put a name to, suddenly became clear. Because it wasn’t just a frequency, it was organic, like a brainwave. It was unique as a fingerprint, and Alastor was all too familiar with the hand it belonged to.
This was Vox’s frequency.
But it was also…different somehow. Vox-adjacent. Its flavor was just the tiniest bit off.
It was stronger too. Way stronger. So potent that not even standing in Vee Tower, in the heart of the Media District, could’ve compared. Alastor could almost taste it’s electrifying zing on his tongue.
Too curious to help himself, he broadened his own signal and reached out to pluck at one of the smooth, humming threads.
He realized his mistake immediately.
He barely grazed the signal, a touch as light as a brush from his fingers, and it jolted, reeling from him like he’d burned it. An echo of vibration shuddered from it, rattling from strand to strand, zipping through the web, and arriving at the center in little more than a nanosecond.
It all happened so fast.
Alastor barely had time to register the jolt.
Barely had time to follow its progress.
He froze as the airwaves suddenly stilled.
And then, in one smooth, synchronized motion, every signal, every frequency and electromagnetic wave, turned toward him. His fur didn’t so much stand on end as it bolted to its feet and raced alongside his beating heart.
A weight settled in the air. Giant and overwhelming. A presence. The spindly-legged creature, with its millions of eyes and hypersensitive nervous system, looked up from the nexus of its web and met his gaze.
Vox knows he’s there.
An unexpected chill ran down Alastor’s spine and he instantly cut off the connection, but it was too late. Already, cameras were whirring to life throughout the plaza, buzzing with vigor as they whipped in his direction, but he entered the shadows before the first one landed on him.
The darkness spat him out a few blocks away, but the invisible threads in the air had come to life, and even here every camera lifted its head and spun on its neck, zeroing in on everything that moved. Alastor dampened his signal and stepped back into the shadows. He didn’t stop. Couldn’t afford to stop as the city came to life in ways unseen by everyone but him.
He traveled in quick, short bursts, getting as far away from the center as possible, and only paused when he was on the outskirts of the pentagram again, where the buzzing wasn’t as strong and the cameras were only peppered throughout the streets. He massaged his forehead, skin still tingling with hypersensitivity towards that influx of vibration. Now that he was out of the crux of it and had a moment to collect his thoughts, his brain felt like it’d been scrubbed raw with a wire sponge.
He’d never been afraid of Vox. Wouldn’t say he was now. But his presence, not just his appearance but the way he carried himself, unsettled Alastor in a way that a barking cat would startle a dog. It wasn’t right. The intensity of his signal. The way it’d taken less than a second for it to zero in on Alastor. The sheer weight of it on his mind. How encompassing it was, casting a net over him that was so large and tight-knit he couldn’t help but feel like a fish that’d narrowly avoided a trawl.
He eyed the entrance of the alley, half-expecting Vox to zap out of the camera nailed over the doorway of the store next to him. He didn’t, of course. Because if there was one thing Alastor excelled at, it wasn’t getting caught. Not by the police, not by nosy reporters, and not by psychotic cake-eaters with an addiction to voyeurism.
Still, it was better to air on the side of caution, and he suppressed his signal even further. It made him woozy if he did it for long periods of time, and he wasn’t exactly fond of the way it made his thoughts unfocused and fuzzy, like a blanket of lint cast over his mind, but it was a necessary evil. He couldn’t afford to be detected again. Not until he knew what was going on. He’d just have to hope he’d be swallowed up by the countless streams of connection flowing throughout the pentagram, like a needle in a haystack. He was but one signal in a city of millions.
Picking through a minefield of trash, he peeked out into the street. They were in a more residential area, with run-down apartment buildings, laundromats, and stores. More digestible than that cesspool of capitalism and neon lights. But Alastor still, for the life of him, couldn’t tell where he was.
It was easy to spot the difference between the main districts once you’ve lived in the city long enough. Shipping ports, truck yards, and warehouses in Carmilla’s district. Building fires, razed streets, and constantly wailing sirens in Zestial’s. The perfectly manicured gardens and charming boutiques in Rosie’s.
But there were no distinguishing characteristics here. It was a pell-mell of cluttered skyscrapers and stores, each trying to stand out with so much flash and decoration they were cookie-cutter molds of idiosyncrasy. The roads were so congested it was impossible to walk without bumping elbows, and the infestation of drones, tv’s, holograms, and cameras scuttled in the walls like bugs eating away at the foundation. For the first time since arriving in Hell, Alastor felt well and truly lost. Nothing but a child wandering the streets, searching for a familiar face.
A familiar face…
He perked up. Yes, that was exactly what he needed. Someone he knew. Someone who could explain what was going on.
And he knew just the person for the job.
All he needed to do now was figure out where the hell Cannibal Town was.