SCENE: INT. HELL’S CUSTOMER SERVICE WING.
A vast, low-ceilinged chamber that doesn’t feel built so much as excreted—less a room than an architectural cyst. The air hangs wet in a way that resists classification; not humid, not oily, just coated, like every surface has been basted in someone else's breath. The walls pulse faintly, soft and vaguely vascular, like the inner lining of a throat that has recently stopped singing. Press your palm to one and it gives—not spongey, exactly, but yielding, like a surface that’s been thinking about you for too long.
The floor is carpeted in a high-pile material that looks like fetal skin but gives underfoot like an ice rink made of syrup and chewed gum. Every step is a moist compromise. Overhead, a tilted LED sign flickers in and out of legibility, pulsing in a font designed to induce migraines in the literate:
“DISSATISFIED? WE LOVE THAT.”
The smell: melted printer plastic, deep-fryer ghost grease, and something unmistakably intestinal—a colon emptied of everything except memory. It doesn’t so much fill the nose as burrow into it.
Booths stretch out in both directions, vanishing into a perspective that feels mathematically incorrect, like someone tried to render infinity with office supplies and unprocessed childhood trauma. Each booth is manned by a DEMON, and each DEMON looks like the result of a group project between a drunk god, a broken Xerox machine, and a biology major with a humiliation fetish. One has arms like boiled noodles—wet, elbowless, swaying gently like they’re underwater or listening to slow jazz against their will. Another is just a gaping mouth, ringed with smaller, angrier mouths like some cursed fruiting body of spite, click-clacking away on a keyboard using what might be chewed thumbs or possibly just pink erasers jammed into wet clay. A third is sobbing and lactating from the same glistening orifice, though calling it a “face” would be an insult to both taxonomy and decency—it looks more like a prolapsed theory of the self. None of them look up. Not even when one of them lets out a fart that sounds like a fax machine dying in shame.
Somewhere behind the booths—though "behind" implies a spatial coherence that doesn’t quite apply here—there’s a door (or the suggestion of one) marked “INSTITUTE OF EXACT SENSIBILITIES.” The mission statement is posted outside but unreadable—overwritten too many times, layers of script cross-fading into something closer to texture than text. It’s implied they regulate affective thresholds for cross-tier infernal dispute arbitration—the Dantean sense, the Nine Levels, codified and corporatized, a Kakanian holdover dragged into hell’s jurisdictional sprawl. The same bureaucratic impulse that once tried to balance national identity against moral philosophy now reduced to parsing whether Wrath or Fraud gets first refusal rights in an escalation. No one remembers the last time a threshold held. The door hasn’t been opened in epochs. It shivers rhythmically, like a creature trying to sync with a clock that no longer ticks.
Above it all, a warped, lurching 3/4-time version of the Friends theme dribbles endlessly from unseen speakers, like a music box possessed by a theater kid who never healed. It’s rendered on detuned keyboards, a weeping kazoo, and possibly the internal organs of a disgraced oboist. The rhythm is all wrong—drunken waltz wrong, like Chandler learned to dance in a cursed mirror. The lyrics are worse. The lyrics are wrong. They’re about mildew. Not metaphorically—actual mildew—its scent, its texture, its emotional availability. “So no one told you life was gonna smell this way / Your mold is gross, you’re hosed, your spores have gone astray.” Clap track plays. It is not in time. It is not okay.
MARK stands in line, clutching a clipboard that is, with clinical malice, growing teeth—not metaphorical teeth, not metaphor-for-capitalism teeth, but real teeth: yellowing little bastards erupting slowly from the laminate, gleaming wet under the fluorescents, each one emerging with a soft pop like a zit that bites back. The clipboard twitches occasionally, as if dreaming. His number: 666-B, printed in a nauseous font that looks like it was sweated onto the paper. Every few seconds, the number buzzes—not with electricity but with a soft, fleshy whimper, like something fragile and hairy has been stapled inside it and just realized you’re trying not to acknowledge its suffering.
To his left, a DEMON with four knees—knobby, inward-bending horrors like someone installed extra joints during a blackout—shuffles violently in place, trying to fill out a sticky, translucent consent form using only its glistening elbows and a Pentel Pocket Brush Pen that drips something too viscous to be ink. The pen is clenched in a trembling fold of skin lodged between what might’ve once been shoulder blades or a set of unused genitals. Its posture suggests both shame and arousal.
To his right, another customer—a MAN WITH A NECK LIKE A SACK OF BUTTONS, lumpy, jaundiced, faintly sweating through his collar like something taxidermied wrong—curses under his breath at a vending machine that wheezes like a ventilator full of regret. The machine lurches, judders, then belches out a laminated coil of microfiche, still steaming and coated in a film that looks suspiciously like spit. Each reel twitches faintly, etched with fragments of dreams no one should’ve recorded—naked funerals, teeth made of rice, wet gameshow floors. The reels stink—like melted Barbie, fish tank gravel, and the back of a TV remote no one’s opened in years. Instead of instructions, each one comes smeared with what might be mustard or birth fluid. One of them unfurls and makes a noise that sounds exactly like your dad sighing in the dark. The man licks it absentmindedly, pockets it, and bangs on the machine for another round like he’s got a punch card.
RECEPTIONIST DEMON. (barely opening its mouth, which stretches vertically like a meat Pez dispenser) Reason for reversal?
MARK. Existential nausea.
RECEPTIONIST DEMON. (slides a sticky ticket across the counter with its eye) Popular. Take a seat or gently melt into the wall. It’s all the same to us.
(MARK attempts to sit in what appears to be a chair but behaves more like a sentient hemorrhoid—sagging instantly beneath him with a prolonged, trumpet-ass fart that sounds both wet and accusatory. The cushion lets out a moan, low and perverse, like it just came a little. Then it starts to suction—slowly, deliberately—latching onto his lower back like a horny jellyfish in the midst of a spiritual crisis. He yelps, peels himself free with a series of slick, obscene shlurp noises that echo off the walls like meat being wrestled out of a shoe. Just as he staggers upright, a deafening horn blares—part foghorn, part orgasm—and a blinking, epileptic arrow erupts over BOOTH 7, flashing the color of spoiled ham. The chair burps. Mark does not look back.)
INT. BOOTH 7.
JERRY WITH A G slouches behind a steaming slab of compressed bureaucratic failure, a slick, twitching cube that pulses faintly every time he strikes it—with his knuckles, not out of necessity, but preference. His typing is somewhere between percussion and self-harm.
He looks like a middle school wrestling coach who fell asleep in a tanning bed full of corn syrup—skin pocked, glistening, faintly blistered, like deli ham someone tried to polish. His polo shirt, which clings like a needy ex, is clearly made of some synthetic fabric not yet approved for human contact, printed with what can only be described as a heatmap of nipple topography—dozens of fleshy, slightly off-center orbs rendered in sickly gradients, as though a demonic sublimation printer had a seizure mid-orgy and no one had the decency to unplug it. His name tag reads, in smeared glitter-gel ink: “HELLO I’M GUMBOY.”
His eyes are catastrophically mismatched—one grotesquely oversized, bulging out like it’s trying to escape his skull and file a restraining order, the other a puckered pinhole that leaks a steady trickle of warm, brown ooze that smells unmistakably like off-brand barbecue sauce left in a glovebox during a divorce. Not dripping—weeping, with the slow, devotional stickiness of a condiment grieving its original pig. The socket twitches when he blinks. Which he does out of sync.
His chair is constructed entirely from jawbones—some human, some animal, and at least one from a creature that looks amphibious in theory but spiritual in function. They’re bolted together with orthodontic wire and what appears to be chewed gum, and they creak violently every time he shifts—which he does constantly and with no clear reason, like a man whose bones remember a trauma his brain is too stupid to process. His breathing is aggressive and wet, like he’s just finished calmly describing, in detail, how he got the stain out of his mother. Every exhale sounds like a decision he’s going to regret on purpose.
JERRY WITH A G. (typing aggressively; the cube whimpers) Date of damnation?
MARK. ...It was earlier today. I think. Time’s been weird.
JERRY WITH A G. You people never wait. Okay. Let’s pull up your Contract. Hmm. Looks like full-body, full-soul, irrevocable, with modifiers. Ah—Clause 47-B: “All regrets to be experienced in full sensory surround, with potential for smell-based flashbacks.” That’s gonna start any second.
(A small puff of cinnamon and cat piss erupts near MARK’s temple. He shudders.)
JERRY WITH A G. What are we thinking? Downgrade? Freeze account? Attempted repentance?
MARK. I just want out. I’ll take responsibility. I’ll compost. I’ll forgive my parents. I’ll delete my Twitter. I’ll pretend to like contemporary poetry.
JERRY WITH A G. (deadpan) Mmm. No can do. Redemption window closed at signature. And even if we made an exception, you’d be rerouted through the Department of Contrition, which—(leans in)—is currently undergoing... restructuring.
(CUT TO: a department—if you can call it that—more like a padded purgatory annex lit by fluorescent lights that flicker with the twitchy inconsistency of a guilty conscience trying to fake a seizure. Inside, rows of weeping angels—not the elegant, stone kind, but flabby, patchy things with molted wings and the hunched posture of middle managers who've just been told their grief isn't billable—are stapling apology letters to themselves with the manic dedication of people who know forgiveness is off the table but still want to look busy when God swings by. Their paper is damp. Their tears hiss when they hit the floor. They roam the aisles in slow, useless loops, like Walser’s walkers, endlessly circumambulating the void of purpose, staplers clutched like relics, eyes glassy with unslept centuries. One angel, shaking like a jellyfish on lithium, is gnawing violently on a framed MFA—glass and all—while muttering something that sounds like a grant proposal written in tongues. Another tries to staple its own forehead and misses. No one intervenes. The office printer is jammed with feathers.)
MARK. Okay, okay. Fine. Then can I file a complaint?
JERRY WITH A G. Absolutely. (hands him a laminated card)
MARK. This is blank.
JERRY WITH A G. You write your complaint in blood. Then eat it.
MARK. What.
JERRY WITH A G. The system is very efficient.
MARK. No offense, but this whole place feels like a satire written by someone who failed a theology class and took it personally.
JERRY WITH A G. That’s literally everyone down here.
(From the wall, a mouth unfolds—just a mouth. No face, no eyes, no bone scaffold. Just two enormous lips, thick and glistening like overboiled hot dogs pressed together and lacquered in Vaseline. They’re the size of a filing cabinet drawer pulled out and left in the sun too long, edges crusted in a brittle, yellow scab that looks like dried glue and egg yolk congealed into a sad geological layer. It doesn’t open with muscle—it separates, slowly, with a nauseating suction-pop, like duct tape being removed from a ham in heat. The wall puckers and dimples like drywall trying to hold in a hernia. What emerges is not speech, but the possibility of it—the mouth pulses with unspent breath, the kind that smells like a humidifier filled with meat. No teeth. No tongue. Just wet suggestion and the unmistakable sensation that it knows your name and doesn’t plan to pronounce it right.
The interior is worse—a high-definition horror show of glistening gums, the kind you’d see in a cursed toothpaste ad, pocked and veiny like uncooked liver left in a colander overnight. The tongue is thick, furred, visibly sweating, and covered in crater-like taste buds that twitch independently, like they're trying to unionize. Just above the uvula—a thing already wobbling like it’s been emotionally compromised—squats a second, smaller mouth, nested there like a parasitic twin that majored in broadcast journalism. It moves in perfect sync with the larger one, whispering in tones so rehearsed and clinical they sound like dental hygienists delivering a eulogy through gritted teeth.
It starts in on the Gettysburg Address—backwards—spitting out each warped syllable like it’s choking on Lincoln’s ghost. The voice sounds like someone gargling blood-warmed pennies through a baby monitor stuffed with wet cotton. Halfway through “liberty,” without pause or explanation, it pivots into “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” but in Morse code, and only the part where you gently down the stream, delivered entirely through rhythmic chewing sounds and the wet, meaty thwap of raw chicken being slapped onto cold tile in a pattern that feels both ancient and medically inadvisable.
As it whispers, the air fills with the unmistakable scent of Play-Doh, breath mints, and elementary school vomit dust. The drywall around it begins to leak glue in long, sticky pulses—slow and viscous, like a wall trying to apologize.)
MARK. What the fuck is that.
JERRY WITH A G. Ignore it. It’s just The Mouth. It likes attention. It feeds on speech. If you make too many declarations, it tries to narrate your origin story. It’ll file your childhood as a trademark and sell your memories to a theme park in Iowa.
MARK. This place is a joke.
JERRY WITH A G. (gesturing to the cube) Buddy. This place is the punchline.
(MARK collapses into the chair, which instantly slumps beneath him like hot cheesecake, letting out a slow, damp exhale that smells faintly of microwaved bologna and carpet cleaner. The cushion begins to vibrate in irregular pulses—like it’s trying to remember CPR—and from somewhere deep in its stuffing comes a hiss of ASMR whispers, each one in the exact voice of someone who has, at some point in his life, told him “I’m not mad, just disappointed,” only now the words are wet and fricative, like they’re being licked into his ears through a dental dam. His knees vanish into the chair’s gelatinous lower quadrant with a slurp, absorbed up to mid-thigh like a man being slowly reclaimed by expired upholstery. He doesn’t notice. Or can’t. Or won’t.)
MARK. (covering ears) Is this really it? This is the grand punishment? Inconvenience and aesthetics?
JERRY WITH A G. No, no—that’s just onboarding. The real punishment starts when it hits you like a sock full of teeth that your whole identity was basically a warranty scam cooked up by a call center in the eighth circle. That every so-called “choice” you made was just a fart in your firmware. That your precious little “soul” is basically a trial version of a meat app nobody finished coding, and you clicked “I Agree” while covered in placenta. And Mark—(leans forward, breath like hot baloney)—the self? That sad little narrative you drag around like it’s got a plot? It’s just customer-facing. A polite hallucination slapped over the part of you that screams.
(Long pause. MARK opens his mouth—slowly, carefully, like he’s about to ask a question he already regrets knowing the answer to. His lips part. A syllable forms.
And then, from the wall, the MOUTH lets loose a chirruping, high-pitched warble—“Tiptoe Through the Tulips”—but off-key, too fast, and with the breathy urgency of a dying balloon trying to flirt. The tune wavers between whimsy and threat, like a clown funeral scored by a calliope having a small, wet stroke. MARK freezes mid-vowel. His tongue gives up. His face closes like a bad app. No one speaks. The MOUTH just keeps crooning, louder now, like it's enjoying the silence it just murdered.)
MARK. I’d like to talk to Mephistopheles again.
JERRY WITH A G. (deadpan) He’s in a quarterly alignment meeting. With Branding.
MARK. I renounce renouncing. I double down. I want the power. I want to break the interface. I want to hex Jeff Bezos and reverse-engineer death.
JERRY WITH A G. (typing) You want the Advanced Package. That includes:
- →One televised god duel per fiscal quarter, sponsored by Jack in the Box.
- →Ten themed plagues, each with collectible mascot.
- →Infinite libido, zero intimacy.
- →And a personal cryptid.
MARK. That last one actually sounds kind of cool.
(A CRYPTID slams down from the ceiling like a soggy futon stuffed with gossip, hitting the floor with a sound halfway between a slap and a whimper, then immediately begins steaming—not with heat, but personal humidity. It is wet in a way that feels intentional, like it had been marinated for this moment. Its skin is pale, veiny, and glistening, like a shrimp in crisis, and its spine bristles with a luxurious mane of perfectly blow-dried back hair, as if someone had lovingly groomed it with a horse brush and lies.
It has three human feet, none matching, one of which is jammed into a single Croc, heel-first. The Croc squeaks when it moves, like it’s protesting its role in this birth. Its face is Mark’s, but not quite—puffier, smudged, like if someone had tried to recreate him from memory on a warm Fruit Roll-Up. Its eyes blink out of sync. Its mouth is always slightly open, like it’s about to either speak or drool out a confession. Either way, it smells like wet felt, Ziploc breath, and boiled novelty soap.)
CRYPTID. Hello, father.
(It shudders wetly across the floor—not slithering, not crawling, but performing a kind of damp, full-body wiggle, like a slug attempting ballet or a flan having an episode. Its limbs flop in infantile rhythm, slapping the tile with the innocent abandon of a toddler trying to twerk. One arm bends the wrong way and pats its own stomach in a gesture that might be self-soothing or just gas. The Croc—still heel-jammed—lets out a long, squealing meep with every convulsion, like it’s trying to cry for help through a party horn soaked in milk. The cryptid coos, then attempts to roll over and present its belly, but gets stuck halfway, limbs flailing like a moldy Chuck E. Cheese reject in a discount nativity scene. It giggles—a sound like yogurt being stirred too fast—and reaches one drippy hand toward Mark with the earnest, horrifying joy of something that shouldn’t know what love is, but does anyway.)
MARK. I want to kill myself.
JERRY WITH A G. Already included. Deluxe death loop, with optional legacy haunting.
MARK. Fine. I want divine recursion. I want to fold back into myself like a myth. I want to scream the unspeakable and hear it echo in my own pisshole. Make me the symbol of my own cancellation.
JERRY WITH A G. (stamping the cube, which screams) Done. You’ll be contacted by our Symbolic Representation team within six to nine eternities. Business days, of course.
(The lights dim with a noise like someone choking on a glow stick, and from the ceiling descends a giant animatronic rat, twitching and wheezing on a sagging cable that screeches with the exact sound of a rusty zipper being yanked open across a urinal cake. Its fur is patchy and wet, like someone brushed it with hot dog water, and its plastic face jerks in tiny, frantic spasms as if the firmware controlling it is mid-nervous breakdown; one eyelid keeps trying to blink but gets stuck halfway like it’s trapped in a loop of remembering something it wasn’t designed to understand. In each clammy paw it clutches a kazoo and a jaw harp, both visibly sticky, and it launches into a warbling, full-volume rendition of “Enter Sandman” that sounds like a sleep paralysis demon doing karaoke inside a port-a-potty. Every note is wrong in a new way. The rat’s pelvis starts gyrating with what appears to be pride. Below it, the CRYPTID [still dripping from at least three locations not visible to the human eye] slowly rotates its arm inward and begins to lick its own elbow with the solemn intensity of someone performing a ritual to resurrect a very stupid god. Somewhere in the room, a child laughs—high, wet, and close, like they’re sitting right behind your ear with peanut butter in their teeth. There is no child.)
MARK. Do I get an orientation?
JERRY WITH A G. Welcome to Advanced Damnation. Do not feed the metaphors. They remember faces.
(As the animatronic rat’s hips begin to twerk in erratic, hydraulic spasms, its pelvis making a sound like syrup being stirred with a meat fork, it suddenly coughs—no, ejects—a small metallic packet from somewhere deep in its throat, the kind of depth that suggests an internal storage compartment lined with flavored latex and old report cards. The packet launches through the air with a wet shimmer and lands directly in MARK’s lap with a sound like a raw ravioli slapping linoleum—thwip. He doesn’t move. The foil is iridescent, warm to the touch, and slightly greasy, like it’s been nestled against a demon’s thigh for far too long. The label reads: EgoSheath™ — "The Only Condom That Cares," printed in tasteful Helvetica over a background of smiling clouds and disappointment gradients. Tiny lettering along the seam begins to murmur softly, the voice that comes out bizarrely calming—low, male, soothing in a way that feels both medically inappropriate and vaguely like your therapist trying to be flirty. It says, “You are valid.” Then, “You matter more than your father thinks.” And finally, as the packet begins to warm audibly, “Just focus on breathing.”
There’s a beat, the kind that stretches out like saran wrap pulled too tight over something that’s already gone bad, and for one long, perfectly unhinged moment, everything freezes—the kazoo mid-squeal, the CRYPTID mid-lick, MARK’s pupils dilated just wide enough to reflect his own spiritual bankruptcy—and then, with a noise like a balloon full of soup hitting a grill, the animatronic rat violently detonates, erupting into a blizzard of confetti made from old receipts, each one stained with thawed pus chutney and emotionally inappropriate purchases. The shreds whirl in the air like ash from a failed franchise, sticking to every damp surface. The smell that follows is immediate and non-negotiable: a thick, greasy wave of meat-scented Gak and scorched Bible paper, like someone microwaved a youth pastor’s laundry. The room does not recover.)
MARK. (quietly, blinking) I don’t think I have a metaphor for myself anymore.
BLACKOUT.
[END SCENE]
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