Doe Eyes

A Fresh Hell

Josephine walked down the hill from the Hazbin Hotel in an awkward formation, half-hunched over to balance Nifty's little claws still wrapped around her hand. The world outside the hotel was still dark, the spiky green plants and crumbling dirt road illuminated by the ambient red sky. The only way Josephine could tell that it was early morning and not fading to night was the rising orange glow around the edge of the horizon, slowly reaching up and turning to a sickly purple. In the dim light, she pictured Alastor watching herself and Nifty depart from one of the windows behind them and tried to stay as dignified as possible. It was an idea somewhat easier said than done; Josephin could hardly keep her legs about her as the younger girl sped forward down the streets leading into the rest of Hell's established districts.

She was grateful when Nifty stopped them at a little trolley station and ushered her onto a bench. Holding onto the railing and looking outwards, Josephine took in the sights as the trolley trundled along. From her large bedroom windows, Josephine already had a hazy idea of what the rest of Hell looked like. It was urban, maybe four times as large as her New York, and organized into distinct districts. Nifty, hanging gleefully onto one of the upward trolley bars with her little shopping basket on her arm, was only too glad to play tour guide and answer questions. She said that the urban area was called Pentagram City, then rattled off a series of place names that Josephine completely missed. Her eyes were full of new sights as the trolley moved along at its slow pace.

As the vehicle moved them from the area by the hotel towards a tall, golden clock tower looming above the rest of the buildings in the distance, Josephine had a sense of approaching activity -- and doom. The first couple of districts were quiet enough. The streets of one neighborhood looked older, like newspaper photos Josephine had seen of early small towns in the midwest. Small dark lumps scattered here and there in the streets denoted rotting corpses strewn about like litter. As Josephine watched a few undeterred morning residents step over the bodies and enter the trolley, she noticed that the forms were treated with about as much care as trash. With a sigh, she closed her eyes and asked herself what she could have expected from Hell. Glimpsing a few empty storefonts as the trolley chugged away, Josephine made a mental note that they could be useful places to set up an aid and education center for the Hazbin Hotel's redemption efforts. The least they could do in this area was improve sanitation.

The next district was full of signfronts illuminated in blinding oranges, greens, purples, and reds, most of them advertising clubs or what appeared to be burlesque shows from the suggestive outlines in the windows. Pounding music with a distorted sound -- clearer than Alastor's voice but buzzing in a different, intense way -- vibrated through the walls of the city and made Josephine's heart beat out of time. After a point, she wondered how much of the strange things she saw were from future technological inventions in the living world, and how many were unique to Hell. There seemed to be no clear way to tell. Josephine saw a couple of figures walk by, both wearing leather hoods and carrying whips, and wondered absently what they could be doing. As the trolley pulled up at its station in the neon neighborhood, her view changed to show the open door of one of the clubs and an illustration of just what could be done with leather and whips. Josephine could only blink in surprise, but Nifty leaned forward to ogle the activities inside the club with a desirous giggle.

Looking away in an anxious sweat, Josephine pulled down her hat and tied it tighter as the trolley moved into the next district. Seeing such explicit sexual activity made her intensely uncomfortable for a number of reasons. She knew that compared to some of her fellow reform house workers and the people she worked with that her view of the world had been very sheltered by her family's money. Alastor had been only too kind to remind her of that deficit in her knowledge here, as well. But Josephine wasn't naive, she knew what people did behind closed doors and how many ways that interaction could go good or bad. It had never been her wish or choice to do any of that. That didn't mean that she had never felt the threat of those bad interactions approaching her while she had been working out on the streets.