Heaven, Hell & Room Service

Chapter 3: Group Dynamic

To start this chapter, I offer a brief a commentary on relationships. Men and women are weird, weird creatures. There is no weirder species than humans, if you pause and think about it. The stranger something is, the more likely humans are to do it. The various genders of human are so fundamentally different, and yet still insist on trying to be 'compatible' with each other. You know what other species do when they're not compatible? Kill each other! Men and women, however, have an entire social culture around the interaction between the genders. Books, studies, ten-question quizzes in the front of magazines, the works.

Without a doubt the oddest phenomenon between the two, seeing as they are so damn different, is attraction. Attraction can be flirty, subtle or glancing. It can be loud and passionate, or sweet and understated. Neil was currently a victim of the worst kind of attraction, the ever-dreaded unrequited kind. Yes, he was crazy about Emily, but wasn't exactly getting the return vibe. It was like playing tennis alone, swatting the ball back and forth against your Granny's garden wall. It's fine at first, but after a few smacks, you really want someone else to play with. It gets depressing after a while. That was Neil, hitting the tennis ball of attraction at Emily, hoping that she'll wow him with a return volley of flirtation. So far, there had been not so much s a dribbler over the net cord.

Alright, that's enough with the thinly veiled sports analogy. Time to zoom in on our hero and heroine, who were sitting at lunch together, engaged in a discussion that reeked with the stench of platonic friendship. "Are you telling me that when you were alive you never, ever did anything illegal?" he had just finished saying.

"Nope, never had an interest in anything illegal. Why, did you?"

Neil shrugged. "Well I mean I'm no Tommy the Tooth, but yeah, I've dabbled. What about speeding? You can't tell me you've never gone a few clicks over the limit."

"Never drove," she replied simply. "Took my bike everywhere, more environmentally friendly."

Neil finally voiced something that had nagged at him since they had been hanging out. "I just gotta say, you led a pretty clean life for someone who ended up in Hell."

"I know," she remarked with a nervous laugh. "I'm still trying to figure out what I did."

If they had kept on that subject for another few minutes, they might have unintentionally stumbled upon what will be revealed in three chapters from now. But, because that would be too easy, Adam entering the scene at that precise moment appropriately interrupted them. "Hey you two."

"Hey Ads," Emily greeted. She had taken to calling him that because she felt that he needed a nickname, a fact that he was all too happy to accept from a pretty girl.

"Everyone is requested to go down to the banquet hall tonight," he said. "There's a notice on the bulletin board."

"The banquet hall? But the Beezles aren't for a few months." The Beezles were the annual awards handed out to residents for excellence in hellishness, but that's beside the point.

"I know, but they've got some big announcement to make. Eight o'clock, go read it yourself if you want."

"Any idea what it could be?" Emily asked, she was trying to be social at least.

"Probably just another opportunity for the staff to gloat about their devilish deeds.," Neil said uninterestedly.

"I think it's cooler than that," Adam interjected. "Maybe they finally listened to my requests for an arcade suite!"

"God help us," Neil groaned, and then he realized the irony of that sentence.

It's worth pointing out that neither Neil or Adam's guesses were correct, but guesses rarely are. That night they entered the banquet hall, decked out in the usual décor, and found seats together at one of the back tables. What does a banquet hall in Hell look like, you ask? Use your imagination, and make it as wild or subdued as you like.