Back in Hell

[Originally posted at Slacktivist (page 2) and The Slacktiverse.]
[I started thinking about how some of my original characters from other stories might deal with the Rapture.]

The following is somewhat difficult to write because the characters all have names, and they're presumably written down somewhere, but I don't remember them. Giving them new names seems wrong when I'm pretty sure they have names. There are also relationships that sort of matter for understanding it. [Woman] is narrator's wife, Cat, the one person whose name I remember, is the personification of Hope, [Demon] has been living for 20 years as a human, he actually grew up along side [youth]. Hopefully that's enough to understand what's going on. Also, when I first produced these characters there's no way in Hell someone at age 20 would be called a youth. They've been with me since high school.

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Twenty odd years since we'd left. We went to ground, got married in hiding, managed to settle down in a house without being found, helped out the odd divine revolution, and in the end it, in a moment, it all fell apart and I was back in Hell. I reached out with my right hand and took her left, to remind me that I wasn't alone. I wasn't sure whether that was good or bad. If my previous stay had taught me nothing else it was how much of a difference the right company makes. At the same time, you don't want the right company to be in Hell, even if you are.

We were back in Hell. And that was a much less hopeful thought than if it had just been me alone.

“Hasn't changed much,” she said.

“Home, sweet home,” I said.

For a time we walked alone, toward the gates. There was no reason to avoid going in, there was no way out of the dumping grounds where souls arrived, you could make your way to the the entrance to Hell proper on your own, or you could wait for the demons to make you. Then someone took my right hand I looked and saw Cat, it was the first time I had seen her look less than optimistic. She didn't say anything.

Soon after we saw another familiar face, [youth]. He was a kid, barely twenty. He was apparently ready for action. He expectantly asked, “What's the plan?”

I wasn't sure if he was addressing the question to me or [woman]. When she didn't answer, I did, “What makes you think we have a plan?”

“You got out of here before.”

“Oh yeah,” I told him. “It's simple. We just make our way down through all the circles of Hell.”

“Which are guarded by demons,” [woman] added. “Several of whom are probably still pissed off that we got by them the first time.”

“And once we make it to the bottom, this is after we've made it passed unbearable heat and unimaginable cold, we climb right down Lucifer's back.”

“Actually,” a new voice said, “Lucifer is out on parole.” I looked to see that [demon] had arrived, putting his arm around Cat. “It is the apocalypse after all.”

“Ok, so we jump down the giant gaping hole where Lucifer used to be,” [woman] said.

“Crossing the center of the earth and hoping our momentum carries us to the other side of the cavern before gravity pulls us back like a yo-yo,” Cat said.

“Then we climb up through the earth to the far side,” I said.

“Up the island mount of Purgatory,” [woman] said

“Into the Garden of Eden,” I said.

“Steal some fruit and run like Hell,” [woman] said.

[youth] was not impressed. Which is understandable because it was a bad plan. He asked, “Do we have a Plan B?” When [Woman] and I didn't respond he looked to [demon].

“Well don't look at me,” [demon] said, “There's no chance in the ninth circle we get out the way I did last time.”

“It wouldn't help anyway,” Cat said. “We're not running.”

I hadn't been expecting that, “We're not?”

“This isn't just about getting out of Hell. This is the apocalypse.”

“Told you,” [Demon] said.

Cat continued, “Every child on earth has been kidnapped. Moreover, if we don't do something to stop it, the world will be destroyed and almost everyone will be sent to Hell. There will be nowhere to run, and no one will escape.”

“So what is the plan?” the kid asked.

“The Garden of Eden is connected directly to Heaven. If we can make it that far, we can make it inside. Then we take the fight to the enemy,” Cat said.

“That's suicidal,” [youth] said.

“You're already dead,” [woman] said. She let that hang for a moment, then added, “This is the second time I've been dead.”

“If we're going to do this,” [demon] said, “I might know some people who'd prefer to slip in through the back door than wait for Armageddon. If you don't mind making some stops along the way, there are plenty of demons around who don't particularly like God or Lucifer.”

The gates of Hell had come into sight, inscribed, inexplicably, in Italian. [Woman] released my hand and said, “Bet I make it to the second circle first,” and started sprinting before I had processed it was a race. There was a point to it beyond being something to do. Hell was designed around the belief that people would try to get from the more painful parts to the less painful ones, not the other way around. The demons didn't expect anyone to run through the gate, at least not in that direction.

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[Original Work Index]

The relationship between Hell and Earth in the story from high school

[Originally posted at Slacktivist.]

In my largely stolen from Dante cosmology for the series of stories I mentioned before I decided that is Hell was located in what was basically the spiritual/astral/whatever plane associated with Earth (the reason you can't see angels or demons when they don't want to be seen is that they're standing on the spirit side of things*) the metaphysical plane and the physical one looked pretty much the same until Satan was smashed into the metaphysical one causing the changes cited in Dante. (Looked the same on the surface I mean, inside the workings would be entirely different thus allowing Hell to exist as described.)

This somewhat complicates escaping Hell by climbing down Satan's back and up Purgatory and stealing fruit of the tree of life to revive yourself because ideally you'd want to make the transition in a place where you were standing on dry land and the topography of both planes at least somewhat matched.

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It might be worth noting that if Dante were right then it looks like Purgatory would be in the middle of the pacific ocean.

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* Like Daniel Jackson/Sam Carter/Whoever it was this week when they're shuffled somewhat sideways such that they're invisible and can pass through solid objects.

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[Original Work Index]

More Ideas for Novels

[Originally posted at Slacktivist (page 9).]

[In response to the question, "How many unwritten novels does this community have between them, I wonder?"]

Lets see, that was five I've mentioned so far, then there's the thing where someone dates and angel and ends up pursuing a run and hide strategy since God, who violates the evil overlord list because said violation is the centerpiece of his entire society, does not approve. Main characters end up enlisting the help of Greek gods in the process. I figure I got about 90 thousand words into that, give or take. Unfortunately they weren't very well written words.

There was an entire series of books in a single contemporary fantasy setting where I'd just come up with a premise, figure out where it fit in the timeline and say, "Someday I'll make a novel of this."

There was the idea about various people with special powers (manipulate time in a bubble around yourself to move really fast or slow, walk through walls, teleport, the like) each such type power has its own conspiracy trying to capture/kill/control/do bad things to the people with that power. They all do such a good job of keeping it hidden that everyone assumes the special power they have/deal with is the only such power. The plot is what happens when suddenly the various groups become aware of each other.

A take off on Percy Jackson (the movie, I haven't read the book) where main character's lineage was downgraded from "Child of Poseidon" to "Child of the Goddess of Dew" and most of his/her problem solving takes the form of trying to figure out a way to make the ability to cause water to form on surfaces somehow useful. (As Athena-child points out, creation ex-nihilo is nothing to scoff at.) Also, instead of hiding him by grabbing a stepfather whose stench would keep him hidden, they hid her by making her a boy. Main character was very pissed off, supernatural beings didn't understand. (What's wrong with being male? At least you stayed human, I once had to spend three years as a cow.)

Something about werewolves that was lacking in plot because I tried to do the whole write a novel in a month thing with no preparation (though not during the proper month) I think it was supposed to end with the evil politically connected werewolf hunters being taken down by arranging that they would be stopped by the FBI while in possession of detailed records of their shady dealings that they had confiscated by pretending to work for the FBI.

Another thing that I tried to do for a novel in a month thing, this time at the proper time but it turned out that November was busy for me last year. The basic premise was that when Lucifer fell to earth reality itself shattered, hell was built between the cracks. For people with a natural affinity it was possible to choose to travel to the space between the cracks rather than across them (to the casual observer they'd appear to disappear.) And something about a demon doomsday cult.

I've wondered if some of my more stand alone Right Behind stories might be novel material, Not Even the Angels in Heave, A World Without God, Where Antichrists Come From.

A story set in the future in a virtual reality game world. The game has dungeons and whatnot but mostly it's a wide open sandbox for people to do what they wilt in it. (The lead character is a shopkeeper in the game world who, by selling his virtual currency for real money to people who don't want to do the work to get it on their own, is able to afford the bare minimum necessary to stay alive and connected in the real world, his poor real world living conditions don't bother him because he's got a good quality of life in the virtual reality.) The plot of the novel would be how a group of characters came together when a massive power outage threw the game world into chaos (people who lost power were disconnected resulting in a sort of mini rapture, the more pvp users saw this as a golden opportunity to have the sort of fun that tended to end badly for everyone else.) At the end the characters would have formed a team that would do city saving heroics again in the future on an ongoing basis. (Or smaller level heroics, probably more on an A-Team level.)

An alien invasion gets screwed up when one of the first scouts of the body taking over aliens merges with the host instead of taking over. The aliens were aware that this would happen once or twice sooner or later, but the fact that it happened so early on is problematic for them. The story would be told in first person plural except briefly when the aliens attempt to use torture to separate the alien and human.

An alien invasion that gets screwed up because, in order to properly blend, the initial invaders didn't know they were aliens with their alien memories only emerging at the proper time, at which point they cared about as much about their alien hopes and dreams as you or I might about plans for the future we made when we were four.

An alien invasion story of the "We merge with your minds" variety in which turns out that almost everyone who escaped the doomed town was actually an alien. Not an alien particularly bent on invasion, but this would be one of those paranoid "Who's one of them?" stories and it would turn out to be everyone but that guy, "that guy" being the one who kept on saying, "I don't care who's one of them, what we're doing to find out is morally wrong and I refuse to be a part of it." Then they'd all go their separate ways in peace.

Something about two teenagers who met in Pompeii becoming inexplicably immortal and taking nearly 2000 years to run into each other again. I may or may not have put more thought into it than that.

A time traveler gets stuck in the past and sullenly explains to the local rulers that there's nothing he can say about his technology that will help because it requires an infrastructure they simply don't have. He say's the Archimedean screw is more useful than anything he could offer. They don't know about the Archimedean screw. He cheers up and explains that in that case he can be very useful indeed. Years later the kingdom is thriving and working it's way in the direction of whatever passes for utopia in the absence of penicillin. The literacy rate is high, the people are well treated, and the envoy just returned from the east with copies of scrolls talking about all of that cool stuff the eastern empire kept alive after the fall of the west. (Look up Heron of Alexandria, the man was amazing.)

Everything is looking wonderful until more time travelers show up who have identified this as a point where interference with history could destroy the future. Apparently the kingdom is to be destroyed and everyone in it either slaughtered or sold off into slavery. If Anachronism City State isn't destroyed then the changes made to them will rewrite history. Original time traveler doesn't give a damn. The people in front of him are the ones he cares about, the future can go to Hell if it's advocating for mass murder. One of the new time travelers is captured, the philosophy of time travel is discussed, and finally at the command of the original time traveler new-time traveler is given a bucket, put on fire suppression duty and told, "If you really think these people deserve to die, let them." That doesn't happen, putting out fires leads to fighting to save the city, the future be damned.

For a completely different take on time travel, time is a spatial dimension. Time travelers have learned to navigate it as easily as the others. A thriving city exist in a single moment, with those still in the normal timestream existing like statues around which those who are outside of normal time live and work. A giant minefield is set up to prevent people from changing the past before a certain point. Settlements are made close to this minefield because changes in time can be pretty catastrophic for those outside of it. (Think about what happens when the building your standing on ceases to have ever been constructed.) A totalitarian regime is being fought, in large part through the use of a five pound remote control bomb, well, that and the ability to traverse the minefield to put it as far back as needed. (One push of the button releases the bomb into the timestream set to detonate in three seconds. Another push removes it from the timestream before it detonates. One click knocks the comet off it's appointed path and into the enemy instillation, a second click puts things right back how they were.)

A couple of things about prophesy, possibly combined into one thing such that one of them became a story within a story.

Probably various other things as well, I should dig out my old notebooks some time.

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[Original Work Index]

More About A Book Idea From High School

[First posted at Slacktivist (page 9).]

[On demons growing up as human beings as described in the novel idea here.]

Mine wasn't so much that that happened regularly, in fact I was thinking of it as a novel idea that no one had ever thought of before. I think that I had a lot of obvious seeming things that I thought of as novel ideas*. And suddenly it hits me: novel ideas to be used in ideas for novels. Perhaps "novel" wasn't the right word. Previously unthought ideas.

I do think I realized at some point that it didn't make a whole lot of sense that no one in the history the universe had this plan before and tried to justify it by saying that most demons wouldn't want to be tied to a human body in the first place and were perfectly happy to be in hell torturing people. Those that weren't weren't trusted enough to get earth duty, so first the protagonist demon had to work his way up in the hierarchy somewhat which was difficult and slow because protagademon couldn't be evil to save his soul. (He'd be something like Fuchsia from Sinfest after she fell in love with Crimminy.)

So part of it was that most demons weren't coming at it from a "there must be some way out of here," angle and most of those who were didn't manage to implement any plans. First he had to get trusted enough to be given a shot at possession, then he had to convince someone more trusted to go along with this plan because he still wouldn't be trusted enough to choose an assignment, certainly not enough to choose one that would allow him to slip away unnoticed, and even then it was hard to implement (try to take possession too early and it's not a human yet, so you bounce, take it too late and there's already a soul so it's like any other possession and not at all exorcism proof, you need to get it just right) and didn't exactly work perfectly (main character's amnesia being the result of a head on collision with a human soul.)

So it really wasn't angels/demons/both are born as humans as part of the setting but more of, for the first time ever four demons used a complicated possession plot to free themselves from Hell.

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* The one that comes to mind is the tree of knowledge. It's the fruit of the tree of knowledge, not the fruit of knowledge. The fruit isn't all of knowledge, just a part of it. So I decided that to get the full blown "I am enlightened," effect (which I suddenly find myself imagining said in the manner of, "I know Kung Fu" from The Matrix) you need to eat the whole tree. And what is a seed if not a whole tree?

So far this is just a minor quirk of the setting, but I remember then thinking that the response to learning that the characters from the first book figured this out and ate the seeds was something along the lines of, "How did they think of that? No one's ever thought of that. Did someone tell them? In all of human history no one ever came up with that before. How could they possibly think of that?"

And, obviously, they took some seeds with them so they could grow a new tree of knowledge in their eventual back yard. Because that's what you do.

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[Original Work Index]

Story Ideas I had in High School

[Originally posted at Slacktivist (page 8).]

I've always been fascinated by the idea of taking on God because it seems like the natural thing to do, especially if you believe in Hell. Hell cries out for liberation. Yes, there are very bad people in the world, but after a few quintillion years of torture I defy anyone to come up with an explanation of how they did something so wrong as to justify the continuation of the pain. Hell is a wrong in need of righting (which I initially miswrote as "writing"), of course heroes take up arms.

In high school I had several stories that I hoped to one day write about going up against God. And apparently if I let myself I'll go on forever talking about them. I'll try to keep this somewhat short.

[Added] I completely failed to keep this short. You have been warned.[/Added]

Almost without exception they had male viewpoint characters as protagonists who were about my age at whatever time I happened to be thinking about it. Which probably shows the limits of my imagination quite well.

One was a short story that had gaping holes in it large enough to drive an entire fleet of fully loaded 747s through, but unlike the others it did get written, that involved teaming up with not-evil Lucifer to stop God. In this one God died, off camera. And Lucifer quoted Jimmy Buffett.

Another was supposed to be a series of books, for I had ambition and was going to be a novelist. The first book involved someone's soul being sent to Hell while he still lived. (When he slept he'd be in Hell with no knowledge of his waking life.) This was a good thing (set up by the Greek goddess Hope) which caused the very depressed kid to meet up with a damned girl, fall in love, escape Hell, ascend purgatory, steal the fruit of life (which I think I decided should be a pear) and seeds from fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (for good measure) get to a safe place to revive the girl, revive her using the fruit of the tree of life, and disappear to live happily mostly after.

I think I'm failing at keeping this short, it's my second try as well. Book two was to be about a group of demons, (one of whom was helpful in the first book) who became effectively human and thus undamned by possessing embryos before they gained souls thus becoming the souls of the human bodies that resulted. The one from the previous book was both less evil than the rest and the only one to suffer complications (he lost his memory) in the book he would regain his memory and then stop the others from doing evil.

The next book would have been about a boy who sprouted wings. (He's descended from Nephilim you see.) I figured that would probably be trouble enough to fill up a whole book.

In the last book the whole opposing God thing would finally show up. A teenager would be sniffed out as being the next big thing, theologically speaking. Gifted on a savior like level. Heaven would have some very strong ideas about what he should think and say and do. Characters from the previous books would be trying to keep Heaven off the kid's back. (They'd span a generation, but they would have all gone to the same high school.)

In the end he'd realize that he couldn't hope to oppose Heaven, but there needed to be an option beyond Heaven and Hell. This realization would come after all of the good characters had been beaten back and forced to take refuge inside the high school while they were totally surrounded. So he'd create a new plane of existence, starting it with the high school. (A spherical section of reality would simply disappear from the universe, and become the center of a new afterlifey place. I imagined the school surrounded by empty white space that would eventually be filled.) The various humans gods and angels (in this concept the Greek gods are real beings that are more or less on the same level as angels) would start building a new Utopia there, presumably intercepting Hellbound souls and also liberating souls from hell as they went along.

Another story was the one I've previously mentioned that was intended to be a series of inconsistent accounts that fit together like gospels. It was, like the last book in the series above, to be about a new savior. It would have had a different tone, and a very different backstory. Where setting of the above is more or less a standard take on Heaven and Hell (stealing heavily from Dante and fundamentalists) viewed in a negative light with Greek gods thrown in, this was to be heresy from the ground up.

Jesus was not the son of God but the son of the angel sent to tell Mary that her son would be a really important person. (If I'd bothered to do research I would have know that this was Gabriel I was talking about, but I didn't.) That angel, by the way, was totally female*. God did not like that. But it wasn't until after Jesus' death that they had their major falling out. Jesus was sent to Hell due to creative differences with God. (Love and Mercy didn't fit into the divine plan.) Hell sucked. There was a revolution, Jesus took over.

When the new savior got himself sent to Hell by God, he'd meet up with Jesus, discuss strategy, and then ... I don't remember how he was going to oppose God, but it probably involved the fact that I assumed that there was access to Heaven via purgatory since that was how Dante got in.

There was definitely something involving fallen angels entirely unrelated to all these things. I remember having a recurring scene in mind where an angel, on his way to fall, would talk about the idea that if you dropped a coin from the door out of Heaven, it would take an entire day to hit the earth. Then they'd drop a coin as they fell. The angel who it was said to, being someone the soon to be fallen angel had friendship with, would be the next to fall, though it might take centuries, and pass on the comment someone they trusted, who would then turn out to be the next to fall. Those who walked away from Heaven were absolutely the good guys, so I assume it involved opposing god.

There were probably others, it was a recurring theme for me. I'm not sure, but I think it might have kicked off when in some class or other they listed kinds of conflict in stories and "Man vs. God" caught my interest.

I think that the thing about someone getting a job from Lucifer as a reaper delivering souls to Hell was something much later, some time in college instead of high school I would guess. In that Hell was a safe haven and the opposition to God mostly took the form of deciding to delay the Apocalypse over and over again. (They couldn't cancel it, but they could say, "It doesn't feel right yet, lets put it off for ten more years," every five years.) Hell was a really nice place, with thriving art districts and all the free therapy the dead of the world so desperately need.

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* At least she looked that way to me in the painting I was thinking about at at the time. Assuming I remember correctly. It would be nice if I could remember the name of the painting since it was, as I recall, very good.

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[Original Work Index]

The Story Where Jesus Has Two Mommies - Summary

[Originally posted at Slacktivist (page 2).]

After discussion of how LB Nicolae is the result of combining the genetics of two gay men it was stated:

Sorry, but that kind of reproductive monkey-business is off limits for our Lord and Savior. It's unnatural and spits in the very face of God and his holy plan. Anyway, back to Jesus, the real Messiah, who as we all know was born from the seed of a woman.

So, if I understand correctly, what you're saying is that far from being the child of two gay men, the real Messiah will be the child of lesbians?

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I actually think that I outlined that story in high school. I recall there being some bizarre twisted logic about the virgin conception going into the idea, but mostly I think it was that there are some really awesome Annunciation paintings out there, and in quite a few of them the angel looks female, and they really looked like such a lovely couple and ...

I think the idea I came up with was that the angel was supposed to stop by and say, "Your firstborn child is going to be really special," but then Mary and the angel really hit it off, and so the firstborn child got started somewhat earlier than planned, and in the end God was pissed off and sent Jesus to hell, but Jesus led a revolution and overthrew Satan and as a result Hell became rather moderate and not very Hellish, and by the time the story takes place there's a new Savior being produced on earth but it's going about as well for God as the last savior, so God is really pissed off, angels come to earth, the new Savior figures that he could use advice from the last one, so he has someone turn him over to the angels (for more than 30 pieces of silver because inflation and whatnot) and gets himself sent to Hell so he can talk to Jesus. Judas was there too.

Anyway, while this is happening the disciple who handed new-savior over is trying to rescue the other disciples because, having learned from Christianity, Heaven doesn't plan to let any of them go.

As I recall the plan was to have parts of the story told from each disciple's perspective, possibly a historian or two as well, and have the entire work be like a set of gospels (contradictions and all) with the final version being new-savior's version of events. Whether new-Judas came across as a hero or complete scum would depend on where the gospel in question ended.

It was high school. I think that that is my excuse for everything I've written here. I hope it excuses it because I don't have anything else to say in my defense.

I'm not a Christian, and yet I still somehow feel, upon writing the above, that I must be going to Hell.

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Oh, and something about walking on water being a bad idea on a windy day (because if the water is hard enough to stand on the waves will knock you around in the most painful ways.)

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[Original Work Index]