See the City

I looked at the city for a few moments. After my run-ins with some of the weird creatures around here, I decided that my best bet was to seek out civilization - or whatever passes for it in Hell, anyway.

Taking a deep breath, I lifted one foot, stuck it forward, and fell off the cliff.

Immediately, my wings spread out, and I was flying like ... well, like a bat in Hell, I guess. Though I'd never really used them, my wings seemed to know what to do. Swooping down, I got a good view of the ground underneath me. I guess I'd always imagined Hell as this place made out of black rock so hot it burned your feet, with big fire-pits where devils roasted people on pitchforks. To my surprise, I discovered that the plain below me was pretty much what you'd expect to find in a tropicl climate on Earth: some low, rocky hills, small streams, clumps of weird-looking but green trees. I caught glimpses of things moving around, but none of the animals stayed still for very long, and I was flying pretty quickly anyway. I did notice that most of the flying critters had bat-wings like mine instead of feathers.

Finally, I reached the city. Up close, the buildings were enormous, the biggest being around ten times as tall as the Seer's Tower in Chicago. Some were made of shining metal and glass, and other looked like they'd been built out of marble or even stranger things, like one tall, thin, spiraling building that looked like it had been carved from one huge pillar of obsidian. There were smaller buildings in between the super-skyscrapers, and as I came closer, I noticed that every building had big porches or verandas sticking out from high above the ground, and there were people - well, people-like, winged beings like me, anyway - flying all over the place. It looked pretty cool to me, though I'll bet it would have been an air-traffic controller's nightmare.

I landed on what seemed like a special landing pad on the outskirts, made of some kind of soft, cushiony foam. Stepping off the pad, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a bunch of stalls and wagons. I guess the various creatures calling to me were just regular street vendors like anywhere else, but it looked like something out of the cantina scene in Star Wars, only weirder. Things - well, people, I guess I should call them - looked at me, flashing teeth in huge smiles and gesturing at whatever they were selling.

Some were selling jewelry, and a few had clothing on their carts. I turned toward the smell of cooking meat, and saw that one old woman - at least, she looked old, and I'm pretty sure she was a woman - was turning some kind of big, six-legged lizard on a spit over an open fire.

Everyone was shouting in who knows how many languages, as if these people had come here from every part of the world, or maybe even the whole universe. Is Hell just for bad humans, or do aliens come here, too? I wondered. If I ever ran into anybody who spoke good old English, I'd ask them sometime.

I felt around in my torn-looking skirt, but wasn't too surprised to discover that my one pocket was totally empty.

That settled, I looked around again at the street vendors and all the cool stuff they were offering. Mall rat that I'd always been, my first thought was, Is this Hell? To see all this neat stuf, and to smell food cooking, and not be able to buy any of it?

So, that basically left me two options. The most rational one would be to make my way through the press of shopkeepers and go further into the city, where I might find someone to talk to and some way of getting by in this strange - though surprisingly livable - underworld. Another, naughtier side of my mind also pointed out that I was already in Hell, so why not just take what I wanted? Or maybe trade some of my feminine charms for these fantastic goods - I could see a cute, red-skinned guy a few stalls down ....