Well hello, humans! I hope you are surviving in New Hell. It is I, Nix, your favorite demon girl coming to you from Hell.

I first want to thank all of you who sold your souls to me over the years. Last you saw of me, I was super sick with COVID-19, and without your souls, I would not have recovered so quickly.

Even though I’m in Hell this semester, and not lurking in the tunnels, don’t despair! I’ll be holding Zoom sessions for you to get all the soul selling taken care of. There may be a small increase in prices, but that’s the cost of the pandemic and remote deals with the demon.

Like many of you, I was left without an internship this summer due to that pandemic. So I did what was only natural: I turned to smuggling humans into Hell. It’s a perfectly legal job to help humans get to a better place, in case you were wondering, and they needed extra help this summer (I’m paid per person smuggled).

Typically, we only see a few humans try to get into Hell a week. This summer, thanks to ‘rona, you were trying to get into Hell like we had the secret to immortality. Okay fine, we do have it, but in the end you’re still going to Hell.

I get why everyone wanted to come here. We’ve only had three cases, there’s free healthcare and housing, and it’s more pleasant than what you’re experiencing on the surface or in your doomsday bunkers. It seems like most humans seem to have forgotten the criteria to come here. You typically have to do something really bad.

Well, that was before. What better time than a Pandemic for Hell to roll out its new slogan: “Hell is the New Heaven.” So just for the duration of coronavirus, we changed around our criteria to help us stay COVID-free.

Our first criteria is that you have to wear a mask. Not a surgical mask or an N95. We won’t accept anything less than a full-on gas mask. Extreme? Perhaps. But do you really want to be breathing toxic fumes the whole time? While I definitely have some nostalgia for the asbestos and mold spores lingering in the air back on campus, nothing can compare to the sweet sweet smell of cyanide vapor, petroleum, and durian.

Next, any human trying to get into Hell has to spend a month quarantining in purgatory with mandatory daily COVID-19 tests. You want to get into Hell? Is it that important to you? Let’s first see you survive a week with no outlets, no games, and over 100 pages of customs, tax, and immigration forms to fill out.

Finally, if you’ve somehow not gone insane from us asking you if you’ve ever gotten a parking ticket 500 times, the last step is giving up your soul. Just think of it like a security deposit. Once we have your soul, that’s when the fun begins anyway. It’s just a short ride down the River of Blood, through the Cataracts of Insanity and into the Tunnels of Despair, and if your mind is still intact, congratulations! You’ve successfully gone from one Hell to the other! Be sure to rate us a 5 on Airbnb. Sure, it’s Hell, but compared to what’s up above, it may just be paradise.



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