Radicle (Terminal trilogy #2, can stand alone)

5: Reminder/Remainder

She pushed at me with her hand and I went inside.

There were six demons there, and I guess they really did look new. A few of them were- fondling?- themselves in great confusion, running their hands across gills and horns and new sharp teeth. As is normal, they all turned to watch as I entered the room.

"Hello?" Said the woman who was likely running it. She sat legs crossed with her hair in a bun neat enough that it didn't even look like it was made of hair.

"I'm- I'm sorry. I'm late. I'm sorry that I'm late. There was a problem. None of my papers got through. Administration's error. I was told to come here."

"Certainly." She said. "What's your name?" She held her pen above her clipboard, ready to write.

I struggled. "Creed. Farmer-Soldier."

The pen tapped at her lips.

"I mean, that was a preface to my actual last name, which is not Farmer-Soldier, but has roots in those words. It is Far...dier. Fardier."

"Middle initial?"

"Lavender."

"Alright Creed, please take a seat. And welcome. You came in right towards the end of our meeting, I'm afraid. We've already covered a lot. Just having some general question and answer time now. You have any questions?"

"Uh- no." I figured it'd be a bad thing to let myself become too rememberable.

"So- are there really torture chambers?" One of the demons asked.

The informational session lasted for a long time, after which I was held longer by the demon overseer. I hadn't entered with many questions regarding Hell, but I left with a number of miscellaneous answers.

Hell did, in fact, have torture chambers. But their proper name was 'research rooms'. It seemed every so often, after selling their soul, a human would fail to become a demon when they arrived in Hell. Usually they'd be killed immediately and reset back on Earth on the next cycle change, but a few were kept for research purposes, just in case, for up to nineteen years.

Cycles were discussed at great length too. All of the new demons had much difficulty understanding the concept of them. I had to feign this, though it was true I knew little about cycles myself- we did not experience them in Heaven, so my knowledge was through word-of-mouth only. The gist was that, for whatever mysterious reason, the Earth reset every nineteen years. Hell was unaffected, as were any demons on Earth at the time. But all the humans and the trees and the animals would just leap back in time to nineteen years prior. The dead would be revived. Babies would be un-born. And then life would continue on again for another nineteen years.

The only way to remove people was to bring them to Hell. Because there had been nine cycles so far- meaning one-hundred and seventy-one years- many humans had simply disappeared from Earth. Parents would go missing, neighborhoods would empty, and friends would lose contact. Some humans grew suspicious. But there was something hazy and odd about cycles, and no one seemed to have the drive to realize how many people had gone missing.

Most of the new demons grew uncomfortable at the thought that they had lived their life many times prior, each in a slightly different world. In addition, they learned that the cycling of Earth had created two different Earths, so to speak: the one caught in a cycle, and the one stuck in the present. Hell was in the present, that's how it avoided the effects of the cycle change. Heaven was on the same plane.

The primary travel between the past and the present were giant portals, like the two I had used on my way here. I had to wonder what Michael had been trying to do though, making me travel through past Earth to meet Tecie and then having to travel back to the present to arrive in Hell- wouldn't it have been easier for Tecie to just climb out of the Hellmouth and meet me in the present? He must have had a good reason though- all his reasons were intelligent and correct.