Heaven and Hell: Honorarium

By Melanie E.

In memory of a great friend and a wonderful person. Maggie, we'll miss you always.

----

"Hey. Hey! Wake up!"

"Hnghwha?" I opened my eyes and stared up at the woman who was shaking me. It took less than half a second for her beautiful features, wavy chocolate brown hair, large lavender eyes, and pouty lips, to register with me and get me to give her my best smile. When another half-second later I also registered the purple tinted skin, slit pupils, and tiny horns my smile wavered for a moment, but quickly returned.

One of these dreams again, huh? It's been a while, but....

"Hey, snap out of it!" The vision said, snapping her claw-tipped fingers before my nose. "The boss has been waitin' on ya and wants to get this over with."

"The boss?" I asked, even as I stood and started to smooth out the wrinkles on my clothes, only to finally notice I wasn't wearing any. "Umm..."

"Ugh." The demonic debutante rolled her eyes at me. "We've seen it all before, hon. Let's get a move on."

With that she stepped away from me and waved for me to follow. Looking around I finally took stock of my surroundings, a well-outfitted waiting room with dark wood and crimson details, stone walls, and a rather antsy looking little demon-guy behind a counter filling out what looked to be a stack of paperwork taller than he was with a red pen. There was something familiar about the place, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it....

"Hey!"

"Coming!" I yelped, then got up and trotted along behind my escort, the vision of her long supple tail swishing side to side with each step helping to keep my attention on her more than my surroundings. I'd always had a thing for shapely derrieres, and I'd seen few that were quite so shapely as the one before me at that moment.

It wasn't too long before we reached a huge set of dark wooden doors, carved with images of men and women being tortured in hellfire and punished by demons, all very Old Testament. This was certainly a very vivid dream, even compared to how active my normal imagination worked, but it was nothing too over the top really. I wondered which of my many creations would come to take me away for a debaucherous evening of lust and transformation, and could feel my own smile growing wider as the doors opened....

Before me was a luxurious office, a large oak desk in the middle of it, and behind the desk sat the most gorgeous blonde bombshell I had ever seen. Her figure was only set off that much more by the ruby red velvet suit she wore, the large white wings behind her offering a brilliant contrast to the otherwise dreary and demonic surroundings. She smiled back at us as we entered, a smile that offered everything any man or woman could ever dream of... at a price, of course.

"Yer dark ladyship, M. Finson here for their appointment."

"Thank you, Lorelei. You're dismissed."

"Lorelei?" I said, surprised as I watched my escort strut back out of the office. The put upon look on her face vanished as she pulled the doors shut behind her, and I would have swore I saw her give me a quick wink just before the heavy doors closed.

With the doors closed I turned back to give my new host another look, and gulped. "If that was Lorelei, then you must be...."

The blonde bombshell stood up from her desk and walked around, the echo of her heels -- no, hooves -- on the black marble floor filling the space between us. As she approached me, she gave me another of those honeyed smiles and offered me her hand.

"In the ectoplasmic proto-flesh. Though given your reasons for being here, you can call me Lucy."

I shook her hand and chuckled. "Well, this is usually the part in the dream where--"

"This isn't a dream."

"That's just the kind of thing a dream vixen who was about to ravish me within an inch of my life would say."

"Touche'," Lucy returned, quirking an eyebrow up. "But do you remember where you were before this dream started?"

"Where I was? Well, I was... oh. OH."

I looked around myself again as the situation dawned on me, and gulped nervously.

"Welcome to Hell, honey."

I gulped again. "Is this about that time in Tijuana? Because when they asked if I wanted to be a mule I thought it was just some kind of kinky role--"

"Nope!"

"The eight grand in unpaid parking tickets?"

"Nuh uh."

"That time I blamed the cat when i accidentally broke the window throwing rocks at my brother?"

"Not that either! Though if you want to keep guessing I'm sure we can arrange punishment for anything you want."

"...No, I think I'm good."

Lucy laughed and wrapped one of her gorgeous arms and wings around my shoulders in what I was sure was intended as a comforting gesture. Unfortunately, the nature of the situation kept me from being able to enjoy her closeness as much as I might have otherwise.

"Well, if you must know your presence here is a bit of an exception to the rules. NORMALLY folks end up in Heaven or Hell based on their actions in life: you do good, you go up. You do bad, you go down. Simple as that. In YOUR case, though, the Power that Be thought a bit of something special was in order."

"So I'm not here to experience eternal damnation for living a hedonistic and evil life?"

"You wouldn't be meeting with me personally if you were."

"Huh."

"You seem surprised," Lucy said, her eyes twinkling.

"I mean...."

"Let me show you something."

With a wave of her hand a small marble pedestal appeared before the two of us, a compact laptop sitting open on top of it with a number of files showing on the screen.

"Hey, that's my computer!"

"Yep. And you see all those files?"

"My stories?"

Lucy nodded. "Those are why you're here."

"I didn't think my writing was THAT bad!"

Lucy laughed, a tinkling sound that felt completely out of place in our dire surroundings. "Aaah! You are a treat! No, you're not here because of that, though I will say that your Bionic Woman fanfic from ninth grade was pretty awful. You're here because of what your stories have done."

With that, she clicked on one of the story files on my laptop. I looked on, expecting to see the text editor window pop up and show the opening lines of Fey's adventures at Whateley, but what I saw instead was a list of names, dates, and numbers, in different colors and fonts, some changing and others remaining static.

"What's this?" I asked, as I watched one name change from red to green as an eight-digit number next to the name began to rapidly tick up.

"That's the people who's lives your writing has helped to save. Names, and their death dates. The color shows those who go to heaven, and those who come down here."

I looked at the list again, and taking a guess at what colors meant what I felt pleasantly surprised. "So my stories have helped a few people then?"

"No," Lucy said solemnly. With another wave of her hand the laptop grew, and grew, until its screen was the size of a Jumbotron, seeming to stretch beyond the euclidean limits of the room's geometry, the text getting smaller and smaller as more and more information appeared.

"Whoah."

"Indeed. Your stories haven't just helped a few people. They've helped thousands."

Another wave, and the information began to form itself into columns, with story titles at the top. There was Dierdre's tale, with a long list of attributions. There was Whateley, and Caregivers, and of course, my Heaven and Hell stories, all neatly organized, all extending off even the massively expanded screen before me.

"I was just writing silly stories...."

"And in doing so you changed people's lives. Saved people's lives."

I felt the urge to cry, but couldn't. A bit of my own lore from Heaven and Hell came to me, about the loss of a body changing the way spirits experienced emotions, and that brought me back to the here and now. "So, if I did so much good, why am I here then?"

Lucy laughed again, giving me a squeeze that was much more comforting than the first one. "Because the Man Upstairs -- or maybe they're a woman this week, damned if we get a chance to chat very often any more -- thought you might like a quick tour before getting to spend the rest of eternity in eternal joy and all that good stuff."

"Oh. Oh! I mean, yeah? Sure?" I said, unsure of exactly how much I really would enjoy a tour that would probably involve copious amounts of torture, pain-filled screaming, and the smell of burning flesh.

"With our first stop being Lillith's little grove of joy. Or I guess Lorelei's for now, I don't think I have to explain to YOU of all people what happened there."

"Heheh, no, I guess not," I agreed, wondering just how much of my Heaven and Hell stories might have stumbled into being something more than fiction. "Wait, if we're going to see the succubi then--"

"I mean, you know as well as I do that Heaven's what you make of it," Lucy said impishly (and nobody can be impish like the lady of hell herself.) "And who knows, maybe after spending a few days with my succubi you may not want to go north after all?"

I couldn't help but grin: maybe this tour would be more fun than I'd expected.

-FIN-

NOTES

*HUGS*