When they had walked and/or been dragged ten thousand steps across the nothingness, The Author saw another doorway in front of them. It had a neat little sign chained to the top of the frame, announcing Hell - Registry Office 14. And beneath: Please mind your step.

He’d been pretty calm all through the desert. But now, looking at that staircase just beyond the frame, meticulous reflective tape on every edge flickering with the heat of some unseen, infernal bonfire beneath, he began to panic.

“It’s not godawful!” he screamed.

The dim, misery-festooned figure of Barry turned morosely from the top of the stairs. He said nothing, but the look said it all.

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“It’s not a sequel!” The Author tried.

Barry only beckoned, and his quarry, kicking and screaming, approached the void. “A broken promise is a promise broken,” he recited, and his cold voice echoed from a thousand of faces of dead stone below.

The recently deceased got a toehold in a peeling bit of tape in dire need of a good risk assessment. “Don’t I get a trial? I can prove it! Prooooove it!”

Instantly, the force was gone. From the fifth stair, Barry peered up at him, perplexed. “Why, of course you do. This is Hell, not some earthly capitalist dystopia. You have an hour to lay your evidence before me, if you like.”

The Author liked. He stepped away from the entrance gratefully, then looked back at Barry sharply. “Before you? You’re a bit of an opinionated dick, to be honest. I’d never prove my piece wasn’t godawful to you.”

The officer gave him the look again. “My soul is not like yours. It is incapable of opinion. So if I say your story is-”

“Alright, alright!” The Author snapped. Scrap that one.

He’d take route two.