The few days following my visit to the Hazbin Hotel had the merit of reminding me just how much I appreciated silence.
It wasn’t that my domain was actually silent.
From early in the morning, the workshops were running, vehicles moved between the various buildings of the complex, and my soldiers carried out their patrols with almost perfect regularity.
The administrative offices, warehouses, and underground facilities generated their own share of activity as well, not to mention the few demons employed for tasks my creations were incapable of handling on their own.
And yet, even with several hundred individuals working around me, no one burst into my office to suggest a trust exercise involving a blindfold.
I had rediscovered the value of that particular detail.
Seated behind my desk, a still-hot cup of coffee within reach, I went through the reports that had accumulated during my absence.
An entire morning spent away from the domain had obviously not been enough to cause its collapse, which would have been slightly insulting after all the decades I had spent building an organization capable of functioning without me personally supervising every fucking decision.
The manor occupied the highest part of the complex, far enough from the industrial facilities that their noise had faded into a distant rumble by the time it reached my windows.
From my office, I could see part of the main courtyard as well as the road leading down toward the warehouses, where several groups of soldiers were currently unloading a truck under the supervision of a lieutenant.
I watched them for a few seconds before returning to the document in front of me.
A shipment of ammunition had arrived two days late.
The company responsible was still demanding full payment.
I picked up my pen, calmly crossed out the stated amount, and wrote down the corrected figure.
They were welcome to complain.
Someone knocked twice on the door.
“Come in.”
My usual lieutenant entered the room carrying several folders under one arm.
I had allowed him to resume his normal duties as soon as we returned from Pentagram City, which had also marked the end of his personal ordeal at Niffty’s hands.
He approached the desk and placed the documents in front of me.
“The reports from the western section, Commander.
Repairs to Warehouse Three are complete, and the teams assigned to the northern road have reported no further incidents since last night.”
I picked up the first folder and quickly scanned the figures.
“And the convoy that was supposed to arrive this morning?”
“It passed the outer checkpoint at nine forty-seven.
The cargo is currently being inspected.”
“How late was it?”
“Forty-two minutes.”
I looked up at him.
“You actually counted?”
The lieutenant remained perfectly still in front of my desk, his shadowy face revealing nothing but that eternal row of sharp teeth.
“The register lists its scheduled arrival at nine oh-five.”
I let out a small, amused sigh.
“Of course.”
He waited while I signed two documents, then took the ones I handed back to him.
He probably would have left the room without adding anything if my gaze had not fallen on his cap.
A particularly useless thought crossed my mind.
“Did Niffty manage to damage your uniform?”
The lieutenant froze.
“No, Commander.”
“Your cap?”
“No.”
I picked up my cup to hide the smile threatening to appear.
“In that case, your first visit to the Hazbin Hotel can be considered an operational success.”
He remained silent for several seconds, long enough for me to begin wondering whether my creations were capable of developing some form of trauma.
“She tried to clean my teeth with a brush.”
I slowly lowered my cup.
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“You were speaking with the bartender.”
This time, I failed to hold back my laughter.
The lieutenant tilted his head slightly, as though trying to determine what could possibly be amusing about that information.
“Why did you let her?”
“You ordered me not to harm her.”
“I also authorized you to ask her to leave you alone.”
Another silence followed.
“I did not understand that option was included.”
I ran a hand over my face while trying to recover some degree of seriousness.
Well.
That was instructive.
My soldiers were perfectly capable of interpreting complex tactical situations, coordinating an assault, or adapting their positions when an initial plan became impossible.
Faced with a five-foot-tall cyclops armed with a brush, however, several decades of military refinement suddenly seemed useless.
“Next time, you are authorized to tell her no.”
“Understood, Commander.”
He hesitated briefly before adding, “Will there be a next time?”
I paused before reaching for the next folder.
The question should have had a simple answer, but I found that I didn’t really have one.
“Probably, but not immediately.
I spent enough time there to satisfy my curiosity for a few days.”
The lieutenant inclined his head before collecting the remaining documents and leaving the room.
I returned to work.
Well, at least I tried.
For nearly an hour, I managed to handle my affairs without thinking about the Hazbin Hotel even once, which seemed perfectly reasonable considering that the place held absolutely no official position within my organization or my plans.
Then someone placed an envelope on my desk.
I looked at it and raised an eyebrow.
The envelope was pink.
Not dark red, not burgundy, not even simply colored in some vaguely acceptable way for professional correspondence.
It was genuinely pink, with my name handwritten across the front and a small drawing resembling a star in the upper corner.
I stared at the object with the kind of suspicion I would normally reserve for a package likely to explode.
“Who brought this?”
The soldier stationed near the door answered immediately.
“A courier from Pentagram City.”
I turned the envelope over and saw that the seal bore the initials of the Hazbin Hotel.
Of course.
I should have known.
I opened the envelope and pulled out a stack of papers thick enough to make me check whether Charlie had decided to send me a property contract.
The first page bore a carefully written title.
Short Summary of the Current Rehabilitation Program and Possible Observations.
I looked at the thickness of the document.
Then at the word short.
“This woman is incapable of lying properly, but she makes a remarkable effort.”
The soldier near the door did not react.
I began reading.
By the third page, Charlie was still explaining the general structure of the group activities.
By the fifth, she had added an entire section about the need to avoid turning observation of the residents into intrusive surveillance, apparently because my comment about cameras had affected her enough that she felt the need to explicitly state in writing that no cameras would be installed in the bedrooms.
On the seventh page, I found a table.
I stopped.
The table wasn’t bad.
In fact, it was surprisingly clear.
Charlie had divided the behaviors she wanted to encourage into several categories without assigning them ridiculous moral values.
Spontaneous mutual assistance, control over certain destructive impulses, the ability to admit a mistake, respect for other people’s boundaries, and willingness to repair the consequences of bad behavior were among the elements she now intended to track.
I picked up my pen and, without really thinking about it, corrected two columns.
Then I added a note in the margin regarding the difference between correlation and causation.
I finished the page.
It was only when I turned to the next one that I realized what I was doing.
I looked at my pen.
Then at the document.
“Fuck.”
I had just participated.
Indirectly, admittedly, and no one could seriously claim that a statistical annotation constituted a contribution to a redemption program, but the principle remained uncomfortably close.
I kept reading anyway.
Since I had already started, I might as well prevent Charlie from building an entire methodology on shaky foundations.
This was absolutely not helping.
It was intellectual hygiene.
Yeah.
That was it.
And I refused to accept any other interpretation.
The afternoon was, thankfully, much more normal.
I left the manor after lunch to inspect part of the facilities on the eastern side of the domain, where expansion work had begun several weeks earlier.
Nothing spectacular happened.
No Overlord tried to assassinate me, no heavenly portal opened above my head, and no one asked me to contemplate the deeper nature of my soul.
I greatly appreciated those few hours.
Two foremen showed me the progress of the construction while several of my soldiers carried equipment behind them.
I asked a few questions, rejected an unnecessarily expensive modification to the original project, and spent nearly twenty minutes discussing a ventilation problem which, despite its complete lack of glamour, at least had the advantage of being perfectly understandable.
A duct was too small.
It needed to be enlarged.
No one needed to believe in the power of friendship to solve the problem.
By the time I returned to the manor in the late afternoon, I had almost recovered my usual rhythm.
I was removing my gloves in the entrance hall when a soldier approached me carrying a small communication device.
“Commander, incoming call from Pentagram City.”
I held out my hand.
“Who?”
“Charlie Morningstar.”
Of course.
I took the device and continued toward the sitting room.
“Put her through.”
A faint crackle sounded, followed almost immediately by a voice far too energetic for the hour.
“Tanya!
Hi!
I hope I’m not bothering you.
I mean, I probably should’ve asked that before I started talking, but if I am bothering you, you can tell me and I can call back later, unless later is also inconvenient, in which case you can just give me a time that works for you and—”
I sat down in an armchair.
“Hello, Charlie.”
A brief silence followed.
“Ah.
Right.
Hello.”
I placed my gloves on the armrest.
“You’re not bothering me.
I’ve finished my work for the day.”
“Great!
I mean, great that I’m not bothering you, not necessarily great that you worked all day because resting is important too, but I guess you already know that.”
“I managed to survive several decades without a sleep schedule designed by the Hazbin Hotel.”
She laughed on the other end.
“Okay, message received.”
I smiled slightly.
“I also received your summary.”
This time, the silence was far more revealing.
“It might be just a tiny bit longer than expected.”
I glanced toward my office, even though the document was two rooms away.
“Twelve pages, Charlie.”
“With the table?”
“Twelve pages with the table.”
“Then technically, without the table, it’s only eleven and a half pages.”
I remained silent.
“That doesn’t help, does it?”
“Not at all.”
She laughed again, slightly embarrassed.
I leaned back against the chair.
“That being said, I read it.”
“All of it?”
Her enthusiasm rose so abruptly that I almost regretted mentioning it.
“Yes, all of it.
Your table isn’t bad, actually, although it contains a few methodological issues that I corrected.”
“You took notes?”
I closed my eyes.
Fuck.
I should have kept that information to myself.
“A few.”
“Could you send them to me?
Because I tried to use what you said about spontaneous behaviors, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to tell the difference between something that happens once and an actual lasting change, and Vaggie said we could just track frequency, except then I wondered if frequency was really enough because a behavior can be rare but still important, so I thought maybe we could also record the context and—”
I let her talk.
And it lasted for quite some time.
Strangely, I no longer found her enthusiasm as exhausting as I had during our first meeting.
Charlie had this peculiar ability to construct an entire conversation without leaving much room for the other person, but she actually listened whenever you managed to get a word in.
She wasn’t simply waiting for her turn to start talking again.
She absorbed comments, mixed them with her own ideas, and sometimes returned to them several minutes later.
When she finally slowed down, I was able to answer.
“Frequency alone probably won’t be enough.
If Angel helps someone ten times because he knows you’re watching him, that interests me less than a single occasion when he does it spontaneously without expecting a reward.
More importantly, you need to avoid turning your residents into laboratory animals who know they’re constantly being evaluated, otherwise their behavior will change simply because they know you’re taking notes.”
Charlie remained silent for a few seconds.
“So I need to observe without making it feel like I’m observing.”
“To some extent, but don’t start hiding behind furniture with a notebook either.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Niffty would.”
A hesitation.
“…Yeah, Niffty would.”
We both laughed.
The conversation then moved on to less serious subjects.
Charlie told me that Angel had tried to convince my lieutenant to give him his number before realizing that my soldiers didn’t own personal phones, then moved on to an argument between Husk and Niffty regarding the correct use of a cleaning cloth behind the bar.
I wasn’t entirely sure why she was telling me any of this.
More strangely, I wasn’t sure why I kept listening.
And yet, by the time she finally changed the subject, almost fifteen minutes had passed without me feeling any need to end the call.
“Oh!
And we’re going to make a commercial soon.”
I frowned slightly.
“A commercial?”
“Yes!
For the hotel.
A real commercial to explain what we do, show the place, and try to attract people who might be interested in redemption.
Ideally people who are actually interested, because we’ve already had a few who thought it was just a free hotel and others who mostly wanted to meet Angel, which wasn’t really the audience we were looking for.”
The idea itself made sense.
It was probably the first promotional initiative of Charlie’s that I could describe as obvious.
“That’s fairly reasonable.
Who’s handling the production?”
“Alastor.”
I didn’t answer immediately.
Charlie seemed to notice the silence.
“Tanya?”
“I’m considering the most diplomatic way to phrase my next question.”
“Oh.”
I took a few more seconds.
“You actually entrusted Alastor with the responsibility of producing an advertisement intended to convince sinners to join your hotel?”
Charlie hesitated.
That hesitation already gave me part of the answer.
“Technically, he volunteered.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose.
“That wasn’t my question.”
“I know, but he knows radio, entertainment, staging, and all that stuff.
He has way more experience than I do in that area.”
“Charlie, his primary historical contribution to infernal broadcasting consists of airing the screams of Overlords he slaughtered.”
“I know.”
“I simply wanted to make sure we were talking about the same Alastor.”
She sighed, but I could clearly hear the smile in her voice.
“He isn’t going to slaughter anyone for the commercial.”
“I sincerely hope not.
That would be an unusually aggressive recruitment strategy.”
Charlie burst out laughing.
“Vaggie said almost the same thing!”
“Which once again confirms that Vaggie possesses excellent survival instincts.”
“She’s mostly just really suspicious of him.”
“She therefore possesses excellent survival instincts.”
Charlie laughed again before continuing more calmly.
“I think it could be good.
We need something to show people that we really exist and that we’re actually trying to do something serious.
So far, most people only hear about the hotel when something goes wrong or when someone makes fun of us.
If we can present the project ourselves, maybe at least a few people will give us a chance.”
Her tone had changed slightly.
The enthusiasm was still there, but now something more fragile accompanied it.
I straightened slightly.
“On that point, I agree.
Your project cannot attract candidates if no one understands what you’re actually offering.
I’m only questioning your choice of director.”
“He’ll do a good job.”
“And what exactly is that confidence based on?”
Charlie thought about it.
“He said he knew exactly what he was doing.”
I looked at the ceiling.
“That is precisely what someone like Alastor would say immediately before a disaster.”
“Tanya!”
I smiled.
“You’ll call me after the shoot and tell me which one of us was right.”
“You could come see it yourself.”
There it was.
I had been wondering how long it would take her.
“No.”
“You didn’t even think about it!”
“I did.
It took approximately half a second.”
“But it could be fun!
And since you’ve already seen the hotel, you could tell us whether the commercial actually represents what we’re doing, and maybe give us your opinion before we show it to everyone.”
I rose from the armchair and walked calmly toward the window.
Hell’s artificial sun had almost disappeared behind the terrain surrounding my domain, allowing the lights of the complex to gradually take over.
“Charlie, I visited you a few days ago and spent almost an entire day there.
I also devoted part of my morning to correcting your supposedly short summary.
I like you, but I also have a life outside the Hazbin Hotel.”
She didn’t answer immediately.
For a second, I worried that I had been too harsh, until her voice returned with a far more amused tone.
“You said you like me.”
I froze.
Fuck.
“That was absolutely not the important part of that sentence.”
“But you said it.”
“Charlie.”
“I’m just pointing it out!”
I could practically see her smile through the device.
“If you continue, I’m hanging up.”
“Okay, okay!
I’ll stop.”
She did not sound sorry in the slightest.
I shook my head.
“Send me the commercial when it’s finished.
I’ll watch it.”
“Promise.
And I’ll try not to send twelve pages with it.”
“That would be appreciated.”
“Ten?”
“Good evening, Charlie.”
“Wait, I was joking!”
I laughed despite myself.
“Good evening.”
“Good evening, Tanya.”
I was about to end the call when she quickly added:
“And thanks for the notes.”
My hand stopped.
This time, there was no joke in her voice.
I looked out at the lights of the domain beyond the window.
“You’re welcome.”
I ended the call.
For several seconds, I remained still with the device still in my hand.
Then I placed it on a small table and returned to my office.
The lieutenant was waiting outside the door when I arrived.
“Is the call over?”
“Yes.”
He opened the door to let me through.
I retrieved the folder I had abandoned earlier and settled back behind my desk.
“Will the Princess be coming to the domain?”
I looked up.
“Not as far as I know.
Why?”
The lieutenant stood straight in front of me.
“I wanted to know whether we should prepare a reception.”
I studied him for several seconds before understanding.
“You’re afraid she’ll bring Niffty.”
“I did not use the word afraid.”
It took considerable effort to keep my expression serious.
“Of course.”
He didn’t move.
Eventually, I gave in and smiled.
“Don’t worry.
Charlie was simply calling to discuss her program and inform me that Alastor is going to produce a commercial for the hotel.”
The lieutenant tilted his head slightly.
“The Radio Demon?”
“Himself.”
“Is that a rational decision?”
I looked at my soldier.
“Thank you.
I was beginning to wonder whether I was the only one who saw the problem.”
He remained silent, probably unable to determine whether a response was expected.
I picked up my pen again.
“In any case, it has nothing to do with us.
We have enough work here, and I have no intention of returning to Pentagram City simply to watch Alastor hold a camera.”
“Understood.”
He headed toward the door.
“Lieutenant.”
He stopped.
“Yes, Commander?”
“If Charlie sends the commercial once it’s finished, have it brought directly to my office.”
His shadowy face turned toward me.
“I thought it had nothing to do with us.”
I remained perfectly still.
Wait a second.
Had he actually just said that?
I narrowed my eyes.
“Are you developing a sense of humor?”
“I was asking a question.”
I wasn’t sure I believed him.
“Get out of my office.”
“Yes, Commander.”
He closed the door behind him.
I stared at it for several seconds before shaking my head and returning to work.
The evening continued exactly as it should have.
I finished the most urgent reports, reviewed the schedule for the following day, and had dinner brought to the small sitting room rather than the main dining room.
After that, I spent another hour reading before deciding I had worked enough for one day.
Several hours away, Charlie was probably preparing her shoot with Alastor, Vaggie was likely trying to limit the damage, and Angel had almost certainly already found a way to make the situation obscene.
I wished them luck.
They were probably going to need it.
As for me, I had a busy day ahead of me tomorrow and absolutely no reason to believe that a simple commercial for a hotel would change anything about my life.
In hindsight, I really should have known by then that this kind of certainty had an unfortunate tendency to bring me bad luck.