Although the concept of a ‘high-way to hell’ is centuries old, when stripped of obfuscational metaphor these ancient roads more resembled footpaths than anything and were seldom-trodden by any but the most brave and foolhardy – and even those often preferred to risk transport on the more-common-but-perilous bat. The first seeds of the modern hellish superhighway system are many, but its most obvious starting point can arguably be pinned at the eternal damnation of Henry Ford to the asphalt boilers. If it’s arguable, then argue it, do not simply state it and leave it at that.
Ford was as quick to speak of his own value as many of the powerful in life are, but unusually enough his claims found a receptive audience in the local baron, who found herself tired by the troubles of managing nightmares for her daily tours of her lamentable demesne (a diet of sweet dreams sufficient to keep an adult nightmare in rideworthy health was as complex and expensive to procure then as it was now, and their tempers were no kinder). More fortuitously still, said baron proved to be absent-minded enough that following her shackling of Ford to a drawing-table she became distracted by assassination attempts and familial bothers and let him be to provide not only properly-itemized blueprints for an automobile but of the factory floor that might produce them. The prototype vehicle proved an ostentatiously noisy and therefore desirable ride, and the idea of the profit to be gained through them led to first one, then two, then three production lines. The booming of business and combustion engines resonated far and wide throughout the asphalt ridges in but a few scant years, and soon word of this strange fad reached beyond its boiling backwaters and into deeper and more august ears. Such drama does not become a history essay; this is NOT a creative writing course, and if it were you would be receiving harsh marks for excess.
Interest in automobiles was hot, with demand not far behind, but there remained a key obstacle: traversable roads. Travel and hell had never been given reason for ease before; what was the point in a journey that wasn’t harsh and cruel, and what obstacle to your enemies was a well-trodden path? But cars, even cars forged with hellish steal and shod with wheels rubberized with the sobs of the damned, required some evenness of surface to ensure a ride that was merely ‘rough’ as opposed to ‘self-destructive.’ Quotation marks identify quotations which demand citations; they are not to be sprinkled for idle decoration. In the backwater asphalt ridges long stretches of barren and blackened ground were readily come by, but more glamorous rings such as the scorched sea or the murder spires possessed no such monotony in their terrain. Adequate driving surfaces would have to be constructed in some of the most demanding environments known to any departed being.
Prior hellish efforts in this vein were constructed from good intentions, which on exposure to harsh enough reality would curdle readily into a sort of molten brick that would seize most readily to the nearest solid object and congeal into an immovable stain upon the world. The principal objection raised to this was scarcity; private footpaths might be made by them, or perhaps a single great road, but for general use one might as well suggest that the streets of London or Shanghai or Timbuktu be paved in gold and platinum. No matter how great the demand, the supply simply wasn’t there. Much effort was expended on locating a suitable substitute, an endeavor that was lent a serious setback when Ford’s demands for an increased share of the profits led to him being sewn face–first into a cupholder by his then-employer. Evidence? Argument? Anything that isn’t an assertion? Innovation came from a surprising source: a chance mugging of a visiting and inattentive cherubim in an alleyway of the central inferno led to the procurement of a small handful of stray partially-crooked prayers, several of which were subsequently purchased by an overworked alchemist who fell asleep at his workstation and accidentally set himself on fire. As his remains were being scraped free from his chair, it was noticed by the janitor that the prayers in the unfortunate alchemist’s pocket had been fused by the heat with a few absent-minded thoughts that had been left lying around his workstation, producing a vast amount of a nigh-ephemeral substance. The janitor quickly stole all of it, was mugged on her way home, and once the mugger made it to the nearest patent office and was discreetly murdered by the on-duty clerk who was then usurped by her supervisor the rest, as hell knows it, was history. This construes libel and I would advise you remove it unless you are fond of extremely physical practical legal education.
Thoughts and prayers were the ideal construction material for roads: they were cheap, plentiful, and came apart with minimal wear and tear, leading to yearly maintenance work that would ensure a constant stream of treasure and favours to anyone providing them. Six competing companies all sprang up within weeks, each of which battled each other in gruesome ‘road wars’ that devastated infrastructure for miles around until it was revealed that all six were in actuality engaged in a conspiratorial monopoly whose illusory feud provided them all with plenty of construction work. All levels of staff deemed important enough to be responsible were subsequently flayed, liquefied, drained, and repurposed as road paint before being replaced with mortified toadies as per standard, and with that squabbling beyond them hell’s road system boomed from the Styx to the Abyss with a speed hitherto undreamt of. Highways and byways evolved and unspooled; goods began to speed from dock to destination; Would you care to expand on this or are you just slipping it in for the sake of hearing yourself talk? and the distance between the hinterlands and the heartland began to erode, which immediately led to the next great displacement event caused by the infernal automobile: the urbanization of hell.
The infernopolises had always been the prime grounds for making money, and with transit rendered so much faster and easier more than ever flocked to them, leaving hell’s backwaters settling deeper and deeper into stifling deoxygenated swamps (often literally – e.g., the case of the burnwater boglands). With the corresponding rise in the cities of both the newly-flush automobile elite of corporate CEOs, CFOs, directors, vice-presidents, vicer-presidents, and department heads and the vast tangled underclass of road workers, furnace tenders, prayer miners, thought melters, and assembly labourers, both in close proximity, a new goal was given to those who had already attained everything they wanted: getting as far away from their serfs as physically possible. The ultrawealthy immediately bought out the prettiest of the backwater reaches for estates; the merely rich contented themselves with sprawling cottages and off-season homes in the uglier but equally secluded corners of the pits; and the more numerous but pitifully desperate ‘upper-middle-class’ QUOTATION MARKS contented themselves with simply exiting the infernopolises proper and separating the land into an endless web of nigh-identical homes, each with a single lawn that was not quite the right size or shape and a garage big enough for two and a half cars.
Thus was created the final and most dangerous side-effect of the infernal automobile: the suburbanization of hell.
The patterns begun then continue at work even now: over 90% of hell’s recorded inhabitants live in dense urban communities, each aspiring not to become a baron but a petty lord of their own individuated dwelling-space – and each year, more homes are constructed for the consumption of the landed elite, who are quite enjoying the opportunity to once more play at landlord and watch their new serfs slave for the chance of a petty prize. By now the newest suburban homes are located so far from the central infernopolises that they are beginning to come perilously close to penetrating the earth’s crust, and reverse earthquakes are a common price to pay for taking one’s place among the nouveau-rich. Other side effects, such as the raining of chunks of cratonic debris and tectonic plate splinters into the hearts of the cities proper, are deemed irrelevant and inevitable. Despite this, all scholarly evidence from the lowest imp-sage to the most ancient puzzle-demon is agreed: hell must cease to sprawl, must contract itself, must make amends for the reckless love of the car that has transformed it into a land of crumbling thoughts-and-prayers and panicked would-be-wealthy, or the surface itself may cave in upon our heads.
A downright alarmist conclusion, poorly-written and filled with hysterical exaggeration if not outright lies – what consensus can there be, when the Xxxon-Noble corporation’s own science department has just this week published yet another paper proving that all notions of so-called ‘infernogenic cavern crumbling’ are nothing more than the lies and exaggerations of desperate academics hankering for funding?
Also no, you can’t have time off to mourn your grandmother. ‘Crushed to death by mysterious rocks falling from the sky,’ do you all think I’m an idiot? That’s the third one this semester IN THIS CLASS. F-. Get out of my course.