The sky over Pentagram City glowed that usual sickly crimson — like a neon wound that never healed. The air buzzed with static from flickering billboards and the half-alive hum of radio chatter. Every alley was a grin of teeth and shadow; every window a hungry eye.

Out of that chaos, someone new walked in.

The crowd noticed immediately. You didn’t just blend into Hell — not when you had no stink of sin clinging to you. You simply appeared. One second there was an empty stretch of cracked sidewalk, the next, there you were, walking through the fumes like you’d been there all along.

Your steps were too steady for a lost soul, too calm for a demon. Your clothes looked out of place — not fancy, not ragged, just… wrong. Like the color had trouble existing here.

A few eyes followed as you passed. The closer you got to the hazy spire of the Hazbin Hotel in the distance — its sign blinking erratically with “Now Open!” under a halo of static — the more heads turned.

From a corner booth of a cracked-open diner, a drunkard with three eyes squinted and slurred,

“Hey… who’s the stiff? Ain’t seen that one crawl outta any pit.”

A one-armed demon girl leaning against a lamppost, cigarette glowing blue, flicked ash onto the street.

“They don’t look like a sinner,” she said, voice dry and frustrated. “Too quiet. Too sure. That’s creepy.”

A group of half-melted street hookers giggled, perfume clinging like gasoline.

“Bet they’re new meat,” one whispered, “or an angel that got lost.”

“If that’s an angel,” another sneered, “then I’m the fuckin’ pope.”

Someone else — a shadow with too many teeth — muttered from an alleyway,

“No mark. No scent. No sin. Whatever they are, they ain’t supposed to be here.”

You didn’t react. The city buzzed around you — taunting, whispering, watching — but you just kept walking. The hotel loomed ahead like a beacon built from hope and bad decisions, its golden lights cutting through the haze.

For a moment, the wind carried a faint sound — laughter from somewhere deep inside the hotel — bright, defiant, out of place.

And maybe, just maybe, that was why you were walking there in the first place.