The workload has forced staffing changes.
Gehenna, February 2 - The administrator of the underworld voiced displeasure today at the need to create fresh types and levels of suffering to which he and his minions will subject the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran and his enforcers, now that Khamenei has broken new ground in the perpetration of murder, torture, humiliation, and oppression against his own people.
In an rare on-the-record interview conducted amid the sulfurous fumes of the Pit of Eternal Paperwork, Lucifer described the situation as “frankly exhausting.”
“Look,” he told reporters while idly twirling a pitchfork that had seen better millennia, “we’ve had despots, genocidaires, and garden-variety tyrants checking in for eons. The file on mass murder is thicker than the collected works of every medieval scholastic combined. But this latest batch? They’re making me innovate. I’m supposed to be the Prince of Darkness, not the Prince of R&D.”
Sources close to the infernal bureaucracy say the problem stems from what one senior demon, speaking on condition of anonymity because promotions are on the line, called “Khamenei’s inflationary cruelty index.” While previous entrants—20th-century dictators or particularly enthusiastic colonial administrators—relied on familiar classics such as mass executions, forced disappearances, and the occasional public hanging, the Iranian leadership has layered on innovations that even veteran tormentors find hard to top.
In the recent protest crackdowns, for example, security forces, including the ever-versatile Basij militia, reportedly shot children in the head, injected detainees with mysterious chemicals, broadcast coerced confessions of teenagers accusing themselves of leading riots, and then pressured grieving families to claim their murdered loved ones had actually been loyal Basij members all along. “That last bit,” the demon grumbled, “is particularly galling. It’s not just killing someone—it’s killing them twice. Once with bullets, once with gaslighting. We’ve got people down here who’ve been flayed alive for centuries who are taking notes. Eichmann and Mengele have been staring in disbelief, before we burn their eyes out again with acid.”
Satan finds the theological branding especially irritating. “They do all this while waving the flag of piety,” he complained. “I mean, I invented hypocrisy, but this is next-level performance art. They suppress women for showing hair, then massacre people for protesting the suppression, then blame the victims for being American-Zionist agents while quoting scripture. It’s like they read my old playbook, crossed out ‘fun’ and wrote in ‘divine mandate.’ Now I have to come up with something worse than ironic eternal recurrence just to keep the hierarchy intact.”
Lucifer admitted the workload has forced staffing changes. “I had to pull imps off the Lust department and reassign them to Cruelty Innovation. Productivity is down 14% in Greed because everyone’s too busy brainstorming ‘torture-plus-moral-superiority’ combos.”
He sighed, a sound like a thousand oil wells catching fire. “I used to be able to coast on classics—boiling oil, racks, the occasional creative impalement. Now? If I don’t deliver something that combines physical agony, psychological erasure, and ideological self-congratulation, these guys will just sit there smirking and say, ‘Been there, done that, had a fatwa for it.’ It’s demoralizing.
”When asked if there was any chance of leniency—perhaps assigning the arrivals to a lower circle reserved for mere garden-variety authoritarians—Satan shook his head. “No can do. Standards must be maintained. If word gets out that you can massacre thousands, torture kids on camera, and still get grandfathered into the existing tariff of suffering, we’ll have every tin-pot strongman from here to the afterlife demanding an upgrade. I’m running a business, not a charity.”
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