/lit/ - Literature

>>19253313
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“Apologies Archangel, of course you wouldn’t be familiar with this. You see, Hell doesn’t make fair bargains. Their deals with mankind usually follow a similar structure: the Prize, the Price, and the Pinch. A devil may grant some king a male heir in exchange for initiating a war with his neighbor. That’s the ‘prize’ and the ‘price’ they agree to in the contract. The ‘pinch’, which only Hell tracks, is that the king’s son diesyoung as a result of the war. They have a cruelly poetic way of clawing back as much of the ‘prize’ as possible.

“Each agent maintains a ledger with these three columns. We scour thousands of such ledgers to find all of Trump’s transactions. He sold his soul to be rich, then sacrificed his wealth for a hot wife, exchanged the hot wife for fame…and on and on.”

“Seems like a lot of deals,” the Archangel puzzled “I’m surprised they permitted this.”

“As were we.” Jacob continued, “Turns out Hell has hundreds of agents; apparently Trump had been engaging with many of them, independently. In some cases even shopping around or playing agents against each other for better bargains - they had no clue! He sold his soul to at least 5 different demons, and in other instances either optioned or recouped aspects of his soul. The whole thing is so murky half of Hell is at a standstill while they fight over whose claim takes priority.

Stern Michael had to stifle a laugh, while Gabriel wore a ‘told you so’ grin.

Jacob continued, “And the pinches make matters so much worse: he bargained away his wealth before a pinch took affect that bankrupted him, he sold his wife’s love before the pinch that would make her loathe him. The pinches were actually robbing hell, Trump always seemed to be one step ahead of them.”

“And how did he manage that?”

“It seems like his first bargain with the demon Forneus is at the heart of it. Trump agreed both to sell his soul and open a casino in New Jersey in exchange for being ‘the greatest dealmaker’.”

“And the pinch?”

“The pinch was that no man alive would trust him enough to make a deal with him.”

“‘No man alive’, huh?”

“My thought exactly…no mention of devils. So, bargain struck, Trump immediately re-opened the negotiation with Forneus, recovered a 68% share of his soul and sold it as a full soul to some other hapless agent. He still built the casino they wanted, but a dozen of hell’s own ‘pinches’ destroyed it.

“Even mankind is starting to catch on. They can’t tell if he’s a billionaire or broke; a genius, a conman, or an idiot…Hell really made a hash of everything.”

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