• 'Tonight's load will be approximately four hundred fifty-three. It's a bit of a light night, but it is also a Monday. Everyone typically behaves on Mondays. After all of the partying, they finally have to drag their vile asses back to their meaningless jobs. It's almost a pity that they don't realize all of their actions will prove fruitless in a matter of moments. Their loss.'

    Just as his final mental jotting came to a close, a pile of steam rose from the lean smoke stacks at the head of the transportation vehicle. The majestic beast came to a screeching halt at a particularly quick pace. Most generic locomotives took a few hundred feet to stop. His train took exactly one hundred ninety-five feet to appear as still as a week old decapitated being. Then again, it wasn't like he was exactly a normal person. While he held the average features of a mortal, he was far from it. In fact, he would be thoroughly disgusted with anyone who dared to compare him to those putrid sacks of flesh. He was far superior to them and far more pleasant in every aspect. Just the fact that he was immortal was enough to prove that he was great to any inquiring member of the peanut gallery.

    His peanut gallery wouldn't be questioning him that night. Whether they were aware of it or not, they were simply his job. He didn't give the slightest damn about their names. Their faces were nothing but flaws in the universe. Their families were just more specs in the galaxy that he could deal without. Those people meant less to him than the dust on his suit and were far dirtier. If he had a conscience, it would have told him that he was killing innocent lives. Innocent people that didn't deserve to die were standing around the train station like mindless little zombies.

    It was too bad for those people that he saw them as vicious animalistic creatures that weren't worthy of life.

    Bang!

    Each door on every cart of his train crashed open in unison to produce an ear-shattering tone that bounced off the walls in the station. Despite its large size, the noise was too obnoxious to scatter across the area and instead made every humans' ears ring.

    Out of the depths of the train's engine walked a regal and sleek figure that held perfect posture. The atmosphere was quickly coated in a dense aroma that wafted from the being as he exited the locomotive. All of the humans could smell the spice of incense mixed with some cinnamon particles and a splash of hot maple syrup. It was quite the concentrated concoction and nothing more than a natural phenomenon.

    Pure black locks that fell into his eyes didn't manage to shield they color of his hues. They gleamed the color of a freshly cut amethyst. However, they never remained that color. For whatever reason they always turned the blue and red mixture when he crossed over into their world. Perhaps it had to do with their air's composition. After all, he was very much accustomed to the stench of burned wood. That signaled home to him, and he couldn't wait to return to that comfort. The sooner he loaded those cattle onto his wheeled vehicle, the sooner he could go home.

    That night his outfit had consisted of the atypical uniform of the train conductor. It was abnormally formal as it was a black business suit. He had never been one to dress down, and his job was no exception to that trait. If he had the chance, he would look his best. Perhaps his egotistical tendencies had something to do with his attire. He took great pride in how he looked and not in how others presumed he appeared. After all, he lacked the typical horns and fiery breath most expected. It wasn't his fault his kind had been mistaken for another over the millennia.

    Stereotypes brushed to the side, he mustered up his voice a projected it across the train's platform with the assistance of his vocal chords.

    "All aboard! Show your punch card to the nearest ticket man and find your assigned seat!"

    His tone was no where near as threatening as it tended to be. In fact, his voice didn't change to its normal texture until after every person boarded. There was no way to properly explain how much he didn't need to deal with escapees. They were nothing but an annoyance that he would be scolded for when they didn't show.

    Just like lemmings, the humans began loading themselves into the cars. Any being in the vicinity could clearly hear the distinct clippings of cardstock under the hole punchers. Each man worked at differently paced intervals, so the sounds resembled a timed melody. One after the other, people began to take their seats and stow their bags above head and under foot. When a few people outside of the train's perimeter didn't move, the man called out the same message, however he did it in a few different languages. Latin, French, Greek, German, and Romansh were just a few of the tongues he knew. On a good day he fluently spoke, wrote, and comprehended well over two thousand languages fluently. On bad days that number dwindled to around eighteen hundred.

    At the very moment he threw the directions out in different languages, the rest of the group joined in and hopped aboard the land vessel. His job had always been far too simple. Shout a few commands, punch the cards, and continue on. Everything was rather dull until they crossed back over to his world. As soon as he was able to make his announcement, things got interesting.

    'That's everyone.'

    Déjà vu swept over every person in the locomotive as the doors slammed shut like they had been upon arrival. The coal heavers tossed piles of coal into the burner that caused the vehicle to lurch forward before gracefully flying down the tracks. To the people on board, they were going to more than fifty miles an hour. In reality they were breaking the sound barrier.

    Almost as rapidly as the train had arrived, it all but vanished back into thin air. The man's train traveled very smoothly and the moment the entire train felt like it had hit a massive road barrier, or possibly a short teenager, he knew that it was time to 'reassure' every victim on board of their final destination. Without even the slightest bit of hesitation, his pale spidery hand grabbed the microphone and flicked it on. There was a slight bit of white noise before his voice finally crackled in.

    "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. As you are well aware, you have all come to major crossroads in your lives. Some were positive, others not so much. However, I regret to inform you that your trials and tribulations proved to have no effect over you in the way they should have. Thus, you will soon find yourselves in the place I refer to as my home."

    The voice over the loud speaker belonged to a being that had been dubbed Daemian Kalidas Carlier. His once toast dry voice held a newly found heavy voice that sounded like it had been drenched in the darkest chocolate with slight acidic under lacings that weren't easily detectable by the mortal ear. Daemian's voice's thickness drowned the speaker and slipped into the ears of those riding the mechanism. All of the people in the cars immediately felt their skin crawl, unaware of what the conductor was referring to. Any lucky, or not-so-lucky, people to glance out the window would have noticed the gray bits of a supreme being's scalp gently fluttering to the earth. The material was not innocent like snow crystals and was, rather, the burning bits of flesh left over from that morning's festivities. Ash was the common term most knew the flakes by.

    Along with the gray matter falling there was a slight ominous red haze on the horizon. As the train drew nearer and nearer, the color fluctuated between a feisty red and a scalding orange. But, the lemmings on the train weren't so concerned with the surroundings as they began to process the next announcement that filled the air with anxiety.

    "Welcome, my black sheep, to Hades."

    A single crackle ended the announcement as the tension in the cars grew with every passing breath. As soon as they processed that they were in for an eternity of damnation, chaos ensued and all hell broke loose.

    A|N : First chapter done in about two hours. Please give me feedback and let me know if I should continue on. Later parts of the story will also be posted to a different site, so PM me if you would like the link to be able to follow along.