IN> Human Cultures in Hell: the Lost Causes of Stygia

[William Keith]

Ever wonder who Malphas' damned are?  His share of the Fated are those 
who managed the delicious irony of identifying with a cause greater 
than themselves, then warping the cause to reflect their own desires.  
They thought they were giving their all for an ideal, when in fact they 
were demanding that the ideal become their tool.  Terrorists and 
rebels, to be sure, but also the petty party bosses that made their 
bread off of an undeserved appointment, or relished the exercise of 
penny-ante power in a courtroom playing one side against another, or 
"moderating" an Internet forum into slavish devotees vs all outcast 
others.  Some of the Damned expected to wind up in Hell; many of 
Malphas' Damned expected Heaven.

In the Villa Discordia, Malphas' share of Hell's souls wander the 
unending passageways, one of the few places in Hell where humans are 
encouraged to form gangs, parties, and juntas.  They band together for 
strength against other gangs while giving strongman souls dictatorial 
command over newer and weaker arrivals.  They are kept in line, of 
course; any cabal that seems to be ambitious beyond its immediate cause 
or starts getting uppity toward demons is ruthlessly crushed.  Even 
among those that don't, inevitably the personalities of the Damned and 
the machinations of the practicing Malphasians split the groups 
endlessly, fracturing and remolding them along new ideological lines.

The lines are ideological because Malphasians are quite open with the 
souls in his Principality.  Malphas supports many Earthly causes, they 
are told, yours included.  Yes, we're completely willing to abandon 
your homeland or your pet philosophical movement the instant it looks 
like a losing proposition.  But... you do have the chance to help keep 
that from happening.  Give us your Essence.  Exact tribute from as many 
of the other Damned as you can, either by force or by convincing them 
to join up with you, and pass it along to us.  We'll spend it on 
whatever we like, of course, but the bigger and more powerful your 
group is, the more likely we are to figure there's something there that 
can manipulate people, and spend our strategical efforts supporting it. 
  Oh, sure, you find our motives curse-worthy, but the greater good of 
supporting your cause justifies the means, doesn't it?  Do you have any 
other options for continuing to support the Movement?

In fact, it's not size that the Malphasians prize most in a human 
"lobbying group": it's the degree to which a given position or cause 
polarizes the humans in the gangs.  Religious warfare is an old 
standby, and the Villa is filled with churches having the same titles 
as denominations presently in existence or long since passed away, 
filled with the fervent faithful and feeding Essence to demons assuring 
the flock that particularly effective examples of living church 
leadership are being given the support they need to wage battle against 
the heretics.  The Confederate States of America continues to fascinate 
Malphas in its hard core of loyalists dead in civil war and dying 
afterwards unreconstructed.  A century and more after the rebellion was 
crushed, the CSA in Hell continues to gain new adherents from the 
recent dead, and controls (the human population of) a relatively large 
swath of the Villa.  Under its Essence umbrella are American nativist 
and white supremacist causes of all sorts, and as these causes please 
Malphasians the large Essence flow is directed to some extent toward 
the actual goals promised.

Ironically, the losing side of wars tends to have the more dead and 
thus, since the balance of Destiny and Fate is rarely significantly 
different between the two sides in a conflict, has the greater 
representation of fierce loyalists in Stygia.  Many of these are easily 
persuadable that their cause, while injured, can make a comeback with 
enough support.  Long past the point where a rational living human 
might have realized the hopelessness of the cause, the Stygian damned, 
lacking anything else to give their existence meaning, will continue 
forking over the Essence in hopes that something will make a 
difference.  They spend their days in rituals and observances 
half-recalled and lacking landmarks or totems from the real world: 
priests preside over infernally twisted attempts at orthodox rites; 
zealous patriots from all nations cling to ragged flags made from the 
best materials to hand, often the skin of a defeated foe; the dead of 
long-extinct tribes sing songs in languages lost to the living.  An 
outsider's trip through the Villa offers a ghastly and tattered museum 
of human cultures, but it's perhaps the best-preserved collection of 
anthropological distinctiveness in Hell.

William