New dorms are slated to join the Howe Center in mournfully looming over the Hudson by Spring 2022, but there has been a hiccup. Construction worker Daryll Rodriguez found he had accidentally rendered a hole he was digging into a bridge between the mortal plane and Hades.
“I don’t know what happened.” Mr. Rodriguez admitted. Though he’d “dabbled” in necromancy when he was in high school “like everybody else,” the most he’d done had been, “like, reanimating my sister’s stupid beta fish.”
Off The Press is excited to report that we got the first mortal peek into the bowels of Hades — a colonoscopy, if you will. With permission from the big guy downstairs himself, your reporter personally spelunked into the underworld.
Mr. Rodriguez’s hole opens into a cavern where literally billions of pale, semi-translucent souls mill around as if waiting for an indefinitely-delayed train or Godout. As I dropped, cat-like, into the underworld, over 10 billion souls turned and regarded me with tepid gazes for a moment before going back to staring into middle distance. It was somewhat unsettling for your reporter with a diagnosed case of stage fright, but they were all nude, so your reporter didn’t have to go through the fuss of picturing them thusly to calm her nerves.
As I scanned the nude souls after dropping, I instantly recognized one from various portraits around campus: Edwin A. Snevets.
Off the Press: Hello? Edwin? Edwin A. Snevets?
Edwin A. Snevets: Yes, that is me.
OTP: How are you?
EAS: I am dead.
OTP: Oh. Right. Well, I’m a reporter student from the student newspaper at Snevets Institute of Technology — The Stupe. What have you been doing for these past 200 years?
EAS: Standing here.
OTP: Anything else?
EAS: No.
OTP: Oh, well that… sucks.
EAS: I do not care; I am dead.
Mr. Snevets did not care, either, about the invention of bubble wrap, unequivocally the best thing to come out of Snevets.
The god (i.e. the President Narfarvar) of his eponymous underworld, Hades blamed Cerberus for Mr. Rodriguez’s “breach of his domain.”
When we asked the three-headed hellhound for comments about his flub, two of Cerberus’s heads hung in shame like those of a husky who’d just dug his human sister’s diaper out of the garbage and ate it. The third head said, “bow-wow,” but the bark appeared to be directed at the notorious campus groundhog.
Cerberus and Margarita—President Narfarvar’s beloved dog—have been spotted (n.b. Cerberus means spotted in ancient Greek, though Cerberus himself is covered in eternal black flames of the damned) running around Palmer Lawn together. Cerberus was seen chasing his tail even though one of his heads had already caught it. Associate Professor Clarissa Barkley from the botany department gave us her impression: “I wager 50 bucks Persephone snuck out of the hole. And that must be why everything’s been blooming so early.” OTP can confirm this is bad news for allergy sufferers everywhere, especially since every box of Kleenex in the known universe has been hoarded by Coronavirus preppers.
Speaking of Coronavirus, Hades announced that Snevets could drop any and all its victims of the nouveau-March Madness plague down Mr. Rodriguez’s hell portal to skip the processing fee. An, as it were, “bulk discount.”
We tried to get a comment from Charon, the boatman who collects the coins from the mouths of the dead. He had been spotted sailing around the Hudson, but he had reportedly been picked up by the New York Waterway Police for boating without a license, not having life vests onboard, and also for being in possession of dozens of corpses.
While digging the hole, Mr. Rodriguez remembered he’d been brushing up on his Latin. “Let’s see, what was I saying? Hmm, ‘Ego sum circumdatio braccas;’ ‘Per aspera ad astra;‘ ‘Ego sum ostium per foramen est ad inferos.‘”
Then, behind us, we heard a rumbling. A pair of double doors half the height of the Howe Center rose from the Earth. They swung open with a blinding flourish to reveal dozens of exceedingly handsome and strong-looking blond men singing uproariously and sloshing mead around while ripping flesh from rotisseried elk carcasses with their bare hands. A buxom, armored woman approached us. “Welcome to Valhalla!”
Mr. Rodriguez commented, “Oh, I guess it was that last one, then. Must’ve messed up a declenchant.”
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