Chaos at Work...

Ralzatar was burnt out. Pun not intended. 

A millennia working in the bureaucratic depths of Hell was a millennia too long. He'd filed more paperwork and run more doomsday simulations than anyone else in his section. He was a lifer. One of the first to fall. Though he would tell you, if he were being honest, which let's face it wasn't in the job description, but if he were being honest he didn't fall so much as got pushed.

He thought he was going to watch Lucifer and his group get tossed out of Heaven but ended up a little too close to the velvet ropes if you get what I'm saying. One accidental jostle from behind and he was on the wrong side. He always assumed it was accidental anyway. Not really their speed up there to be malicious. He just hoped whoever did it was aware and wracked with guilt. Maybe that's how they started Catholicism?

Anyway...

He was burnt out, but it was all worth it because today, today he started in Chaos. No more "what if" simulations. No more filing endless paperwork on new acquisitions. No more ignoring items from the complaint department. Though that last part was actually kind of fun. He had a big red stamp that he'd had specially done that said NO! and there were little flames around the top of the letters. Pretty sweet.

But today! Today was a new day! 

"Ah, Ralzatar! Welcome in. Have a seat. I have some paperwork for you to fill out and then you can file it along with that stack over there." Graizaline waved toward a stack of paperwork that towered so high Ralzatar wasn't sure where it ended. Crap, this was just going to be more of the same in a new office. 

"HA! You should see your face! Nah, man, I'm just fucking with you. We don't file paperwork here. We are CHAOS!"

He was so relieved he couldn't even be mad, "You got me. So what do we do then? I'm ready to get started."

"Yeah, no. Nothing really. Watch. Crack a few jokes. Take bets on what will go wrong next. But we don't have to do anything anymore. It was all set in motion at the beginning and it's run like clock work ever since. I mean, clocks that barely work, for the most part. Ones that mark the hour a few minutes early or late but never the same few minutes and never in the same direction, but clockwork."

"So we are the Chaos Department and we don't actually cause Chaos?"

"Nope. Now, don't tell anyone or we'll all be tossed out and put into new jobs and nobody here wants that." With that Graizaline sat up straight behind his desk showing his full glory. It was a dark glory now, but he was still pretty fearsome. 

"Got it. No complaints from me. I could use the break for sure. But..."

"But...?"

"Wouldn't it be more chaotic if we actually did our part?"

Graizaline laughed and called out to the office, "New guy alert! Thinks we could make it more chaotic down there than it already is!" (common misunderstanding that Hell is below Earth and Heaven is above. The truth is Hell is below Heaven, thus the Fall, but it's all part of the same celestial complex and that's located above the known Universe)

This was met with much merriment. Listening to the Fallen and the accumulated Demonhoard make merry was not for the faint hearted. It still gave Ralzatar the creeps and he was one of them. 

"Look, give me your best idea for chaos making and let's see what we can do with it."

Ralzatar thought for a second. "What if we..." he trailed off here. Every idea he thought of he remembered it was already done. He had always assumed that it was the Chaos Department doing it. "Wait so you guys aren't the ones causing all of the problems down there? They are doing it all themselves?"

"Yep. They did it all themselves. Look, it was different in the beginning, I'll give you that. When they were really afraid of the big dude, when he would pop off every once in awhile and slaughter a whole mass of people, flood the world, burn down a few towns. He was the master at Chaos so they didn't create it. They feared it. And we didn't create much of it because honestly how were we going to top a world wide flood? We did a little messing around here and there. The Tower of Babel was a good one. Though people gave the big dude credit for that like it was a punishment, so why did we bother?

But then he got tired of it all and decided to turn it over to his kid. It gave us a chance to step in and do our last great piece. Didn't realize we were working ourselves right out of a job. But..."

"What did you do? The whole crucifixion part?"

"Nah, that wasn't us, that was him again. What we did was make sure the old religion was kept as part of the new, even though it totally conflicts. His kid is out there trying to establish this whole love and respect mantra we kept the whole destroy you if you fuck up parts. And then, and here, this was Zlantrialaza, and it was perfection, we brought in a guy who had never even met the kid and let him dictate huge parts of the religion. Convinced the Romans to toss out any books that showed women as equals and called Mary Magdalene a whore for good measure. Started years and years of just calling women whores to dismiss them. Do you know what all could have gone differently if they hadn't done that?

Well anyway... we did the extra cherry on top by adding in a fever dream by a rando who shared the name of an apostle that talked about destroying the world again. So the peace and love cult never had a chance."

"But you haven't done anything since then? For thousands of years you've just watched?"

"Yep. And I have to say, it's been impressive. They say Hell is other people and they've really worked to make that true."

"Wars, famine, despots, disease? That's all them?"

"Yep. They are amazing. Now just put your feet up over there and enjoy the break. I don't think you are going to have much time to get used to it. The way they are ramping up down there I'd say we've only got a few more years before we are all looking for new work."

Ralzatar took a deep breath and relaxed into his comfy office chair. Lumbar support. Now this was something to get used to. He opened a screen on his Earth viewer and watched a well known conservative radio host get hooked up to a ventilator while his last radio program calling the virus a hoax played in the background. Graizaline was right, there really wasn't much they could do to top this.