Pandemonium, damned parliament, can be found in the province of Irkalla, famed for its Mayan architecture, in the city Agartha, where one is ten times more likely to get credit-consumer neurosis than low-amp significant eye-contact. Level 6. Heresy.

Pandemonium itself is a stucco saw thumb of Grecian ribbed columns perched on Agartha's inflated belly of a dead volcano. Inside is the Royal Court, the Peer's Court, the Chancellor's Court, the Speaker's Court, the Common's Court, a couple of other courts, one tea room, one smoking room, one billiards room, one hair salon, one nail salon, one tailor, one Playstation, one Nintendo Wii, two council funded therapists and the House of Hell.

The House of Hell is a circular, cavernous room with oak paneled walls pitted with eleven alcoves where personifications of the Hierarchy, carved from orange-amber carnelian gather ash in manner of Pompeii. Ash because the indigenous rock of Irkalla is heavily pigmented with white phosphorous which will ignite into wild fire when in contact with oxygen. The only consistently paid tax to the Agarthian council is that which goes towards the city's oxygen ventilation network.

The Hierarchy is an arrangement of eleven demonic deities ascending in relative possession of Independent Charge [IC]. The most commonly accepted definition for Independent Charge comes from Decarabia’s Encyclopaedia Demonica (DED). The definition is stated as follows:

The percentage of God making up a single living being.

Independent Charge [IC] is a quantifying power value measured per individual, not to be confused with external power sources obtained through loaning, stealing, bargaining, trading or tapping another being, or group of being’s, Independent Charge [IC].

Slang terms include but are not limited to: your “beef-and-fries”, “Consecrated Coulombs”, “CC”, “Earwax”, “Gasoline”, “Paste”, “Sangre”, “Savvy” and “Juice”

Note: This passage of Decarabia’s Encyclopedia Demonica should be presented by God to its therapist when discussing its identity crisis.

Theory goes, God, once a single, dense mass for unknown and in certainly God's, retrospect, nit-witted reasons, branched into material design. God split into fragments. Everything in existence is a certain percentage God. The damned term this IC as they can become temperamental when broached with the suggestion that God resides within them or, even more fun: you are God and God is you and let's all grab a mat and sing kumbaya. The more IC you have the more powerful you are.

The hierarchy are gods because they are the most powerful, or otherwise put, with the highest ICs the most God exists within them. The lowest of the Hierarchy is Mammon which has an IC of point five the power equivalent of every photon in existence plus seventy percent of all slightly-lopsided-faintly-peculiar-but-otherwise-endearing-quarks.

Today the statues had been dutifully dusted, sixty nine banners of house sigil hung, two hundred and thirty scarlet leather upholstered pews polished, a glossily laminated blow up of the talk agenda propped in the speaker's pit and great heaps of extension lead flown down for the press.

Dead or alive, at least one rep of each of the 69 noble houses, each in allegiance by character to one of the Hierarchy, was obligated to attend parliamentary Pandemonium. To the point where, in the back left hand corner, was the coffin of one of the elder members of House Paymon, Lucifer's sleeping army. Everyone else, who knew better, had drifted beneath Pandemonium to The Throne's Toast a knurled, broom cupboard pub, eighty percent oiled oak, nineteen percent splintered polystyrene and one percent humpbacked brass work.

To reach Toast it's necessary to excavate two floors of labyrinth administrative cubicles banner posted with Sanskrit directional signs designed to send you trudging a continuous eight for eternity. To then catch Kronos, Hades' ferryman, on seasonal temp duty, to cross a sewage quarry pre-informed of inflation from two pennies to twenty pounds whilst resisting the urge to drown yourself as Kronos crones on about health and safety scythe regulations.

The Toast's walnut bar had been reclaimed from Toast's original site in Pandemonium's lavishly stylized Pandemonium Hall of marquetry horizons and ruby filigree. It now dominated what had once been the basement lavatories where sewage juices crawled seeping beneath the rims of toilet stubs and the resident peahen could be heard squawking Marxist poetry by MPs.

Bunting of electrics sagged pot bellied between dislodged ceiling tiles and the bar back was a mosaic of bottle green, medicinal brown and extreme-left political propaganda. Oil lanterns hung at a tactful height so that patrons repeatedly smashed their crowns if stewed enough to dare break eye contact with the belly of their drinks. The darkly stained chipboard parameters of the bar floor were dressed in inverted crosses and repro Pinturicchio defaced with Sharpie mustaches and arrow headed tails.

Once the cornucopia of political opulence, inebriation and casual sodomy Toast was purchased by a Separatist. Separatists are similar to communists and can be found shoulder-to-shoulder huddled in low-ceilined basements on makeshift stages caroling anti-Hierarchy hogwash or in the foreground of a backdrop of Volkswagen campers with rolling hills of witty placards sailing above them. In most cases one can identify a Separatist by the presence of any of the following: corduroys, burnt oranges, outgrown, grease-weighted hair, hand woven headbands, and rainbow bandanas.

Separatism, the forlorn younger brother of damned political parties, is taken with a breath of exasperation by its more powerful and established older brothers: the grey-gods of Capitalism and Consumerism as relied on by the Hierarchy. Grappling for a new card beyond the classics of hellfire and extracted liver pecking, Separatists have become increasingly digitally nifty.

Separatists use Toast as an IC laundering enterprise of dual irony. Firstly it is clogged in the colonic soft tissues of Lucifer's Pandemonium and secondly because the project's objective brought quirky new meaning to its original name. I-C Architects, biological hackers, Sepratists biohack IC from the underworld's affluent. For those who have been hacked this results in a gnawing snack lust akin to mid-first trimester pregnancy and for the I-C architect a small but significant bump on The Toast's HSBB business account. Hell and Substratum Bank of Berith.

This impressively increasing sum is claimed as The Toast's profits which always falls conveniently under the tax bracket. At present the Separatists have very little to do with their money other than buy Haagenti Food's Ten Percent More but Worth it line of marrow macaroons for political meet-ups. Most of this stolen power is transferred from The Toast owner's HSBB account to a wallet on a server on Level 1. Limbo in a series of crypto mining by semi-cybernated trolls. Level 1. Limbo is theologically neutral, used by both the damned and the sainted, and is therefore a tax h(e)aven.

The upshot of this is the Separatists are quickly becoming the most affluent of the damned and the peahen, when with enough ketamine to sedate all four-legged enlisted of the Genghis Khan regiment, was found to have a talent for forgery, was promptly fitted a peacock green visor and, much more contented under new management, spends her time in Toast's back room knocking out fraudulent receipts.

Hunched over the Toast's bar with a regulated oxygen supply and an owl the size of a forty liter backpack Faith watched the bulb flare cauterised clash of press, politician and house representatives churn inflamed way up above her on a mounted television set. The TV made her feel she'd walked into a bar somewhere in semi-urbanised Alaska and should be sipping Bud. A representative of House Barbas, of Lucifer, was poking a PowerPoint presentation with a collapsible aluminium probe. Faith's eyes dragged to the laminated agenda saddled at the door.

Verrine: consequence and action.

Faith was of a slight, prepubescently curveless build which she accentuated with a cultivation of angrogynous mannerisms and dressed in shapeless tweeds and pocked cotton shirts as though she'd tripped backwards through the costume department of a piece on WW1 working class males. A glassy blush shone over the bridge of her nose and plump cheeks like a digital art piece of a prepubescent fey and her long ebony ringlets were stuffed into the collar of her blazer. Her pointed right ear was missing it's tip, shrivelled a grey-black at its outer rim like a rotten vegetable.

Faith's eyes were too large for her face. Morax had read that this was why baby animals and infants were appealing. He'd rather liked the idea. The shape of brazil nuts. Could remember the first brazil nut he'd plucked mildly entranced from Gremory's fingertips, how this bland new curiosity reminded him of her looking down on him as a small lad. Her lids sank above them in silvery arches and her irises were a cat-like and tip-cut onyx disappearing up beneath her lashes the paternal demon in her eclipsing their human genetic makeup's hazel.

Faith wondered how Lucifer contacted people to let them know he was calling parliament. Perhaps he phoned them. She thought it odd to think of Lucifer, the profoundly unpopular crowning king of the malignant anti-holy, gripping a smartphone. Perhaps it didn’t hold it at all but assimilated with the network of electrical pulses dialling out a computerised audio circa Siri or Bixby or Cortana.

Verrine. Deity of disease.

"A striking shade of royal aquamarine" Faith recited from memory her tone low and dry.

The largest percentage of Verrine, deity of disease, existed in a bacteria the ancestor of blue-green algae and which was quoted in most reference and textbooks as a striking shade of royal aquamarine. A cunning bacteria Verrine was crafty at avoiding detection by humans, the only known case by a frizzy-haired girl tasked by her ninth-grade biology teacher to draw and label the contents of a pre-prepared Petri dish. The girl failed ninth grade biology instead excelling in the art department executing her work in blue ink. Flattered as the girl’s artistic muse Verrine took action and the biology teacher suffered a spiking of the levels of colloidal silver in his blood developing Argyria a condition characterized by smurf like bluey-silver skin.

Fallen.

Faith felt a wave of exhaustion and her head bowed over the bar top. Fallen. Verrine had fallen. There was no more human disease. Not for three whole days now. Lucifer had called Pandemonium to instruct the damned on how to keep population numbers down until a long term solution could put in place.

Faith flipped the leather coated front of her phone case examining three paper cut-outs of the 69 noble houses she'd sticky-tape laminated there for easy reference.

Faith's eyes trailed reading the fuzzy penciled names. Lucifer and next to the name, in Crayola felt-tip, a block of scarlet, the colour of the sigils of Lucifer’s associated noble houses of the 69. Followed by Beelzebub and sapphire, Leviathan and baby blue, Astaroth and gold, Adramelech and pink, Ose and emerald, Berith and amethyst, Agares and orange, Amon and silver, Verrine with turquoise and Mammon with copper.

Faith looked over the Dukes, Presidents, Princes, Marquis, Counts, and Kings, name holders, of the sixty-nine upper-order demonic clans so listed in Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, a fifteen hundreds grimoire first placed pen to paper by the demontologist Johann Weyer. From Lucifer's house of the family of King Bael at position one, the nobles were associated, in the same ascending order of power, with each of the Hierarchy. Lucifer's six, then Beelzebub's and so on.

Faith stabbed her overly long and dirty thumbnail down each of Verrine's houses. Eight. Eight houses and their legions.

Legions are the hundreds of thousands of damned ruled by each house of the 69. One’s position on the demonic power ladder is dependent on two things: One’s own IC and the number of legions one has to get things done for it so it doesn’t have to. A total expenditure of IC is referred to as burnout and is a good way to drop a few rungs of the power ladder. Total burnout is characterized by symptoms of nausea, light-headedness and complete disintegration. Burnout is the highest cause of fatality amongst the damned.

Toggling the earbud in her right ear and absently offering the left to her owl drinking companion, who declined, she jabbed the 666 iPlayer app to rewatch the broadcast which had forced her day trip to Pandemonium.