The Tablets of Dis, Part I

I'm defecting from the United States government. I believe the public should be privy to the knowledge I am revealing.

On April 22nd, 2016 the Tablets arrived with a blast of fire in a house located in rural North Dakota. The house started burning and the local fire department was notified of the phenomenon. Eventually we found out about it and the cover up was given first priority.

Though made of sandstone, the Tablets pose a significant health hazard. They are highly radioactive and contain trace elements such as Uranium, Plutonium, and most strangely Technetium.

They were etched in a language similar to English, with heavy Chinese influences on grammatical structure. There was a breakage down the midline of Tablet #4, but the loss of material was minimal and did not affect translations.

I work in a sector of the military which studies abnormal phenomenon. I have copied a series of documents which hold the translations of the Tablets Of Dis. After thorough investigation, it was determined that the Tablets are not a hoax. It is believed they were in fact written in Hell. I am currently pressed for time and need to get the post out quickly. I know I don't have much proof right now, but I'm working on that. I'll let you decide for yourself for now.

The following is the modern English translation of the first Tablet Of Dis.

---

I still remember the first night I arrived in Dis. If I was to guess, I'd say about 4000 years ago.

I woke up drowning. I was in a sac full of liquid, clawed my way out, and fell from the ceiling of some stone room onto a muddy dirt floor.

Gasping for air and sputtering as slime fell down over my mouth, I yelled fervently, "HELP! WHERE AM I?"

Bones covered the entire room, strewn about like a mass grave site. There was a group of 4 people around a fire in the far corner looking right at me.

They were dressed in light colored leather, holding various weapons fashioned from bones. The smallest one, male, immediately walked over to me and stabbed me in the chest with a spear.

"Ferst tyne en Dees heh?" he said in a casual, Scottish-sounding accent. He gave a little chuckle and his friends laughed in the corner.

I stared at him right in the eyes in that moment. They were flat. There was no emotion, no malice, no enjoyment over what he had just done. It was like he was taking out the trash - calm and disengaged, casually joking about the task at hand. I looked down in horror as blood poured from my naked chest over the parchment-white weapon. I fell to my knees and tried to scream, but no air came to my voice.

Next thing I knew, I woke up in a sac of fluid and clawed my way out. I fell from about 5 stories down to the ground below me with a crunch. I couldn't feel or move my legs and I was covered in blood mixed with thick slimy liquid. It was dark, raining, and cold. The smell in the air was sulphuric and rotting, like a dead animal carcass.

No one was around, but human bones and remains were piled all around me, filling the alley like a bathtub. The buildings were carved out of giant stone pillars, and the alleys were about 8 ft across maximum. I wracked my brain to try to figure out what was happening. Before being killed by the Scottish lad, the last thing I could remember was walking to the liquor store. My head was swimming.

I knew there was something terribly, terribly wrong because for the first time in my life, deep down in my chest, I felt like I was in the right place. Underneath the fear was an emerging understanding - I was in Hell. As my vision dimmed, I saw a tall older man saunter around the corner of the building, wading through human remains. He saw me and started walking my way, as I slipped into darkness.

I woke up in a sac of liquid, clawed my way out, and fell to the ground a few dozen more times before i was able to last more than a few minutes. The damned place was absolutely packed with citizens so it was likely you'd be spotted from the moment you were "born". Most of the time I was stabbed or beaten to death before I could even get up to look around.

One time I dropped into a large alley where thousands of people were trampling over each other in a flat out sprint. It looked like a river of flesh below me as I fell. I knocked over a bunch of people on the way down and was crushed under the stampede. Another time I woke up in a completely dark room, halfway filled with water. Someone there crept up behind me, grabbed me, bound me to a post, and started cutting out my muscles while I was still alive as he giggled like a giddy schoolgirl.

At attempt number 40 or so, I was dropped in a relatively unpopulated area. I jumped up over a wall into a stone building that looked like it was formed by volcanic ash. Muddy bones still littered the ground, but much more sparsely than usual. Upon inspection, the view for miles around me was more of an endless shantytown than a city. A few spires of rock jutted up from the ground around me, chiseled out to form caves and shelters. Some shelters were built with big rock slabs, some with bricks and some with cement. In one direction, enormous pyramids and spires loomed in the distance, silhouettes through the rain. In the other, the buildings seemed to get more and more sparse into the grey. Little did I know how lucky I was to end up here.

I ran across the mud and grabbed the closest femur bone. I began exploring the huts around me. I rounded each corner ready to viciously fight until my last breath, yet no one was around. I found some old leather clothes under a table, a small bone dagger, and replaced my femur club with a sharpened bone-spear.

I was exploring a larger hut when a loud squishing sound next to me rocked my nervous system into fight mode. I would not be eaten, beaten, stabbed, or tortured this time around. I turn to see a small green blob grow to about my size. Suddenly something fleshy in the blob begins squirming, clawing at the inside.

Fluid gushes out and a young darker-skinned woman with an athletic body falls to the ground like a calf being birthed. She immediately looks around and sees me, locking eyes.

We freeze, neither of us making a move. I realize she is cornered, with the door behind me. I back up towards the door, but like lightning she leaps towards me, screaming a piercing, inhuman war cry. I point my spear at her and thrust, but she easily parries my thrust and slams into my torso, throwing me to the ground. She reaches her hands for my throat, but I grab them just before they connect. She immediately bashes her knee into my balls and escapes my bind. She scratches at my face like a rabid screeching animal and just misses my left eye. I throw her off of me, grab my dagger from under my clothes, and plunge it down into her turned shoulder. She screams as I stab the knife down again and again, blood splattering all over me. Her body goes limp and I roar louder than I ever have as my dagger smashes down through her rib cage in one final motion. My rage from having been brutally murdered and tortured 40 times was replaced with a feeling of deep primal power coursing through my veins as I claimed my first kill in Dis.

Before I knew it, I had a fire going, a fully loaded set of human weapons and armor, and a belly full of human flesh. I had gone through a sort of hazing, and was now initiated as a monster - a full blown demon of Hell.

Luckily, the small leafless shrubs here were extremely flammable. They didn't seem to have seeds or life of any kind, yet they grew all over the ground and lit right up even when wet. I put some more brush on my fire and boiled some water over a ceramic bowl.

Back on Earth, born 2005 A.D., I always did whatever I wanted, and I especially loved fighting. I would get in fights over nothing at all, accusing and swearing until someone threw a punch. I usually won my fights. I had grown up in a big city with lots of brothers, and it was fight or be tormented there. In my time on Earth I never intended to kill, but there were a few opponents I left beaten so badly I imagine they never made it to the hospital. I'll never know though. I suppose Dis was just the next logical step.

I killed everyone I saw in Hell for a while. I stabbed them quickly, sometimes before they even got out of the sac. You could say I had trust issues. I had set up a life here in the shantytown, albeit a lonely one, and I wasn't about to go back to being someone's breakfast anytime soon.

But after a few months, I started getting bored. I had figured out how to sneak around, check corners, kill without hesitation, cook the meat and boil the water, but something was eating at me. It wasn't that I wanted friends, but I wanted answers. I wanted to know what other people had been through here, and I wanted to make some sense of this place. How long had they been here? How big is the city? Is it all this barbaric?

One day a sac grew next to me but never opened. I looked at it for a few seconds and then cut it open with my spear. A frail looking white man collapsed to the ground, spewing up liquid and coughing violently. I figured a surplus of meat would do me well, and raised my spear. Suddenly he screamed through his coughs:

"PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE SIR SPARE ME NONONONONO DON'T KILL ME, I'M BEGGING YOU-"

His pleads were panicked and interrupted briefly by hopeless sobs, spewing a desperation I had never heard in my entire life. A desperation of pure misery and suffering, without any knowledge of why it was happening.

I stepped back for a moment. I let him continue to sob and plead for a while, wondering how long he would keep it up for. I finally sat down across the room and set my spear down. He looked up at me and then bowed his entire body down to the ground, groveling and bawling as he thanked me over and over. "Thank you sir, thank you oh dear Master thank you for sparing me what you have done is a truly great thing and I owe my life to you, thank you-".

"I have a question." I said. He immediately stopped.

"Why didn't you leave the sac?"

"Sir..." He said into the ground, still bowing in deference. "... I am unable to escape the water. I have been drowning constantly, over and over since I committed suicide in my car. Sometimes I am freed, but immediately killed by demons. Thank you for sparing me kind demon. Thank you thank you thank you-" While he was thanking me I noticed he had no hands and his legs ended at his knees.

"Quiet." I said softly.

We stayed in silence for a moment.

I didn't know what to do about him, so I figured I'd fill him in. "I'm not a demon, I'm a person just like you. Most of us can leave our pods."

I let the reality sink in for a second, thinking about what to say next. I swallowed a feeling coming up to my throat.

"We're all here in Hell, but there are no demons. Just us."

He remained motionless except for his breathing.

"The newly born are the only source of food and weapons here. That's Hell. Get born over and over again into a wasteland where nothing grows except little shrubs, it rains endlessly, and the water is diseased and undrinkable." After a few moments he finally looked up at me, a face of horror, surrender, and defeat.

I continued. "You can use my fire, there's meat next to it on the left, and there's a few extra spears in the corner if you want to try them. Learn to walk, survive, and most importantly, figure out how you're going to escape your next pod. Maybe you can... use your mouth or something. Good luck."

I picked up my satchel of provisions and turned to leave.

"My name is Michael" he said. "The kindness you have shown me is worthy of redemption. Carry that knowledge with you for the rest of your lives."

I still needed answers. So I began walking. I headed straight towards the giant structures, to my later dismay. You see, this particular time around I was born in a very special place - the outskirts. Why is it special? Because Dis is larger then you could possibly comprehend. Imagine how much space people take up in one generation on Earth. Now add together all the generations of people that have ever existed. Even taking just the bad ones who end up in Hell, that is going to leave you with a nonstop city larger than any state, country, or continent on the planet. We're talking probably trillions of damned souls here.

The chances of you being born on the outskirts is like winning the lottery times 1000. And eventually, I would be determined to find the outskirts again even if it killed me. Which it would, for millennia.

---

So as I head away from the outskirts, I eventually came upon a gang of men huddled in a hut. There were a few women around the fire, and a few naked dead bodies laying off to the side. I listened through the rain and heard some kind of Arabic sounding tongue being spoken. I decided to move along and find someone else. I travelled aimlessly and silently from group to group, avoiding conflict when I could.

Weeks later I found a group of about 10 people I could understand, mostly speaking with a heavy British accent. I was unsure of how to announce myself. My heart beat heavily in my ears as I listened, frozen in place for a few minutes. Finally I broke my fear induced trance and simply stepped out in front of the doorway. I extended my empty right hand and clutched my spear with my left as I said, "I wish to join your group" firmly and clearly.

Some of the men jumped from their seats, weapons ready, but the largest man in the group grunted and held up his hand, stopping the rest of the men in their tracks. I watched them for a reaction as my muscles tensed to capacity. "I have food to offer you if you need it," I growled as I extended a severed human limb from my satchel to the leader.

He was tall muscular fellow seated next to two women. He stared at me with piercing, unreadable dark eyes. I stared right back at him, ready to bolt if they advanced an inch further. Then, to my surprise, he spoke calmly.

"To join us we have to see you fight. You must best the next fresh meat." He spoke with a deep, bellowing voice. The other men in the group cheered, pointing their weapons into the wet stone floor. I guessed he thought he could use another strong follower. I nodded in confirmation and squatted down, eying my surroundings for a fresh pod. Eventually a few shelters away a sac began to form. The membrane burst and a large man fell out on to the ground, landing on his feet like a cat. He was midsized, muscular and had a huge scar across his chest.

We locked eyes as I raised my spear. The sound of the cheering and stomping became distant as my heartbeat raced The scarred man understood, and decided not to run, but fight. He picked up a large bone from the ground. I glanced at the gang leader and he nodded. With this I advanced at the scarred man, closing our sparring distance.

Unfazed, the scarred man closed the distance as well. We began to circle each other and I lunged with the spear. As expected, he parried with the bone and went in for the kill, bringing his club down towards my head. I sidestepped his swing and whipped the back of the spear around at his temple with my left hand. He ducked, but with my right hand I was ready and leapt into him with my dagger. It caught him in the rib cage as he brought his club back across to connect with my shoulder. We both screamed in agony as I kicked him back, dagger still lodged in his side, and thrusted my spear through his stomach. With the last of his strength and a grunt, he struck the spear with his club, breaking it and falling to the ground. He spit at my feet as he collapsed. I stepped back and turned to the leader, who nodded and signaled me to join them by the fire. I finally began learning.

The main tongue in Dis was similar to Latin, but a kind of shortened muffled version of it. Once I learned it, I was able to talk with most in Dis. This main language would change over time as Dis's population became filled with new people from Earth.

The women in Dis seemed to all arrive at the same conclusion - have sex with the strongest man in the area. They figured they'd either have willing sex and be protected, or be raped, so they usually chose the former when they could.

Once you were in a gang, group, or organization, the social dynamic wasn't all that different from an inner city middle school on Earth. The strong guys led, but social skills and unique talents were valued within the tribal system. Weak, old, or fat men and women made great followers because they would accept a somewhat lower status since their options in Hell were limited.

The problem is, no one is really scared of death, so many do not accept a low social status. Instead of a great scary unknown, death is an inconvenience. You don't want to lose your friends, home, and belongings, but it's not a huge deal when you do. You revert to the body you had when you died on Earth, and start anew. For this, there is constant conflict and infighting, and it gets much more violent than Earth. Many of these people have been fighting for thousands and thousands of years and the fights are unlike anything you would see on Earth. The human body is pushed well past it's limit as people use any and every part as a weapon.

The longer you'd been in Dis, the better you were at fighting. Ancient peoples from civilizations long ago were terrifying. They were often youthful, having died young, and had incredibly strong bodies. On top of this, they'd been in Dis longer than most so they had thousands of years advantage.

If you managed to survive initiation into a group that had ancients, you could learn a little about their time period. The ancient Egyptians were the most fascinating. Apparently the pyramids were built to be charging stations for the elite - they channeled Earth's energy to increase healing, strength, and awareness of the user. Most of the Egyptians I spoke to believed this phenomenon whole heartedly and many pyramids had been erected in Dis for this reason. However, apparently the charging effect did not work here in Hell, and most pyramids were abandoned as useless.

When you meet older and older humans, they start to lose their ability to communicate very well. The adaptation that had taken place to form civilization was apparently fairly recent in human evolution, tied to an increased capacity for language. Some of the oldest citizens of Dis described their life on Earth as similar to Hell, having partaken in cannibalism, rape, and constant tribal warfare.

Keeping slaves in Dis is difficult. It's almost comical what happens. Since people don't care about death, the slaves will take any chance they can to kill themselves. And I mean ANY chance. Can their head still move? They'll just break their own necks, a skill that most here learn quickly. Even totally immobilized, some will bite their toungues and start inhaling the blood into their lungs, drowning in the course of a few minutes. One slave farm I was a part of immobilized every part of your body, even your mouth, but would keep the legs free. They tied you to a big stone generator wheel and they whipped you if you stopped walking. Each slave would only last until they died of thirst, so it wasn't even that bad.

Large organizations sometimes develop. After a while of smooth sailing, sometimes an area stabilizes and order takes place. Slaves power luxuries for the residents, housing is constructed, mines are dug and I've seen weaponry as advanced as iron be crafted. In barracks, guards take shifts to handle any fresh meat that forms within the sleeping corridors. Leaders control the followers with lots of women, food, and entertaining blood-fights. If someone is caught breaking rules, the torture cells are a fate worse than 1000 deaths. The craft has been honed to perfection by the most brutal, psychopathic people in history. The women used as prostitutes stay instead of killing themselves because they are treated with relative respect outside the bedroom, often a better deal than starting anew. Some of them end up forming exclusive relationships with men, especially with the leaders.

What returns things to savagery? Leaders dying, mutinies, and most destructively: portals.

Every so often, a portal opens up. First you see a pillar of fire that slowly falls from the sky. The first person to step inside the portal once it connects to the ground is immediately taken back to Earth at a some time in Earth's history. It is unknown when, where, or inside whom on Earth you will end up. It is also unknown how that system works given that it breaks the laws of time, but the eventualities are unable to be tested. When a portal appears, say goodbye to any semblance of a life you had.

If a portal shows up near you, every single being will stop in their tracks and head for it with the momentum of an out of control freight train - except the conductor of this freight train is a maniacal lunatic who, instead of trying to brake, throttles the engine to maximum speed.

I've seen stone towers collapse from the force of stampeding denizens sprinting towards a portal. In highly populated parts of the city, so many people get trampled that the stampede gets raised from the ground as they sprint atop the dead bodies piled below them. When the portal disappears, the aggression turns inwards, and with the collapsing self destruction of a dying star the residents slaughter each other in a bloodbath that would leave Hitler himself sick for a week.

In my travels through Dis, I also found out about the future of humanity. A few hundred years after I had died, the English hybrid (the one spoken in Dis) had become the global language. The population had skyrocketed, with humanity reaching numbers well beyond what the earth was capable of sustaining. This is why Dis is now so full of people from that time period - pure population density. These people were also the weakest - fat, lazy, undisciplined and unknowledgeable. They often knew little of defending themselves or surviving and had trouble adapting their soft bodies to survive after a new birth. Their time in Hell was sub-par until they learned the realities of survival.

Apparently after Earth's huge population boom, there was a series of natural disasters, famines, and global environmental changes that completely destabilized the population. After civilization restabilized, there was a period of peace, restructuring and repopulating. Upon reaching another population pinnacle, humanity launched an all-out nuclear war; after that apparently very few humans survived.

The survivors struggled with rebuilding for centuries, until a big technological breakthrough occurred and humanity began to prosper again. With a new level of technology empowering them, people moved to different planets, and started exploring the solar system.

After that, however, it is unknown what happened. People either all died out, or people stopped going to Hell for some reason. About two and a half thousand years into my time in Dis, I just...stopped meeting any newcomers. I haven't met anyone from after that point, and I haven't met anyone who knows anyone from after that point.

One woman from the final period claims one day as she was looking up at the sky, she saw the sun suddenly move across the sky real fast, in a sideways direction. Then the sun started circling around, up and down over the horizon, and getting smaller until it passed over the horizon one last time. Then everything went dark and freezing cold and she woke up here. Granted, she was very mentally unstable so I don't take anything she says as fact.

A few others from the final era claimed that around that time there was a "second coming" of sorts, a person who gained enormous popularity as a global spiritual leader. They said the movement was spreading across the globe, and people were beginning to change all over the world: stopping going to work, stopping using technology and generally becoming more peaceful.

Either way, I met very few people in Dis from that final time period of Earth. And I have met many millions of people.

Over the course of the next few thousand years I killed many, many denizens, and was killed many times. I was raped, eaten alive, tortured beyond comprehension, and slaughtered like cattle on a farm. I had my fill of sex with the most beautiful women I had ever seen, and some were far better than any woman on Earth in bed. As time went on and I got more and more bored, and my actions became like the rest - increasingly violent, increasingly despicable... and I became increasingly miserable. After a while you just start not getting much out of any of it. My desires started to become chores I attended to, and I became less and less satisfied with more and more. Deep down I missed the simple things - drying off with a towel. Warmth on my face from the sun. Soft sheets on a comfortable bed.

It seemed as though when you get born from a new sac in Dis, you'd be in an entirely random place, but the timeline of Dis was the same as Earth. This basically means if someone died a year after you, you could perchance see them, at the earliest, one year into your time in Dis.

About 2000 years in, I had a conversation that would change everything. One night around a fire, an ancient began speaking. He was one of the oldest ancients I had met, his head strangely small and warped into an oval. His language was nearly impossible to understand - he had learned Latin but had a grammatical structure that seemed illogical, loose, almost improvisational. I leaned in close and listened intently, fascinated.

He claimed in broken speech that he was first born into a desert landscape with no buildings or shelters in any direction. Just giant spires and strange geological formations all over the ground. Above him there was nothing but light cloud cover and a gentle sprinkle, with a white desert in all other directions. After running for a while and just seeing a few other groups of people, he was killed and realized he was in Hell. Over millennia, he saw Dis as the population grew and the city was erected from nothing. Stones hauled from the ground, chiseled and carved, bricks laid and pyramids constructed. People back then had a name for the desert: Gehenna.

What stuck out to me was the storm. He said during that time in Dis he felt free from the constant torrential downpour. If what he was saying was true, this meant the storm expands based on how dense the population is. It made me wonder if the deeds we did here strengthened, or even FUELED the storm.

It was this line of thinking that made me decide to leave the rain of Dis. That night, I had restless dreams of a giant desert expanse with no horizon, the enormous stormy city far behind me and a small white sun shining down on my skin. It was the first time in centuries I had felt something hopeful, an warm core deep down in my belly. I woke up with a start and sat up from the ground. I had to find Gehenna.

I packed up everything in the night while my comrades were sleeping, quietly enough so the man taking guard duty wouldn't notice. I grabbed all the provisions we had, including my roommates', and snuck out unseen and unheard. They'd be fine, there were plenty of bodies to go around. I silently wished them good luck and made my way. I realized it was the first time I had wished well on someone since I met drowning Michael.

I began walking in a random direction. There were no roads, guide points, compasses, or familiar landmarks that you could use to navigate so it didn't really matter. I figured I'd continue walking until I died, and keep doing that over and over until I reached the edge of the city by chance. Sure enough, an absolute psychopath dressed as a medieval doctor snuck up behind me, somehow immobilized my body with a tiny bone sliver, and killed me slowly, ripping out my veins through my skin.

You never really get used to the pain of dying, but you do get used to the emotions of dying. You become comfortable with the extreme anger and hatred, and just kind of accept it. You fight when you can, run when you can, but since it happens so often you learn to process it.

Unfazed, I woke up again and landed in a very old looking part of Dis. The layout was a series of caves and holes dug into rocks, with a lot of open space. It was here I met my first child in Dis.

For the most part, you don't see any children. Some people claim they have seen unopen pods with babies floating in them, but if they do exist they're very rare. Unopen pods are usually people with weak or disabled bodies.

The child in front of me was sitting in the mud naked, crying and holding a small sharp bone. She had long brown hair and looked to be about 7 or 8. I stood right there, frozen in my tracks, eyes wide as saucers. I couldn't even begin to imagine what this child had been through here.

After while, a pod started growing next to her. A giant, muscular black man tore his way out. He stopped moving when he saw her. He glanced over at me, as shocked as I was.

I saw him take a step forward, and instinctively I shouted "NO!" But he just knelt down next to the child and put his hand on her back. He was trying to comfort her.

The tone of the moment flipped upside down as the bone in her hand rocketed up through the man's windpipe with lightning speed. The man lurched back, grabbing his neck. He gurgled and struggled for breath, but after a moment, he stopped resisting. He looked at the girl in her eyes, grasped the bone in his throat, and ripped it out with a flourish, pulling through the rest of the thick tissue keeping him alive. Dark crimson blood arced through the rain as his eyes glazed over and he fell to the ground. The girl immediately stopped crying and jumped on him, grabbing the blade from his hand and crudely butchering his body.

I simply turned around and closed my eyes for a second, processing what I had witnessed. There were no words for what just happened or how I felt. There was no other option for her to survive. That was her only way.

So I picked a direction and started walking.