The air shimmers around you, and you stand there on the streets of the Gluttony domain, the little blue imp floating in front of you with her arms outstretched, welcoming you to her horrible home.
The first thing that hits you is the smell. It literally hits you, the pungent aroma of this domain hangs physically in the air, almost like a fog. It's the sweet smell of rotting fruit mixed with the more foul scent of rotting meat. All this mixes with a heavy presence of grease and deep-fried food. It's inescapable. It's like being in a fast food restaurant with severe health code violations and a landfill at the same time, and there's no exit from either.
As mentioned, you're on a street. As you look down it, it seems to be lined with open-air shops and stalls. Large wooden stands offering just about every foodstuff you can imagine. It's not just produce. The nearest to you is an entire large tray filled with gravy, meatballs the size of your fist bobbing and floating in it. Across from it is a booth stuffed with pizzas. Not any shelving or boxes, just dozens of pizzas stacked one on top of the other. You can't even see someone inside manning the booth. Demons walking or floating by don't even look, simply grabbing a slice and stuffing it into their mouth as casually as can be. Other demons are seated at various nearby tables with patchwork umbrellas hanging over them, stuffing themselves with an entire smorgasbord of collected goodies.
Behind these stalls are more buildings, ugly monolithing cement and plastic structures. They look slapped together and ramshackle, almost as if they were never intended to be a single structure. Several have large support beams just to keep them propped up against another. Haphazard staircases, ledges, walkways, and scaffolding run through them, linking the various large open windows together. Upon further inspection, they're service windows. Massive quantities of food are passed through them, one direction or another. Bright neon lights in red and yellow line the place, and colourful awnings drape over the windows to try and disguise them as more than simply a hole in a concrete slab. For all the world, the whole place seems like a mad mashup of open-air market, mall food court, and greasy-spoon diner applied to an entire city.
Food is everywhere. Not just in the stalls or being handed through the windows. It litters the place. Half-eaten candy bars are scattered down the street, wrappings still on them. Chunks of meat, half-finished sandwiches, and discarded slices of pizza drip from every surface, smeared against the wall or hanging off the awnings. A steady rivulet of grease runs past your feet. Nearby, between a cotton candy stall half-melting from the vapours around it and a booth selling stacks of hamburger patties, is a large outflow pipe. Instead of sewage, a constant flow of molten cheese oozes from it, pouring out into a slow-moving orange waterfall until it drains away into a storm grate below it. Passing demons merely stick their food or even bare hand into it, again with all the casualness of your average pedestrian.
All this was expected. What you didn't expect were the flies. They are everywhere, hundreds of thousands of them, hanging in small black clouds over the hazy yellow skyline. Occasionally a small contingent of a dozen or more will break loose and head for the nearest glob of food. This seems to be the only thing that gives the demons pause in their feasting. When a fly lights upon something currently being eaten, the demon neither continues to eat nor shoos the fly away, waiting for it to finish on its own before its meal resumes. This respect and reverence for such filthy pests seems odd until you remember one of Lady Beelzebub's other titles: Lord of the Flies…
