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A dark room with a red glow surrounded him, his memories immediately prior to this moment in this place being a cluster of thought uncorrupted by time. It was as though the whole of his decades of life up to this point had been condensed into yesterday - and each memory was just as easy to recall. Thoughts and events five years ago were just as clear as ones from ten years ago, which were also just as clear as what happened hours ago. He knew who he was, he knew his life, his friends, but where was he now?

Twitching as he returned to the present moment, he looked around quickly. The room was dark, a faint glow illuminating the room through the cracks in the walls. They looked like grout lines, as if he were surrounded by brick walls which had lava flowing between each block of masonry. Though while these glowing lava lines were easy to see, they didn't exactly shed much light on any of the rest of the room. His eyes remained wide out of instinct, trying to see the best they could in the low-light conditions. The best he could do was made out the rough- small- size of the room, the fact that he was sat in a chair facing a desk, and that there was another chair opposite him. A small stalk of something was sat on the desk, but he could discern nothing else. He figured it was a lamp, perhaps a candle stick?

He could've reached out to touch it, maybe, but he was in such a state of confusion and fear that the thought didn't occur to him. He didn't think to speak, either, until he saw some movement out of the corner of his eye - causing him to flinch and quickly change from staring at the desk to instead look right. It was less that he saw movement, as much as he could tell the glowing grout lines of the brick walls were being covered by something. A strange figure he couldn't make out any details of walking across the room to the empty chair at the other side of the desk.

"W-Wha, who- Where am I?" He stammered, deciding to skip the 'what' and 'who' and jump straight to the 'where', which was certainly the more pressing question on his mind.

The figure was unphased, moving along with clicking footsteps along the hard, presumably stone, floor before it lowered itself into the empty chair. It stared into his eyes for a few seconds after that, an animalistic clearing of its nostrils being the only noise he heard for a moment before it moved a strangely shaped 'hand' to wave over the stalk on the desk - revealing it was, indeed, a candle, as it caught flame and dimly lit the desk.

Try as he might, he couldn't make out much more of the figure - or the room - even with that candle lit. However, the lighting of the candle revealed a sheet of paper and a pen nicely centered on the desk. He leaned a little bit forward to examine the sheet of paper and what was written on it, though in doing so, the creature across from him gave a startling snort before it finally spoke.

"You have arrived in the Afterlife, and due to your lack of belief in God and Heaven above, you have been sent to Hell. However, due to your lack of any crimes against humanity during your mortal life, you have been chosen for the position of a demon," It began flatly, speaking in a voice which one could only describe as an animal trying to speak English. He still couldn't see much, but he imagined that there was quite a bit of mucus and saliva flying as the thing vocalised.

Though the hygiene problem was quickly overruled when he realized what exactly that thing just said. "Afterlife? Demon?" He repeated aloud, quieter, which seemed to be all the prompting that the thing needed to keep talking.

"Should you reject this position," it continued, "you shall be reduced to yet another lowly soul doomed to eternal torture and torment with no opportunity to attain demon status ever again. Benefits of being a demon include housing, food, not-being-eternally-tortured, as well as regular vacation days."

As it paused once again, he blinked, looking up at where he imagined the thing's face was. Clash of tones aside - he felt like he should be scared by this thing and place when in fact the being seemed to be acting somewhat jovial - the actual option being presented to him seemed like a no-brainer. Being eternally tortured, or being a demon? "There's... Gotta be some sort of catch, right?" He asked, voicing his thought aloud.

This gained a snarl from the beast which caused him to recoil slightly before it spoke once more, "Not unless you've got a problem with torturing people," it replied. "That will be your job, and you have free reign to torture in whatever way you deem necessary - physically decimate them, try your best to kill them, make them beg for a death that will never come, or perhaps psychologically torment them until their brain cracks like an egg. The raw kind where the yolk and white dribbles out, not hard-boiled where it just sits there."

Was it trying to be funny? He really didn't know, but the need to torture people as a job seemed like a steep enough price for people to turn it away, even if it meant that they would be the torture dolls instead. He considered for a moment, "So, like, a waterboarding and flashlight-with-no-lube kinda thing?" He decided to ask.

Another snort from the thing as it spoke, "Eight hours a day, five days a week. You get weekends and vacation time as I said, and you have complete freedom with how you do your job as long as you cause the eternally tortured souls to have plenty of the pain and suffering they're here for. There's a quota you need to reach or exceed each week but it's pretty lax and easy to accomplish."

"Oookay..." He replied, still trying to process all of this information, currently deciding to play along as if it's some dream. He then considered just how he'd go about torturing. He wasn't a violent man by nature, but if he was honest with himself, he wouldn't terribly mind having full control over people for a job. Especially if that meant he could- "Crushing is on the table I assume?" He blurted out, "Ah- But if I'm a demon, what does that mean? Like, how will I change? Will my skin just turn red and I sprout horns and claws?"

The creature snorted and cackled briefly, "Crushing is a viable means of torture, yes. As for what it means for you to be a demon, you could just turn red and grow claws and a horn if you wanted, but you can think plenty bigger than that. Another bonus of this position is that you'll get to pick out any form you like to live as for as long as you're employed here."

His eyes lit up at that, perhaps sparkling a little bit in the dim flaming light of the weak desk-bound candle. "Could I be a dragon? Like, a big proper one - four legs, a tail, wings, scales... Nice big paws for, uh, stomping?" He inquired, trying to somewhat hold back his excitement as his heartbeat quickened.

"Dragon, huh? That's easily doable," it replied, "If you have no more questions, get to signing the paper, and you can begin immediately."

He was... Excited! Quite genuinely so! Even with the strangeness of this place and how he got here currently being a mystery, he couldn't be bothered to worry. Even if half of what this thing said was true, it'd be worth signing off on. "Of course!" He said, hands moving to the desk to pull that sheet of paper closer as he skimmed the wording and lined the pen up to the signature line. Though as he skimmed the document, it seemed like it was much more dense than when he first looked at it... Like more paragraphs had been added and the font size had been changed to accommodate it all.

Reading it over, it seemed that the updated terms of the deal he was about to make with the thing included the finer details they discussed - working hours, vacation days, and the nature of the demonic dragon form he was about to occupy. Excellent! The contract looked even more official and less likely to screw him over! Though he still had half a mind to cast this whole thing off as a dream, he soon began to jot down his signature on the nice big obvious line at the bottom of the page.

As he did so, he quickly noticed that the ink from this pen must've been of a similar variety to that which was oozing out of the cracks in the walls, as the pen strokes of his shaky signature glowed a brilliant sanguine - causing his writing to look as vibrant as ever when he placed the pen down after the fact.

"Very good," it spoke, the contract seeming to fade away right before his eyes in that moment. "Henceforth you shall be a demonic dragon, and shed the name bestowed upon you in the mortal world. Now you begin your new life, and your new name shall be," It paused, either for consideration or dramatic effect, before very clearly deciding, "Velimir."

The candle was blown out, and even the ooze from the walls seemed to grow dark after the utterance, and the newly minted Velimir felt himself drift away from reality as if asleep as the room around him faded to darkness...