Why Do I Own Millions Of Souls? (II)

The sunlight slithered through the curtains that were protecting the room and engulfing it room in partial darkness.

My phone, which was resting right under my pillow, suddenly vibrated with the sound of my once favorite song, but now no more than reduced to a simple, but effective alarm tone.

And as I woke up sluggishly and went through my mundane yet familiar routine, I mentally catalogued my actions. It has become a sort of a boring routine.

Wake up, brush my teeth, wash my face, grab a few bites from last night's dinner that technically counted as breakfast and head out at the crack ass of dawn to go to work.

Keeping my eyes open while driving was torture with how I barely slept last night, and I was only able to get a few minutes of shut-eye by closing my eyes during the morning traffic.

Parking my car in the staff parking space was as much torture as driving was, and I even almost parked right into a car in my sleep deprived state, accidentally thinking it was a light pole instead of a 5 foot long scrap of metal that was powered through fuel to fulfill humanity's selfish needs.

...Maybe I was reading too much into this.

As I stepped up into the elevator, I contemplated my issues. I wasn't getting much sleep for the past week for some reason. Well, not that I got any sleep at all the week before but for some reason, this time it seemed more than usual.

Back then, my movement felt sluggish and weak, but as of now, my movement felt straight up that of a rotting zombie!

Shaking my head from those thoughts, I stepped outside of the elevator as it opened up and walked straight into my desk office and promptly sighed in bliss as I practically melted into my comfortable chair, booting up the computer with nay a thought. Such was the power of office work.

Sinking into my chair further, I thought about faking unconsciousness for a moment, if only for a few desperate minutes of sleep.

Someone would probably call an ambulance if they noticed my lack of work in a few hours and me not responding, and hospital would mean away from work, and away from work would mean sleeping. What an iron clad plan.

Nodding sagely with all the finesse of a fasting monk, I decided to just do that and relaxed myself to prepare for the nigh-impossible mission—

The noise from my computer blared as I jolted and I let out a stream of colorful swear words. In my exhausted state, I instinctively raised the volume of the computer without realizing, and as I glared at my computer, it seemed that I had also gotten a notification from my work email.

Goddamnit.

Cracking my fingers, I sighed as I resigned myself to a miserable life of work and opened up my inbox.

There, at the top, sat an email innocently. Quite innocent, perhaps, a bit too much. Although oddly enough, I noted that the email was not one I recognized from any of my coworkers.

I also noted the childish email name (thedevilmaycare69@gmail.com), though I paid it no mind, as my work email name also followed a similar format, courtesy of my childish tendencies and my little "jokes".

Deciding to stop staring at the screen like a mentally ill person and monologuing to myself like some cartoon villain in a virtual novel, I clicked the email and began to read, apprehensive of what I might just find.

It read as the following:

[Hello,

The name's Satan.

It has recently come to my attention that in your Terms & Conditions surrounding—]

Oh fuck. I knew that would backfire.

[—your new game, "The Life of An Ephode", has an interesting tidbit regarding the last lines. Mainly the part where you specifically claim that anyone who accepts the conditions presented that you will, "own your their soul".]

[Now, as you probably may know, I am Lord Satan—]

I snorted indignantly.

[—and as the rightful owner of Hell, all the souls within my domain belong to me, and lately I've been losing clients that are and were rightfully mine. Of course, all it took was some illegal—ahem, I mean legal investigation, and guess what? All the souls that were supposed to go to Hell, are now somehow soul-bonded to you!]

The long-winded email continued with the same passive aggressive tone it had adapted somewhere through the middle.

[I amicably request of you to reverse this little mistake by updating your Terms & Conditions to not include what you had typed or you could have it specifically say that you "legally own no souls and all souls should belong to Lord Satan.]

[If you do not go through the solution my lawyers have introduced, you may expect a personal visit and a Cease and Desist letter from yours truly,

Lord Satan.

P.S: you may treat this as a cease & desist letter.]

I leaned back in my desk chair and recounted what the fuck I had just read, the artificially made leather of my chair rubbing uncomfortably against my suit.

Someone with the email that went by "hellishlord666@gmail.com" had emailed me about me somehow stealing souls that belonged to him.

It seemed ridiculous, because honestly, it probably was. This was a person with little to no social life who saw what I wrote and came up with this silly prank, it seemed the most probable explanation for all of this, right?

...Right?

...

Right.