3. Author, Table For One

Lucifer Pendragon needed a new story, that or a change in career. He'd been doing the horror novelist thing for so long now that he really cared little for it these days, there are only so many times that you can write about tentacled god-monsters and psychotic episodes before you begin to question your own sanity.
He sat in his darkened room staring at the old Apple Mac word processor, he had a brand new MacBook sitting in a leather case beside his desk but for some reason always felt more comfortable typing on this archaic piece of machinery before him. Clicking the keys distractedly the makings of his next bestseller appeared out of the ether, he really needed absolutely zero effort to describe horrors the likes of which few could imagine, the words just found their way onto the page.
About four paragraphs in he highlighted everything and deleted the lot. On the now blank screen the cursor blinked expectantly, awaiting his fingers to jump over the keys once more, for the creative flow to continue its torrent.
Lucifer frowned at the empty screen, cautiously as if his fingers were unsure of their course the words he held her in his arms flitted into existence and every ounce of his ability fought against it.
Love was a thing that happened to other people, it was never to be for Lucifer because once, a long time ago he had experienced true love, not the lust coupled with OCD that most people believed to be love but actual genuine love. The kind of love that you could never doubt, that would never falter and to his knowledge it never had, even to this day. You never know what you really have until you lose it, and at a time when Lucifer had wanted more he turned his back on that love and now he ached without it, its absence burned his being and threatened to consume him.
His only output was the written word, to fill his time with anything that might distract him from that which he once lost, the words flowed from his mind so quickly that he could scarcely keep up but he would not let it overtake him.
For maybe twenty years now he had occupied this apartment on the hill behind the promenade of Purity Bay, it was a nice building and the rent was cheap, plus his landlord was the kind who kept himself to himself so long as the rent came in. He rarely went to the cities out of fear of his fans, kids dressed in black with dark makeup whining about the existential meaning of his stories and the deeper philosophies of his cynosure asseverations. God, get a life you morose little bastards, there is no hidden secret to enlightenment in his tales, no guiding ideology wrapped up in an enigma in his words, they are simply stories about about bad things happening to people who may or may not have deserved it.
This may sound like an ungrateful attitude to take towards one's fans, but these kids who dressed like ghouls were all the same, pretentious little shits who push the world away and then complain about being lonely and misunderstood. If they would only stop once in a while to look around and appreciate the true splendor of the world then they would see that what Lucifer had simply been trying to put to paper was the idea of a dark side of the universe trying to pervert this one. There were no tenets or doctrines in his tales, there were only motivations for his characters, reasons for them to go on living until the horrible thing happened.
Tapping at the keys the words struggled onto the screen, he needed a setting, he needed a place to wear down the characters, to make them more human so that his audience could relate to them. He needed somewhere in which life would spiral out of control for them, that things could go wrong and life would seem bleak, somewhere were in the darkest hours of their lives they could find one another.
Drumming his fingers on his desk and lost in thought Lucifer Pendragon stared out his broad window, he needed to send them to somewhere truly forsaken and lost, a place forgotten to the rest of the civilized world.
He saved the file and shut down the Mac, rising from his chair and grabbing his jacket he decided to head down to the bar for a drink and see a bit of life.
Lucifer Pendragon needed to send his characters to Purity Bay.