 "Mostly cannon" |
The Dimension of Pain (shortened as DoP) is a demonic alternate reality ruled over by a group of demons specialised in tormenting mortals, all in practice very bored because they have no-one left to torture. Physically, it's a world of caves and caverns, at least in the part inhabited by the demons, though there is also a rarely visited surface, a jungle inhabited by numerous bizarre demonic creatures. The caverns also open to a space with open air at the Elder Village. It first appears [2] when Riff is using some of the parts from the DFA to fix the Mark I and accidentally sends Torg to the Dimension of Pain.
History
The Beginning
The Dimension of pain was once a less hostile world inhabited by beings who appeared human except for their exotic skin colors. It became corrupted when the Demon King sent his legions of demons against it and fought and defeated the Goddess of Goodness in the Elder Village. All the goodness in the dimension, including the goddess, was sealed in a zip-lock bag and stuffed at the bottom of the Fridge of Heavens in the Demon King's house-like residence, On High. The Demon King himself became the god-like ruler of the dimension, promoting the demon Horb to Demon Lord under the name Horribus to lead the demons personally while he was not present.
Torg's Visit
Eventually, the demons found that they had no more souls left to torment, and were doomed to eternal boredom. This changed when in 1998 (which was possibly much after the abovementioned events) Torg arrived in the dimension via a mishap with Riff's Dimensional Flux Agitator. The demons eagerly set out to torture him, trying to force him to agree to open a portal to his own dimension so that they might conquer it. However, Reakk misheard an order to "re-leash" him and let him free. He escaped and managed to get into the Sacred Circle of Protection created when the bag used to seal away everything good in the dimension had leaked. The demons were unable to enter the circle, since the light of goodness burned them, and before their inept attempts at luring him out could succeed, he was rescued by an alternate Zoë from the Dimension of Lame. This left behind a pinhole to that dimension. The Demon King appeared and declared he had ordered the Evil Super Mop of the Heavens, which could be used to clean away the Circle of Protection and give demons access to this new dimension. Now all they had to do was to wait four to six eons until it was delivered.
The Halloween Hunt
Meanwhile, Torg had made it back to his own dimension, and the demons discovered a way to go after him and capture him. Every Halloween night, the walls between the worlds weakened, and one demon could get through and stay until dawn, its objective to kill Torg and capture his soul. This became a yearly occurrence, a new demon going through each year and failing miserably but making Torg's and Riff's Halloween parties the most popular in town. On the first year, Reakk was sent, and on the second, the ghost of Squeekybobo. The latter was punished for his failure by sealing himside a glass ball, which accidentally awakened the First Dragon of Annoia. This flower-breathing menace terrorised the dimension for a while, until Reakk drove it away sort of accidentally. Next, Lord Horribus obtained the Demon Spear Calmadar, which could turn mortals into demons of the Dimension of Pain, and sent Psyk after Torg with it. All that managed to achieve was to turn the demon hunter Steve Uozin into a demon and a native of the Dimension of Pain, much to the demons' horror. On the following years, Mospinispinosp and Lord Horribus himself had little more success, even though they were both theoretically very dangerous to the mortals around them.
The Interloper
When Horribus returned to his own dimension, it was to find that he was on trial in front of the Demon King himself for failing so miserably to capture a single mortal. The trial was interrupted when Steve Uozin showed up and humiliated the Demon King, ending in both his and Horribus's banishment to the surface forever. Meanwhile, Reakk had accidentally awakened the Second Dragon of Annoia, which was less overtly threatening than its flower-breathing counterpart, but nevertheless very annoying. The demons began to prepare for an election for a new Demon Lord, the candidates being Reakk and Horribus's brother Terribus. However, things also began to get increasingly bizarre in the dimension, even compared to its normal state. This was because Terribus had sold his soul to a mortal politician to attain power, and in his haste in opening the portal to the mortal realm, he had left the way open for an angel to slip in. This angel could possess different demons, and eventually it made its way to the Demon King himself. Possessing his body, it imprisoned his spirit in the Squeekybobo Ball along with the disgruntled elf ghost. As Terribus was elected the new Demon Lord, the Dimension of Pain was beginning to resemble the human world, and was moving even further into the direction of something all too suitable for children. The only remaining uncorrupted (or unpurified) demon was Quixxle, who managed to get the by then downright chibified Reakk, Psyk and Mospinispinosp sent to the surface to look for Lord Horribus. They found him as the new ruler of the surface; he had managed to shake off Steve Uozin and enslave some of the natives, forcing them to start building a demonic tower. When he heard their news, he entered the Dimension of Pain through the Dimension of Grief (ruled by his sister Deplora) and confronted the angel. In the course of the encounter, the angel tripped and fell. The fallen angel naturally became a demon, which was then burned up by the Sacred Circle of Protection. The dimension reverted to its normal state.
The Evil Super Mop arrived at this time, and Reakk used it to mop up the Circle of Protection. Then he attempted to free the Demon King, but instead managed to free Squeekybobo and hand him the wand used to ball him up in the first place. The enraged elf zapped almost every demon into their own balls before vanishing (because he was resurrected back into his body by the Deus Ex Ovum). For a time, the demons faced an existence even duller than before. Ball jokes were also told. Eventually Deplora freed them, though the Demon King's spirit vanished when his ball was broken. For a time, Terribus managed to fool the others into thinking himself the Demon King, but he was eventually found out, and the real Demon King returned.
The Invasion of the Dimension of Lame
Soon after this, Lord Horribus grew sick of all the fooling around. The pinhole into the Dimension of Lame (which they thought was the same as Torg's home dimension) was finally open for them to invade through, and now he led the demons through it en masse. The peacefully oblivious world was thrown into chaos by the violent demons, and the humans provided no resistance. Lord Horribus was by then obsessed with finding Torg, and it just happened that that world's Bun-bun soon used their version of the Dimensional Flux Agitator to fetch Torg to help them, as his other version was known as a hero in that world. Torg managed to avoid the demons, largely due to the discovery that his old sword became extremely deadly even to demons when fed with innocent blood, which was found in abundance in a helpless world like this beset by demons. He hid with Bun-bun, Zoë, Lady Gwynn of the Book and Fred in the sewers, which smelled too good for the demons to enter them. Meanwhile, the local Riff and Kiki were transformed into demons by the Demon Spear Calmadar. The demons started using the spear on a larger scale to transform the local humans into demons, following Psyk's plan to take over the world, but it didn't progress as expected, and Horribus's obsession with finding Torg above all else didn't help matters. At one point, he snapped off and ate one of Psyk's horns as punishment for questioning him, which never grew back but left Psyk with an infection in his head.
Just as the demons figured out a way to enter the sewers (they used clothespins on whatever passed for each one's nose), the United Nations elected to "nuke" the demons. Hearing about this, Torg, Zoë and Bun-bun hurried through the portal to the Dimension of Pain itself to shield themselves from the blast. Of course, like everything else in the Dimension of Lame except trying to be nice too hard, the NUKE turned out to be quite harmless, but the chase was now moved into the demons' own realm. Torg decided to find the Fridge of Heavens and unleash the goodness within the zip-lock bag to cause a distraction. He and the others found their way to the Mountain of Bones where the Demon King's house was situated, but Horribus was right on their tails. Horribus killed both Mospinispinosp (whose human part stood against him to atone for the earlier transgression of helping the demons to invade her home in the first place) and Zoë. Torg managed to resist the temptation to try to kill him in retaliation and instead made the side of the mountain to collapse under the demon, taking him down into unknown depths. Torg then proceeded to the Demon King's house, incidentally freeing another version of himself while looking for the zip-lock bag. When the bag was opened, the Goddess of Goodness was released, but, faced with the Demon King and stranded in a very un-good world, she elected to flee, carrying the mortals. The Demon King flew ahead to intercept them, striking at them with a sword formed of his own essence, but Torg parried the strike with Chaz. That much contact alone with the blade was enough to hurt and scar the Demon King.
Aftermath of the Invasion
The Goddess of Goodness escaped to the Dimension of Lame, where she immediately gained great power, and gathered most of the remaining demons and sent them back to the Dimension of Pain, and then closed the interdimensional tear forever. In the Dimension of Pain, the Demon King stood to judge Lord Horribus again, punishing him for his failure by stripping him of his aristocracy and casting him into the depths. Psyk, who had been acting rationally to the overall benefit of the demons and their King, was promoted to the new Demon Lord. While he grew new and bigger horns, the mass of infection on the side of his head went nowhere; and thus began the age of Lord Psykosis.
Inhabitants
Most of the inhabitants of the Dimension of Pain seem to be demons; a few others are mentioned.
For an overview of all the individuals in the Dimension of Pain, check out the characters page or the category page.
Demons of the Dimension of Pain
The demons that rule the dimension vary greatly in shape, though all seem to have some attributes in common. Aside from the Demon King, all are corporeal. Their appearance is often humanoid, but always a bizarre combination of human, animal and monstrous features, ranging from a flying fuzzball to a Diablo-lookalike. Many of the demons have been shown to be physically powerful, easily able to overpower a human and tough enough to be immune to weapons such as an unpowered Chaz (who is still more powerful than an ordinary large sword in that state). Even when the demons do get hurt, they may remain unaffected even if their whole body is pierced through. In fact, the behavior of the demons sometimes suggest they enjoy pain, or at least are indifferent to it. On the other hand, they have an aversion to some things humans would consider positive, and are repulsed by the smell of flowers.
Transdimensional souls
It's possible for the soul of a dead being to end up in the Dimension of Pain if it is left with a particularly strong inclination to cause pain at death. Such a soul appears in the dimension as an incorporeal ghost. Squeekybobo the Christmas elf was the only known example of such a soul.
Dragons of Annoia
- Main article: Three Dragons of Annoia
The Three Dragons of Annoia were imprisoned in the Dimension of Pain by separating their minds from their bodies. The demons have so far encountered and awakened two, dubbed the First Dragon of Annoia and the Second Dragon of Annoia in order of appearance. The first has been boinked and driven away, and the second was turned into a parody of Barney the Purple Dinosaur and then mercifully killed and eaten brutally.
Arachnaseuses
The Trapdoor Arachnaseuses are spider-like creatures that feed off the psychic peace and relaxation of their patients and are natural enemies of the demons of the Dimension of Pain.
Torg encountered them when he climbed the fake pile of bones. They told him that they had been driven to the lightest and longest corners of the world, but with the demons mainly invading the dimension of Lame, they had become bolder and stepped into the dark with their elaborate demon traps.[1]
The Arachnaseuses are skilled masseauses, which is nice to dimensional travellers such as Torg, but niceities are a bane for demons of pain like Re'akk.
Inhabitants of the surface
While many creatures on the surface seems to be in the field of expertise of a demon hunter, they exhibit an even greater variety of weirdness than the "normal" demons under Horribus. Some are gigantic and many possibly unintelligent, even plant-like, whereas others (the thukks) are small, tribal humanoids.
Locations
- The Surface. Formerly a lush jungle world, it was tainted and corrupted by Horribus during his brief rule over it.
- The Elder Village
- The Mountain of Bones
- The fake mountain of bones (the abode of the Arachnaseuse)
- The Cave of Nekkros
- Demonion
- Le Snoutier
- The Cave of Dublundundyr
- The Tombs of the Lost Ones (possibly), The Tombs of the Found Ones, and The Tombs of the Missing for the Past Half Hour Ones
Demon Lords
The Demon Lords of the Dimension of Pain are appointed by the Demon King to rule the dimension. Demon Lords are from the demonic aristocracy; when the Demon King wants to appoint a non-aristocrat for lordship, the demon is made an aristocrat, with a new name and more powerful body.
The known Demon Lords are, in chronological order:
Alternatives
The Dimension of Pain has at least one mentioned alternate version, the Dimension of Sham-Pain. The Dimension of Grief is also a variation of it to some extent, but much more clearly independent and different. (See also: Dimension.)
Developments in dimensions more overtly parallel to Sluggy Prime, and indeed there as well, have also lately begun to show clear similarities to the Dimension of Pain. The NoFun Corporation's random mutagen distributing device turns people into monsters that look very much like demons of the Dimension of Pain and are even obsessed with pain for some reason, and indeed itself looks very much like the Demon Spear Calmadar. In an unknown but presumably large number of dimensions, monsters parallel to these have taken part in the R&D Wars being referred to as outsiders. The group appearing in Sluggy Prime is calling itself "The Dim Sum Henchmen of Pang".