Sombra had been having just another morning of his endless torment. Apparently, murdering, torturing, and brainwashing hundreds of thousands of ponies was considered a 'bad move', so he got put in one of the most torturous places in existence: a lower middle-class bachelor suite apartment. The underworld, or 'There' as the denizens were inclined to refer to it, had a lot fewer pits of lava and torture than he expected.
No physical torture at least, he reminded himself as he glanced at the blood dripping from his ceiling. Sombra sighed to himself; He had reported the leak to his landlord nearly three months ago and nothing had been done of it. At this point, he was fairly certain that the leak would remain there for the rest of time. He was a king after all, so it's not like he'd fix it himself. That was peasant work.
Glancing at the clock above the fridge (that would run five minutes slow or fast depending on how it felt at the present moment), he let out a sigh as he took another sip of his lukewarm coffee. Even he with his all-knowing mastery over the darkest arts and vilest rituals had no clue how the coffee down here could go from impossibly and dangerously hot to mediocrely tepid in a single blink. Perhaps some sort of cursed time manipulation? He tried making iced coffee once, but it would always taste horribly watered down no matter how strong of a brew he used. Such was life in this tormentous segment of the afterlife.
What he had not expected was a knock upon his apartment door (with eternally squeaky hinges and a deadbolt that always turned the opposite way he expected), followed by a slip of paper being pushed beneath the crack under his door that seemed to always let all the heat out in the winter yet provided no cooling draft in the summer heat.
Grumbling to himself as he levitated up the paper with a crackling aura of malevolent energy, he scowled at the messy and almost childish hoofwriting across its surface. A summoning? For him? He could have laughed if he wasn't more insulted. How dare a being try to summon him as if he was just some minor spirit or wraith. How dare they! Did they really think he had nothing better to do than some menial task and labour for some wannabe necromancer? Why, he oughta burn the thing and toss its ashes out the window.
Hearing the dull drips of water against the tarnished metal of his kitchen sink, he grumbled and put his focus back on the letter. A summoning was one of the few things that could get him out of the damned call center. (Literally, the entire call center was Damned.) If he went and did this... at least it would get him out of there for a few days. He wouldn't have to Becky standing around the bloodcooler and complaining about how Kyle had cheated on her for the seventy-third time this month. Nor would he have to deal with the complaints and wailing of the (literally) Damned customers on the other side of the phone for eight hours, broken up only by a single unpaid lunch break of a soggy sandwich that someone else had already eaten one half of.
Maybe... maybe he could do this. The damned letter didn't say the name of the summoner, of course. They never did. Something about diversity and fighting unfair biases in summoning the dead that the council had decided a millennium or so ago. Well, would it really be so bad? Paid leave back up in the surface world away from the dripping, away from the traffic, and away from Celestia-damned Becky.
Taking a deep breath, he lifted one hoof up to his pointed horn and slashed a small cut across his frog, cursing softly under his breath. That was going to sting so much for the next few hours when he walked on it. Pressing the soul-essence dripping cut against the paper, he signed across the line, and suddenly the idea of walking on his hoof didn't sound so bad.
Honestly, most things would sound much better than standing in the painful, blistering, scorching black flames that erupted from around him, consuming his ethereal form in a pillar of the Darkest fire.