An autistic man who routinely plans his conversations well in advance decided to ditch the habit of a lifetime “to see what it was like”, landing him in a Biblical underworld of Christian hell, sources have revealed. 

Lloyd Didcot, 32, took the unusual step to not carefully prepare a mental script for his coffee order last Friday and, subsequently, experienced the actual, literal torture of eternal damnation for about five minutes in his local Costa.

Didcot said: “It was horrible! Normally I make sure to know exactly what I’m going to say. I even sketch out a quick probability tree of potential responses, just so I don’t get caught out, but for some reason I decided ‘what the hell!’, and didn’t even think about the tone in which I was going to say ‘hello’. Before I knew it, I was surrounded by fire and brimstone. I don’t even know what brimstone is!”

Barista Kit McGodden, 24, commented: “One minute he was standing there, and then there was a sort of ‘poof’ noise, a smell of sulphur, and he’d vanished! Five minutes later, he reappeared, looking slightly singed and muttering something about the thermostat being set to a billion degrees.”

Scientists are unsure what caused the incident, but have speculated that, by not carefully figuring out what to say to other people well in advance, Didcot was briefly transported to another dimension of endless torment, where capering demons tortured him with pitchforks and memories of what went down at his 13th birthday party. 

Satan, 13,000,000,000, was not surprised Didcot’s sudden appearance. “This happens every now and again,” he said. “Autistic people think they can freestyle a conversation, and bam! Here they are, forced to watch every social interaction they’ve ever flubbed, like the time Didcot said ‘yike’. That’s right, just the one ‘yike’.”

”He’ll be back for good soon, though,” Satan added, “because of that one time he put a glass bottle into the regular bin instead of the recycling.”

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