hell high school
grades: 8 - 12 mascot: hellhound 🐺 colors: black and crimson motto: ignis in tenebris ("light in the darkness")
hell high school sits just up the slope from hell's cove community college, perched on a low bluff that lets the football field overlook the water. the school serves the entire town, making it the place where children of every family from every neighborhood come together under one large roof. the building itself is a mid-century sprawl of red brick and long hallways, half-renovated in places and crumbling in others, with a proud but fading banner that reads home of the hellhounds.

the campus is notorious for its sprawling maze of hallways, rumored to have been added on piecemeal over the decades, so freshmen often get lost on their way to class. stories circulate about a "ghost hallway" that doesn't appear on the blueprints but shows up late at night. teachers brush it off as urban legend, but janitors have quit mid-shift claiming they found themselves trapped in looping corridors.

hell high's sports teams are fiercely supported, though their win record is mediocre at best. the real competition is for the annual spring festival, when each grade decorates a float for the town parade. seniors swear the winning class never graduates without some kind of curse falling on them. the last five graduating years can point to accidents, illnesses, or scandals that "proved it."

the library doubles as the school's unofficial archive, stuffed with yearbooks dating back to the 1920s. some have pages mysteriously missing, and one yearbook from 1966 reportedly shows faces of students who never existed. despite these unsettling quirks, hell high is a source of pride for the cove--its murals painted by shady canyon artists, its science fair projects often guided by the community college faculty, and its classrooms filled with kids whose families have shaped hell for generations.