There's such a rancid, forceful sense of wasted energy in the room, that the whole thing can, if played ever-so slightly wrong, descend into a hellishness each and every participant a player in a drama that becomes devilish through sheer bloody-minded mundanity.
The gifted Robbie Williams left Take That to become a devilish pop star; in 2010, the band reunited with Williams, recording a remarkably successful album called "Progress".
As corruption increases, the Overlord's armour will become more devilish with horns protruding out of the back, shoulders, elbows and knees and he will acquire a black aura.
It was 1995 and Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema had just launched the Security Administrator's Tool for Analysing Networks.1 SATAN, as it was to become known, was a devilish tool indeed.
TO the knotty complications that have helped make the India-Pakistan face-off over Kashmir the world's scariest crisis, the United States' war on terror has become yet one more devilish twist.
He fared less well in the following century: his book, banned in France by a zealous church for whom doubt was now devilish, became a primary inspiration for English writers as diverse as Laurence Sterne, Isaac Walton, Alexander Pope and William Hazlitt.
It all goes to show just how devilish the details have become as astronomers close in on the goal of finding Earth-like planets.
But with each additional detail that Nasdaq has provided about the plan, the more devilish some investors think it has become.
After crackdowns in California and Texas, the 261 miles of devilish desert border along Arizona has become the nation's busiest area for illegal crossing over the past five years, officials said, describing it as the bottleneck of human smuggling in the Western Hemisphere.
Writing in the mid-sixties, John Updike appeared irritated that Vladimir Nabokov, rather than extending his identity as an American writer by "composing the delightful, devilish, and unimaginable successor to Pale Fire", had become consumed in the backward-looking endeavour of translating his "minor" Russian works.
