Mike floated aimlessly in what seemed like an endless expanse of white space as he considered his current predicament. He really hoped he hadn't just made a huge mistake. On the one hand, he was dead, which definitely sucked. He had more than a few regrets and there was a lot of stuff he never got around to doing while he was alive. He was pretty sure his friends and co-workers would miss him and he hoped whoever ended up with his possessions was kind enough to delete the browser history on his computer, but he supposed that in the grand scheme of things it wasn't really that important now that he had passed on.
On the other hand, at least he still existed. Mike hadn't really been expecting any kind of afterlife so the fact that he was still able to think and feel at all was a huge plus. And getting to live in magical world while being given godlike powers seemed like he had really hit the jackpot as far as afterlives go. The expanse of white space he found himself in was disconcerting, but the Goddess he had just spoken with seemed nice enough and hopefully this was all just part of the process and not some sinister trap.
After his untimely death the Goddess Cali brought Mike's soul into this space and explained the situation to him. A long time ago civilization on the world of Calimandao (literally translated as "The World of Cali" or "Cali's World") began to stagnate. Her people had not advanced technologically or culturally in a very long time and didn't seem to have any motivation to advance further or continue the march of progress. In an effort to help fix this, the Goddess Cali began a project which came to be known as the Age of Dungeons. Every three months she would select a random soul from a myriad of other worlds, give them limited access to her divine power and charge them with the task of building a Dungeon on her world. Each Dungeon would feature trials and challenges based on the Dungeon Master's original world, and would offer knowledge and resources copied from those worlds as a rewards for those who challenged them.
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By the time Mike had been selected the Age of Dungeons had been going on for a few hundred years, and Cali offered him the same choice she offered all the other souls that came before him. He could live again as a Dungeon Master on Calimandao and be granted a fraction of her divine power, or he could be sent back to whatever afterlife was supposed to await the people of his world. Since neither he nor Cali knew for sure what normally awaited the souls of Earth when they passed on, he chose to accept her offer.
Cali thanked him and welcomed him to her world. Then she handed him three crystals and a large book, said she would let him 'figure things out from there' and vanished, leaving him alone in the seemingly endless expanse of white space.