When I saw the building, still mounted on my bicycle I had a wave of deja vu. I'd never seen a building like it, and certainly not in the park, but maybe in a dream over the past year. There was an obvious entry facing me, wide enough for a double door but no actual doors in place. I felt like the building was important so I decided to carefully check it out.

I walked all around the structure, more or less a cube with ten meters to each side but found no markings or other entries. All straight lines with no seams of any kind. When I stepped inside there was a brief static feeling in the air, and after a hallway turning to the left there were stairs going down. I had a flashlight as part of my usual carry, but didn't need it. Four flights down, what would be two floors in a normal building, I found a large empty room as if the exterior walls had been extended straight down, and a single doorway, double-wide.

The room was well-lit but with no obvious source of light, and inside the doorway was filled with a slow moving pattern of light and dark like waves of water at the beach. Feeling brave, I approached and gently touched the pattern with an outstretched hand and just about pissed myself when a deep voice shouted at me from all around, making the floor vibrate with its power

WELCOME MASTER

Right? I got a little more from the voice, how it guarded a set of labyrinths, and it insisted that I owned the world, which is to say planet Earth. Then the portal threw some cards at my feet, they looked like playing cards printed on cardboard stock. Three had pictures of a jester, like they were jokers or wildcards and the fourth had a picture of a blonde man with a sword, perhaps a Jack but with no signature J and no sign of any suit. I stared at the last card for a moment before it disappeared and the man from the picture stood before me, introducing himself as Lance.

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Lance and I had a long talk, and evidently this is what happens when people die. Everyone else in the world goes away, or stays on their copy of Earth, or in their dimensional space, or however that works. Pets are linked to and stay with their owners but wild animals are copied over. And these labyrinths (also called dungeons) are some kind of afterlife proving ground. The cards are some kind of dungeon treasure. Beyond the doorway there are treasure objects I can take into the outside world, but cards are a kind of treasure that usually only manifest inside a labyrinth. The joker cards would each yield one random, low-level treasure if I focused on them. If Lance walked out of the building, he'd return to card form.

There are monsters in the labyrinth, and Lance's primary function is to be my bodyguard if and when I choose to explore. He assured me the first floor would be no problem, but each deeper floor held more powerful creatures. Also better treasure. And, I couldn't bring outside weapons into the dungeon. Past the glowing portal, any outside weapons would turn into cards and be restored only when I left. Outside protective gear was fair game.

There was no way I was going to try the dungeon unprepared, even if Lance could handle it, but before I left he urged me to explore my status. Just think the word "Status" with the intention to see your personal status information. It didn't work for me at all. New skills, even the Status skill he explained, take time and practice but I should get the hang of it after a few thousand attempts. That was a lot to take in, but at least it explains the bellybutton thing.