You have died.

I stared at the notification in front of me, hovering ominously in an otherwise pitch-black void.

What the fuck?

Seriously, what the fuck just happened, and what the fuck was happening now?

I had been on the subway, coming home from work. It was late, because we were all working overtime hours trying to meet our deadlines, and I was exhausted and hungry. I had just stepped out of the subway and started walking home when the stranger approached me. It hadn’t been so late that I was expecting to get mugged, but the man with the wild eyes demanding my wallet had other plans.

I was going to give it to him. Better my wallet than my life, right? Problem was, I was so sleep deprived and tired from work that I accidentally grabbed my phone instead of my wallet. I guess the mugger thought I was trying to call the police or something? That would have been a pretty dumb idea, but the guy clearly hadn’t been in his right mind.

So the fucker stabbed me. Right in the neck!

And then I guess I died. That was what the sign said, anyway.

You have died.

There wasn’t anything else except a small button underneath that said “Ok.” Like, ok, I was dead. I guess a “cancel” button would be asking a lot. Still, it took a certain mental fortitude to actually reach out and press the “ok” button.

It took me more than a few minutes to actually summon up the will to go ahead and press that button, let me tell you. Of course, before this, I would have told you that I didn’t think there was anything after death at all. An awkward notification about it was certainly not what I was expecting. The absurdity of it probably encouraged me to press the button more than anything else.

I pressed the button, and I was hit with a feeling of falling. It was like the feeling of going over the first crest of a roller coaster, the moment where the anticipation releases and the adrenaline kicks in, except it was many times more comprehensive. It wasn’t just a feeling in my gut, but in my whole being. My soul, I guess, since I was apparently dead but still experiencing… whatever this was.

The feeling came to a sudden end and I was awash in white light. I squinted at the overwhelming brightness as compared to the dark void I had just left. Was this Heaven?

Slowly, my eyes adjusted, and I started being able to make out what was around me and where I was.

My mouth dropped open a bit as I took in my surroundings. I was in a run-down waiting room, sitting in those cheap uncomfortable chairs that they always seemed to use. You would think that a space exclusively designed for people to sit and wait would use better chairs, but the budget was always more important than comfort, I guess. I glanced at my hand and saw that I was holding a ticket with a number on it. Well, calling it a number was generous. It was a whole mess of symbols, none of which I recognized, but when I looked up and saw the update board I saw similar symbols there.

I checked my ticket against the board and didn’t see my, uh, number there. I watched as what looked like a half-spade turned into what looked like a horseshoe, and felt some movement behind me.

I turned around and saw someone stand up to move past me and head up to a desk ahead. I started to look back at the update board before I did a double take and stared stupidly at the man as he walked past me. His skin was green, he had massive tusks sticking out of his lower jaw, and thick, pointy ears. Also, he must have been seven or eight feet tall.

I looked at my hands. Not green, still the same fleshy color I had always been. I glanced around the room discreetly to see who else was waiting near me.

The chairs seemed to extend off into an infinite distance on both sides of me, although there were only a dozen or so rows of chairs. I instantly thought that it was kind of weird to have such a long waiting area and not just have more rows of chairs. I couldn’t even count how many chairs were in a row since I couldn’t even see walls in either direction, and yet there were only… I counted it out, 11, 12, 13 rows. Why 13 rows? I looked ahead and saw the booths with little signs above showing more symbols, and administration of some type operating at each booth, all of which with a person standing on this side of the plexiglass-like barrier, seemingly communicating with the person behind. As I watched, a person at a booth popped out of existence, and the sign above the booth changed as the update board changed as well. Another person behind me stood and shuffled forward. I guess there were 13 rows because it seated the amount of people these booths could manage?

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

The word “people” here was doing some heavy lifting. The sizes and shapes of the things around me were varied and numerous. It was all so outside the ordinary for me that I couldn’t even process it well enough to start to describe what I was seeing in broad strokes. I ignored the rest when I realized there was someone sitting next to me, so I tried to study him from the corner of my eye.

He was large, for a human, but since he wasn’t human I had no idea if he was large or small for his kind. As for what his kind was, I couldn’t say. The green fellow who passed by me before looked more or less like an orc from some fantasy video game. This guy was gray, or rather, his skin looked like it was made of a multitude of pebbles instead of flesh. The stone shifted as he moved to scratch his groin, which was charming behavior for a public setting.

I braced myself, summoning up some nerves, and turned to speak with him. “What is this place?” I asked. Or at least, I tried to. No sound came out. The stone man looked at me, raised a gravelly eyebrow, then looked away while continuing to scratch himself.

I finally noticed that I couldn’t hear any conversations around me, nor the conversations at the booths ahead. There was just a dull hum. I looked up and saw fluorescent lights, which might have been the source of that. As I sat there, waiting, the hum became incredibly hard to ignore. I wondered why that sound wasn’t muted out as well.

Every now and then, a person would pop into existence in a chair nearby, and while it was frequent, it seemed to more or less keep pace with the people popping out of existence at the booths ahead. I started to get a sense of the symbols, which one came next in the sequence, as the board updated and new people moved up. At one point, a group of about twenty four-foot-tall creatures all popped into existence at once in a cluster of chairs nearby. They looked a bit like bipedal weasels. There was some angry gesticulating and a few resigned shakes of the heads as they settled in.

All around me were people in various emotional states. Plenty of anger, some sadness, a few in what seemed like complete shock, and every now and then I saw someone looking around in a state of confusion, like myself.

People-watching wasn’t really getting me anywhere, so I went back to studying the ticket board. I didn’t want to miss my number. If I was reading the symbols right, my turn would be up pretty soon.

I wasn’t sure how much time had elapsed since I had first got there—my sense of time felt a little funky in here—but eventually a number on the board appeared that matched my ticket. I stood up and checked the line of booths, searching for the one with my number, and spotted it ahead and to the right. I walked over and stood awkwardly in front of the plexiglass-like barrier.

Sitting at the booth behind the clear barrier was some kind of fairy or pixie, maybe two feet tall with iridescent wings. She was less Tinkerbell and more discount fairy godmother, old and wrinkled with her hair pulled into a tight gray bun. She had a nametag, which I couldn’t read since the letters were more nonsense symbols.

My ears popped and the little speakerbox mounted in the plexiglass crackled to life, the first thing I heard aside from void or hum since I, uh, died, I guess. “Xrtzzghorp,” the old fairy lady said.

“What?”

“Xrtzzghorp,” she said again, then pointed at my ticket. I slid it forward into the small tray which was the only opening in the barrier between me and the old fairy. She snatched it up and fed it into a slot which sucked the ticket up. The tray slot snapped shut and a blue window appeared in front of her, just off to the side. It floated in place, some kind of hologram maybe, and she glanced over it before tapping something on the screen.

“No language, weird. Is that better?” she asked. She had the voice of someone who had smoked for fifty years, but at least I could understand her words now. I nodded stupidly, not really sure what to say.

“All right,” she said with disinterest. “Employment or resurrection?” she asked.

“Uh, sorry, what?”

“Are you applying for employment, or resurrection?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, entirely overwhelmed.

The old fairy lady—oh, I could read her nametag now. Her name was Fefferlem. Fefferlem rolled her eyes a bit but started scanning through the screen again, then frowned slightly. “Ah,” she said after a moment. “Your souldebt has been purchased by the Parxathlem Corporation. Welcome to the Parxathlem family. Looks like you’re from… Earth?” she said, pronouncing it ee-arth. “Never even leveled up. Are you some kind of baby?”

I frowned. “No, I… I’m an adult.”

“That’s what I thought this said, but then why are you level 0?”

“I, uh, I don’t know what that means.”

She squinted at the screen and frowned while reading some more. Then she leaned back. “Gladyx, what’s the deal with this fellow from Ee-arth?” she shouted over her shoulder into the white mist behind her.

A person-shaped red dragon stepped out of the mist behind Fefferlem. “What’s the problem?” she asked the fairy.

“I’ve got a level 0 Ee-arthanoid here,” she said. She leaned back a bit. “Seems a bit slow,” she whispered, although not so quiet that I couldn’t hear her.

“Ee-arthan–ah, an Earthling. Right, I’ll take him in my office,” she said, turning away. “Can’t believe this clusterfuck,” I heard her mutter as she wandered back into the mist.

“Right,” Fefferlem said, turning back to me. “Sending you up the chain.”

She tapped a button, and I was falling through the void again.