|| …assah, mommy will be right back… ||

My heart rattles inside of my chest like a bolt of electricity striking a conduit. 

Did my heart just skip? 

That’s new. It’s never felt like that before. It’s so strong…

While I grip at my heart I catch sight of my surroundings. 

I find myself sitting at a black table with an empty seat in front of me. The room is rectangular and the walls are a yellow-beige color. Feeling the need for a body check, I pat around my body and find that I’m still wearing my jeans, bomber jacket, and shirt from this morning. I breathe a sigh of relief that I haven’t been messed with. I even reach around for my curly dark hair to make sure it wasn't cut, but everything is in order just as I was when I left the house today. 

Rectangular room.

Yellow-beige walls. 

Am I in a waiting room?

Upon examining the walls, I’m left with a different answer. On the walls opposite of each other are pictures that are moving.

To my left is a picture of a wooden ship, of Fortunian-make, sailing on what I could only guess to be the Hoam Sea on a dark stormy night. As I stand up to get a closer look I hear a faint, low rumbling of thunder as the dark sky flashes. There’s another painting next to it of a sprawling forest clearing like a sanctuary. The trees that lined the clearing are in their autumn phase with leaves of various yellows, reds, and oranges. My cheeks feel the breeze coming out of the clearing just as the tree branches wrestle and the leaves dance. 

On the opposite wall, to the right of the table, is a photo of 2 mugs on a circular wooden table lit by some unseen spotlight above. The 2 cups steam away constantly with hot ghostly clouds rising out of them.

Are these pictures theirs? 

This isn’t any ordinary place. Who could possibly possess enough influence or money to have not just 1 but 3 of what could only be The Host of Passion’s paintings? And, to have them in such a small boring room like this… Usually if someone had a collection like this, they’d put it in a room like a museum or place them somewhere with a grander significance placed on them to brag about their wealth. But to have it in a meager looking room like this… 

I slowly walk back towards the table to lean on it and face towards the far wall that doesn’t even have a door. 

Where the heck am I?

A shockwave of pain shoots through my head and my heartbeat quickens as I try to recall how I got here. A vague veil of fear covers any stray memories of how I got here. 

With an endless stream of questions assaulting my brain, I turn behind me to the window to get at least one question answered. 

I go around and look out to see something I’ve only learned about either through my legend history class or through my family’s ramblings about the afterlife.

On a hill stands a giant golden gate sparkling under a deep cotton-candy purple, red, and blue sky. 

This can’t be happening…

My eyes trace a pathway from the hill down to the base of the building I’m in. 

Trying not to freak out, I frantically look around the area outside to look for answers elsewhere. My eyes retrace the pathway to a diverging section that leads around the giant golden hill and farther back toward a smaller and a less grandeur-silver gate. It shines brightly too but it looks more the size of a two-door garage compared to the ridiculous gargantuan size of the one on the hill. It’s silver instead of gold, but the brilliance seems more robust and genuine than the bigger gate. The path to it also seems to narrow thinly as well due to it being less traveled.

Two knocks emanating from the blank wall in the front of the room tears my eyes away from the gates. Wondering where the knocks could have come from, I scan the far wall closely; it was missing a door after all. My eyes are drawn to a single white dot in the middle that I hadn’t noticed before. 

Just then, the dot grew larger and larger until a white door formed. But the door isn’t what surprised me the most in the past 5 minutes. It’s the person who walked through the door who is the real surprise, because—

My heart skipped a beat.

A woman in an all black suit walks in with a clipboard and a pen. 

“Sorry I’m late, I had to hunt down your file. It wasn’t on the 4th like usual. I even had to coordinate with PURG to find it.”

The clack of her shoes did little to ease me of the heavy weight of tension pressing against the back of my mind. And it didn’t help that the door soon changed back into a dot on the wall after she closed the door.

She takes a seat in front of me and then motions for me to sit too. As I approach she flips through the papers on her clipboard. 

“Happy moment!” She says, breaking the silence.

Still staring in disbelief I manage to say, “Umm.. hello…”

“My name is Jessica, and I’ll be taking care of you for this moment.” She stops flipping through the papers and finally looks up, letting the stack fall back to the first page. 

As silence overtook the room I was able to gather my thoughts and ask, “Where am I?”

“I’ll get to that, but first, can you tell me your name, please— for the record.”

For the record? What the…?

“Just who are you? Where am I? And what is this place?” I reply without yelling. 

She fiddles with a few pages, “Well, you should already know. We humans are governed by those who were raised by the heavens.”

“You can’t be serious?”