The two players walked past the rickety bridge and walked into the empty streets of the city. A lot of tiny streets and alleyways were starting to encroach their view as the visage of the beach was left behind and replaced with long, thin sidewalks. They stretched into the morass of tall glassy skyscrapers and rows of empty apartment buildings, stores, and cafes.

"I didn't see you at the Vargas afterschool party. We had a dance battle and everything that night."

Tyler rolled his eyes and forced out an exasperated smile. For some reason this girl really loved to ring in the past. All this happened three years ago. He was a different kind of person back then. Younger, dumber, cooler. Cooler because he was careless. So perhaps cooler was an understatement. "Sou mais do tipo de pessoa que joga futebol. Sorry sis."

Braxxie snorted allowing the front of her teeth to widen. "You've got to be joking. What kind of Brazilian doesn't like to party?"

"What kind of Brazilian doesn't like football?"

"I never said I didn't."

"Você e um pe no saco. Sure you didn't."

They both stared at each other in the eye and held in their inflated laughter.

To replete his hungry curiosity about what went on inside the buildings, Tyler slipped behind a European-styled awning and entered a tiny glass door. The cafe was riddled with empty mahogany chairs and round tables. There was no one standing at the register, but just as he was about to leave, a bright beam of a hologram flickered into the air.

It was an employee, but she wasn't dressed in a hat and apron. She was naked and had a slim face. Her forehead had been branded with the bloody anarchy symbol and she smiled at Tyler. But there was something behind that smile...

"Hello, would you like to order anything? I'm sorry, você fala português?" The woman had really shiny, glittery skin, perfect teeth, and a curvy pale body with protruding breasts. But before Tyler could be turned on he saw a red glare blink into her brown eyes.

"Não, obrigado." Tyler vanished behind the glassy frames. Braxxie stared curiously after him as they continued their purple-like expeditious excursion.

After walking for a few more sweltering minutes, Tyler and Braxxie arrived at a massive, elephantine four-columned marble museum. It held a wide rectangular slab of rock that was inscribed with the words "Museum of Spirits." There was a strange glowing presence about the building and the longer Tyler stared at it, the more he felt like there were more than just bones and antiquated paintings in there.

Tyler and Braxxie looked at each other and burst into inflated snickers. They climbed up the slick glossy marble steps and opened the wide-framed doors. A second later they found themselves gazing at a vast darkened, looming hallway. As if the bloody ink black night had taken a leisurely stop in the establishment and stood unresisting until the end of time. The lightless museum was redolent of some forbidden spiritual sanctum found in the murky woods of a Romanian village.

The air breathed of steaming black smoke and the noxious smell of bleeding black roses. As they walked down the whispering derelict hallway, they witnessed stands of cryonic glass tubes carrying what appeared to be humans but turned out to be AIs by the way they twitched and their bodies convulsed, sending a type of mechanical squeal through the dead, heartless light. Passing that display they witnessed a new one of large floating crystal balls, resting on tall erected black podiums. But fraught inside the balls weren't the accompanying purple gas or a fuming prophecy, but instead a bright dancing picture show of orange flames. And inside those flames were wispy amorphous smokes of faces. Tormented faces. They burned and boiled like a barbecue of living hogs. Their fists clanged inside the crystal ball but they couldn't seem to escape.

"Please, Please! Get me out of here! It's so hot!" The players cried in a unified torment of echoes.

"Take me to my parents. Take me back home to earth. I don't want to burn here forever!"

Tremulous, Tyler stared closely into the taut miserable faces. He recognized a few of them. They were some of the players he had come out with from the arena when the game had first started. Some of them were Brazilian. He had gotten their names. He considered some of those faces friends. Could it be, Tyler gulped, that he would end up here when he died?

Braxxie moved in closer to him, wrapping her arms around his waist. "Tyler, we really shouldn't be here."

But Tyler wasn't listening to her cold, trembling words. Instead, he found something red and sparkling straight ahead. A strange fey of humming began to linger in the air as he inched closer. "Look, another orb," Tyler pointed.

"Tyler!" Braxxie cried, hapless tears tricking down her soft rectangular face. "Você nunca ouve?"

Tyler stared, a plaintive yet determined light creeping up on his face. "Eu sei, mas ouca I have to know what secrets this building holds."

"No, you don't! Why are you so attracted to death?"

But Tyler snubbed her rebuke and plowed on forward until his feet froze at the large red, sparkling orb. It had dancing fumes inside but there were no faces or anything redolent of anything animated. Just like the rest, it stood on a podium but it was surrounded by tiny inverted headstones of crosses. And behind the large scarlet glass orb was a proud headstone of a lofty inverted cross. Epitaphs of names were debossed on this massive headstone before it vanished. Then more names appeared.

The bloody red crystal ball began to shine brightly and before Tyler knew it he found himself being introduced to a distorted film of a temple on a bright sunny day. Braxxie grazed his shoulders, staring curiously into the orb.

A tall, handsome blonde young man appeared angrily out of the temple, followed by his legions of followers dressed in flashy white togas. Hanging grandiloquently behind those togas where a magnificent sight of feathery white wings.

"Who is he to conscript ordinances on how to run the fashions of men?" the young blonde man shrilled indignantly. "Enlighten me, Samuel."

The other handsome man beside him with long flowing midnight hair scowled in silence. "If I could encroach, Lucifer, it would seem he is the Lord, after all. Creator of the universe. Though jaded from his abundance in power, we may have to submit to his emblazoned regime."

"Some universe," one of the men called out in a contemptuous snort. "What universe is in vogue where one can't democratize his desires? I will not be enlisted into this blind, robotic regime. Lucifer, my enlightened master, why don't you take over?"

Lucifer snorted. "Have we not attempted that you fool? Do you see it so simple a task to excrete the existence of men? No, for once, we must humble ourselves in the face of logic and get to work on our owned fashioned palace. We must get to work on our own regime. We will go to earth, where we have been so tastelessly banished to, and begin to work on our kingdom. And then I will fashion a game that will feed the tantalizing pits of children, lure them in, and make waste of them in my House. And in mercurial taste, we will call this game Chaos."

"Ingenious," purred Samael.

"But we toil among the denizens of flesh!" One of the angels called out.

"Yes, but flesh with desire. Smart desire. This is what separates these animals from the true beasts of the earth."

The orb began to whirr away and suddenly Tyler found himself staring out into the simple red gas.

An irksome hand was tugging his shirt. "Wh-what?" Tyler shouted, eyes watered.

"T-Tyler..." Braxxie whispered desperately.

"What!"

"Oh, you'll soon find out what my dear pawns," a dark growling voice scratched the air. "Having ourselves a little treat are we?"

Tyler whipped around and found himself face-to-face with a pack of large black wolves. Their eyes glowed hellish red and there was a brazen contour of blue on their furs.

"Wh-who the hell are you guys?"

The boldest and scruffiest of the wolves extended its bloody yellow teeth. Its gleaming paws made a propulsive edge forward. "We're the Police."