The two men entered a long hallway. The door they had entered from was located at one end, with doors of many colors along both sides stretching farther than Dix could see. As soon as the door closed behind him it promptly vanished, exposing the other half of the endless corridor of doors. Dix wasn’t all that bothered by this latest surprise, after all he’d died, become not dead, met a couple gods, got some weird healing thing, and now there was an endless corridor. At this point it was pretty much par of the course. The only thing that made sense here, was that nothing made sense. Trying to apply logic here would make him crazy, so he let it go. At least this hallway wasn’t made of that same everything eating existence as the walls in the room had been. Turning back, he hurried to catch up to Crossroads, who hadn’t stopped walking, or talking.

“While we walk I will give you the short version. I’m responsible for those that die. Call me what you will, I really don’t care. Father Time, George, Asshole, whatever. There are a lot of different gods here, and none of them are the ones you heard of on Earth. This isn’t the afterlife. You’re on a different world. We call it Mantra. And no, we haven’t summoned you to kill the demon lord. Apparently that’s the most common question the people of your world ask, although I have no idea why.” With that he turned to look at Dix, catching him trying to open one of the doors in the hall. It wasn’t the first door he’d tried, and just like all the others the door and handle seemed to be made of a single piece of whatever it was, meaning the handles didn’t budge at all. With a sigh, Crossroads reprimanded him, “Stop that. They only open for the gods. They might as well be sculptures for you. You’d better hope you were paying attention, I won’t be repeating myself.”

Dix laughed good naturedly, “No worries, big guy, I caught it all. And the demon lord thing comes from a bunch of made up stories people read for entertainment back home. But that does bring up an interesting point. Why am I here?”

The god grunted, then continued the journey and explanation. “As I was saying, you are on a different world. This world, Mantra, it’s not like your world. There are a number of different species of sentients that have made their homes here, but they all have one thing in common: none of them started here. Mantra is basically a big beach where all the refuse of the galaxy washes ashore from everywhere. Refugees, criminals, victims, warlords, winners, losers. It doesn’t matter what the circumstances of their ancestors were, in the end it all comes down to the fact that they were lost, and Mantra is their new home. Even most of the gods were brought over the same way, so don’t let the rest of those prima donnas tell you otherwise.”

He paused briefly to make sure Dix was still following and had stopped trying the doors before continuing. “Normally we would get a wide diversity of beings, but for quite some time now the only race we’ve picked up has been humans. And let me tell you, your species is full of worthless assholes. Originally, the vast majority of them refused to integrate and ended up dead through a severe case of the stupids. Those that did integrate, we tried to get them to work for us doing tasks, and for those that succeeded we returned them to Earth. Most failed miserably. Eventually we made a few changes that have allowed humanity to stop throwing themselves onto everyone else's swords. Mostly. It’s a work in progress.” Abruptly, he stopped and turned, leaning against the door jamb of a nearby door that was gleaming an eye watering shade of pink. Other than the material and color, it looked to be exactly the same as all of the other doors they had passed. In fact, Dix was sure that they had passed this headache inducing door at least three times, at least once on the opposite side of the hall. Crossroads was eyeing him thoughtfully, so he pretended he cared. In reality, Dix thought he had at least a small idea of what might be going on here.

Role playing games weren’t exactly a new idea now, but they were a pretty crazy idea when they first showed up. And a number of people who contributed to the rise of the RPG genre were rather odd. Maybe some of those that went back had something to do with it. Combine it with all of the alien abduction stories and the crazy blue light of the transfer that led to his own death, and it almost made sense. Well, not sense, but at least it was plausible enough to start building a hypothesis around. If nothing else, he was going to run with the idea that whatever happened around here was similar to role playing games, and pretend he didn’t need to ask a lot of questions. Even if it was because he didn’t think anyone would answer any.

To Dix’s surprise the next thing the god of the Crossroads asked was, “Questions?” What followed immediately after was less surprising, however. “I said questions, but you only get one. After that you go to the tutorial. We borrowed some ideas from your world to try and keep some of you alive.”

Dix’s mind spun for a moment while he tried to think of a useful, single question. Something that wasn’t so vastly scaled that it would irritate the god in front of him, nor inane enough to be pointless. Briefly he was tempted to ask about the Crossroads this being was the god of, then quickly changed his mind. When the next question he thought of was, What’s the tutorial like, he went back to his previous one. Just before he opened his mouth however he looked the god straight in his strange eyes and had a bit of an epiphany.

This was fairly common for Dix. All his life his subconscious did most of the work for him. During his school years all he would do during class was read, flirt, and sleep. He never did homework or studied, and never cheated, yet he still managed to get a ninety five percent or better on every test he took. Barely awake and still drunk from a night of partying he managed to miss a total of forty points on his SATs. So when an idea popped into his head he went with it. Always. There was no second guessing, no checking his work. Dix was a man who trusted himself implicitly, and had a great deal of experience to prove that faith was true. And even facing death, a new world, and gods, Dix never wavered.

“Let’s see. You’re the God of the Crossroads, and responsible for the dead guy. Would I be correct in saying that the crossroads are life and death crossed with chaos and order, and bound by time?” His thoughts following this statement were, Awesome, I shocked a god. That hadn’t exactly been his plan, but getting it right was. Hopefully, Crossroads would offer a tidbit of information on something important for figuring out what his responsibility was.

When Crossroads recovered from his shock, he gave Dix an evaluating look. I knew this human was different, but this is something else. “How’d you come to that conclusion? Most people seem to think it's Good vs Evil, or Light vs Dark. And no one mentions Time.”

Dix smiled again. “Good and evil are moral constructs, not absolutes. People think there is this all encompassing law that dictates what is good and what is evil, but they don’t realize it’s all in their heads. The society that people live in dictates this. The Mayans thought it was good to carve out their hearts and offer it to their gods. Americans think it’s ok to send their army to rob countries of their oil, but wrong to rob a liquor store. Communists charge the families of people they executed for the bullet they used to do so. Morals don’t have to make sense to other societies, just the ones that they are applied to. And being raised in a society is how you are indoctrinated to these morals. People only break away from this after contact with different morals and societies.” He stopped there as this was supposed to be resulting in a reward, not a discussion on how people are sheep.

Crossroads actually seemed a little anxious, but still pressed Dix to continue, “Yes, yes. And the rest?”

Dix kept his smile to himself, but expanded on his thoughts nonetheless. “Calling something just Light and Dark leaves out the existence of shadow, which is a necessity when discussing the topic of either. With three different aspects of the same thing, you can’t get a straight line out of it. And your eyes being a cross wrapped in a circle is a bit of a give away for how things are arranged. As for time, it's the only transition that makes any sense. I guess it could be space, but that seems a stretch, even if they are essentially the same thing. So if, as a god, you are the embodiment of some sort of absolute concept, then these are the only options that make sense. However, if you are just the embodiment of what a certain grouping of people think, much like I assume that lovely lady earlier was the embodiment of Beauty for some people, then there’s no way I would be able to figure that out. People rarely apply logic and reason to the things they want to believe in. And people are idiots, so they’ll believe whatever someone tells them to.”

For a moment Crossroad’s brow scrunched down in thought, before his expression brightened again. Then he looked closely at Dix, narrowing his eyes, studying him. Searching for some sign that explained why this strange human was the way he was. “You’re an odd one aren’t you? I might need to keep an eye on you.” He stared for a bit longer, while Dix calmly gazed back, trying to keep his rising excitement to himself.

“For advice, you have three tests coming your way after the tutorial. Try to figure out what is really happening with them, and when they are over we’ll have a chat about it. Do that and I’ll help you out a bit for the transition. From this point on the rest of the gods will be watching your every move and thought, so try and keep our affiliation and your thoughts on the tests away from them. Don’t worry, most of them are idiots. Keep your wits about you, and you’ll do fine.” Then with a very evil smile he added, “Enjoy the tutorial.” With that he pushed the pink door open. As though the door was a portal to a black hole, Dix was yanked off his feet and through the opening with no chance to resist.

The next instant he became aware he was sitting in what appeared to be a classic school room. Black board, fluorescent lighting, and those horrible chairs with the desk attached to them. There was even what appeared to be a hamster cage off to one side, and a fish tank to the other. Neither had anything alive in them, but the fishtank still had water. Dix himself was actually stuck in one of the desk seats. Even the chairs used in high schools usually fail to contain an actual adult properly, but the ones in this room were made for middle school kids at best, and Dix was quite a bit larger than that. With a bit of struggle he managed to pry the desk off his hips as he stood and surveyed the room. If Crossroads was still watching, and who’s to say he wasn’t, he would have had a huge smile on his face from seeing the look of abject terror the human was wearing at the moment his eyes found the tutorial guide. Isn’t there anything from Earth that they could borrow that’s better than this? Surely we managed to make something better in the last 20 years? Kill me now. At this point he was basically begging anything that could listen in to his thoughts to save him from what he knew was coming.

The tutorial guide was the living embodiment of the most evil existence ever brought to mankind by video games. A fairy. And not just any fairy, a very particular one. Spawned from a great game whose only real downsides were the stupid horse, and the fairy god mother of hate. Two pairs of wings, shaped and patterned like a dragonfly’s but clear of all color, adorned what was presumably the back of a glowing, blue, ball of light. No other features were visible at all. No legs, arms, torso, or head were visible. The ball itself was perhaps three inches in diameter, with the wings being six in height, and double that in wingspan. The irritating thing was erratically bobbing and darting around at the front of the classroom above a large desk. Dix’s palms were itching to get ahold of one of those electrically powered fly swatters. The ones that look like a tennis racquet, and treat annoyances the same way the electrical chair does, but with more exploding things.

Suddenly the ball whirled into a high speed turn, seeming to ignore things like gravity and friction, and shot straight at Dix. He didn’t even have time to dodge before the tiny projectile came to a dead stop right in front of his eyes. There was still no telling if there was any sort of body within the light, which was oddly comforting to Dix. Shortly a voice that was a dreadful mixture of nails on a chalkboard mixed with that high, too loud squeal of microphone feedback came from the ball and drove a headache straight between Dix’s eyes. “Hi there! I’m Tuti! I’m so glad you’re here! We’re going to be the bestest friends! It’s been so long since I had someone to teach! Sit down and let’s get started!” If the high pitch, and scratchy rasp of its voice wasn’t bad enough, it had enough exuberance to scare a pack of 5 year old princess wannabes away from any princess sighting at that hellhole people think is a happy place. This was going to be worse than he thought.

Apparently there would be some sort of status menu that he could access at some point. That point being when he eventually made it to Mantra proper. Right now he was in some sort of weird pocket realm that the gods maintained for reasons unknown. The system itself worked about how he’d expected as soon as it had been mentioned by the cheerful sadist. Think about your status and it will appear. Same with skills, spells, and gear. There were however a number of differences from what he had experienced gaming before. There were no inventory, maps, quests, pet status, or even contacts for people you know. At least not to start with. Also things like Identify, or enemy health bars, heck even your own health bars. Evidently it costs the gods too much to give this to everyone, so it has to be earned. Not that the lightbulb of doom would tell Dix anything about how to do that. Nor would she tell him much of anything really.

About the only other piece of information she gave Dix was what was coming for him next. Right now he couldn’t see, use, or access the system in any way because he didn’t yet have it. The reason for this was that people coming to this world need to be trained and tested first to allow the gods to initialize the system with the proper values, skills, and stats. According to her this was all about fairness. The people already on this world grew up with the system, and as such have already earned their stats and skills, and have been working on them their whole lives. Therefore, the incoming people needed some way to advance their currently nonexistent skills, so first they would be introduced to different weapons, crafts, and magics. After that was survival training. Also known as combat. All perfectly safe of course because they won’t let people die until they were ready. But pain? Oh pain is an excellent motivator and teacher, so of course the gods still let people feel that.

Dix tried, he really did, but after ten minutes he was struggling to see. After twenty he was bleeding from his ears. After thirty his eyes. After the half hour mark the reality of the situation set in. Yes, she was trying to explain things that might save his life, but she was literally killing him in the process. And he was already dead. Something needed to be done. First he tried asking questions, but they all got the same answer of, “Don’t worry, sweetie, I’ll tell you all about it when we get down to Mantra.” This vicious thing seemed to think it was going with him, and that absolutely could not happen. Then he tried begging to be released, but the incarnation of hatred just laughed like he made the funniest joke ever. Finally, just as he was resigning himself to suicide by smashing his head down eyeball first onto a pencil, he spotted salvation.

By this time the angel of torture had decided he was furniture, alighting on whatever part of him it decided would be most comfortable as Dix paced the room like a caged tiger. The Death Sprite didn’t even notice when Dix made a beeline for the last hope of sentient life everywhere. As he approached deliverance he held his hand out palm up in front of him, and the vile luminescence buzzed over to its favored perch, screeching all the way. Just as it was alighting on his palm, he quickly flipped his hand over and bashed the hateful spark straight into the fishtank. Before it could make any response, he tossed a desk on top of the tank, and followed it with everything heavy he could find in the room. It turns out that drowning pixie makes a very relaxing sound, even more soothing than those white noise generators people use to help them sleep. Dix stretched out on the floor, waiting for his headache to pass, relaxing to the sounds of the dying pixie. When it finally stopped making noise a peaceful smile graced his lips for five minutes before his expression turned quizzical. Now that the incarnation of irritation was dead, how was he supposed to get out of here?