Frey woke up in a crumbling hall of stone and dust, a splitting ache in his head. A dozen set of eyes were on him--eyes that were distraught and restless, eyes that quickly lost interest in him as he stood up, pushing his dead-heavy body up with quaking arms.

He stood among the crowd of a hundred people, maybe more, and all the faces he saw were nothing like each other: there were men and women, boys and girls, and they were all young, some barely in their adolescence, some nearing the end of or past their teenage years. Some were Caucasian-white, some African-dark, while others were copper-skinned and others still were yellow, the only thing they all have in common being the dumbfounded and clueless looks on their faces.

Vast, stone-vaulted ceiling hung thirty feet above them, webbed with thousand-year-old cracks and neglect. Golden daylight streamed in through the thousand arch windows lining the chamber's walls that circled them, giving the hall an old sepia hue. Frey heard whispers, cries of 'where are we' and 'what happened', and those who weren't darting their eyes across the hall nervously were pinching themselves back to reality.

"Excuse me, Mister." he felt a tug at his left sleeve. Frey turned around to see a short girl (she might've been close to his age, but she looked much, much younger) in a black minidress with a pleated skirt that stretched until above her knees.

"Yes?" he asked. She had silk-white skin, with flowing jet hair and bangs as flat as a plateau. Her eyes weren't any less black than her hair, and they were narrow at the corners, which might've told him all about her ethnicity.

"Do you know where this is?" she asked with a smile, like a lost tourist asking for directions, although she was too collected herself that he could've been the one asking her.

He shook his head. "No, I'm afraid we're all on the same boat here."

"I see." the girl sighed. "Thanks anyway, Mister...?"

"Frey. Frey Alcott." he replied.

"Mister Alcott. The name's Airi Ohara. Please remember it." the girl said.

"I'll try. Nice meeting you." he said, and the girl's face went dubious, almost cynical. "Is it? Is it nice meeting me? I think you are speaking too soon." She walked away and disappeared into the crowd, and Frey didn't know what she meant then.

"Weird girl." he muttered, looking at the direction the Asian girl, Airi Ohara, vanished.

In front of them was a circular stage of some sort, made from marble, but was far too weathered to be called majestic, elevated a good four feet from where they stood. At the center of the stage was a gargantuan archway, with runic characters carved along its craggy surface. The first time he ever really noticed it was when the people around him clamored and pointed at the arch. The runes from the edges slowly filled up with blue light that danced and swirled like smoke. This lasted for ten seconds, maybe more, and Frey could not help but gawk at the sight. Were they neon lights, he wondered, or LED lights behind a smoke machine.

Or perhaps it was something entirely absurd, like the fact that he's in a weird place suddenly, with a hundred people none of which he knows.

Like the fact that he completely had no memories as to how he got there, no matter how deep he dug in his brain?

When all the runes were filled, a cyclone of blue stars warped the insides of the archway, like the flat surface of a glass being distorted and deformed by intense heat. Everyone held their breath as they watched impossible happen.

When a figure stepped out of the typhoon of blue luminance beneath the archway, Frey swore they could have picked their jaw off the floor.

"Greetings, Players." the figure was a woman in a pitch-black ball gown accented by blood-red frills on the sleeves and bodice and skirt. She had flowing long platinum-gray hair, and was the prettiest woman Frey had seen, no matter how badly he didn't want to admit. But, as far as women's wiles go, it didn't distract him enough to miss what she just said.

"I am Victorina, and welcome to the Hall of the Lost. I guess this is what you call Purgatory back on Earth, though I assure you it doesn't work quite the way you think." Another round of whispers and exclaims swept the crowd, only to be extinguished when the woman, Victorina, laid down her next words.

"Before I explain to you this... unlikely predicament you are in, I feel it is my obligation to tell you all first one, most important truth." people held their breaths.

"All of you, are already dead."

The hall was grave-silent. Frey couldn't move. It was as if his body was an intricate sculpture of ice--static, stiff, cold.

The woman in the black-red gown glanced at him, and in the golden sea of her eyes he saw his life flashing before his eyes. He saw stars and skies and soul and death, his failures in life, successes and victories, the faces of the people he have met throughout his life and even some he haven't, or he couldn't remember. He saw everything, and at the same time he could commit nothing of what he saw into his memories, then with the shutting of the eyes his vision went black, and he remembered.