Inside the Ministry of Misplaced Souls

“Next, please,” a blue-skinned man announced in a tone that made abundantly clear he would rather be anywhere else than sitting behind his overly large white desk. The only decoration in the muted room was a single photograph of a tree hanging on the wall behind the receptionist. It was slightly tilted and off-center.

There were only two other people present to whom the receptionist could be speaking to, and they were very confused. They were both young adults, a man and a woman, who knew each other very well. They were both troublemakers of the classic variety who met in high school and almost instantly fell in love. They had been two peas in a pod ever since.

Neither had the wherewithal to understand their current circumstances, so they both stepped forward, hoping to get some answers. They didn’t know why they were here, nor even where “here” was. For another mystery, both had recent memories that were hazy at best, preventing them from figuring out where they both had just been moments ago.

The receptionist(?), mildly annoyed that both of them had approached at the same time, spoke again in that same bored tone from before, “Hello and welcome to the Ministry of Misplaced Souls.” It seemed clear to the pair that he was simply reciting a line he had spoken hundreds—if not thousands—of times before. “I regret to inform you, if you did not already know, that you have died.” His tone did not change even as he delivered this world-shattering news.

“What?” the man exclaimed, putting a hand to his forehead.

The woman simply gawked at the blue man before her.

“Indeed,” he nodded, the closest thing to sympathy that it seemed he could muster, “however, your consciousness has traveled across dimensions to this location. Soon, you will be allowed to enter one of the infinite number of afterlives that are linked to one of the infinite sapient-life-bearing planets across every possible universe in the multiverse. Your existence’s journey has only just begun.” Although this line was likely meant to be delivered in an enthusiastic and encouraging manner, it appeared these were not emotions this receptionist could conjure.

The pair, however, had not yet fully processed his previous statement.

“I’m dead? We’re dead?” The young man asked the receptionist, turning to look at his long-time girlfriend who was still simply standing and staring in shock.

The receptionist blinked, “Yes, we’ve already been over that. You wouldn’t be here in this room if you were not dead.”

“How did we die?” the woman finally asked.

“I don’t know, but we can find out pretty quick. You both being here means some sort of mix-up or intervention has prevented you from being in the afterlife you were supposed to. It’s my job to get this sorted out. Can I please have your names, home planet, and—if it is known to you—your universe’s identification number or UIN?”

At this point the rest of what the man said was crashing into them in waves. Sapient-life-bearing planets, plural? Every possible universe? There was more than one? Each one had an identification number? And not only was the afterlife real, but apparently there was also one for every single world that bore intelligent life.

The azure receptionist must have seen the confusion evident in their expressions, but his response revealed he had no idea what they were actually confused about, “Don’t worry, most people don’t know their UIN. I’m just required to ask because it would help me find your files faster.”

“We’re really dead?” the young man asked again, distantly.

“U-uh, well, his name is Alexander Grant III and mine is Arianna Finley,” the woman’s reply was shaky but only because so much of her worldview and outlook had just been shattered. Even the reality of her own name was being brought into question simply by association. “And we’re from Earth.” She followed up her response by grabbing her boyfriend’s hand and squeezing it gently but firmly.

The receptionist began typing on a keyboard beside him and looking at the monitor. He nodded, “Okay, since there are many different universes and a lot of them have versions of you two from Earth who might have died recently, I’ll need to ask a few questions that will help narrow down which one you come from.”

The pair shared an unsure glance but did not object. This seemed very important, Arianna reasoned that there would be time to have a mental breakdown later. Hopefully. By this point, Zander was slowly being brought out of his daze thanks in part to his girlfriend’s support.

“How many Koreas are there on your Earth?”

“Just two, a North and a South,” Zander replied.

“Is there a country or kingdom named England?”

“Country, yes,” Arianna answered this one.

“Does it reside on an island?”

Arianna blinked, “Uh, yes.”

“Are you familiar with a Kingdom of Alagadda?”

The name didn’t ring any bells for either of them. They shook their heads in unison.

“Does your world have legends of someone named Arthur Pendragon?”

“Oh, King Arthur? Yeah,” Zander nodded.

“Oh good, my next question was going to be whether or not he was a King. What’s the name of his weapon?”

“Excalibur,” Arianna smiled in spite of herself. Memories ran through her mind of a childhood spent reading Arthurian legends underneath the covers. She would illuminate the pages with a flashlight as the crickets chirped outside her window. This had a somewhat calming effect on her in the moment.

Zander, instead, was thinking of that one cool anime where Arthur was a cute girl and a bunch of other historical or mythical figures were also cute girls. This is what had a calming effect on him.

The man spent a few moments typing into his computer and clicking a mouse before announcing, “Okay, I think I have your files. Let me just confirm a few things to make doubly sure. You were both 23 at the time of your deaths, correct?”

They nodded. Their recent memories were still foggy, but general stuff like that was still available to them.

“You both flunked out of high school and had been jumping around various minimum wage jobs, correct?”

They nodded again; it was accurate enough. The truth of the matter was that they spent most of their school days playing elaborate but harmless pranks on their peers and teachers; and not much had changed in their adult lives. Most employers couldn’t stand to keep them more than two or three weeks.

“Okay these are definitely your files, then. It looks like there were a number of things that went wrong all in rapid succession. Chief among them being that either of you died at all.”

Arianna’s eyes widened while Zander’s narrowed.

“In fact, according to my system, you’re the only Arianna Finley and Alexander Grant III across all realities—in which you both exist—that died in exactly the moment you did. Evidently, it was sudden cardiac arrest.”

“A heart attack?” Zander asked. “We both died of heart attacks?” He found this to be very suspect. Admittedly, neither Arianna nor Zander took the best care of their bodies, but what were the odds that both of them would suffer a heart attack at exactly the same time? Then again, he supposed that those odds were definitely low, but not zero.

“Just really bad luck, then?” Arianna asked.

To their surprise, the blue man shook his head, “The reason you’re the only ones who died in exactly that moment is because one of our goddesses killed you both in an act of divine intervention.”

Zander had to make a mental effort to stop himself from being overwhelmed and shutting down again. So, on top of all the other things he had just learned about his reality, gods and goddesses apparently were real too and one of them was a murderer.

Arianna was compartmentalizing her instinct to be overwhelmed by the situation far better and asked the obvious question of why a goddess would want to kill them both.

The man shrugged indifferently, “File doesn’t say. It just says that Anterose did it. And if that’s accurate, it probably wouldn’t do much good to ask her directly either.”

“Why not?” Zander asked. He really wanted to know if this was some mistake.

The receptionist sighed, “Because she’s currently on a drunken binge that is likely to continue for a couple more centuries. It’s likely she doesn’t even remember why she did it.”

Arianna had difficulty parsing that, so she just moved on, “Okay, you said that a lot of stuff went wrong, what else is going on?”

“Well, upon your **** you were slated to go to an afterlife called Melfluere by divine mandate. In other words, one of the gods specifically requested that you be placed in an afterlife that isn’t connected to Earth, Melfluere is the afterlife of another planet called Halphor. It looks like this mandate was also from Anterose, and she specifically requested that you be placed in the Faerie Arts Academy,” then he added, turning a puzzled look to Zander, “an all-girls school.”

“There are schools in the afterlife?” Zander decided to tackle the most recent point. He put the important detail of Anterose being both responsible for his **** and responsible for this apparent mix-up in its own mental box for later use.

“In some of them, yes. Probably not like the schools you’re familiar with, these ones are basically just primers for Melfluere itself. The afterlife works a lot differently than the mortal realm, the movers and shakers of Melfluere try to get people adjusted to things before letting them loose into it.”

“Okay, and we’re divinely mandated to enter one of these schools?” Arianna couldn’t deny that the idea of going back to school had a lot of appeal. Not only was it a lot like an isekai anime, having to deal with adult life was miserable in spite of how much they tried to make it fun. The good old days of harmless pranks sounded like a pretty sweet afterlife to her. Being bisexual, the thought of such a school being filled with nothing but cute girls had its own appeal as well.

“Yeah, but there’s a problem. There’s a note here saying the Faerie Arts Academy only had two slots available and Anterose apparently already filled one of them a week ago with a guy named… ‘Mursky’? I bet she just forgot she did that. The point is, only one of you would be able to go there, the other would have to go elsewhere. That’s probably the actual reason you both ended up here, so we could work out which one of you is going.”

The pair looked at each other, their interlocked hands tightening around the other.

“What if we would prefer to be together?” Zander asked.

The receptionist sighed, but in a moment that proved he actually did have a heart somewhere in him, he said, “I hate to say it, but my hands are tied. I can tell that you both are close, but you’ll have to be separated for a while. The good news is that there’s nothing saying I can’t stick you both in Melfluere, and you’d both be able to leave and meet up after a week or so attending whatever school you end up in. The academies aren’t a hard requirement.”

The two looked between each other. Since the day they started dating they had been nearly inseparable. The idea of being away from each other in a strange foreign world was sort of scary. But if they had ****…

Suddenly, the man held up a finger and fished something out of the pocket of his white pants. It looked kind of like a phone, but it wasn’t plastic, in fact it looked like metal. He didn’t bring the device up to his ear, instead holding it out in front of him.

The pair watched in wonder as a transparent image, like a hologram, appeared above the “screen” of the device. The image that was displayed there just looked like a ball of purple flames about six inches wide. Arianna found it very pretty in an eerie sort of way. Zander just thought it looked cool.

“You have reached the Ministry of Misplaced Souls, this is Vardt speaking,” the receptionist greeted.

The hologram gave no reply, and yet Vardt responded as though it had, “What the—how did an abyssal find this number?” he went silent again. His eyes were narrowed in a suspicious sort of manner, but he was nodding along to words that apparently only he could hear. Arianna assumed the phone-like device could broadcast itself directly into the man’s mind. He didn’t have any earphones in, so she was struggling to figure out what else could explain it.

Zander was just confused. Arianna had always had the brains between the two. She often wondered how Zander managed to survive before they met. Then again, when he turned on the charm, he was genuinely really good at dealing with people. That probably helped.

“I see…” Vardt rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Yes, they’re here right now.” He glanced to the pair and then back to the image. “All right, I can’t believe that Anterose, even while drunk, would have agreed to that but… of course, yes… fine, goodbye.”

Before the image of the purple orb of flame disappeared, both Arianna and Zander heard a very sultry and feminine voice inside their heads.

I apologize on behalf of my deific friend for her rudeness. But her negligence has created an opportunity for not just me but for you two as well. My name is Ilvaneth, abyssal of the Moonlit Vale, the embodiment of lust and dark mischief, and you two are just my type.

Zander and Arianna both were mildly frightened and turned on by this sudden voice. They were also strangely comforted by it. Similar to the way they felt when they had first met each other, this entity, Ilvaneth, made them feel like they were in the presence of a kindred spirit. This thing, whatever it was, got them in a way that most other people didn’t.

I hear you’re having troubles getting placed into a decent school, and I have just the solution. I can see the value of having you both in the same place at the same time since you two are capable of great things when you’re together. I’d like to keep it that way, and I have just the perfect school for both of you to attend. A place where you can indulge in your wildest fantasies together, I only ask for one thing in return…

“And what’s that?” Arianna asked, intrigued but somewhat nervous.

Simple, I want you both to be my agents in that school, working together with a secret cultist of mine in order to convert the institution into a hall of hedonistic pleasure. A place of darkness and debauchery. In other words, I want you to turn the school into your own little slice of paradise. In return, you shall hold a place of honor within my domain once you graduate, and I will show you the true meaning of mischief and pleasure. How does that sound?

Zander and Arianna looked at each other and had largely the same thought. It sounded kinda risky but also delightfully devious. They also came to largely the same conclusion.

“We’re in,” they agreed in unison.

And then hologram image vanished along with the echoing sound of devious seductive laughter.

Vardt cleared his throat, “That was one of the abyssals, a demonic counterpart to the gods and goddesses.” Both Arianna and Zander added demons and demonic gods to their growing list of things that apparently existed.

“Should we be worried?” Zander asked.

Vardt shrugged his shoulders, “The abyssals are all schemers and dark dealers but out of all of them Ilvaneth is probably the most harmless. He’s not one to tell black lies, though, so if he promised you something you can probably be sure he’ll deliver. Despite being recognized as a goddess of mischief, he is surprisingly opposed to harmful deception.”

Both of the pair noticed the mixing of pronouns and gendered titles but didn’t comment. They were too new to all of this to know if that was normal or not.

“In any case, Ilvaneth has managed to convince Anterose to give another divine mandate,” Vardt said after a moment of silence.

“What’s the mandate?” Zander asked.

“Some physical and metaphysical stuff about your reincarnation into Melfluere, which you’ll have more time to find out about in a bit. But more relevant, the mandated school for you both to attend has changed. It’s now the Twilit Dragon Institute, a co-ed school.” As he said this, the receptionist seemed a little unsure of himself, like something was a bit awkward about this fact.

“What’s wrong?” Arianna asked, curious.

“Nothing wrong, just… odd. The student body of the Twilit Dragon Institute… don’t seem like the kind of people that Ilvaneth would be very interested in is all. A lot of pious religious types there.”

But of course, Arianna and Zander knew the reason for this, and it made perfect sense to them. What did slightly disappoint them was the co-ed status. The bountiful garden of an all-girls school was not a place for them to frolic in the end, instead that honor belonged to a guy named “Mursky”, apparently.

While they were both bisexuals, they also had similar tastes in men, the sort of guys who could easily and often be mistaken for girls. Zander had always been an exception to this otherwise ironclad rule for Arianna. Somehow, the possibility that some or even all of the boys attending the Twilit Dragon Institute were exactly the sort of guys they would be into hadn’t occurred to either of them in that moment.

“Well, anyway, I guess that just about wraps up your business in the Ministry of Misplaced Souls. I hope you enjoy the rest of your existence.” Vardt said, without even a shred of enthusiasm.

Before either of the pair could even think to respond, they were suddenly somewhere else entirely, and the strange blue man was just a figment of an already fading memory. But neither would forget the echoing dark laugh of their new patron, and neither would want to.