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Author's note: the title is truer than i at first realized. i'm going to try and update this post as i please. oh my gosh, an ongoing story! this is exciting.

I remember how it all started. I was late for work, traffic was light, I ran across the middle of the street, I heard a bus horn. After that there was a moment of the strangest sensation, it was like pain and bliss, confusion and complete understanding, then it was all over, and i was standing in the middle of the street, a buss screeching to a stop off to my left.

"Welcome to the land of the unliving." I looked to the source of the voice, a boy who couldn't have been over sixteen sat on top of one of the cars parked on the side of the street. He was wearing grey sweat-pants and a black tee-shirt with a skull and cross-bones emblazoned on the front. The oddest thing about him was the snow-white hair cleanly parted on his head.

"What do you mean?" i looked down at myself, I felt whole enough, and I didn't look transparent, or anything. However, as the kid hopped off the car he'd been perched on, he pointed to the street at my feet.

"See that?" my attention was quickly drawn to a dark streak on the pavement that originated at my feet and extended to the bus, around which a crowd was beginning to gather. the boy put one arm around my shoulder and lead me toward the crowd. as we closed on them, i tried to stop, but he was surprizingly strong, and compelled me through the crowd without a word. And when I say through the crowd, I do mean through. I passed straight through a half dozen people, before we stopped, standing in the middle of a small semicircle of open space directly in front of the bus. Lying at my feet was...me. A broken and bloody body wearing my clothes, and that probably would have looked just like me if not for the damage a city bus had recently caused, lay lifeless in the street. "You're dead, Jim," was all the boy had to console me with.

"So...what does that make you?" I asked as my situation began to sink in.

"I'm death," the smile that plastered his face was a bit unnerving at first, but as it persisted, I realised that it was sincere, "I love how people react to that. Never gets old. I should really start carrying around a mirror, if you people could only see your faces."

"I always thought death was more of a skeleton with a robe, scythe, that whole...image," I offered weakly.

"Yeah, I have that outfit. Today's been a busy day, and you wouldn't believe how heavy that scythe gets. Nope, today was a day for sneakers," he waggled one foot at me, and indeed, he was wearing sneakers, black with the skull and cross bones on the toe of each. "Well, you've accepted this pretty well, we should probably get going."

"Didn't have a lot to live for. I don't imagine you've ever worked tech support. So uh...death, where are we going?"

"Call me Roger. And we're going to hell," He turned around and flashed me that same smile. I stuttered something unintelligible for a moment before he started laughing. "I swear, the faces you people make. It was a joke."

"Well it wasn't funny!" I was understandably flustered.

"Yeah yeah, it's never funny, but i always laugh. And depending on your vernacular, it's not really a joke. We're headed to the underworld. All dead people go there, heaven and hell and all that aren't for everybody. A lot of people prefer hades. It's got history, some say it gets better with age but, well, it's hard for dead people to age."

"Uh-huh..." I said intelligently, "And how do we get to the underworld exactly?"

"Subway."

"Ri-ight," I looked at him sceptically as we decended down to the subway station. As we approached the crowd at invariably forms when people have to get to work, I tried to weave between people, but they were packed so tight that despite myself I passed through at least a half dozen before just resigning myself to being incorporeal. "Don't tell me you have some kind of service entrance to the living world and we're gonna have to climb down to the underworld."

The boy I was following didn't pay even the slightest attention to the crowd around us as he pressed on. He didn't even seem to notice the turnstyle as he walked to the platform, "Hell no, you have any idea how much trouble my job would be if I had to hold everybody's hand? No, no my friend, you are gonna take the soul train."

He turned and smirked at me. I greeted the line with a faint groan, "Does the sense of humor die along with the body, or did you just never have one?" a chuckle was my only answer.

After standing on the platform for a while we finally heard the train coming down the tunnel and pull up to the platform. The doors open and the mass of bodies surrounding us surged through them. For the first time since the bus hit me, I was actually more comfortable being dead than i had been alive, as the throng getting on the train didn't result in me getting shoved and elbowed along. I was quite happy trotting on board at my own pace. However, as I was just about to step through the door, death's arm shot out in front of me, "Not this one. Trust me, you'll know it when you see it."

I raised an eyebrow, but stepped back and continued to wait. The doors closed and the train went off to the next station. It was only a few seconds before i heard another train coming. It looked normal enough as it pulled to a stop and the doors opened. Standing on the train was an old man, hunched forward, wearing a uniform of a train conductor. When I say an old man, I mean an old man; I was amazed he was still alive. Then it hit me, "All aboard," his voice sounded like a death rattle, "Next stop is the end of the line," Death chuckled at that, and after i thought about it for a moment, even I had to smirk.

We both got on and the doors slammed shut behind us, "I thought you didn't go with everyone you work with," I looked down at him.

"Normally I don't, but my next appointment's not for a few hours, so i might as well go home. Plus, I show the new guy around every once in a while," he shrugged.

The ride felt short, but that might've been because after exiting the station there weren't even lights outside the train windows. Once we stopped and the doors opened, I was looking out into what appeared to be the main street of a city I'd never even imagined. The architechture ranged from modern apartment buildings to romanesque mansions to townhouses, all on one block. Off in the distance I saw a squat, white building with a peaked roof that I couldn't believe was crafted in an ancient greek or roman style, complete with huge columns, and appearing to be solid marble. "Welcome to the big city," I heard from beside me as I stepped off the train.

I turned to the teenage boy who'd brought me here, "This is..."

"Eternity," he finished for me, "Duat, Adlivun, Barzakh, Irkalla, Beralku, Mictlan, Kurnugia, Naraka, Annwn, Di Yu, Purgatory, Limbo, Tuonela, Svarga, Uku Pacha, Yomi, Xibalba, Nabangatai, Pulotu, Hades, Heaven, Hell. It has many names."

I looked at him, my expression had to be a blend of amazement and confusion, "I haven't even heard of half of those."

"None of them are completely accurate. The fact of the matter is that this is where people have to go, everything else is where people believe they go. Sometimes, when confronted with the truth, people are willing to change their beliefs. And sometimes, people just don't have very strong beliefs in the first place. Those people stay, and well, some old habits die hard, so they made buildings, and then cities, and here we are."

"That's the second time you've mentioned people choosing to stay here. Since when is your destiny optional?"

"Since you died," he said simply, "look, I know religion sounds really absolute and educated while your alive, but no one who writes holy books or philosophy has died yet, which makes their views of the afterlife drastically skewed toward not knowing what the ******** they're talking about. Here's how it actually works: you die, you come here. Once you're here your soul can go where it will. If you really believe in heaven, you can go to heaven, if you think you've been a terrible excuse for a human being, you can go straight to hell. If you really like babies, you can go to purgatory and tell them all how over-rated baptisms are. The spirit is more than what starts the physical body, and differentiates life from action. It has powers all its own, that even I haven't seen all of, but the least of which is crafting a fate suited to it."

"You're telling me people would choose to go to hell? Or turn down heaven?"

"When you're still fresh out of your skin, letting go of your old mentality is hard. People feel like death is final still, they feel like something has to be done about their lives, and their consciences work in overtime on that note. Some people know in the back of their mind, their whole lives that they've lived a horrible life, they know they're going as deep into hell as they can get, and when they meet me, they resign themselves to that. Some people come down here, and are so scared about saint...paul? I dunno, christianity's lost my interest in the last few decades. But whatever his name is, they're so scared he's just gonna tell them that they don't get in, that they don't even wanna look for the entrance to heaven."

"Wow," I said, as I reflected on how much I should've payed attention to all that mind over matter stuff while I was alive. "So...what can a guy do in the underworld that's so damn great?" I asked as I finally began seriously inspecting my surroundings.

"It's a city with inhabitants that lived throughout generations of the last...oh, entirety of human history. What would you like to do?" I had to raise an eyebrow at his reply, maybe dying wasn't so bad after all.