Judgement

 The quarantine area of the Underworld didn’t have a huge number of occupants, but Millie recognized a couple of them right off the bat. At the card table in the middle of the tent, she could see the librarian from the city of Daylight, playing poker with a dullahan, his head floating behind her and reading her cards. She didn’t recognize him, really. But she did recognize the headless body of Valentina in the corner, looking bored. Her fingers were tapping against her leg, and her shoulders sank in an implied sigh. Millie cringed a bit. She’d never really imagined what it would be like for one’s body to be killed while their head continued to live, but it was definitely going through her mind now.

Then again, she’d never died before today, either. First time for everything, she supposed. Even potentially-disturbing existential questions. The other, less-disquieting question that came to mind: if she should warn this librarian that her opponent was cheating. There was also that possibility that she already knew and that this was a common thing for them, too, and so she decided to leave well enough alone.

She found a place to sit down, finding herself next to another young woman, one who had been in the middle of flipping through a magazine. Curious, Millie glanced over her shoulder to look at it. It looked much like an average fashion magazine, but she noticed a lot more fangs and pointed ears in it than she was used to. It shouldn’t have shocked her so much to find that this world she’d been brought to had its own such reading material, but it still surprised her to some extent.

The woman beside her looked over. “Ah, fresh meat, hm?” she asked, her voice having a certain huskiness to it.

Millie nodded. “Yeah. How long’ve you been here?”

“Few months now. Got killed by one of the Soul Stealers.”

She tilted her head. “Ooh...okay, that’s a good name for ‘em,” she said. “Mind if I use it?”

“Go for it. So, how’d you end up here?”

Millie told her of the entire experience so far. “So...not, like, officially killed by a Soul Stealer, but tangentally?”

Her companion closed the magazine and set it aside, offering a hand. “Bella,” she introduced.

“Millie.”

“Did I hear you mention an ‘Amaia’?” the dullahan at the card table asked, his head having floated right over to Millie and Bella.

She nodded. “You know them?”

“Sure do,” he said. “I’m their older brother.”

At this point, Millie really hoped she’d be able to reunite with the others, because she was pretty sure Amaia would love an update on their brother after having lost him. Though she still wondered how she’d go about securing a way out of the Underworld in the first place.

“They’ve been teaching me about fighting,” said Millie with a grin. “And they’ve been good at using that spine whip they got from you. ‘Vertiwhip’, right?”

Amon groaned. “Oh, come on...they named it that? I kept telling them, ‘Sir Doom’ is a much better name!”

“Is it, though?” Bella asked.

Millie looked over at the table, seeing the librarian sneak a peak at Amon’s body’s cards.

Before anyone could say another word, Hecate showed up again. She poked her head into the tent.

“Miller? With me, please. The judges would like to speak with you.”

Millie took a deep breath and stood up, going to join the goddess in question. Her palms were getting sweaty. Of course, she knew that she hadn’t done anything profoundly terrible in her life that’d be worthy of Tartarus. But on the other hand, she wasn’t sure she could spend eternity wherever they sent her, either.

The walk to the courthouse felt longer than it had any right to, and she had to keep reminding herself that she wasn’t in trouble, exactly. Just dead and facing judgement. That was all.

They arrived at the courthouse, where she saw five figures around the room. The first three commanded her attention most, all three having the same rune that Charon had on his forehead tattooed on their person somewhere. She assumed that these three were the judges in question. But her attention soon drifted to the side of the room. Seated in a couple of chairs were a green-haired woman in a black dress and a very familiar dullahan.

She nearly cried upon noticing that someone had actually come for her, but would address that later. The witch had been pointed toward a bench, where she sat down. It was then that she noticed the screens on the wall opposite the two witnesses.

“Okay, Ms. Miller,” one of the trio began, glancing at her from behind a silver fringe of hair. “Call me ‘Aeacus’. Here with me are Minos and Rhadamanthus, and we’re here to just sort of go over your life and see where you’ll be spending eternity. These proceedings are usually done without witnesses, but there are unique circumstances this time around. The enemy you’ve faced is on Hades’ list, so he’s sent Persephone to keep an eye on things for him, and your friend came here to look into your release. This whole thing is more of a formality, but we’d all like to make absolutely certain that we don’t find anything too wrong with your history.”

“Um...would you be able to call up my history? I’m not from around here and came from the human world…”

“Hm...where from?”

“Somewhere in New York, if that helps.”

It took a bit (and a few calls) before they could truly start on this. But before long, the screens clicked on. And each of those showed a different part of Millie’s life. There was her childhood, where she didn’t tend to have a lot of friends. She’d always been a bit awkward, had a hard time fitting in with others her own age. The college years, where she drew constantly, did a lot of reading, started to figure herself out… Her graphic design career, where she seemed perfectly content (until her firing). There was one that showed her viciously keying her former boss’s car on the way home from the office, angry tears streaming down her face. That brief flirtation with the Call of the Void on the way home. And then there were the the newest memories, those built after arriving.

As the memories played out, Millie rubbed the back of her neck at some of the more embarrassing ones, like that time she got drunk and went streaking in college. Or kept calling her former boss by the wrong name on her first week at work. Repeatedly, despite being corrected each time. She glanced toward Persephone and Amaia, seeing the dullahan drum their fingers on the head in their lap.

“Seen worse,” Minos spoke up with a chuckle. “Seriously, up until you got summoned, your life looks like it was pretty average.”

“Someone like you would typically be headed for Asphodel Meadows,” Aeacus put in.

“That area’s already quite populated, and you were in the middle of a quest when you were brought here. So, you’ll be given an option,” said Rhadamanthus. “You can either be guided there, or you can put that off for a while and return to your quest. Now, the conditions of that quest, as Hades had stated, are that you are to find the man responsible for your being down here in the first place and return him here. Is this agreeable to you?”

A wicked grin crossed Millie’s face as thoughts of revenge immediately sprang to mind. Her eyes took on that pink glow for a moment.

“How long have we got?” she asked.

Persephone soon got up to join them, flowers blooming with each step. “A week,” she said. “And it was already decided that the dullahan will be responsible for keeping you on task. If this falls through, you both get dragged back down here. Understood?”

The only part of that that Millie had any issue with was the time. Not because a week sounded like too much time, but because she still wasn’t sure how one told time in Nightshade and areas like it.

“One question,” she said. “How will we know how much time has passed?”

“Internal clock hasn’t quite kicked in yet, I take it?”

“Not really, no…”

Persephone looked at Amaia. “Got that covered?” she asked them.

“Yeah,” they replied.

“Alright. So, make sure you gather anything you brought down with you, and you’ll be free to go,” she told Millie.

Amaia got up and walked over to the witch, the pair taking their leave of the courthouse. As they left, she looked to her friend. She still couldn’t believe that someone had actually come down there to retrieve her. She might expect that of Nibbles, sure, but she wasn’t sure it would have even occurred to the werewolf. She stopped for a moment, pulling them into a hug.

And with a chuckle, they hugged her back.