the bell tolls for all

the bell
a signal

the beam
a sign
the warmth
a tribute
the void
a time
-inscription engraved on a clipboard near site A

The following is an excerpt from a report from 09/04/12 by Head Detective Adelaide and Assistant Detective Damián of the events that took place on 1537 Hallminster Rd NW. Reader discretion is advised.

Adelaide: Once we got to the place described by the tenant we discovered just outside the door that the smell was even worse than we thought, I'm surprised lil D over here didn't puke his guts out.

Damián: Stop. We scoped out the apartment, looking through some windows, which were closed, only to find nothing significant, it looked like a regular messy apartment. I guess that could have been where the smell was coming from.

A: At around quarter till-

Interviewer: A quarter till 17?

A: Yes, around then we decided to breach the do-

I: When did the report come in?

D: Half past noon...

I: And why were you two not there until 4 hours later? There's nothing in the books here that says what you two were doing before then, and you were on call...

A: Fuck you. You know how short-staffed we are, I scarcely have time to write down what time reports come in and when we're going out. You yourself would probably chew me out for 10 minutes about wasting time if I wrote down that we were spending time on the backlog of documentation we need to do on these cases.

I: Well its not my fault you look like you're doing nothing when you're writing down notes on your stupid little- whatever. Let's continue, this is live.

A: Give me a break...

D: I tried to break a window to get in but Adelaide suggested we do the door first. I don't see why a sliding glass door would be that hard to break, we don't even need to pay for damages since the tenant is deceased, but okay.

A: Not how that works, but we spent a few minutes on the front door and managed to get it open. Inside, the smell was worse, naturally, but the main living area seemed to be deserted, except for-

I: Describe the smell. Food, blood, feces, or generic decay.

A: Wh- how am I supposed to know, I just knew it was bad enough that I could only stand it for about 5 minutes before I started to get physically ill and had to come back to station.

D: If I may, for the brief period I was in there, it seemed like mostly food and decay, but then again, I wasn't in there for more than a minute.

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If you wanted to, you could certainly call him a NEET, "Not in Employment, Education, or Training" for those of us blissfully unaware, but you'd be wrong. You see, buried under all the years of garbage and carefully crafted walkways was one of the most prolific gamers, one of the most benefitted individuals by the advent of stay at home jobs, but most definitely not a NEET. Judas Jameson (jew-duh-s jay-meh-son) was possibly the most unbalanced individual out there in his side of the wide world. His office was clean, or at least the portion directly surrounding his computer, even more specifically the portion in frame of his camera. He took the bare minimum precautions to appear a normal member of society, going to office parties, socializing with coworkers, but he never invited others over. It was almost like he was an alien, trying to blend in, but that was just a symptom of the social isolation.

"Ahhh-" Judas cut himself off from doing too loud or long of a yawn, it was 3am after all, and he didn't want to blow his cover. He had just finished a session of Call to War, where he finally completed the Easter Egg on the Gehenna map, the last one he had left for that specific game. He didn't care much for the multiplayer, these games had fallen from grace enough that if you didn't have a high-paying job or an unmedicated addiction, you weren't getting far. Either way, it was still fun to mindlessly merc' medium sized monsters, to quote the back of the box, while doing an immensely complex puzzle, even if it was weird for a supposedly war theme game.

As he got up to feel around for his phone and get into bed, he felt a sharp, piercing pain in his chest. It was a nail hammered into his heart, a feeling he'd felt only once before. A shard of glass peering past his skin. He clutched at his chest, stumbling around the piles of old memorabilia and work books. He bumped into his office door, barely getting it open before collapsing on the bed beyond. As he laid down and waited for the pain to stop, he closed his eyes.

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It wasn't the worst sleep he'd ever had, but he'd had better ones, certainly. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Judas groped around for his phone, failing to remember he hadn't grabbed it during the process of collapsing on his bed and passing out. He quickly realized the reason he had woken up wasn't because he had reached some natural waking point in his sleep cycle, but because he wasn't even sleeping where his awake cycle normally took him.

Around him stretched a vast plain of glass, below it large gems shining embedded, faintly shining with light from above, a blank nothingness pinpricked by rays of light shining on the gems. He was directly under one of these, the gem below him casting multifaceted patterns of orange over Judas's barely shaven facade just as the light above him casted a 5 o'clock shadow over his own. Below was what looked like an pond, studded with pebbles and stones protruding from it, but more likely an ocean, littered with knolls and islands.

A quick check of his pockets revealed that he had kept nothing but his clothes, not that he probably had much on him at the time. A quick check of his mental state revealed that he probably was still in shock about it all. He decided it would be best to look around, and so, getting up off the sitting position he was in, he started in a random direction. As soon as he started walking, he realized he wasn't bathed in light because he was coincidentally above a gem at the time he woke up, he realized it was actually following him. He looked directly up, past the dark mass above him, into the pinprick of light, and saw what could never truly be described by words. We've come to describe it in religious and otherwise mystical terms, ones such as "heaven", "jannah", or "shangri-la", but the reality of it is-

A great and mighty force came over Judas, wrenching him across the plain, faster than any train, plane, or magic could. Without any warning, he was stopped in mid air, over to a great dark mass below the glass, and after a moment of pause smashed into the world below.