The following is yet another excerpt from my encyclopedia, and also the main focus of a short novel I will be writing in November. So enjoy or die?
4: Death
Death
is an interesting concept, and is not discussed in great detail often enough.
The traditional image of death is that of a lone rider on a pale horse coming
to collect the souls of the living, but the truth is actually far more mundane.
Death is overseen by a series of political organizations and various elderly
deities.
While
death is no longer a single person, it is true that in the past he used to be.
It is this man who owes me a great deal of money over a game of fighting boars
from over two Christmases ago! But I digress;
he was a short man with more fingers than teeth, and a greasy crop of black
hair that hung down to his waste. Really a disgusting man, and the last that I
would ever want to see before dying.
Luckily
for me and the rest of the population, we don’t have to deal with such nonsense
anymore and there is an institution for carrying out such archaic rituals,
including ferrying souls to the underworld (See Deadliest Catch: Dead Edition
4:2) and taking them from the bodies in the first place(See Death Co. 4:1).
4:1 Death
Co.
Nowadays
the concept of death has become too massive for one pale rider, or slightly
chubby ambler to handle. The fact is that death has become a business, and with
the world’s population skyrocketing, business has been booming. It is these reasons that led to a
restructuring of the traditional notion of death in the late 1940’s.
1947:
Enter the Death Corporation. With the increasing population of the world, the
burden of billions of corpses began to be too much for one man. In a meeting with
the big man upstairs the previous death even threatened to quit, which would
have mucked up the afterlife in a severe fashion. It was then that a brilliant
idea was proposed.
The
way it works is quite simple, when a lawyer or a business shark dies, they are
given a choice. They are taken up to a sublevel of purgatory and are told they
have two options: They can either be ripped apart by goat people in various
horrifying ways (Usually decided as the result of an oversized game show wheel,
acquired on a routine earth raid (See: The Goat Raiders, and Their Treasures)),
or they can serve a term of one-thousand years working for the company.
The
workers of Death Co. find themselves in one of three departments:
The
Department of Paperwork: tedious
little buggers, they make sure every aspect of a death goes exactly as it is
supposed to, and then afterward file the mountains of paperwork that come
afterward. Usually we find dead bankers
and stock brokers, who were otherwise dick-ish in life, and whose dickbaggery
can serve a higher purpose in the afterlife.
The
Department of Acquisition: These are the glory hounds, or what we would traditionally think
of as death. They work quickly and efficiently in collecting the souls of
recently deceased humans, and also work in the orchestration of the individual
deaths. Their methods are often brutal and unkind, but sanctioned by the
department. Any unsanctioned killings, or “unnecessary brutality” is grounds
for review, which almost always ends in termination, after which the
perpetrator is ravaged by angry goat people…
The
Department of Complaints: This is by far the worst of the three. It is strikingly similar
to what we find in the mortal world at the DMV (See: The DMV 7:2). Here we find
endless lines of the dead, waiting their turn to complain about how they have
been taken before their time, and that they deserve another chance at life. The
lines can often span thousands of years, and the dead remain in the state that
they were when they left earth, leading to a stench that is far more
overwhelming than any inner city gutter that I have ever encountered. It is worth noting that this department has
the highest dropout rate.
It
is also worth noting that there have only been two successful cases in the
department of complaints: The first being Freddy Mercury, who was later
reincarnated as Susan Boyle, and the second of course was Heath Ledger, who of
course now resides inside Mark Hamill’s left arm.
The
Death Corporation has three basic rules:
1.
Dropouts
will be dropped out. When a worker opts out of the program, the floor beneath them
opens up and they are literally dropped out of the office and straight into the
goat ridden inferno of hell. Another interesting fact is that as they fall they
are berated by hundreds of aggravated cherubs.
2.
If you are
found incompetent at a ruling, you will be ejected. Similar to the first rule, only in this
version, the offending party is shot out of a cannon into the mouth of a T-rex
who is on fire. While I have never seen it myself, I have been told that the
experience is quite breathtaking, and also incredibly painful.
3. Don’t stick
yo’ nose where it don’ belon’ aigh’? This was written by a cantankerous old Cajun
rule master, who had spent his life as a crocodile dentist (See: 8:1 Crocodile
Dentistry). He died shortly after making the rule, and thus its true meaning
has been subject to many different interpretations. While some take it to mean
no sleeping with co-workers (Which is gross, because they are also dead…)
others have taken it more seriously to mean: Don’t meddle with the human world.
For more information see 4:3 You done
stuck yo’ nose in da wron’ place!
With
these rules and regulations in mind, we can now move on to the other more
interesting aspects of death, and the workers who surround it.
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