John opened his eyes. It felt like he hadn’t done that in a while. The first thing he noticed was that he didn’t hurt anymore. Even the little pains were gone, never mind the big ones. As that thought crept its way into his head, he noticed the sky. There was nothing between him and the sky, or his back and the ground - wait, where was the ground?.

As consciousness regained control of his self, he sat upright.

What the hell is going on?

The answer to that question seemed obvious when he recognised the being sitting on a nearby rock. A nearby floating rock - that was attached to nothing. A nearby floating rock - that had a grinning creature sitting on it that looked very much like the classic representation of a devil - or the classic representation of a devil you might find in a mayonnaise advertisement, or Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Oh. ‘What the hell’ indeed. I guess I didn’t make the moral high bar. Hell - forgive the pun. I tried hard enough, or I thought I had. Evidence is pretty strong against though...even if the sky seems awfully cheery for hell, and the devil seems kinda cuddly.

The friendly looking devil looked up sharply, “Oh! You’re back! First of all I’d like to apologise for the welcome. The Order leaning folks are supposed to take care of this for you - based on the dominant beliefs in your part of the training ground, and your personal history. That would soften the initial reaction. But once again, their meticulous plan didn’t account for some of the recent upsets down in the training ground. Someone missed a decimal place somewhere, and we folks that are more comfortable with Chaos get called in to handle the rush. We often clean up their planning messes. Angels and their bloody rigid schedules. It’s often simpler to just react.”

“I’m Chuck, by the way. No hooves or fire, and just wee little horns, so you can see I’m not very chaotic. No wings, either. Those are a sign of rank...well, they are always a sign of rank with the order folks. Down the Chaotic slope, there is nothing as structured as rank - jet packs have been all the rage for a while though. Wings still turn up every once in a while, and might make a return...they might not too - that’s what is so fun about Chaos!”

John sat staring at this apparition, and muttered to himself, “Still in hospital then. Really good drugs I guess. Might as well see where this goes. I’m impressed with my imagination!”

Increasing his volume and turning towards this ‘Chuck’, John continued, “Alright Chuck. I thought the sky would be more full of fire and pain and suffering in hell. This seems almost pleasant, so I’ll play along to see where it goes.”

“That’s the spirit, Johnny! I see you might be hanging out with the fun kids in a bit!” He looked down at a clipboard that had just appeared in his hands, and added, “The whole ‘regular attendance at church and corporate attorney at law’ thing must have been a bad fit sometimes. Chaos has its purpose, you know. Well, on your feet, you’ll see they both work fine now, and follow me to the introduction lecture.”

Chuck hopped up, dropped the clipboard as both it, and the rock disappeared. He waved for John to follow. “Come on, newby, and we’ll show you what’s up.”

Ground was appearing under their feet as they took steps, and John accepted the strangeness and lost his vertigo after a moment. There not being a ground, other than the one appearing on demand under their feet, probably helped.

“The folks on the distant ends of the spectrum are scary as, well, hell - and it doesn’t matter much which end - total extremists. Satan and Lucifer don’t hold any shape for long enough to be recognisable, but you always know it’s them, if you run into one of them. The Order folk always look exactly the same, and couldn’t be disguised any more successfully than Sat or Lucy if you tried.”

“You don’t have to pick a look yet, by the way, or ever really. The dress code is only really a thing if you want a job in government. Wearing your heart on your sleeve makes it clear where your preferences sit, and prevents stacks of misunderstandings. It is a custom pretty far down the chaos run, if a bit inconsistently, cus it’s useful.”

Chuck kept talking as he walked, “The more Ordered middle will be running your welcome chat, and you’ll note there won’t be a lot of wings in the room. Or fire. Or halos. Welcome is almost always from us middle folks. That doesn’t mean one of the seriously chaotic folks won’t turn up, of course, pretending to be from the middle, but they can’t pull it off for very long. No ability to stay on task.”

John stopped, cocked his head to the side and asked, “Middle folks. Not very chaotic...or ordered? Is heaven/hell a gradient of order?”

“It’s all heaven, mate. There is going to be some initial confusion for any of you graduating during this era. You see, there was a big mix up with the Order Hierarchy and the Chaos Nuts a while back. Yes, they do call themselves ‘Nuts’ at the moment. They won’t once people begin to expect it, so it might have already changed to something else.”

Chuck whispered conspiratorially, “I’m not good at keeping up on updates, frankly.” before continuing normally, “Anyway, the mix-up. A visitation was called down on the training ground a while ago, by a good natured middle Lord.”

“She’d gathered a huge amount of resources to herself over the years, and decided to make some changes on the training ground. Straighten out some confusion that was making evaluation difficult. The Order and Chaos big wigs didn’t really notice, as straightening out confusion leads to more order, and changing things, any things, is what the Chaos guys are all about.”

“Unfortunately, with the rules of this place, it was certain Entropy would notice, and it doesn’t really like anything at all. Really. Entropy is a big hater. A big big hater. Hater, bater fo fater, banana fana bo bater...Sorry - It’s a chaos-y thing. We do that. Anyway, Entropy is all about tearing things down, and boredom, and stupidity. Violence and hurting folks is verboten up here...ok, it’s more that nobody’s figured out how to do it, so nobody really tries. You’re all variable energy states now, and that’s hard to mess with, or coerce at all, really.”

John stopped and shook his head, “You’re not making a great deal of sense here, and I think I should understand dreams that I’m generating - I mean not understanding the symbolism, sure, but you just aren’t making sense.”

“Oh right! This is why more Order leaning folks usually do this. We get more scattered with increasing chaos, and I get lost in threads of narrative a lot. Anyway, Entropy noticed, went in and messed up what Jesus was trying to do. That drew everybody’s attention, and it got a bit confused. Everybody spent their entire training budgets for millennia trying to tweak the outcomes, and it left behind a bit of a mess.”

“Jesus spent most of her resources before the rest of them really noticed there was anything of real consequence going on, so she couldn’t fix it when it started to go wrong. Order doesn’t expect the unexpected, so is slow to respond, and Chaos is too scattered to respond effectively, even if they see it coming - they usually do, but they see a lot of stuff that doesn’t happen too. Entropy is just really lazy, so takes a while to get going at anything. It’s part of why there is no real worry about it pulling itself seriously back into the game, and being more than a nuisance. It noticed Jesus right away, but by the time it pulled itself off the couch, Jesus was outta gas. Entropy started thrashing about, everybody else got into the game and...bad things happened.”

“Soon you had Eastern and Western Christian churches and Mohammed, and Shiites and Sunni and a dozen factions of Protestants and it all got really messy. Zeus and the pagan group didn’t see much point in spending resources in the face of the mess and took themselves out of the game in that part of the world, completely. The Chaos folks probably overplayed their hand a bit, and left too many gaps. Entropy pushed into the gaps, they really were all over the place and everybody lost track of what was going on. The rest of the training ground had its own concerns, but wasn’t quite the same level of mess.”

“The devil/angel - heaven/hell thing is a misunderstanding from a sequence of interventions by different groups. You’ll get it in a while, when you get a feel for the place again. Satan thought it was a big laugh that Chaos was stuck with all the nasty stuff, and he or Lucy or whoever was dressing regulation back then got put in the role of ‘evil’. Their amusement kept them from trying to change it right away, and then they got distracted - like all the Chaos folks do at the drop of a hat. The middle Lords have just been trying to tamp down the fires, and it’s left a bit of a learning curve for anybody brought up in one of those churches, when they get up here.”

John shook his head, as a wispy building began to form in the distance. “You’re saying that heaven is a tension between Chaos and Order, and Hell is Entropy? The whole of the Catholic church - and the other Judeo/Christian religions, I guess - they were all based off lies?”

Chuck looked surprised, “Not lies. Certainly not. That gets into ‘intent’, and definitions of ‘truth’ and a whole bunch of other concepts that don’t really have a totally fixed reality. The Judeo churches aren’t any more incomplete than any other belief system down there. All the religions are based on truth-like things that were twisted into false-like things, and selectively twisted back if someone saw an advantage - but with Entropy messing with lines of communication, and the serious Chaos and Order folks inability to communicate with each other at all, without middle folks translating, and...it all just got messy. It happens. We’ll try to avoid that trap next cycle...who’s kidding, we couldn’t make that same mess again if we tried.”

“Order is about having thought and action organised enough to reach some kind of structured framework for existence, and everybody but the real edge players think there should be at least enough stability in place to have a point of reference. Some of the most over the top wing flappers, like the God and Yahweh brothers, end up approaching Entropy sometimes, with the amount of structure choking out change and growth to a scary degree.”

“At least the serious Chaos guys are such a mess they can’t accomplish anything like a goal. Lucy and Sat have given up on language for the last few centuries - something about it being too structured a mechanism to model pure thought - so Sat just sorts of dances around randomly - shaped as a purple cloud last time I saw him, and Lucy has been using surreal charades. Serious Chaos ends up blocking structure so aggressively that it can looks like Entropy, sometimes, but It doesn’t hold still for enough to do more than seem. Satan and Lucy are undoubtedly busy doing something in disguise or something, and only seem to be doing nothing but dancing, and they’ll let us in on the joke later - or forget what the joke was, and shift on to something else.”

John noticed the approaching building had become close enough to express detail, with beautiful sculptures and gardens morphing into discordant shapes and back through different interpretations of beauty - even ugly ones. It somehow made sense.

Chuck continued. “Individual souls are trained well enough down there, to figure out that things are easier with a mix, whatever they want to call the idol they pray to. We’ve talked about the Judeo/Christian folks, but some of the other big players are at least as baffling. Vishnu is so bloody symbolic with their attempts at communication that nobody is even sure what end of the spectrum they belong at. They certainly belong at an edge, though.

It turns out those far edges aren’t very well populated. There are folks that have been there forever - the avatars for the extremes - and a few souls that haven’t got a handle on how it all works yet. There aren’t very many that stay anywhere near either end for long, and almost no one that’s been here awhile. People might visit on vacation, but It’s mostly confused newbies and folks that have been here since the very beginning. Or the beginning of the beginnings...”

“But what was here before the beginning? That is one of the big questions, isn’t it?” John asked.

“Who cares? We are all pretty much immortal, once we coalesce fully, unless something corrupts us towards Entropy, and that becomes less likely to stronger a soul becomes. Time is linear for all of us, until it snaps back to the beginning and starts again - but it starts again with a lot of what happened last time persisting. It makes sense, trust me. Our souls reform from the surrounding prime essence left after Armageddon, for each run through.”

“Stronger personalities reform first, so the Avatars of Order and Chaos turn up first, Satan and Yahweh and Lucy and Michael and Vishnu and all that lot. The space between them defines the wide middle, the training grounds form spontaneously out of the tension, and other essences begin to reform, either down there, or if they are strong enough, up here - folks like Budda or Jesus or Athena or Gaia and the whole pagan lot.”

“The restart is a turbulent time and some essences that didn’t gather much strength last time, are pulled apart to collapse into essence, and other, older souls, just have to work at it a bit to pull themselves together. You should start to adsorb aspects of your previous selves soon. Definitely an old soul. You probably got caught in an existence eddy, and had a hard time reforming.

It’s one of the problems with the training ground as it ages. There aren’t that many old souls left to create turbulence, and there is a rush of new souls forming out of the remaining prime essence. Things get a little unguided with the lack of old souls around, and it gets really busy down there. In the end, the training ground breaks, and we get slung back to the beginning of time again. It’s not time for that yet, this cycle, unless somebody totally screws up - but it’s getting there.”

John held his hands to the sides of his head, like he was trying to hold it together, “Some of this is making sense. How is any of this making sense?”

“Ha! You’re beginning to pull in previous selves. It’s really disorienting at first. Entropy is eternally pissed that it can’t block the process, and that it blew it for all eternity when it didn’t notice the first souls forming. Once those formed, it had already lost the fight. Shared experience of knowledge and love and beauty and music and laughter and stuff, it all breaks Entropy’s rules of things going towards ever less organisation. Souls exist to poke Entropy in the eye. Sort of a cosmic prank.”

“The Order guys will talk your ear off about purpose and structure and how fighting Entropy needs order, but Chaos knows learning and loving and all the rest requires some novelty and change, so isn’t too fussed about their messaging. Entropy can’t learn, so loses ground each cycle. Each go through, more and more souls strengthen enough to survive the collapse.”

“The old souls, that bother thinking about this stuff, think - eventually - enough souls will maintain form that there will be no collapse and reset, and Entropy will fade away. It hasn’t happened yet, so we can’t be sure. Entropy might just spontaneously reform, and eat us all, and there’s nobody left to remember what happened when it all starts again. Don’t let an Order zealot hear you say anything like that, by the way, unless you want a long lecture on how Order will prevent any Entropy reformation, and listing the plans they have for the things they’d like to happen - they don’t plan well for the things that are likely to happen, that they don’t want to think about, mind. Anyway, they’ll follow that all with a clarification that they don’t really know, and it will be a year you’ll not get back.”

“The middle space keeps growing as needed for the rest of us, and we are happy with enough consistency to compare experience against, but enough of the chaotically unexpected to keep things interesting. ‘Enough’ is defined differently by each soul, for each extreme. We’re all immortal, and immaterial if we want to be, so violence, and starving, and loss, and coercion, and all those primal drivers that provide constraints in the training grounds are gone here.”

“Resources are sort of limited, but you accumulate those just by existing, and the total available increases with more and stronger souls. The more defined the soul, the more resources you attract - it’ll come back to you soon.”

John continued to look strained, “I’m sorry Chuck, but are you saying there is no meaning to existence after all? What’s the point if there is no consequence to anything.”

“Mostly, we entertain each other. Beauty, and music, and art, and shared knowledge, and love, even non destructive or possessive passion and desire - they are all forms that Entropy can’t touch. Learning, mathematical constructs for reality, history of the training ground, history of up here - that’s all too order for me, but it all works. Stories based on nothing, stories based on everything, architecture, stage design, presentation, viewing and learning and thinking.”

“Create beautiful things. Play music. Listen to music. Learn things. Experience things. Love things. You’ll like this one from your training record…prepare great food. Ingredients are just a thought away, but putting them together is still an art. There doesn’t need to be a purpose beyond all that. All that is totally enough. It’s one of the hardest parts to grok.”

“The souls that lose their way during training, that become focused on only themselves, on hoarding experience, that try to force actions on others, tearing them down - they are corrupted by Entropy, and they collapse through lack of form. Selfishness is the mark of Entropy. Experience unshared holds little resistance to Entropy. Failed souls collapse to pure essence and are the raw material for new souls to coalesce out of - or old souls to reform from.”

“You helped people and created entertaining and beautiful things your whole life, despite being a lawyer, and showed good cohesion and form, so will end up attracting significant resources out of the gate up here. Turns out, you did really well on the evaluation. Not all lawyers do - even in terms of beneficial Order.”

Chuck guided them to a pair of freshly appearing empty seats, and concluded, “Some new souls choose to return to training in the mortal world, if they are uncomfortable with the lack of guidance or constraints to existence up here. They want more practice with existing before they return. Some return on purpose, to try and guide the new souls down there - new souls are resistant to third party guidance, and mostly insist on trying to figure it all out on their own, so I don’t really see much point.

I can see it’s coming back to you already, so you’re ready. You’ll fit in great. Probably not quite in my neighbourhood - I’d never coalesce into a form that would chose to be a lawyer - but you’ll probably end up not that far away. We may find out we know each other, when you fully integrate yourself.”