S.A.M.L.A.R.B Spectral Aquisitons of Material Lands And Resources Bureau
05-04-2016, 12:13 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-04-2016, 12:44 AM by SideWaysThinker.)
The world is a large and strange place. After you die, it gets even stranger. Every religion has it's own version of an afterlife, and every person in a religion has their own interpretation of that afterlife. Oddly, they are all correct. If you truly believe in a heaven of the standard sort, with clouds and harps and big beardy god, then thats where your soul goes when you die. Believe in Hell with devils and pitch forks? If you've been a bad person and think you are going there, then there you will go. Souls that get to an afterlife proper don't really worry about the problems of the Living unless some one makes it their problem. But what about the Souls that don't move on? Why, they appear in the Ghostly Bureaucratic Hub and get assigned to one of the Spectral Bureaus. The Spec Bees, the only people from beyond who seem to care about Earth after death. Granted their interest is self interest, but you can't expect miracles here. They're dead, not paragons. This tale will follow a member of S.A.M.L.A.R.B, the Spectral Acquisitions of Material Lands And Resources Bureau, also called the Spookies. Off you go then!
![[Image: hYkCfby.png]](https://i.imgur.com/hYkCfby.png)
You are Samuel Larbawitz, or Sam Larb as your friends have been annoyingly insisting on calling you since you were seven. The day is finally over. After the last nine or so hours of staring at a filled in Excel spreadsheet while waiting for the Manager On High to pull himself away from his oversized box of doughnuts and ill-advised and poorly hidden affair with the less than attractive receptionist to sound the end of day alert, you are finally free! Free! Free and clear to trudge through the pouring rain to an apartment that PETA would say it would be unethical to house half of a medium sized house-cat in, let alone a human being. Free and clear to see your girlfriend who hates you sitting intently picking her nose on the bed and flicking the resultant gooey discharge onto your pillow. Free and clear to whittle away a few more hours before the grave. You think to yourself, as you have many a time of late, that free and clear are apparently relative terms, and that you're not sure if that makes you feel better, or worse.
You've been walking for some time, in the rain, without an umbrella. Your cheap and ill-fitting suit seems threatening to tear off of you like toilet paper off of a moist turd at any moment. You hide in the bus-shelter and wait. A bus arrives, it's not yours, it leaves. Another bus. Still not yours, it leaves again. You begin to see this as being faintly mocking at this point. You know it's illogical to think that the order of bus arrivals has been contrived to piss you off, but somehow you still feel and urge to act on this bizarre notion. You open your mouth to exclaim to the empty air...and then realise that an elderly...person has moved into the shelter as well. For a moment your horror at the callous nature of the British Public Transportation system is pushed off to the side in favour of confusion at the old person. You've never understood how this HAPPENS to some people. It's as if as they get to a certain age they become gender neutral. Your mind reels as it attempts to decide on if the hunched, wrinkled, dead-eyed, monstrous retiree before you is male or female. You give in eventually. Your verbal reaction to the bus situation is no longer an option, regardless of the state of this person's genitalia. You simply react internally. A little “Damn you god” inside your own head. Your little act of rebellion for the day, even if no one could see or hear it. You feel a bit hollow inside.
Another bus is coming. You lean forward out of the bus shelter. It has your number on it. A sense of excitement rises, along with full awareness that your bus arriving is a very depressing thing to get excited about. Is your life truly that empty that public transport gets the heart racing? It approaches yet still, and hasn't slowed down yet. Must be one of those cowboy bus drivers who thinks it's a good idea to come to a screeching halt in front of the bus-shelter. They clearly keep hoping that if they do it often enough one of the pensioners within the hurtling metal death-trap will eventually have a heart-attack and die, and then he can get fired and have a reason to not work his job anymore. You consider that you may be reading yourself into the bus driver. It's almost here, and it still isn't stopping. It's going to go right past you, and it's the last one. You'll have to walk home for three hours, to your terrible apartment with your hateful girlfriend to recharge before going back to your boring job with the ugly receptionist and the pigheaded manager. You make a decision. Today's act of rebellion was a little lack lustre, you should take it up a notch. You run out into the road and throw yourself head first into the speeding bus. The elderly genderless person doesn't seem to notice. You collide with the bus, and then you're gone.
You wake up. You expect to find yourself in hospital. Instead, you're in what looks for all intents and purposes to be a dentist's waiting room. The walls are beige. The floor is beige. The ceiling is beige. The furniture is beige. It seems like a mad interior decorator with a desperate fixation on making the world as boring as possible tried to make a camouflage room that still had chairs. The only things that don't badly try to blend in with the beige wonderland are a small coffee table covered in magazines and news papers, a large black CRT TV suspended by means unknown in the far left corner of the room, a full length mirror just below that, and a door in the far right corner of the room. The door is very NEARY beige, but is just off enough to be worth noticing.
What will you do?
You are Samuel Larbawitz, or Sam Larb as your friends have been annoyingly insisting on calling you since you were seven. The day is finally over. After the last nine or so hours of staring at a filled in Excel spreadsheet while waiting for the Manager On High to pull himself away from his oversized box of doughnuts and ill-advised and poorly hidden affair with the less than attractive receptionist to sound the end of day alert, you are finally free! Free! Free and clear to trudge through the pouring rain to an apartment that PETA would say it would be unethical to house half of a medium sized house-cat in, let alone a human being. Free and clear to see your girlfriend who hates you sitting intently picking her nose on the bed and flicking the resultant gooey discharge onto your pillow. Free and clear to whittle away a few more hours before the grave. You think to yourself, as you have many a time of late, that free and clear are apparently relative terms, and that you're not sure if that makes you feel better, or worse.
You've been walking for some time, in the rain, without an umbrella. Your cheap and ill-fitting suit seems threatening to tear off of you like toilet paper off of a moist turd at any moment. You hide in the bus-shelter and wait. A bus arrives, it's not yours, it leaves. Another bus. Still not yours, it leaves again. You begin to see this as being faintly mocking at this point. You know it's illogical to think that the order of bus arrivals has been contrived to piss you off, but somehow you still feel and urge to act on this bizarre notion. You open your mouth to exclaim to the empty air...and then realise that an elderly...person has moved into the shelter as well. For a moment your horror at the callous nature of the British Public Transportation system is pushed off to the side in favour of confusion at the old person. You've never understood how this HAPPENS to some people. It's as if as they get to a certain age they become gender neutral. Your mind reels as it attempts to decide on if the hunched, wrinkled, dead-eyed, monstrous retiree before you is male or female. You give in eventually. Your verbal reaction to the bus situation is no longer an option, regardless of the state of this person's genitalia. You simply react internally. A little “Damn you god” inside your own head. Your little act of rebellion for the day, even if no one could see or hear it. You feel a bit hollow inside.
Another bus is coming. You lean forward out of the bus shelter. It has your number on it. A sense of excitement rises, along with full awareness that your bus arriving is a very depressing thing to get excited about. Is your life truly that empty that public transport gets the heart racing? It approaches yet still, and hasn't slowed down yet. Must be one of those cowboy bus drivers who thinks it's a good idea to come to a screeching halt in front of the bus-shelter. They clearly keep hoping that if they do it often enough one of the pensioners within the hurtling metal death-trap will eventually have a heart-attack and die, and then he can get fired and have a reason to not work his job anymore. You consider that you may be reading yourself into the bus driver. It's almost here, and it still isn't stopping. It's going to go right past you, and it's the last one. You'll have to walk home for three hours, to your terrible apartment with your hateful girlfriend to recharge before going back to your boring job with the ugly receptionist and the pigheaded manager. You make a decision. Today's act of rebellion was a little lack lustre, you should take it up a notch. You run out into the road and throw yourself head first into the speeding bus. The elderly genderless person doesn't seem to notice. You collide with the bus, and then you're gone.
You wake up. You expect to find yourself in hospital. Instead, you're in what looks for all intents and purposes to be a dentist's waiting room. The walls are beige. The floor is beige. The ceiling is beige. The furniture is beige. It seems like a mad interior decorator with a desperate fixation on making the world as boring as possible tried to make a camouflage room that still had chairs. The only things that don't badly try to blend in with the beige wonderland are a small coffee table covered in magazines and news papers, a large black CRT TV suspended by means unknown in the far left corner of the room, a full length mirror just below that, and a door in the far right corner of the room. The door is very NEARY beige, but is just off enough to be worth noticing.
What will you do?