And a brief moment of horrible pain later he's standing, whole, in the middle of a garden.

aaaAAAAahaaaaAAAAA??????!!?!!?

The garden appears to be growing pineapples.

...Pineapples are very weird-looking actually.

aaaAAAAaaaaaaaaaaAAAaaaaAa

okay. okay, that's, enough, of that. 

Mordred, without really processing that he's doing it, pushes up his sleeve, bites down on his arm, and stays that way until his brain has stopped screaming.

Then he looks around properly.

"Hello!" a person in brown robes who is weeding the garden says cheerfully. "Do you need to go to the quiet room?"

"I don't know what that is. I just died, I think. Is there something standard I'm supposed to do about that." 

It occurs to him that this garden, which has pineapples and calm people and no fire or screams of the damned or anything, is not really very much like Hell. 

"Oh," the person says calmly. "That sounds very scary. I would be terrified if I'd died. The quiet room is a safe place to scream or cry or throw yourself against the wall or bite yourself, although we do try to discourage biting yourself. It's soundproofed and there are stuffed animals and things to color with and cookies and tea and you can listen to music or watch calming videos if you like." 

What.

"Yes, please. That sounds great. Thank you." 

The person in brown robes stands up. "All right. I'll take you there. My name is Kindness, by the way. What's yours?"

...is he going to?

Yeah he's going to. He's dead and not in Hell and talking to someone named Kindness. Might as well.

"Mordred Melchior. Nice to meet you." 

"Mordred! Nice to meet you."

They walk with him through the pineapples to a squat brown building, past two or three other people in brown robes weeding. 

Inside; the building itself looks a little bit like a cross between a school and an apartment building; more people with robes are walking along, carrying books and pushing carts full of food. No one is speaking. 

The not speaking is a little weird but something something when in Rome. Or wherever.

He doesn't have phantom pain from the truck at all which is nice even if it's weird. Also he zero percent understands what is happening or why or how he isn't in Hell or, again, why, but that sounds like a problem he can work on when he is in the room where one is allowed to scream and bite oneself and there's music.

The quiet room has a soft padded floor and soft padded walls, kind of like an insane asylum, but there is no obvious way to lock anyone up in it. There is, as promised, stuffed animals and various sorts of things to draw with; a tea kettle and an assortment of teabags; a refrigerator; cookies, crackers, doughnuts, and fresh sliced bread; a bookshelf; and a computer on the wall with buttons labeled "Music," "Videos," "Incense," "Phone," and "Intercom." 

Someone has written "FUCK" on the walls.

Kindness frowns. "Ugh, it was Hope's day to clean the quiet room, is he slacking again? I'm going to reprimand him. Well, I hope that's not going to bother you too much."

Mordred might also notice that, while he knows perfectly well the word says "FUCK", it is not in fact in the conventional English alphabet or any alphabet he recognizes. When he thinks about it, the language he's speaking also isn't English.

Mordred feels a distinct sort of kinship with the sort of person who, when given a room in which to calm down, writes FUCK on the walls. He has had the impulse many times in his life to go at things with a sharpie until they all say NON SERVIAM and this seems like a similar sort of sentiment. "It won't bother me at all." 

That being said now that he's actually here, where he's allowed to scream and cry and bite himself and write on things for the first time in possibly his entire life or possibly just since he stopped being a toddler, he doesn't really have much of an impulse to do anything except flop on the floor. This is a fucking ripoff.

Kindness closes the door and leaves him to his flopping or screaming, as the case may be. 

From his perspective he just left the cookies and coffee part of church but fuck it he wants a donut so he's going to have one.

Or two. And some cookies. And then he presses the button labeled "music" and checks out the bookshelf, because the language thing is extremely weird and he isn't thinking of specific tests to do about it but he's sort of constitutionally incapable of not poking anything.

The button labeled "Music" gives him the options of "Hymns," "Folk," and "Classical."

No hymns. Mordred is anti-hymn. Folk sounds fine. 

"Folk" has the options "Choose For Me," "Pick a Playlist," and "Search for Song."

Until such time as he knows any (any) music around here the computer can just choose for him.

A song starts playing which seems to consist exclusively of elaborate puns about sex, all of which Mordred can follow even though he does not technically speak this language.

He thinks he likes this place. Whatever it is and whyever he's here.

He flops on the floor -- the padding makes this much more comfortable than it would otherwise be, and slightly bouncy -- and eats the provided cookies and tries to think, except he gets about as far as 

1. This is clearly not Hell

2. Where is it then???

before he no longer has anything else to go off of except for just plain making stuff up. It would be cool if there were lots of other universes that worked in wildly different ways like in His Dark Materials and when you die you get dropped in one of them but things aren't true just because it would be cool for them to be and the music, elaborate-pun-filled though it is, is not helping much there.

So he gets up again. What about the bookshelf? 

Prayer book! Hymn book! Several books of religious essays! Several books of religious fiction! Romance novels! Fantasy novels! Puzzle books! Poetry! Photograph books! 

At some point he should look into what they pray about here but not right now. Photographs it is. 

Sunsets, flowers, animals, cities, mountains, babies, attractive people, paintings, statues.

(He doesn't recognize any of the paintings, statues, or cities.) 

Yeah, at this point he'd kind of been expecting that.

He'll continue to look through this photography book until either someone else comes in the room or he finishes it, at which point he stands back up and opens the door.

"Hello!" Kindness says. She's been reading a book outside the room. "Xel is free if you want to talk to her, she's a spiritual director, or you can live at the monastery as long as you can follow the rules, or you can take a tuktuk to the train in the morning, unfortunately everyone's busy until then."

"I'd like to talk to Xel, I think, I don't actually know very much about... anything that's going on, and I probably should before I make decisions." 

"All right! Right this way."

Xel, it turns out, has an enormously bushy beard for someone referred to with-- okay wow technically that wasn't even a female pronoun, it was a pronoun for "soft people," whatever that means. Her office is decorated in lovely calming pastels and is full of prayer books.  

"Hello, Mordred!" Xel says cheerfully. "Are you female, soft, or hard?"

"I don't know what it would mean for a person to be hard or soft," unless this is a dick joke but he's like 90% sure it isn't, "but I consider myself a boy." 

"Hard people are the ones who are born women but are masculine, and soft people are the ones who are born men but are feminine. Some of us take hormones or get surgery but not all of us do."

"Hard, then."

"All right. Would you like to tell me your story, or would you like for me to tell you what I'm going to decide here?"

"...how insane exactly do I sound if I tell you that I come from a country called Gilead and arrived here, wherever 'here' might be, upon my death, which happened when I wasn't looking carefully enough and got hit by a car." 

"So there are three options here. One, it is possible that this genuinely happened. It violates all known laws of physics but lots of things violated all known laws of physics at some point. 

"Two, it is possible you're a prophet, and the logos has decided to give you visions of a life in an alternate universe and of your death, for reasons of its own. Transitioning to becoming a prophet is very hard, and I'd want to put you in contact with a support group and a specialist spiritual director who could help you figure out your next steps.

"Three, you might have a brain problem that makes you believe things that are easily falsifiable. This is a very common condition. If you are, I'd like to start you on a special medication called 'antipsychotics.' Leading theologians agree that antipsychotics are not a violation of the prohibition on mind-altering substances, and I can give you some information to read about it if you want. I'm legally required to tell you that I do have the authority to authorize nonconsensual administration of antipsychotics, one time, if in my best judgment as a spiritual director you are currently too disconnected from reality to informedly decide whether you consent to antipsychotics. But after that your consent or nonconsent will be on record and no one can make you."

"......right, okay, so not an afterlife. If Kindness saw me appear out of nowhere in the garden earlier it's the first of those options. Anyway.

I grew up in a country called Gilead, which is a Christian theocracy-- it's illegal to proselytize any other religion, for values of proselytizing that include telling your children you're an atheist; birth control is banned; homosexuality is illegal; it is illegal to leave the country and not come back, because otherwise too many people would leave and they wouldn't be at replacement. I did not like it there and was trying to figure out how to hop the border to a neighboring country, Cascadia. I was also very convinced that when I died I would go to hell. At sixteen in Gilead you're old enough to be a surrogate to older people who are infertile and I was going to be that, if I hadn't died; I was extremely unhappy about this but couldn't think of a reason to turn it down that wouldn't out me as, uh, hard, which you're really not supposed to be, it's not technically illegal to have the feeling but the hormones and surgeries are.

And then I got hit by a car. I don't know if that sounds like something the logos would do or not. I don't actually know what the logos is." 

"That sounds like a very unfortunate village," Xel says empathetically. "Don't worry, here it's legal to use birth control and to be homosexual and to tell people if you're an atheist-- I mean, you'll have to speak to a spiritual director but if you're just an atheist no responsible spiritual director is going to bother you. The logos created and maintained the universe and is the source of all morality. You can think of it as being like a god, if you like. --What's Hell?"

"...Gilead isn't a village. It's a country the size of most of a continent. Hell is-- the afterlife you go to if you don't accept God and Jesus-- if you don't know what Hell is then I really need to back up don't I--

God created the world and there are two afterlives, Heaven and Hell. Heaven is for people who love and worship and submit to God, and it's a paradise. Hell is for people who don't, or who commit too many grave sins, and it's eternal torture. I was very sure I was going to go to hell because I had realized at some point that God is evil because of, uh, the ban on homosexuality and birth control and the demanding that people love and submit to Him or else they'll be tortured forever, along with a bunch of other reasons that haven't already come up and most of which are sort of complicated to explain, and I couldn't make myself believe otherwise and also didn't want to because in fact I was right and it was everyone around me who was wrong. --I don't blame them. They were under threat of torture, it's hard to reason under threat of torture.

What does it mean for the logos to be the source of all morality?" 

Xel looks very horrified. 

"...Well, there is certainly no such thing as Hell. We don't know what the afterlife situation is-- it's generally considered ill-advised to think about it too much, you're supposed to concentrate on the here and now-- but I can assure you that it is better run than that. The logos wouldn't torture anyone."

"You know how you knew that it's wrong to love and submit to someone because they'd torture you otherwise? You knew that because morality is real, in the way that math is real, and the logos embodies it or-- sort of is it? It's all very mystical."

"...I don't see how that can work? Lots of other people thought that the torture was fine-- I guess they might have been reasoning backwards because they were terrified of ending up in Hell themselves but that doesn't seem right, the Gileadite government tortures terrorists and nobody disapproves of that..."

"It's easy for people to stop listening to the still small voice inside them, especially if they're scared or angry. If someone blew up your family, it's easy to-- turn off the part of you that responds to other people's suffering with compassion."