She is having a... weird coma dream? Sure, weird coma dream, she's lost. She goes up to the kiosk for the lost.

A person with shimmery facepaint smiles at her encouragingly. "Newly dead, I'm guessing?"

"Well, I got hit by a van, but I'm still hoping this is a coma dream. I assume you get that a lot."

"We do. Do you need some time or would you like to proceed with getting oriented and applying for residence somewhere while hoping that’s a pointless thing to do?"

"I'm not sure sitting around while I hope it's a coma dream will help any! Let's go full steam ahead."

"All right! You have appeared within the territory of the Dead Republic, which claims the plane of existence that is fourth on the Standardized List of Planes - before we had the list, we had trouble disambiguating the about three heavens and thirty hells. Your reasonably sensible immediate options from here are to apply for residency in the Dead Republic, to apply for residency in the Bastion of Peace on plane number two, to move immediately to New Jerusalem on plane number three, or to hang around here reading while you think through what to do next. You don't strictly speaking need to worry about taking care of any bodily needs but you'll be much more comfortable if you do."

"Is... this... a hell? I wouldn't really expect a hell to have hot chocolate and a reception desk."

"Some people call this place Heaven but I think they've got low standards. Pretty sure they've got both those things in some of the hells, though."

"Well, uh, what's the pitch on my various options?"

"The Bastion of Peace is really stable and extremely dense and in a convenient position to work on some really straightforward humanitarian problems. New Jerusalem's very... boring, in my personal opinion. People call it heaven when their idea of heaven is never being hungry and being surrounded by endless low grassy hills. It's very hard for demons to get there, at least. This place is a republic, which in my personal opinion makes it the best, and it has more climate variation than most afterlives, and we're not prejudiced against people who weren't so lucky as to land here first, unlike the Bastion - they won't be very prejudiced against you, this is a respectable place to have ended up, but if you'd gone to the lava tubes first, say. This is all kind of oversimplifying and I don't actually know what's important to you."

"Uh, humanitarian projects sound nice... what forms of government do those other places have? What's wrong with the lava tubes? What climates am I looking at in the immigration options?"

"New Jerusalem theoretically has a monarch - you might know the name 'Jesus'? - but most day to day governance is delegated to other positions some of which are elected. The climate is very mild there. The Bastion is a federation with different low-level systems and an oligarchy at the top, and the climate is also very mild there but most people live in vast underground cities so it's not very relevant. If you had appeared in the lava tubes, you would very likely have been immediately enslaved by demons hoping to make you a horrible person and use you to torture others, so, potentially not a great neighbor once they were through with you, but it doesn’t do to just assume."

"And these places have application processes - or, you do and Bastion does but New" Jersey "Jerusalem doesn't?"

"Yeah, NJ is for whoever wants to go."

"And what's the process like?"

"If you want to live here you tell me some identifying information and stay in the reception area or visit New Jerusalem for a couple days while we do a background check and then probably you get put in this new computerized database and get an ID card. Ideally at some point you take a look at the bullet points of a guide to not getting in trouble here."

"How do you do a background check from here?"

"Well, a good part of it would be about checking that you’re not someone who's been expelled from the Dead Republic before in disguise, which isn’t exactly harder to do from here. It’s technically possible to visit Earth but very... let’s say expensive."

"If we were trying to say it in more than one word, what would we say?"

"That it takes a lot of magic power to get there from here, and that power is used for other things like defending against demons, and also the people who could do it will sometimes literally charge money."

"Thanks, that makes sense. What is... the deal... with demons. Are there also angels."

"Noooot really. Some of the demons say they're angels? There's Jesus? There are dead people with magic who live in places sometimes called heaven and some of them have wings?"

"Huh. The demons aren't dead people with magic who live in places sometimes called Hell and some of them have horns, or whatever?"

"I don't think they were ever human. There are totally dead humans with magic and horns and dead humans in places sometimes called Hell, not totally sure if there's any overlap but I would bet not, but also there are weird very powerful humanoids who don't seem very human and are so evil, like, so fucking evil, and also at least one dragon which might or might not be a demon, and also some people think Jesus is part demon. They're not really cooperative with the historians and anthropologists, you know, except Jesus but he doesn't even know if he's part demon."

"It does seem like it could conceivably be hard to know. Uh - should I be asking for reading material, here, I don't know how much of your time you usually want to spend per person."