Ever since your 25th birthday you've stopped getting sick, and your hair has stopped growing. It's harder and harder to connect with your emotions, and while you're flourishing at your job, you realize something is deeply wrong.
You're almost 50 now...
"Alright," Eustass moves the coffee table aside with his tail, setting down the big poster board he grabbed as you left the mall on the floor. He starts drawing a diagram with a marker. "Here's Earth in the middle, heaven here, hell here – before you say anything, no, they're not orbiting Earth, they're not even on the same plane of existence. The Turn is here, and the Crucible is here."
You look at the crude drawing, one large circle in the center, four smaller ones around it. The handwriting for the labels he's written in catch your attention. You're sitting on the couch in sweats and a T-shirt, and aside from pants, Eustass isn't wearing anything else. Comfort and style didn't go hand-in-hand, you had both ditched the suits almost as soon as you got back.
"Your handwriting is more elegant that I expected." You muse. It's sloppy for precise calligraphy, but you had expected it to look more like the font for a death metal album cover.
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"Focus." He grumbles. "I hate this preachy shit, so I'm not going to go over it more than once." He glares at you until you look back down at the board. He points as he speaks, tracing lines to connect things while he explains them.
"The Crucible is like a foundry, making really tiny souls that don't do anything and don't do anyone any good. Those bits of life soak into the Earth and collect together. They go through the whole life and death thing a buncha times, getting bigger, and dirtier."
"Dirtier?" The word only sticks out to you because he had mentioned your soul was clean earlier.
"Yeah, s'just how Earth is. Life's gotta go through the whole muck and mire crap." He waves a hand. "Once enough little soul pieces have come together they start inhabitin' bigger things. Fish, deer, shit like that, no more plankton and moss and whatever. Eventually enough of the stuff comes together to make a human."
Eustass draws a little stick figure under the word 'Earth' on the diagram. "Souls start out dirty, but that doesn't mean they start out evil – good and evil are different from clean and dirty. Making human souls is just a dirty process. So folks do the living thing, and in the process of living takes away some of the grime, they die, come down here to The Turn, and go back to Earth to be a different human." He moves the marker back and forth, but doesn't make any marks. "Like goin' up and down a washboard. Live, die, live, die, getting cleaner and cleaner.
"Now," Eustass takes a deep breath and looks at you for a second. "Some folks start out grimier than others, and sometimes people fuck up and make themselves dirtier, but you gotta do real world-shaking levels of bad to manage that. Ya' know, real despot shit, mass-murderin', stuff like that. Anyways, eventually a soul gets all sparkly clean and when that human dies they don't go to The Turn."
He points to Heaven and Hell with the marker. "At that point they go to one of these two places, but honestly these labels are complete garbage. One's not really any different from the other, it's that whole 'as above, so below' shit. They're just two sides to the same coin. The only thing anyone has right about 'em on this world is the conflict, but that's not shit for you to worry about right now."
