I was as degenerate as you could possibly be.

  As I stood in the kitchen of my massive mansion, I stirred up a new concoction of various drugs I had come up with. You see, I was what one might call a bit of a degenerate. After the death of my billionaire parents, who died when I was just eleven years old, I inherited their entire fortune, much to the dismay of the rest of my so-called family.

  At first, growing up with the money wasn't too bad, as I had a caretaker, my butler, Al, to help manage my funds and control what I spent it on. I did decently well in the private school I attended, and when I did get in trouble, which happened more than I would like, I was always able to use my parents’ name and wealth to my advantage. But Al wasn't a saint. The only reason the scumbag even stepped up to raise me was because he wanted control of the money for himself. After catching on to that fact, when I turned eighteen, I fired the guy and was given full control of my fortune. And that's where the real fun began.

  After finishing school, I began to really see where money and status could get you. I attended the craziest parties night after night, meeting the most depraved people you could think of. Because when you travel in the circles that I found myself in, you tend to see things. You also tend to develop a drug problem. Anything you could think of, I tried. It didn’t matter what.

  I finished crushing up the last of the drugs for my mixture and began to down them. It took a moment, but I began to feel them kicking in rapidly. My cold sweating stopped, which was something that happened after I went too long without a fix. My body began to get that numbness that I oh-so-craved, and I began to think clearly—or at least what was clear to me. After thirty years of drug addiction, your baseline for clarity becomes lower and lower.

  Looking on the marble counter in my kitchen, I saw my phone waiting patiently for me. Usually on nights like this, when there were no parties for me to attend or functions scheduled with other degenerates like me, I spent my nights alone in my giant but empty home getting high.

  I didn’t have any family or any true friends, really. When my parents died, my family got into a huge feud about who should inherit the fortune. To their anger, I ended up being entitled to everything thanks to my parents’ will. That led to most of them cutting each other off and all of them cutting me off, leaving me with no one.

  I wasn’t doing much better in the friend department either. In school, people mostly avoided me because I was an outcast. No one wanted to talk to some sad fat kid who didn’t have either one of his parents. People can be so cruel. All of that social isolation led to me not knowing the slightest thing about talking to people, which meant I didn’t have the best social skills growing up.

  When people did try to talk to me, I would eventually find out that they were just using me for either money or my family name. After being betrayed one too many times by multiple people, and especially by my butler Al, I grew to resent most people and learned to always keep them at arm’s length. The only time I could really stand being around people was when I was high out of my mind. And this night was one of those times.

  To help with the loneliness, I usually ordered one of the many hookers I had on speed dial. Being in the underground high-society party scene, you come to learn how much money can buy. It was supposed to be a one-time thing, but it spiraled into a full-blown sex addiction. So much so that I eventually began to pay these women monthly so I could have them whenever I wanted and do whatever I wanted to them. I could live out my wildest fantasies and treat them however I wanted. And I didn’t even have to ask for consent. Sure, they sometimes looked absolutely miserable with an overweight freak like me having his way with them and ignoring all of their boundaries, but I was paying them, and what could a lowly prostitute say to a rich and somewhat famous guy like me? Nothing. And that was what I liked. It even turned me on.

  I called up three of my favorite girls, and they sounded about as enthusiastic as usual but let me know they were on their way. With that set up, I decided to get ready. Usually, I never showered—I didn’t care much for hygiene, and something about a fat slob getting to do it with beautiful women got me going. But today I was feeling generous. Plus, it had been a couple of weeks since I had even seen the inside of my shower. I had just gotten off a three-week bender, after all. Even I could smell myself, and I was used to it.

  I went to one of the eight bathrooms in my home and undressed. Fully naked, I admired myself in the mirror, and in my fried mind, I thought about how my life was going so far. It was pretty comfortable. My life was parties, sex, money, and drugs. What more could a guy ask for? Sure, I was a forty-eight-year-old obese, drug- and sex-addicted freak, but at least I could live life as carefree as I wanted. It wasn’t bad at all.

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  I stopped looking at the hairy ball of mass in the mirror and stepped into my gold-walled shower. Somehow, however, I lost my footing and slipped. It happened so fast that I didn’t have any time to react. I fell backward and smashed my head onto the gold-plated flooring of my bathroom.

  Because of the drugs, I couldn’t feel much, but I knew I was in a bad situation when I tried to get up but couldn’t move. I wasn’t panicked, though. Probably because I wasn’t even fully aware of what happened. Blood began to pool around me, and I could feel myself getting colder and colder. My eyes grew heavier, and I began to want to sleep. That was when the panic really began to set in. I couldn’t fight the sleep, and that’s when I knew I was probably going to die.

  I didn’t want to die. My life was comfortable. And I had just paid my monthly fee to the whores. Plus, I had multiple parties I wanted to go to. My life was nice, and I didn’t want to lose it, especially not in such a shitty way like this. Was this really it?

  Damn it.

  With that final thought, everything went black as I succumbed to death.

  ***

  Surprisingly to me however, that wasn't the end.

  I slowly began to regain consciousness, though I couldn't see anything. I tried to open my eyes but no matter what, all I could see was darkness. I couldn't even tell if my eyes were even open or not. I still remembered what had happened, even though my memory was still a bit hazy and I was still sort of picking up the last scattered pieces. I didn't know where I was but I was warm and comfortable. I wasn't even panicked, in fact, I felt at peace.

  Is this what heaven feels like? I really made it didn’t I?

  Because of everything I had done before my apparent death, I was still a little surprised that I had even made it to heaven. Not that I was complaining though, If the universe felt like i deserved to go to heaven, then i’d take it. Though if this was all it had to offer, it would probably get boring after a while. Though skiing around for eternity in an endless void was probably better than an eternity in pain.

  Wish I could've taken some xanax with me though…

  Suddenly, however, as if the universe could read my thoughts and was punishing me for all of my complaints, I began to be forcefully pushed from the warm and comfortable bliss into a freezing cold hell that shocked my entire system. I was also blinded by light, even through my seemingly closed eyelids. This sudden change of environment caused all of my senses to flare up.

  I took back everything that I was thinking before. I must've been mistaken, I was actually in hell. Involuntarily, presumably because my body was so uncomfortable,I began to cry. I tried to stop but couldn't, it was strange, not being in full control of my own body. I needed to figure out what was going on.

  That was when I decided to try and open my eyes and come to the bottom of it. That was also when I realized that something was wrong. I was looking up at a woman's face. She was young, around twenty or so. Her hair was red, shoulder-length and in a bun and her matching, slightly teared, red eyes stared down at me proudly. Through my tears, glancing to her right, I saw another person peering down at me. A man around the same age as the red-haired woman. The man's hair was light cyan as opposed to his midnight black eyes. He looked down at me with the same expression as the woman beside him. It really freaked me out.

  By this point I had gotten control of my crying, stopping it all together. I had also felt a bit of strength coming to me. Using this to my advantage, I decided to turn my lead and look around. I noticed that when I did, the man and woman looked at eachother then smiled and began speaking to eachother. I couldn't understand a word of it though. What was going on? And why did they seem so big and up close? And what the hell was going on?

  As I looked around I noticed that I was in some sort of wooden room or maybe home of some sort that was lit up by candles. I noticed that there was another, older looking man in the room with us, dressed in strange looking robes. Also there was a little girl, she looked to be the spitting image of the red haired woman and she was staring at me with wonder.

  I turned my head back up to look at the woman and the size of her head really threw me off. It was like a bobble head with how up close it was. Why was her face so large? And why did it feel like I was almost being held? Why did my body feel so strange, so foreign? Was this just all a bad trip?

  I knew that cocktail was a bad mix…

  I decided to try to speak, to ask what was going on, but all that came out was babble. The man and woman turned to each other and seemingly laughed at my attempt at speech then spoke to each other words that I couldn't understand. This frustrated me. I was going through the most traumatic experience of my life and all they could do was laugh at my misfortune as if I were some zoo animal.

  I decided to try to move my body, since clearly they couldn't understand my words. I had hoped that they could at least understand sign language. Moving my hands upwards, I was met with the frightening sight of not my own hands, but the tiny hands of an infant child.

  What the hell?