Tim felt himself suddenly weightless.
He blinked a few times and realized he was floating in some warm, brightly lit place. There were no walls, no
floor, no ceiling... but none of that seemed to matter. No force of gravity seemed to tug Tim downward, and he
didn't feel the slightest fear of falling while looking around.
He seemed to be inside a cloud of some kind. A faintly glowing, white mist permeated everywhere. It felt warm
and comforting. Something about this place seemed inviting, friendly, and somehow timeless. For the first time
today, Tim felt very happy.
“Evelyn Veronica Campbell,” intoned a bodiless, authoritative voice.
Tim spun around and found himself face to face with a pair of glowing, white balls of energy.
“Who... who are you?” Tim sputtered.
“We are eldil,” the two glowing lights somehow said to him. “And we welcome you to the celestial realm, your
eternal afterlife, Evelyn Veronica Campbell.”
“Waitaminute...” Tim said, shocked. He paused and looked down at himself.
Instead of his normal body, he now had the ghostly, translucent form of Evelyn Campbell.
He was now her ghost!
And apparently he had died and... gone to heaven... as Evelyn?!
“Waitaminute,” Tim said again. This time, he clearly heard his own voice sounded like that of a very old
woman. “There's been a terrible mistake. I'm not really Evelyn. I'm...”
“Timothy,” said one of the glowing spheres of energy.
“It is true,” repeated the other one.
“Have no fear,” said the first sphere of light. “But speak to us only truth, o Son of Adam. How did you come
to this place in the soul of Evelyn?”
Tim sighed once, then launched into the whole detailed story.
“So can you help?” he finally said at the end. “I shouldn't be dead. And I certainly shouldn't be the ghost of
Evelyn.”
“You ought not to have toyed with the powers of dark magic,” said one of the balls of light. “This will be
difficult to correct. You now legitimately are the soul of Evelyn Veronica Campbell. You lived a kind and good
life, and died of natural causes.”
“But I'm not really her!” protested Tim.
“But you are,” said the other sphere of energy. “Your identity went into her soul and vice versa. Then your
body died from her extreme old age. This is your just reward for living the life of a charitable, caring
woman. The fact that your identity now inhabits her soul is simply... an odd complication.”
“Can you fix it?” pleaded Tim. “Please, I don't want to be an old lady or her ghost or... or any of this!”
“We cannot simply restore you to life,” said one of the balls of energy. “Your body justifiably expired of old
age. It no longer functions. You can never go back to it. And the current spirit of Timothy Sherman inhabits
Evelyn's body, but living the life of Timothy Sherman. You are no longer the soul of Timothy, and we cannot
justly evict the proper soul of the current Timothy in order to make room for you in that life. Regrettably,
those two options are now closed to you. We cannot make you Evelyn or Timothy again.”
“At this junction, there may be only two possibilities,” intoned the other sphere of light. “We are happy to
empower you to venture down either path you select in order to un-knot this peculiar complication.”
What next?