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"I'm
dead."
Tasslehoff Burrfoot
waited expectantly a moment.
"I'm dead," he said
again. "My, my. This must be the Afterlife."
Another moment passed.
"Well," said Tas, "one
thing I can say for it--it certainly is dark."
Still nothing happened.
Tas found his interest in being dead beginning to wane. He was, he
discovered, lying on his back on something extremely hard and
uncomfortable, cold and stony-feeling.
"Perhaps I'm laid out on
a marble slab, like Huma's," he said, trying to drum up some enthusiasm.
"Or a hero's crypt, like where we buried Sturm."
That thought entertained
him a while, then, "Ouch!" He pressed his hand to his side, feeling a
stabbing pain in his ribs and, at the same time, he noticed another pain
in his hand. He also came to realize that he was shivering, a sharp rock
was poking him in the back, and he had a stiff neck.
"Well, I certainly didn't
expect this," he snapped irritably. "I mean, by all account when you're
dead, you're not supposed to feel anything." He said this quite loudly,
in case someone was listening. "I said you're not supposed to feel
anything!" he repeated pointedly when the pain did not go away.
"Drat!" muttered Tas.
"Maybe it's some sort of mix-up. Maybe I'm dead and the word just hasn't
gotten around my body yet. I certainly haven't gone all stiff, and I'm
sure that's supposed to happen. So I'll just wait."
Squirming to get
comfortable (first removing the rock from beneath his back), Tas folded
his hands across his chest and stared up into the thick, impenetrable
darkness. After a few minutes of this, he frowned.
"If this is being dead,
it sure isn't all it's cracked up to be," he remarked sternly. "Now I'm
not only dead, I'm bored, too. Well," he said after a few more moments
of staring into the darkness, "I guess I can't do much about being dead,
but I can do something about being bored. There's obviously been a
mix-up. I'll just have to go talk to someone about this."
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