The grass tickled my feet as we walked. It was hard to tell where we were going. I could imagine one losing their sense of direction pretty quickly.
"Where are we going?"
"Oh," Morro shrugged. "Just to find literally anyone else."
I looked down at our feet, still very confused. "Why were you out here in the first place if it was so far away from anyone?"
"I'm your 'guardian angel' I guess. It's the universe's annoying mentor system. I have to be here to guide you through the afterlife and whatnot, and once you get a hang of things, you can be someone else's guardian angel, and I can leave you be."
I crossed my arms. "How do you know who's angel you are?"
"You'll figure it out," He sighed. "The universe gets what it wants, that's for sure. I guess I should ask if you have any questions."
"Yeah, is the whole afterlife like this? Just endless nothing?" The vast emptiness scared me quite a bit.
"No," Morro shook his head. "The departed realm is the same as the physical, but you can only see and interact with places and things you remember from life. Evidently, you don't remember anything from the place you were born."
"Is that where this is?" I looked around, attempting to see anything.
"You're born into the afterlife where you were born in your physical life."
I sighed. So I really remember nothing from the village I was born in? It made sense. We moved shortly after I was born, but still, It seemed strange to have such a large part of myself disconnected from me. "Do you see anything here?"
"Oh yeah," he nodded. "Not much, and the details are fuzzy, but I can see the streets, and that's all I really need to get us to Ninjago City. I figured that's where you'd want to go, right?"
"I don't know," I shrugged. "What will it even look like? Ninjago has been through a lot of changes."
"Just whatever version of it stands out on your mind at the moment."
I stopped moving and visualized the city, the way I knew it looked now. "I'm not sure I want to go there then."
Morro stopped as well, looking back at me. "What do you mean?"
"The city that I remember is in ruins. It's falling apart. I'm the one who made it that way!" He slowly started walking back towards me. "I'm not going back to see that."
I sat down again on the grass. Where was somewhere I could go? A place I had only fond memories of? Morro dropped onto the grass in front of me as well as I thought. "Everywhere I've lived has tragedy attached to it. There's no home that wouldn't be destroyed."
He remained quiet for a moment, thinking of something to say. "Hey. You want to see something cool?" He held out his hand for me to see.
I examined it, smiling. "Your hands are all pruney."
"Yeah," he sighed. "You get to keep scars from your death. I drowned, so I get to keep the wrinkles."
"Wasn't that your ghost death? Does that really count?"
"Any death counts. Drowning was my soul," He lifted up his shirt, revealing his stomach, practically a skeleton. "Starvation for my body, and," He lifted his shirt further to reveal what looked like stretch marks circling around his heart in a strange explosion of scars. "And identity crisis for my mind."
I stared at it for another second. "More like identity theft. It's like your heart was-"
"Ripped away from me." He lowered his shirt again, a bit ashamed. "I didn't have to lose my mind to it, but… I did."
"Did I lose my mind?" I whispered. I mean, of course, I did, at least to a degree. But did it count as a death? How would it even be represented? I fingers shot up to my eyes. "Do I have paint-"
