Jordan McRae opened his eyes to a scene that was unfamiliar, but also had that faint whisper of familiarity that gave him pause. As his vision beheld the grand hall that stretched out in front of him, with rising stone walls disappearing into a silvery cloud-haze and endlessly smooth marble floors, his memory grasped at those strong feelings of deja-vu to try to make sense of them.
Just as Jordan was getting to his feet, a man with a Latin complexion emerged from the distant mist and began walking towards him. Noticing the man’s strange garb, a white robe tied with a thickly-braided golden rope, caused Jordan to realize that he was nude. Looking around him quickly, he saw nothing to hide his nakedness, but the urge to be clothed was, oddly, not as strong as it should have been.
The man was now standing in front of Jordan with a stern look on his face. Jordan started to ask a question, but the words were stopped quickly by the man’s putting up a hand to silence him. Then, the man retrieved a scroll from somewhere in the deep folds of his robe, unrolled it, and began to read:
“It is decreed that the membership to the Hall of the Thirty-Point Scorers granted to Jordan McRae on April 13, 2016 has been rescinded.”
So that’s where he was: the Hall of the Thirty-Point scorers. With the name of the place in mind, Jordan could now remember the man’s name as well: Carlos Delfino. “Didn’t I get a lifetime membership?” Jordan asked. He was disappointed that he wouldn’t be allowed to return to this place of ultimate peace and contemplation, even if his “real-life” self didn’t remember anything of the visits.
“I guess not,” Carlos replied, shrugging his shoulders and re-rolling the scroll. “I don’t make the rules, I’m just the appointed guardian of the Hall.”
“So, what now?” Jordan asked. “I just scored 29. That’s almost thirty. Can’t you make an exception?”
“Absolutely not,” Carlos said. “I’m already in hot water with the overseers for some other missteps. There’s no way I’m letting you stick around.”
Jordan wanted to protest some more, but he noticed the floor below him was crumbling. Startled, he stepped to the side, but even at this new spot, the stone still began to fall apart. “I’ll be back,” he warned Carlos.
“And I’ll be here to greet your return,” Carlos said.
Just then, the floor fell fully away, and Jordan fell with it. Through a light-filled, but featureless, void he plummeted, and just as he was beginning to wonder if he would be crashing through Earth’s atmosphere sometime soon, everything went black.
—
“Yo, Jordan, you okay?” Bradley Beal asked. “You kinda zoned out for a while.”
Jordan shook his head a little bit as he came back to reality. “Yeah, I’m good,” he answered with a reassuring smile. But, already, he couldn’t remember what he had been daydreaming about. There was a yearning in his soul to have scored one more point, to have scored thirty, but for what reason he wanted so badly to have hit that arbitrary threshold, Jordan couldn’t imagine…