Finding the Way Home

5: The Order of the Shinigami

I had no clue what the hell just happened. I was about to take a bite into a pancake, and then I suddenly was somewhere completely foreign to me. It looked like a court room, with  a completely black void around it. In front of where the person that sat where a judge would probably sit were eight circles making a larger circle, and it was perfectly symmetrical. I could tell everybody around me was a shinigami, except for Blaire, who just randomly appeared after me.

"What the heck is this place?" I asked.

"You should know." The guy sitting behind the circles said. "You've been here before."

"I don't recognize this place. Like, at all." I replied.

"This is the Order of the Shinigami. When any rules that shinigami's are supposed to follow are broken by a shinigami, this is where we settle their sentence." The shinigami replied. "It is also where we dispute if a child that is only half shinigami gets shinigami powers or not. That's why you've been here before."

"Oh..." I said. "Wait if this place is for shinigami's then why is Blaire here?" I asked. "And while you're answering that why the heck am I here? I didn't break any rules."

"Yes you did." He simply replied.

"What rule? I have no clue how I would have broken any of them." I replied.

"Your blood was used for a revival ritual." He answered me.

"Revival ritual?" I said confused. I didn't know about any revival rituals.

"Yeah, I took some of your blood to revive Black Star, Maka, and Soul." Blaire ssaid plainly. "I didn't know there was a rule against it."

"It said on the page you were reading that there was a rule against shinigami's doing that ritual. You need to be more careful about reading about what your doing, Blaire." The guy to the left said, someone I hadn't even noticed until now. In fact, I didn't even realize that there were a total of five shinigami in there, two on each side of the one behind those circles. "As for the situation, even though you didn't willingly help in the ritual, Death the Kid, both of you have to be punished."

It felt weird being called Death the Kid after everyone just calling me Kid all this time, but I guess he called me that because he was trying to be professional or something.

"Why the heck do I have to be punished if I didn't willingly break the rule?" I asked.

"It isn't a punishment as severe as if you had done it willingly." the shinigami furthest to the right told me. "Normally if someone had willingly done this, their very existence ever happening would have been wiped out, but we can't do that in this case, since the person who did the ritual wasn't a shinigami."

"Okay....." I said. "So how the heck is that supposed to answer my question? I didn't do anything wrong!"

"You have to be punished solely because your blood was used. If we let you go for this, a lot of people would get mad." The guy in the center said.

"Okay." I said, though I still didn't see the point in me paying the consequence for something I technically didn't do. "So what the heck is my punishment?"

"Do you see these eight circles in front of me?" I was asked.

"Yeah."

"These circles all represent a universe, in which everyone you know has existed at some point, including yourself. In one of these universes, you are basically an evil version of yourself. You have to go to that universe and kill that version of you, and then we will summon you back here to decide if you can keep your shinigami powers before we send you back to your own universe."