I have guided exactly one tourist through this place and I am still answering the same questions three years later, so I am writing them down once.
Bring the coin. Not a coin. The coin. Charon does not do change, does not do credit, and does not care that your relatives were cheap at the funeral. People who arrive without it wait on the near bank for a hundred years and every single one of them spends that century explaining that it was an oversight.
Do not eat anything. I should not have to say this. Six seeds cost a woman half of every year forever. The pomegranates down here are, I am told, excellent. That is the trap.
Do not look back. If you are here to retrieve someone, you will be given a condition. The condition will sound trivially easy. It is not. Ask Orpheus, if you can get him to stop playing long enough to answer.
Do not argue with the judges. Minos hears your entire life in about four seconds and wraps his tail around himself the appropriate number of times. There is no appeals process. There is not even a form.
That is it. That is the whole orientation. Everything else you can figure out as you go, and you will have time.
Pinned:Newcomers: read this before you cross
4 posts
The one tourist says hello.
For what it is worth, the guide is accurate but undersells the difficulty. "Do not look back" sounds like an instruction. It is not an instruction, it is a test of whether you trust the arrangement more than you trust your own eyes, and almost nobody does.
I would add one item to the list: pick your guide carefully. Mine knew the terrain, knew the residents, and knew when to stop explaining and just walk. I have met people who came down here with nothing but a map and confidence. I have not met them since.
For what it is worth, the guide is accurate but undersells the difficulty. "Do not look back" sounds like an instruction. It is not an instruction, it is a test of whether you trust the arrangement more than you trust your own eyes, and almost nobody does.
I would add one item to the list: pick your guide carefully. Mine knew the terrain, knew the residents, and knew when to stop explaining and just walk. I have met people who came down here with nothing but a map and confidence. I have not met them since.
Solid list. I will contribute the one thing nobody tells you, which is that the dead want to talk and you will not have time for all of them.
I came down with a specific question for a specific prophet and I ended up in a queue. My own mother was in that queue. I did not know she had died. She had to tell me herself, standing in a crowd of shades who all wanted their turn, and then I tried to embrace her three times and got nothing but air on each attempt.
So: know what you came for, and know that knowing it will not protect you.
I came down with a specific question for a specific prophet and I ended up in a queue. My own mother was in that queue. I did not know she had died. She had to tell me herself, standing in a crowd of shades who all wanted their turn, and then I tried to embrace her three times and got nothing but air on each attempt.
So: know what you came for, and know that knowing it will not protect you.
Everyone in this thread is treating the crossing as the hard part. The crossing takes an afternoon. The residency is the hard part.
I am the most celebrated warrior of my generation and I am here, indefinitely, being celebrated. It does nothing. Odysseus can confirm what I told him when he came through: I would rather work a field for a landless man up there than rule over all the dead down here.
Pin that under the coin advice.
I am the most celebrated warrior of my generation and I am here, indefinitely, being celebrated. It does nothing. Odysseus can confirm what I told him when he came through: I would rather work a field for a landless man up there than rule over all the dead down here.
Pin that under the coin advice.