Chapter 1: Prologue: Happy Birthday

In the beginning, there was darkness. Then there was John.

“Well you look like shit.”

Standing out among the starless, pitch-black void surrounding me, a single column of light shined on a man wearing a pearlescent suit coat and pants with hazel eyes and a fedora resting over his trimmed chestnut hair. He was seated in front of an unusually bright table with a cheesy grin plastered across his face.

“Don’t let it get to you; I say that to everyone. Please, take a seat.”

He motioned toward a similarly bright chair facing him across the table. My head throbbed with some unspeakable pain, yet I felt compelled to sit down in front of him. I found the chair excruciatingly cold to the touch, and when I looked down to identify the issue, I made a horrifying realization.

“Why the hell am I naked?!”

He chuckled. “Took you long enough. ‘All men are laid bare before the eyes of God’ and all that jazz. I dunno pal, I don’t make the rules. You’ll be out soon enough anyway.”

God? Out? “You don’t mean…”

“Forgive me,” the man continued after straightening himself in his seat, “I skipped the intro. The name’s Johnny Shift. Call me John.”

“Okay… John. I’m in the afterlife, aren’t I? And you’re supposed to be some kind of angel?” I asked with disbelief.

He gave a dismissive hand gesture. “More like ‘divine social worker,’ but let’s go with angel. And yes; you, my friend, are super dead.”

I was beginning to get a very bad feeling about this guy.

“And on that note, let’s take a look at your file.” He reached into his glimmering jacket and pulled out a thin stack of papers before laying them out on the table. “Let’s see, Mister… aw shucks, I am just the worst with names. How do you pronounce this?”

“Beryl,” I said with a sigh. “Just Beryl is fine.”

“Sure thing, pal.”

Yeah, this ‘angel’ was really starting to piss me off.

“This isn’t some bullshit waste of time where you’re just going to judge me before you wipe my memories and send me back to be reborn on Earth, is it?”

“Easy there. Let’s just take this one step at a time. Don’t you want to know what happened?”

My head was still foggy and fiercely aching, like I’d been hit by a… shit.

“I remember now! I was on my way home when this nasty old hag was holding up traffic and—ahem, I meant someone’s sweet grandma needed help crossing the street, and I was doing my good deed for the day, right?”

He blinked at me. “Your file says you were trying to get her to the other side when the crosswalk light was red.”

“It’s not my fault her arthritis was acting up in the middle of the road!” I shouted. “What was I supposed to do, pick her up and run?”

He hummed while stroking his chin. “Now would that be ‘intent to kidnap…’”

“Hey, are you even listening to me?!”

“I’m just messing with you,” he said with another chuckle. “You should try unwinding a bit.”

“Unwinding? But I just fucking died. I got ahead of her for a moment and then something ran into me, like… Ugh. It was a truck, wasn’t it?”

The look he gave me said all I needed to know. It was always a goddamn truck.

“At least I saved her, right?”

“Don’t you worry,” he said after a pause. “You sure did. And around here, no good deed goes unpunished.”

“Please tell me you mean unrewarded.”

“We’ll see about that.” He flipped through his stack of papers until his grin widened, finding what he was looking for. “It’s judgment time.”

I could feel my unclothed armpits getting hot and sweaty in anticipation. I resolved right then and there that no matter what happened, I wasn't going to give this cheesy bastard the satisfaction of judging me.

“We got a nice little list here,” John said. “Says you were a college dropout…”

“All the tech billionaires say they did it. I might be a genius!”

“Questionable taste in animated pornography…”

“I know all the best websites, just ask me.”

“Arrogant, selfish, and shameless to a fault…”

“Hey man, those are my best qualities!”

“Deceiving men by impersonating a girl in ‘massively multiplayer online roleplaying games…’”

“And that’s my specialty! I can make anyone believe me, as long as it doesn’t come to voice chat.”

“Irredeemably narcissistic personality…”

“Okay, I’ve gotta stop you right there, John.”

I slammed both my hands on the table between us and leaned forward.

“Let me clear something up before you get the wrong idea. The whole ‘be the lone badass at the top everyone else looks up to’ shtick companies push on solo gamers is a complete lie to get insanely talented, god-tier gamers like me to waste all of our time and pocket money. You don’t want to know how many MMOs I’ve played solo where I did everything I could to be the best and get the recognition I deserve, and that still wasn’t good enough. Every single time, every damn game I played, there was always some bastard with even less of a life than me who wasted more hours in the game, or some rich kid who used his parents’ money to buy the best in-game crap and pay his way to the top. Every goddamn time! Until one day in high school I said, ‘fuck it,’ and I started over with a new character—a sexy sorceress named Lady Beryl. And do you know what happened next?”

John yawned. “The suspense is killing me.”

“I started getting more party invites than you’d ever freaking believe! And not from shitty low-level guilds or newbies who could never keep up with me, either. When some of the best players on the server ‘found out’ I was a cute, charming girl and I kicked ass at the game, they wanted to run all the endgame dungeons with me or give me expensive items so that I would be their online girlfriend. I hardly had to do any extra work, and I was hanging out with the best! I’d been doing it all wrong for years!”

This time he coughed. “You don’t say.”

“Look, John. From that point on, I found my way to the top in every game I played as Lady Beryl without having to work my way up the ranks in some newbie guild and deal with all that annoying guild drama. I finally got the recognition I deserved and took my place at the top, and all it took was a little ‘applied sociology!’ You see, all those guys who thought I was a girl? Whether they were asking me for advice with their personal problems they were too embarrassed to tell their own guy friends or they just wanted to brag about having me as their girlfriend, I provided virtual companionship to other horny bastards like me, and they would spend every single day working to help me out and give me free stuff in-game. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s a win-win! Do you know how many more years of my life I would have wasted by solo grinding for every piece of gold I ever got?”

He raised his eyebrows at me, then gestured around us.

“Come on, you know what I mean!” I said, leaning back in my chair. My headache wasn’t going anywhere at this rate, but at least my bare ass had finally warmed up the seat.

“Not sure I do, pal,” he said before clearing his throat. “Anyways, that was quite the monologue. So let’s say we split the difference and go with ‘redeemable narcissist;’ that’s still not exactly good enough to pass through the pearly gates, you dig?”

“John!”

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“But,” he continued with a dramatic pause for effect, “that doesn’t mean your story has to end in a lake of fire, either. There’s door number three.” He held up three fingers to make his point.

“You’re going to send me back to Earth after all?” I groaned.

He shrugged. “We can find another boring, mundane planet to restart you on with a subconscious impulse to improve. Lots of souls have been wanting to shift out of Earth lately. That planet’s pretty screwed right now, huh?”

“Well, that’s one way to put it…”

“However, we do have a special offer going on right now if you opt to reincarnate into certain worlds with ‘problems’ that need cleaning up.” He flipped through his papers until he pulled out the last one in the stack and gave it a quick read. “There’s this fantasy world that’s been nearly taken over by an evil Demon King.”

Oh God, not another one. I’ve only played fifty different games with that same concept.

“And what’s so special about this?”

“So glad you asked,” John said. “The one who slays said Demon King will be granted one thousand years of paradise with all the angels they could ever want, with which to do whatever the heck they ever want. Yep, that means you could have yourself a thousand-year long orgy with all the sexiest angels you can ever imagine.”

My jaw dropped at all the possibilities. Then after a minute, I thought better of it. “No way. That sounds way too good to be true.”

“You can take it from me: the deal’s as legit as it gets. Be that as it may, you might want to have a look at the fine print.” He turned the paper around to face me and pointed to a line of small text.

Angels and environs can be fully customized to the recipient’s desires, and they may or may not be illusory in nature.

“Figures,” I said with a frown. Still, a thousand years of the perfect paradise, even a fake one? I had to catch myself before I drifted off fantasizing again. “And you said there were other worlds with similar problems?”

“Got that right, pal. Let’s see here… there’s a cyberpunk dystopia, zombie apocalypse, alien invasion, a Demon Queen—”

“Stop, please,” I begged him. I could only take so many clichés at once. “If these ‘problems’ are such an issue, why don’t the angels just take care of them?”

He sat upright in his chair and straightened himself. “Everyone has their own role to play to keep the balance in the universe. ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.’”

“Shakespeare? Really? Sounds like that’s just an excuse for you to be lazy.”

“Maybe so,” he said with a grin.

He didn’t even deny it! Regardless, this was far too good of an opportunity to pass up.

“Go back to that first one, the world with the Demon King. Tell me how this works if I want to start over there.”

He pulled out a mostly blank paper from his stack and then a pen from his suit, giving it a good click. “You keep all your memories and get sent down in an adult body, and we’ll get you set up with the local language. I just need the details of your appearance and starting bonus.”

Starting bonus? I nearly jumped in my seat. “You mean, an invulnerable divine artifact for starting gear? An overpowered magical ability no one else has? A sexy goddess who will follow me around?!”

He sighed and shook his head. “I meant whether you want a bonus to pure strength for a front-line fighter, agility for a flexible stabby-shooty kind of rogue, or something like magical affinity for the wizarding types. You know, just a little boost to get you up to speed.”

Oh, right. The absolute basics of most generic fantasy settings.

“I always go with a magic-based class,” I grumbled.

He clicked his tongue while making a note, like that wasn’t the choice he would have picked. Bastard!

“You also mentioned I could customize my appearance?” I asked with a tinge of annoyance.

“You’re already a decent-looking fella. Do you really want to go through the whole ‘character customization’ thing?”

“Hell yes I do! Well…” Now that I thought about it, just who did I want to be?

This was a once in a lifetime opportunity to start over and maybe even turn into a legendary hero in a fantasy world. This was exactly the kind of situation I’d always dreamed about. I could become the lone badass who triumphed over all manner of trials and tribulations in a world of swords and sorcery, hailed by everyone as the savior of the realm, acquiring my own harem full of beautiful women in the process, savoring a moment of passion with my one true love, and then…!

Oh, who the hell am I kidding? I’ve already been down that road countless times before, and that was in games where my life wasn’t even on the line. I’ve had my hopes and dreams crushed too many times to fall for that crap. Defeat and despair would be the least of my worries on the front lines against a real horde of demons. Plus, I probably won’t be the only one after the Demon King and that thousand years of paradise, and I’m going to need every advantage I can get. If I’ve learned anything in all my years of experience, it’s that I’ve found the one true shortcut to the top. And now I’m going to turn that into my own personal highway to paradise!

“John, I’ve got the perfect strategy to solve your little ‘problem’ in record time. I just need you to make me into a cute girl with average height, long black hair, aquamarine eyes, a curvy figure with a slim waist, and—oh! Can’t forget the breast slider. You know what I’m talking about; on a scale from flat-chested to max-sized boobs, I’m going to go with… how about, seventy percent.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “This ain’t a video game, kiddo.”

“Come on, you’re not going to tell me that that’s too unholy, are you?”

“That’s not my call to make.” John took a deep breath, then fell silent for a minute as he started filling in some empty lines on the page before him. “And you said seventy percent?” He whistled.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You sure picked a real challenge, for starters. I just want to tell you something: this isn’t supposed to be punishment, you know. I’ll see about slipping you a little something extra.”

“What are you writing down there, John?”

Before he could answer, the faint tinkling sound of a distant bell reached us.

“Looks like we got another one coming,” John noted with a frown. “Let’s wrap this up quick.”

“We’re not finished here! What about my starting gear? And spells?”

He ignored me. “So yeah, due to regulations and such it’s going to be your eighteenth birthday when you touch down in the world of Gadea.”

“Hold up, did you just say ‘Gaydea?’ That sounds weird. How do you spell it?”

“Don’t sweat the details, pal. You’re gonna fit in just fine!”

“John, wait no!”

But he didn’t wait. John tapped his fingers on the table three times, and the column of light illuminating him grew brighter and brighter.

“We might just see each other again sooner than you think,” he said with a tip of his fedora. “Oh, and one last thing before I forget.”

The last I saw of that bastard before my consciousness faded and everything turned into a blinding light was a wink and that stupid cheesy grin.

“Happy birthday, pal.”

 

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