“Welcome! Everything is fine.”
The words were painted in large green letters on the otherwise blank white wall in front of me. I sucked in a breath, like I was snapping awake after a nightmare. Where was I?
The space was a waiting room with popcorn ceiling tiles, a beige couch, and fake flowers standing on twin coffee tables. There was a generic painting of an indecipherable body of water on the wall to my side, beside a large veneer plywood door. How did I get here?
As if on cue, the door opened. A woman stepped out, dressed in a dark suit, her long gray hair brushing her shoulders. She cleared her throat. “Uh… Pamela? Right this way,” she smiled, motioning inside.
I stood and shuffled my way into what seemed to be her office. Everything seemed too muddled to do much else. Nothing was making any sense.
The woman sat across from me behind a large mahogany desk. “Hi, Pamela, I’m Michelle,” the woman smiled, crow’s feet wrinkling the corners of her eyes as she tapped a small stack of papers on the desk to align them.
“Hi,” I responded blankly. “What's going on? Where am I?”
“Right,” she nodded, setting the papers down. “Well… you, Pamela Bishop, are dead. Your life on earth has finished, and you’re here so we can figure out what to do with you.”
I nodded dumbly. This didn’t make sense. I was struggling to remember… anything really. All I could manage was “oh.”
She smiled kindly as she turned to flip through the papers she had. “Now… you seem to have died at 26 years old. Graduated from university with honours, got your master's degree, at which point… you crumbled under academic pressures and spent the rest of your life doing nothing. Oh, wait, no, you went into increasing crippling debt thanks to a gacha game addiction and a lack of employment. Sorry, I suppose that’s worse.”
I flushed with embarrassment. She had the entire outline of my life right in front of her. How utterly mortifying.
“Wait… how did I die? I don’t… remember,” I muttered.
“Ah, yes. In cases of traumatic or… highly embarrassing deaths, we wipe your memory for the ease of transition,” she smiled politely.
I resisted the urge to ask. “Okay… so… what now then?”
“Well…” Michelle sighed, clapping her hands together before she slid a thick brochure in my direction. “Here are the options which you qualify for in terms of afterlives and alternatives.”
I blinked. A strange eagerness bloomed within me as my confusion faded. “I wanna be reincarnated!” I blurted, bouncing in my seat.
Michelle blinked at me. “Ah, alright then. Though given your karma… are you sure?”
“No,” I groaned, rolling my eyes. “Not like spiritual religious reincarnation mumbo jumbo. I wanna be reincarnated like in an isekai.”
“This is in reference to…” she hummed, flipping through the apparent file she had on me. “Anime, web novels, manga,” she listed off.
I nodded excitedly. “Exactly. Drop me into one of those worlds. Something fantasy, with dragons and dungeons and stuff. Kinda medieval, Y’know? But with like toilets and stuff, so it doesn’t totally suck.”
“I believe so,” she replied, though her tone made me a little uneasy.
“It is possible, right?” I asked, a sudden worry striking me. “Because I literally prepared for this so hard.”
“Well, yes, of course it’s possible. It’s just not a particularly frequent request. Most want to spend the afterlife with friends or family, or begin a new life. Some simply want to be removed from existence altogether. But yes, we can… drop you into a fantasy world. We can accommodate literally every request,” she nodded.
“Thank god,” I sighed with relief. “And I can have a boon, right? That’s how this works? Something so I can get really strong really fast. Like a special title or something, so I gain XP really fast. Oh, and I want there to be a system, like in a video game, obviously,” I continued in a single uninterrupted stream of consciousness.
Michelle squinted at me. “Video game system,” she muttered, writing that down. “I’m not really sure I’m allowed to give you some kind of head start over everyone else,” she paused, looking up.
“You just said any request,” I blinked. “And it’s not a head start. Everyone else would have a head start otherwise. Plus, if I don’t get some kind of OP gimmick, then it’s no fun anyway. Living in the medieval ages would suck without magic.”
“Well,” she sighed. “Alright, fine. It is somewhat impressive how much thought you put into all this, given the fact that you didn't believe in an afterlife whatsoever. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a human who wasted more time on such a stupid premise, so… I’ll allow it.”
I grinned, rubbing my hands together. “Great. And I was also thinking, can you just give me like a ton of OP magic? I mean, levelling up really quickly would be great, but actually, if I could just start as some kind of archwizard, that would be better. I don’t really want to risk dying, and then I can skip to the good part with slinging fireballs and warping reality.”
Michelle muttered something under her breath but went back to writing. “Anything else?” She glanced up with a polite smile.
I considered it. I wished I had my phone. I had a whole document outlining exactly what I would ask for in this very situation. Ugh, I should have just gotten it tattooed on me when I had the chance. Panicking slightly as my perfect planning was proving less than helpful, I continued, listing everything I could think of.
“Okay, so I wanna like summon monsters, and build a kingdom or maybe a shop. No, that’s too specific, just make all my stats super high so I can do whatever I want to. And give me a ton of spells, the more the better, oh, and a ton of mana so I can cast said spells. And make sure there are dragons, did I already say that? Oh, and I want that hot symbiote thing from that movie? Venom? Yeah, I want a dangerous best friend that can turn me into a super strong thing,” I grinned. Fuck I was definitely forgetting so much. I should have put less time into my genie situation document and more into my isekai one.
Michelle nodded along. “High stats, lots of mana, extra dragons, parasites. Anything else?” She asked, her smile a little less polite this time.
“Um…” I considered it. I had kinda covered everything. I could ask for more superhero powers, but… I’d have magic. And I didn’t really want to punch or stab things; the whole point was magic. I was internally kicking myself. “No, I… that’s everything.”
“Okay,” she chirped, scribbling something more down and turning the page. “We’ll take everything about you into account for figuring out where you’ll fit best. Embarrassing secrets, familiar weather systems, that dinosaur phase in middle school, oh…” she trailed off, backtracking a few boxes to colour one in. “Definitely your sexual proclivities.”
“Hey,” I protested as she continued to scribble.
“Annnd, done,” she smiled, looking up and sliding the paper to me. “Just sign your name on the line there, dear.”
Well… fuck it. Literally, what else was I going to do? I took the pen and signed my name on the dotted line with a deep breath.
“Perfect,” Michelle smiled. “Alright then. Do make the most of your next life, and do keep in mind past mistakes, yes? Don’t spend this one as a shut-in, you’ll literally have everything you asked for, so make the most of it.”
“I will,” I nodded, taking a nervous breath. “Um… thank you,” I smiled. “I’ll do better, I promise.”
“I look forward to it,” she chuckled, pulling open a small glass case and hitting the big red button it covered.
My next attempt to speak turned into a scream as I dropped, plummeting down into darkness at a terrifying speed.