Honestly, she’d never expected to see the person – being? – standing behind her again, so it took her a few seconds to process his appearance. The god wasn’t buff, handsome, with rippling pecs and a spotless toga anymore. No, this bedraggled creature looked almost as pathetic as…well, her.
She let out a tiny bunny scream, and the god placed a finger over her mouth, his skin pasting itself over her flat teeth until she backed up, trying to spit out the taste. “Shh,” he muttered, eyes darting around the small building. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
That was the first thing about this encounter that Pandy didn’t find surprising. She’d assumed that once she’d died and been reborn – or whatever had happened, since there hadn’t actually been anything like a birth, for which she was profoundly grateful – that was it. The god did his job and moved on to the next pathetic soul. Right? But here he was, so skinny that his sagging clothing threatened to betray his modesty, looking even more desperate than she was.
She opened her mouth to ask what was going on, then closed it again. She was, after all, still a rabbit, and rabbits couldn’t talk. Unless he was the System, and she’d been talking to him all along?
“Definitely don’t do that,” he told her. “Just talk. While I’m here, you can.”
Pandy cleared her throat, then said, “What’s going on? Am I actually in Gacha Love? Why am I a rabbit? I can’t just stay a rabbit, you know, even if it was kind of like a very stressful vacation for a little while. For that matter, why can’t I even use the skills I do have? I’m not only a rabbit, I’m the worst rabbit ever! And everyone hates me, even though I’m just a rabbit. Do you know-”
Looking pained, the god raised a hand, trying to halt her speech. Now that she had her voice back, Pandy wasn’t about to stop, however, and she continued, pouring out all of the questions that had plagued her. Yes, she’d made the best of her situation, but who just made someone a rabbit and then abandoned them? This guy, apparently.
Finally, the god stuck his finger over Pandy’s mouth again, and this time she barely managed to resist biting him. She hadn’t even realized just how much resentment had built up inside her until now, and she-
“It was an accident!” he hissed, and Pandy finally stopped, eyes going wide. He drew his finger back, absently rubbing bunny-spit from it with a disgusted look that made Pandy regret she hadn’t bit him when she could claim that was an accident.
“Look, I’d had a bad day when I met you. My girlfriend just told me she needed some ‘space’ to ‘think about what she really wanted’, and I’m pretty sure the egg and chickpea protein shake I had for lunch had gone off. I really just needed to visit the little gods’ room, you know? But you were so pitiful that I just felt like, maybe if I couldn’t help myself, I could help somebody else. And Aglaea likes it when I’m nice to people, so I thought if I told her about helping you, maybe she’d get over whatever was bothering her.”
He shook his head. “Not that that worked. I mean, look at me. I can barely pick up a bag of powdered egg white, much less toss her over the moon or lasso a dragon. She even sent me a message saying she was ready to talk, but how could I even face her like this?” He swept his hand down his body, and, yes, he looked a little like the kind of guy who’d get sand kicked in his face when he went to the beach, but that was better than being the guy doing the kicking, right?
“What do you mean it was an accident?” Pandy demanded, then stopped. Now that she was actually listening to herself, she was shocked. How could her old voice come from her current throat? The sound was achingly familiar, and she suddenly felt her eyes well with tears. Her old body hadn’t been anything special, but it was hers, and to her surprise, she missed it. Missed her tiny studio apartment and her computer and her games and her life. As pathetic as it was.
The god pointed to the SPIN! button, which she’d completely forgotten about in the heat of the moment. It no longer looked like it was about to burst into flame, but it was still smoking gently. “Every now and then, one of us will give one of you a little…boost. You know? Make things a little better for you in your next life. Some gods offer an item, while others give the person a special skill. I figured I could make sure you became one of the central figures of the, the game you loved.”
“Is it a game?” she interrupted, suddenly desperate to know.
He grimaced, then sighed. “Yes and no. In an infinite universe, all things are possible. I just found a place where your game was reality. That was the easy part. The hard part was making sure it played out the way you expected. But I figured, hey, it’s a year, right? And really I only needed to make sure that the events involving this one girl and the people around her went a certain way. At the end of that year, you’d have had a fun time playing your game for real, and things could just go on from there without my interference.”
Pandy stared at him. “So, I was supposed to be Clara, three years from now, when she enters school? Just like in the game?”
“Ehhhhh, not exactly,” he mumbled, glancing away. “You have really bad luck. Like, really, cosmically terrible luck. Translated into the kind of stats you used in the game, your luck stat would be in the negatives.” He waved his hand just over the floor. “Like way, way negative. So I figured, hey, I’ll bump it up just a bit, so she can be a character at the school. Maybe not be involved directly, but you could watch, right?
“But we’re not allowed to just pick your situation for you. After all, if one of us decided we didn’t like one of you, we could make things pretty terrible. Not that I’d ever do that,” he hastened to assure her. “No matter how much of a schmuck the client is, if they’ve earned special consideration, we give it to them. That’s the job, right? A little tweak here and there, that’s one thing, but in the end, it’s all up to fate.”
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
He pointed at the button. “Except that as soon as you touched that button, everything changed. Rather than just taking your luck to something not-negative, my boost sent it off the charts. Like, so high that you got an option that shouldn’t have even existed. Not only were you sent to the wrong body, but you were sent to the wrong time, which means that rather than one year of minor changes to deal with, now I’m powering four years of snowballing changes, and what was the first thing you do?”
He glared. “You go and change the foundation of the entire stinking story! Everything is different now, but my magic keeps trying to force it back on track, whether I like it or not, because I kind of forgot to set limits on it.”
Pandy blinked. “You forgot to set limits on it, and that’s my fault?”
The god opened his mouth as if to say yes, then stopped and rubbed his hands over his face. A few bleached hairs and some flakes of dry skin fell away, before vanishing back into whatever he was actually made of.
“Okay, no,” he admitted. “That’s God 101 level stuff. Always, always set precise rules and limitations around anything you do. Especially anything involving a client, because clients can screw up anything. But I really just wanted to have some, ah, time to myself before gathering some wild asphodel for Aglaea. You know? But I figured that at best, you might be, like, the heroine’s maid or something. That’d be great, wouldn’t it? You could brush her hair and talk about girl things. Like that.”
Pandy was starting to understand why this guy’s girlfriend might need to ‘think about things’. Still, it would have been nice to be a maid in this house, then go on to Condor with Clara. Obviously, that wouldn’t necessarily have ended well if Lian actually became a villain and started killing people who were close to Clara. But surely that wasn’t going to happen now, which meant Pandy could just watch Clara and the boys dance around each other, all while giggling to herself like a rabid stan.
“Let’s do that, then,” she said, leaning forward. “I don’t mind. Thaniel won’t even notice I’m missing after a few days.”
But the god shook his head, carefully side-swept hair falling aside to reveal a rapidly receding hairline. It kind of looked good on him, if he just got a haircut and went with it. He had good bone structure under all those muscles.
“It’s done,” he said glumly. “The one thing I did think to do was to limit it to the end of the original timeline. That means four years before we can do anything else. But in the meantime, every time you use this,” again with the jabby finger toward the button, “it provides you with an option that absolutely never should have been possible. The amount of power that takes is killing me!”
Pandy started to answer, then stilled as something occurred to her. She’d only used the button once since arriving in this world: to save Thaniel’s life. “You said you made it so the events involving Clara and the people around her would go the way they’re supposed to. What does that mean, exactly?”
The god shrugged. “The way they do in the game, you know? I mean, I didn’t play the game, obviously,” he wrinkled his nose, as if otome games were something icky he’d found on the bottom of his sandalled foot, “but it’s just girl meets boy, falls in love, and saves the world. Basic stuff, right? I see that kind of thing all the time. You’d be amazed how many of our heroes die in that kind of climactic battle, and just want a nice, peaceful life as their reward.”
“But in the game,” Pandy clarified, “Thaniel is dead, Lian is a villain, and a demon-horde decimates the country before being defeated. That’s what your magic is supposed to be forcing to happen?”
He rubbed the back of his neck before shrugging. “I mean, I guess so? I haven’t really paid that much attention except when you call the button. I’ve been busy. I still have to work, and I can’t exactly afford to miss leg day right now.” He stuck out a skinny leg and flexed the calf muscle, which looked like a tiny mouse jumping beneath his skin.
She tried again. “So your magic – the magic of a god – is going to just keep trying to kill Thaniel?”
“I suppose so,” he agreed. “For three years, ten months, and eight days, anyway.”
She lifted a paw and pointed toward the button. “And what happens if I push that button?”
He winced. “It uses up the remainder of my power. I go poof, and you go…somewhere else.”
Well, that didn’t sound good. At the moment she didn’t really care if this terrible excuse for a god went poof, but not knowing what would happen to her was slightly concerning. “Somewhere else?”
The god nodded. “When a god dies, it’s kind of a big deal. We’ve existed since the beginning of the universe, you know, and we’re supposed to survive until the end. I’m not,” he cleared his throat, “not a particularly powerful or important god, in the big picture, but if I go, everything I’ve ever done goes, too. It would be like I never even existed. The universe just kind of fills in that hole and goes on.”
“So I would have gotten a different god when I died?” she asked, suddenly even more conflicted.
“Not…necessarily,” he admitted. “Each of us has our own criteria for who we help. My standards are, um, pretty low, you know. I get bored easily, so I like to keep busy. There’s no telling if you’d even be selected by anyone else. So you’d probably just go on to wherever your soul was headed. Unless, of course, you didn’t have a god, in which case you just kind of melt into the universal constant.”
Well, that was a bucket of fudge. Pandy had attended churches, cathedrals, synagogues, and even spent a very memorable night awkwardly dancing beneath a full moon, all in an effort to be part of whatever foster family she was staying with at the time. None of it ever stuck, just like she didn’t stick to those families. How was she supposed to know she wasn’t allowed to drink the holy water or touch the scrolls in the big box at the front of the synagogue? In any case, she had no god, which meant it was the universal constant for her, whatever that was.
“What do I do then?” she demanded.
“Stop calling that button,” he told her instantly. “Definitely stop pushing it. Just let things happen, and enjoy getting to spend a few extra years in your favorite game. I mean, you got to meet the villain and the heroine already, right? That’s great stuff, right there. Do you know what I’d give to meet Batbat? But no, I have to wait and hope that I get him when he dies.”
Batbat? Had the god misspoken? But no, if it was true that everything existed somewhere, then there probably really was a bat that dressed up as a bat and went on vigilante missions to save Gothbat City.
Pandy shook her head. No getting sidetracked. She was trying to figure out something very important right now. “What if Thaniel doesn’t die? Keeps not dying, I mean?”
The god blinked. “But he’s supposed to. You broke your own game when you saved him.”
“I don’t care,” she told him fiercely. “What happens?”
“I guess…nothing?” he said, though he sounded far from sure. “If he stays alive until the game ends, then he just gets to live. The history of this world will have changed, but that’s okay. The universe is surprisingly flexible about things like that.”
“Then that’s it,” she said. “I’m going to protect Thaniel for three years, ten months, and eight days. And if you help me, then I’ll promise not to push that button.”
Sudden hope brought color to the god’s cheeks, but then faded away just as quickly. He looked around as a child’s scream split the peaceful morning air. “You’d better get moving, then,” he told her, “because my magic just did something.” He waved a hand, and Pandy felt herself lifted off her paws, spun around twice, and then darkness engulfed her vision.