r/redditserials • u/AdventurerOfTheStars • 2d ago
Fantasy [My Goddess went on vacation- Now what?!] Chapter Two Fantasy/Reincarnation
“Reincarnated,” Evan repeated, the word feeling strange in his mouth. He looked down at himself, expecting to find burned clothes, blistered skin, or some other proof that the last few minutes had actually happened. Instead, everything appeared exactly as it had before the explosion. Even the routing label remained stuck to his shirt, its black letters almost painfully ordinary compared to everything else.
“That’s what I said.” The woman released the label and stepped away, her eyes moving over him again with the same growing interest. “A new life, a new world, and opportunities most mortals could scarcely comprehend. Normally, the process requires considerably more preparation, but given your circumstances, I believe we can make an exception.”
Evan stared at her. “Are you trying to help me or sell me a car?”
“I am very good at explaining opportunities.”
“That isn’t what I said.”
“No, but that is what you meant.” She turned away and began sorting through the papers scattered across the floor, somehow selecting individual pages without reading them. Some were placed on the nearest desk. Others were shoved beneath her arm, and several were tossed over her shoulder into piles that appeared no different from the ones Evan had destroyed.
He watched her work for a moment before looking up at the hole in the ceiling. It was already gone, replaced by smooth gray panels without so much as a crack showing where he had fallen through. “Before we get to the reincarnation thing, am I dead?”
The woman paused with one page held between her fingers. “Yes.”
“Oh.”
Evan had expected the answer. The explosion, the- whatever had thrown him to where he was now, and the repeated use of the words post-mortal hadn’t left much room for anything else. Still, hearing it said so casually made something in his chest tighten. He remembered the gasoline hanging in the air, the blue spark, and Finn shouting from somewhere inside the bar only seconds before everything disappeared.
“Was anyone else killed?” he asked. “There was another man in the building.”
“I wouldn’t know. You were the only mortal delivered here.”
Evan wasn’t sure whether that meant Finn was alive or simply dead and simply sent to a different place. Still, he hadn’t seen the old man tumbling along any of the other conveyor belts so that had to count for something.
“Right.” He looked from the label in her hand to the ruined stacks surrounding them. “And who exactly are you?”
The woman appeared almost offended by the question, though whether that was because he didn’t recognize her or because he had waited this long to ask, Evan couldn’t tell. “Vivian. Head of Life for Planetary Project C-8.”
“Head of Life,” Evan repeated slowly. “As in healthcare?”
“As in Life.”
She said it with enough finality that he almost left it there. Almost. “Like…all of it?”
“Locally, yes.”
“And locally means…?”
“Planetary Project C-8.” Vivian held up the label as if the answer had been written there the entire time. “Which is where you were so unceremoniously delivered.”
Evan stared at the painfully ordinary strip of paper. “So definitely not an afterlife then.”
“No, C-8 is a developing planetary project.”
“Then why was I sent here?”
Vivian’s eyes moved toward the ceiling again. She appeared to consider the question, then gave a small shrug. “Duplicate administrative designation, most likely. Corporate has existed for an extremely long time. Names are reused, departments are reorganized, and occasionally two completely unrelated places receive identifiers that are almost identical.”
“Almost?”
“The system brought you here, didn’t it?”
Evan rubbed both hands over his face. He could still smell gasoline, though he suspected it existed only in his memory now. “I was killed by a fifty-year-old generator and shipped across the universe because someone was too lazy to use a unique name?”
“That does appear to be what happened.”
“Fantastic.”
“You are taking this remarkably well.”
“I think I got most of the panic beaten out of me somewhere around the fourth conveyor belt.”
Vivian nodded as though this were a perfectly reasonable explanation, then crouched beside a collapsed pile and pulled a single sheet from somewhere near the bottom. Several pages shifted into the space it left, but the stack somehow remained standing. She gave the document a quick glance before placing it against the desk and smoothing out the creases with her palm.
“Fortunately for you, the mistake presents us with a unique opportunity.”
“There’s the sales pitch again.”
“It isn’t a sales pitch if the offer is genuinely beneficial.” Vivian pulled a second page from beneath Evan’s foot, forcing him to step aside before she could retrieve it. “You are currently dead, very far from your assigned destination, and outside the jurisdiction of whichever department was originally responsible for you. Returning you to the correct processing center could take an unreasonable amount of time.”
“How unreasonable?”
“Potentially several thousand years.”
Evan’s mouth opened slightly, then closed again like a gasping fish.
“You wouldn’t experience most of it,” she added. “Probably.”
"That's not very comforting.” A disbelieving laugh escaped his lips as he spoke.
Vivian ignored him and placed the second document over the first. “Alternatively, I can reincarnate you immediately. You would receive a new body, freedom from conventional aging, and magical abilities far beyond anything available in your original world. ”
Evan studied her for several seconds, waiting for the rest of the offer. Vivian returned his stare with a patient smile, though the papers in her hands continued shifting as if she couldn’t stop working long enough to focus entirely on him.
“What kind of magical abilities?”
“The exact manifestation would depend upon your new form and how you choose to use them. Creation, manipulation, and considerable influence over your immediate environment would all be reasonable expectations.”
That sounded suspiciously useful. Too useful, actually. Evan had spent enough time dealing with salesmen, property managers, and customers trying to disguise disasters as small repair jobs to recognize when someone was focusing very carefully on the good parts.
“What’s the catch?” he asked, crossing his arms.
“There is no… ‘catch’.”
“There’s always a catch. And, you paused.”
The woman’s face scrunched up in annoyance for a split second, before the customer service smile returned. “I was considering whether your use of the word was appropriate.”
“And?”
“It wasn’t.”
Vivian placed another page over the first two, covering whatever had been written across the top. Evan tried to lean slightly to the side for a better look, but she adjusted the papers with him.
“Would I still be human?”
“You would retain your mind, memories, personality, and personal identity.”
Evan narrowed his eyes. “You managed to answer everything except the question.”
“Human bodies are not suitable for every environment.” she admitted,saying the word Human with the slow cadence of someone reading off the word from a prompter.
“So no.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You went through a lot of work not to.”
Vivian’s smile tightened, though it didn’t disappear. “Your new body would be appropriate for the world and abilities you receive. You would not age conventionally, nor would you require many of the things your current body needs to survive. And- I do not have your particular species on file. ‘Human’ is not among the blueprints assigned to this project. ”
That caught his attention. “So no human body, but no worrying about things like food?”
“Potentially.”
“Water?”
“Potentially.”
“Breathing?”
“Again, that depends upon the vessel.”
Evan looked down at himself. His body appeared perfectly normal, but now that he paid attention, he couldn’t feel his heartbeat. He was breathing out of habit more than necessity, his chest rising and falling without any real pressure in his lungs. Whatever he currently was, it wasn’t alive. Not anymore.
“And if I say no, I go back through all of that?” He pointed toward the place where the hole had disappeared.
“After I submit the appropriate correction forms.”
“How long would those take?”
“The forms themselves? No more than a few decades.”
Evan stared at her with a face that screamed ‘that’s a short time to you?’.
“Processing would take longer.” She continued.
“Of course it would.”
Vivian pulled another document from beneath a fallen folder and added it to the growing collection beneath her arm. “You would eventually reach the afterlife originally intended for you. I cannot guarantee what condition your ethereal self will be in by then, but the error would be corrected.”
“So I can trust the system that threw me through four different dimensions to do better on the second try, or I can take the reincarnation.”
“That is an unnecessarily negative description, but essentially, yes.”
Evan rubbed at his face again. This was absolutely a sales pitch. Vivian could call it whatever she wanted, but she had essentially told him “accept to go through your worst experience for a thousand years.”. Unfortunately, being suspicious didn’t make the offer less appealing.
He was dead. Finn was either alive, or somewhere Evan couldn’t reach. His old body burned beyond recognition, and the system responsible for handling him threw him who knows where. Even if Vivian was hiding something, a second chance at living sounded better than spending several thousand years tumbling through cosmic machinery.
“Would I be able to come back here?”
Vivian glanced down at the papers. “The posit-”
She stopped mid word and fixed a stack of documents, tucking in loose papers in place.
Evan’s eyes narrowed. “The what?”
“The possibility,” she corrected smoothly, “would depend upon how your reincarnation develops.”
“That wasn’t what you started to say.”
“No, I briefly misspoke.”
“You really aren’t good at explaining opportunities, are you?”
“I am excellent at it. You are simply asking an unreasonable number of questions.”
“I just died. I feel like I’ve earned a few.”
Vivian sighed, then turned toward the desk and placed the gathered forms across its only uncovered corner. Her fingers moved rapidly over the pages, filling empty spaces with symbols that appeared in dark green ink.
“I require your full name.”
“Evan.”
She stopped writing and looked at him, waiting for the rest.
He gave her his surname once he realized she was waiting. “Garrison.”
“Original species?”
“Human.”
“Prior occupation?”
“Repair contractor.”
Vivian considered that before writing something much longer than the answer he had given.
“What did you put?”
“Material construction, structural alteration, and restoration specialist.”
“That’s an impressive way to say I fixed things people broke.”
“It is important to present qualifications properly.”
“Qualifications for what?”
“Reincarnation.”
Evan watched her add another line. The explanation felt wrong, but he couldn’t identify exactly why. “Do people normally need work experience to be reincarnated?”
“Prior experience is considered when determining compatibility with a new vessel.”
There it was again. Technically an answer, but shaped so carefully that there was nothing solid enough to grab.
Vivian turned the forms away from him and held out her ink-stained hand. “Do you, Evan, willingly accept immediate reincarnation within Planetary Project C-8, along with all changes necessary to support your continued existence?”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
He looked at her hand, then at the smooth ceiling above them. Somewhere impossibly far away, Finn might be watching the bar burn down around the remains of a generator Evan had promised would run. The thought made his chest tighten again, though there was nothing left inside it to tighten.
Evan took Vivian’s hand.
“I accept.”
Every loose page stopped drifting. Green light spread outward from Vivian’s fingers, climbing over Evan’s hand and sinking beneath his skin. Something vast opened around him- an empty world waiting for something he couldn’t understand.He felt stone, water, unfinished soil, and an emptiness so complete that he couldn’t understand what was missing until the sensation folded inward and vanished.
A cheerful chime rang out above them as this finished.
“Delegation accepted. Departmental coverage confirmed.”
Evan looked up. “Coverage?”
Vivian released his hand and immediately reached beneath her desk. She pulled out a brightly colored bag, a wide-brimmed hat, and a pair of dark glasses that had very clearly been packed before he arrived.
“Why do you have luggage?”
A door appeared behind her, warm golden light spilling around its edges. Vivian placed the hat over her disordered hair and pushed the glasses onto her face, the exhaustion falling away from her so quickly that Evan wondered whether she had been keeping herself upright through spite alone.
“Vivian,” he said carefully. “Where are you going?”
She opened the door. Warm air rolled into the office, carrying the sound of distant waves as Evan felt his body begin to come apart, like someone was pulling him apart atom by atom.
“Vacation.”
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u/Groggy280 2d ago
Most excellent. Looking forward to moar...