I died. I was hit by a truck, in fact. Or at least, I assume it was a truck - it could just as easily have been a bus; I had just enough time to notice the looming grill and blinding headlights before it slammed into me and I got distracted.
I'd like to say I was trying to save a small ch1ld or a puppy or a nun or something, but the truth is that I was crossing the road when a sudden gust of wind blew my scarf off, and when I tried to grab it I dropped the bag I was carrying, and when I bent down to grab that I lost my balance and fell into the oncoming traffic. I never really expected to die heroically, but I'd hoped to go with a little more dignity than that.
The really embarrassing thing, though? While I was lying there, hurting in ways I didn't know I could hurt, dimly aware that everything was getting cold, and probably concussed and fractured all over the place, guess what I thought to myself. Go on, guess. It wasn't "tell my family I love them" or "a pox upon badly-designed intersections" or the Lord's Prayer or whatever. It was "Oh, I got hit by a truck, just like a light novel protagonist. I wonder if I'll get reincarnated...?" In my defense, I'd been binge-reading light novels for weeks.
Anyway, at around about that point everything went black and stopped hurting, and I started worrying what would happen next. I mean, I am religious, in an impious sort of way, but believing there's an afterlife doesn't guarantee you'll turn out to be right. Plus, I also realized that maybe I was just unconscious or in a coma or something, and that I might wake up to a new world of pain. It wasn't a comforting hypothetical.
My line of thought was interrupted when someone cheerily said "Hi! Can you hear me in there?"
I didn't respond. The counsel for the defense reminds the court that I'd just been hit by a truck, and was in shock.
"Hello?" the voice continued. It sounded female, but also a bit distorted, as if whoever-it-was was talking through a long pipe. "If you're there, speak now or forever hold your piece. Also I'll send you back where you came from. If you don't understand me... Um, I guess I'm really not prepared for that, but my roommate knows Mandarin, at least? I could get her? Hello? Anyone in there?"
I realised I needed to reply, but the only thing that came to mind was "What?!" ...Which I said without thinking. Again: Defense, truck, shock.
"Oh! It worked. Good! I mean, I knew it would - It usually does. The next part is a bit experimental, though."
"What?" I said again. It was weird. I knew I was saying words because I could hear them and because she was responding, but I couldn't feel my lips and tongue move. Or my vocal chords, for that matter. Or my lungs. And it didn't sound like the voice I was used to, either. In fact, it sounded like I thought her voice would sound without the distortion.
"Oh! Right!" she said, "I haven't introduced myself yet. I'm Sally, I'm majoring in history, and my hobby is necromancy. And I don't mean the kind of necromancy where you animate skeletons to attack people, no matter what games you've been playing. I mean the real kind, where you summon the souls of the dead and ask them questions. Usually, anyway. See, a while ago my roommate gave me a link to this Japanese novel she'd found, and it was about this girl who gets reincarnated as a giant spider in a fantasy world, and-"
"Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka?"
"Oh! I guess I can skip that part. Honestly, I kind of lost interest after the first two hundred chapters. You know how when the main character finally gets out of the dungeon she starts killing people for basically no reason? That really weirded me out. Anyway, I started reading a whole bunch of different reincarnation-themed novels after that, and I came up with this idea for a new way to travel between worlds. See, shifting physical objects between worlds is hard, but souls are dead easy to move around. Pun intended.
"The only tricky part is that they zip back to their afterlives if you don't hold them in place somehow. So I figured, if I could catch a soul just after it died, but before it passed on, I could send it into another world, attach it into an appropriate body, and it'd stay there! In theory, at least. Anyway, that's where you come in. I've found this great fantasy-ish world to send you to; I just need to set up the-"
"Wait, I'm dead? You- I'm not gonna end up as a spider, am I?"
Sun Sep 04 02:30:03 2016