I clutched my aching head with both my hands. It felt as if a pain greater than the total of everything I had felt in my entire life flitted away like a small butterfly. Freeing me from the endless torment of what seemed like just moments before. But as I loosed my head from its home in the palms of my hands, I found myself in an unfamiliar dwelling.
The room itself appeared to be on the second floor of a home of some kind. It was furnished in a mixture of wooden and metal furniture that looked far out of date. Before me was a desk with a high mirror, and in the corner was a bed with a rod iron frame. In all, it resembled the kind of furnishing I'd seen in museums in my youth “Where am I?” I managed to say as I surveyed the rest of the strange landscape I had found myself in.
But before I could look around much more a voice called to me from below my field of vision. “Hey, Hey! Over here!” it said in a playfully feminine tone.
“Where are you?” I said scanning the room with my eyes, no one on the bed, no one near the door, I found myself alone with no source for the voice.
“Here, on the desk! I know you can't see past those monsters attached to your chest, but please do try a little harder.”
“Hey...” before I could offer much of a defense of myself, I gave it one more go and looked down. My field of vision was indeed blocked entirely by a wall of fabric projecting from my chest. The top I was wearing seemed to have reached its breaking point. As the very thread weaving it together was threatening to break and free from its confines a pair of breasts bigger than I'd ever seen in my entire life. Even from their cloth prison, I could tell they were perfectly round and issued forth nearly a foot from the wall of my chest and were roughly fifty percent wider than that same number. The sheer size of them was hypnotic, as my brain could barely process their gravity.
“Ahem!” the voice insisted. “Still waiting here.”
Oh right, “Sorry about that, um” I looked around again, this time past my current preoccupation, and to the desk, where sat a small box with a latch on it. I took it and popped the latch with little effort. What greeted me was a deck of cards. Ruffling through the cards, I found that each of them was illustrated lovingly with a monster of some kind, a short description of said monster, and a large crystal embedded at the bottom of each. Dragons, skeletons, mermaids, vampires, they all were present and accounted for. But as I read the back of the deck a card began to shine, and not in the holo foil sparkles that cards I knew were, it shone with a dazzling light bright as the noonday sun.
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“You finally found me!” the voice from before issued forth from...the last card in the deck? Shuffling past several more fantasy creatures, I found myself staring at the shining card face-to-face. The illustration on its face was that of a goddess with pale skin, long red hair, and wearing a two-piece black suit like a butler or other manservant. The text below that hollowed image simply read “Glory of the Goddess”. “I was worried you'd never open that prison of a box for a moment there.”
“Sorry about that, I got a little distracted there,” I said to the card.
“Fair enough, those things would distract anyone, but um, I think it's time for the usual tutorial and welcome speech.” I opened my mouth to pose a question but before I could she continued. “So! Welcome back to, well, life. As per our earlier interaction, you've been granted a second, and final, chance at life. We at the Godly Consortium For Reincarnation and Other Metaphysical Affairs have sourced the known multiverse for a plane of being in which you would thrive. Thus we've assigned you this universe after analyzing everything about you. I think you will be very happy here.
“Thank you?” I uttered in confusion.
“No problem! With that out of the way here's the basics of you're new home. This world is known as Astoria, a type one civilization with a technology similar to your Earth 150 years before the present. But magic is also a thing here, so it is unlikely much advancement will be made any time soon on that front. But more important, are those cards you've been shuffling for the last five minutes.”
True to her observation, I had been unconsciously shuffling my deck for a bit now, my face then blazed as red as a fire hydrant and I quickly tucked the cards, save for the goddess', back into their box. “Oh, nervous habit. Sorry. But why are these so important? They just look like normal trading cards to me.”
“Well, this is the last leg of our little rundown so pay attention. Everything in this world is based on these cards. Politics, religion, social standing, wars, and culture are cards and cards are culture in turn. But that is all I can say on the matter, you'll quickly find out the rest for yourself once you get into the world. To catch you up to everyone else, we've prepared this special deck and two gifts to ensure you aren't crushed immediately. The first is the card you now hold. “Glory of the Goddess” is one of a kind, so do not lose it. The other, well, you've already been acquainted with those two.”
“Huh?” I managed.
“Just look down again.”
“Oh,” I said bluntly. “THOSE”
The goddess card laughed. “Yes, those. No further explanation is needed I imagine. With that, your intro to your new life is concluded. Myself, on behalf of everyone from the Consortium, bid you goodbye and good luck, you will certainly need it.”
With that the Glory of the Goddess card's luminous glow slowly faded to nothing, leaving behind nothing more than a trading card that no longer spoke. I was once more on my own. I took the card box and placed my seemingly best card back among the other. I was tired. I had seemingly just died of course. So I took to my bed and drifted off to sleep.