The night sky as a child was very different by the time I ripened into my later years. There were countless stars, painted across the heavens. You could get lost in them, just staring up into forever and ever. But then the big city folks began to shine up their spotlights to see better and slowly the shy stars winked out. Stage fright is good at killing stars, after all.

So imagine my surprise when I died and the stars came back into my vision.

Stars. Countless numbers of stars. I could have cried.

Except the tears wouldn’t come.

“Thank my lucky stars. I’m not in Hell.” I sighed with relief. I knew I had died. That was obvious. It just wasn’t obvious which death I would be in.

Well, maybe not. Soon enough the stars grew brighter and brighter. The darkness of space faded away as their lights grew into what I could only describe as a free floating billboard with friendly, cheery, borderline comic sans lettering.

An annoyingly pleasant female voice thundered out the words all around me, like an airplane safety video being forced upon all the passengers.

“Oh, hell, no,” I replied back. No, not a billboard. A… game over screen? No, no, just let me die in peace. Thank you very much. Where’s the remote?

I tried to physically move around, but found that no matter where I looked the screen was there. And there were also no signs of my body physically moving about in the first place. I was in some sort of spiritual state floating in the void - just kind of stuck here and forced to acknowledge a virtual TV screen blotting out my view of the stars.

Since there was no analog inputs I could visibly see anywhere I had to improvise. So naturally, I reacted like any person would that hadn’t grown up with the newfangled touchscreen technology of the twentieth century: I pressed randomly until I got somewhere.

Good lord... She said everything so cheerily. A flurry of hundreds of options scrolled across my eyes. Countless boxes and toggles. Blurry words in tiny fonts streamed across my old eyes like a medication infomercial ad. Because, who knew, death doesn’t come with glasses. And I was sorely missing mine.

“No, that can’t be right…” I briefly squinted at the options available in larger font sizes. All of them sounded miserable. Sword fighter? Archer? Spellsword? What on Earth is that? With this old bag of bones I call mine? I scrolled down as far as I could, pressing on other random parts of the screen more, trying to figure out the buttons or if there were even buttons in the first place. Eventually one seemed reasonable: I’d pick nothing.

“Positive. I don’t want any character.”

I mentally jammed the option.

“What? No, ugh. Lady, you’re really cooking my grits right now. Work with me, please. Let me have some choice in how I die.”

“You’re voice activated too? God, no wonder this feels like an insurance phone call now. Okay, how about this: speak with a representative.”

Nothing.

I tried again, louder. In my most authoritative, minimal accented “Karen” voice (as the kids called it these days), “Speak with representative!”

Nothing.

“Fine, I don’t need you anyways.”

“Lady, you’re not making this easy at all, are you?”

I sighed. I was getting nowhere. Despite being dead, I somehow managed to develop a headache. I was tired. Somehow, even in space I could feel my bones. I pressed my spiritual forefinger and thumb to my forehead and started to massage my aching…

“Fine!” I groaned. “I’ll just kill myself as soon as I can in the next one!”

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

Then everything went black.

***

I awoke to dirt.

A whole mountain of it. Pressing down right upon my face. Because I was underground… Clearly, not dead.

Which, honestly, was terrifying. Amid my video game style hallucinations, I had clearly not kicked the bucket. No, far worse: they had somehow managed to bury me alive.

Honestly, I’m not surprised. That’s exactly something my family would do. Intentionally or not. I probably had it coming. The hospital in today’s age though? Well, that’s not surprising either… I never did like that nurse. But surely someone would have noticed before they buried me alive, right? Just they wait until they hear from my lawyers. Ha!

I scrambled about in the dark and tried to reach out, seeing if there was some sort of rope I could pull to ring a bell that would alert the local grave-keeper to get to diggin’. That was something I had read about back from times of medieval plagues. Maybe they still did it?

Or so, I thought. In my scrambled panic of trying to grab anything I realized I didn’t feel… anything at all. None of those fragile sensations from that old mortal shell. I still tensed up and my breathing was rapid, but there was no bodily response accompanying that. Yet I could slowly see in the dark as my eyes adjusted. It was less like being a spirit, and more like some sort of sleep paralysis, except I could… see everywhere?

Wait just a moment here.

I’m a … rock?

A big lumpy, gray rock. Granted, it was a rock with a big ol’ crack split down the middle showing a shiny mauve purple crystal geode core center that radiated outward in a pretty manner. Specks of yellow glimmered across the surface and the air appeared to shimmer there as if it was trapped in a hot mirage. I found myself mesmerizing to behold, if I do say so myself. Perhaps I was a magical rock. But still, I was ultimately, just a rock.

Well, fiddlesticks. Ain’t that the shits. That wasn’t a hallucination? You mean to really tell me that annoying air stewardess really started my life over?

* USE MANA TO SHAPE YOUR SURROUNDINGS TO YOUR IDEAL ENVIRONMENT

* CURATE AND PROTECT YOUR ENVIRONMENT

* USE WHICHEVER BIOLOGICAL, MECHANICAL, MAGICAL, OR HAZARDOUS MEANS DEEMED NECESSARY>

Speak of the devil! What the blazes?

You can hear me?

… is what I tried to say. Except, turns out, rocks can’t talk. Not much way to vocalize and all that jazz.

Instead, a few new words and numbers popped up into the corner of my vision.

[MERRIWEATHER DUNGEON

GEOBLOOM CORE (LEVEL 1)

MANA CAPACITY: 0/20

MANA RENEWAL RATE: 1

MINIONS: N/A

TRAP INTEGRITY: N/A

LOOT VALUE: N/A

AVAILABLE SKILLS:

LEYLINE KNITTING (LVL 1)

GARDENCRAFT (LVL 1)

MANA DUSTING (LVL 1)

UNLOCKED POWERS:

WEARY BONES AURA

SCRAPBOOK SOULSTEW]

No matter which way I turned to look, the words followed me around. At least I had something to read to pass the time? Well, and dirt and stones and some roots. Oh, there’s a worm. And would you look at that, even more dirt. Apparently the hard, 'uphill through the snow' level of difficulty mode of whatever game this was apparently resulted in perpetual boredom. The real challenge was not going insane.

How thrilling.

So there I was, waiting for something to happen. Anything. It would seem I had been left to my own devices. And my own devices appeared to be eternal suffering. Which meant a lot of time to think. I felt so out of touch near the end of my life. Everything was so confusing. And so far, not much seems to be different now. Maybe I was placed into some sort of video game simulation. Maybe this was some sort of sick joke. Or maybe Gertrude was right and I had finally gone senile.

And maybe I didn’t care which one it was. Might as well sit back, relax, and enjoy this vacation. Especially since it didn’t involve Gertrude. That prudish. no-good, rotten home wrecking hussie…

Without even thinking about it, I lashed out in anger. As if trying to And instead got a nasty “mouthful” of dirt.

I’m sorry, can you repeat that? My ears aren’t what they used to be.

I stretched out my … mind, I’m guessing, again. This time I chose a different direction. I reached out and willed the dirt gone, as if it had personally offended me. I watched closely as a small section of dirt tumbled and caved in on itself. Instead, a portion of the dirt was seemingly turned into wavering yellow and orange smoke. The kind of ugly colors you might see on the vinyl flooring of a tacky 70’s kitchen. The smoke drifted about lazily for a moment, then immediately got swept up into my rocky self, straight to my geode center. And yessir, that did indeed taste like dirt. Specifically though, soil: clay and bacteria; nutrients and minerals; decomposing insect shell particles; nitrogen, calcium, oxygen…

Oh? You don’t say, lady?

None of the component parts of the dirt really mattered to me. I played hooky with chemistry class. But I can recognize a good feedback loop of positive reinforcement when I see one. An odd mix of emotions hit me all at once. Greed, satisfaction, pride, hunger… All of them seemingly designed to motivate me to the task of shoveling soil around like a granny in a garden.

Well…golly, if you insist. I must oblige. What else am I going to do?

Alright. Let’s try up this time. Eventually I’ll reach the surface. What’s the worst that could happen?

And after six more modest scoopfuls and one more “level up” of Mana Dusting, I had my answer: water. Water could happen. The rocks and soils would shift above me, collapse into my core, then automatically absorbed into wispy sulfurous smoke. Which wasn’t so bad. Like my Pappy would always say before putting me in the timeout closet, “Nothing like a good deal of claustrophobia to build character, eh?” But the problem was something far above had shifted just enough to divert some sort of reservoir or stream. Just a tiny trickle, slowly gaining in volume as the seconds ticked by. I quickly discovered I could not Mana Dust away water. It had no effect. Which gave me a bit of a startle. I couldn’t swim well as a human. I certainly couldn’t swim well as a rock!

I frantically read through the see-through computer style screen that still remained in the corner of my vision. There were a lot of acronyms, made up words and phrases I didn’t recognize, and enough grammatical errors to earn a switch across the wrists. It still didn't make much sense to me. It all seemed like the kind of mumbo jumbo her nieces would be able to interpret. Which meant that there was still a logic and set of rules to how things worked. I just had to figure it all out.

I noticed two immediate differences. The first being that Mana Dusting read as [LVL 3]. And that Mana Capacity was at 15 out of 20.

Wonderful. What the hell is “Mana?”

I was familiar with a similar word, Manna - food that fell from the heavens. When Moses had to cross the desert. Damn. That takes me back to Catholic School. My mother would be so disappointed to hear that I did not end up in Hell…

Right. Water. Drowning rock. What else have I got? I remembered one tidbit that the lady mentioned - that I could shape my surroundings to my ideal environment, using Mana. Gee, that sounds kind of like magic to me. Which meant I must have had other tools besides Mana Dusting at my disposal. What if I tried reaching out with my mind to manually clicking on the other skills? Would it give me options?

Well, by golly, it does. They looked like schematics? Or blueprints? That’s a lot of options… Too many, actually. And I don’t understand most of them! How am I supposed to make any choices at all?

Okay, how about this? I’ll click the first thing that looks good and see what happens. If chipper attendant lady is to be believed, I might be able to create objects?

And maybe it’ll plug up the water leak.

It felt like a stretch.

I clicked on a tree.

And then the roots around and below me began to glow with a fierce green, rapidly absorbing the nearby water. Air from above whooshed downwards into the roots and a creaky groaning noise immediately began to follow. I watched with anticipation.

Nothing happened.

Then a full grown tree popped up from below me, launching me out of the earth. And into the sky.