Arthur sighed as he felt the hot water running down his face. The truck had come in for the store, and after a day of unloading boxes his body ached. Of course there was something good about being exhausted; he couldn’t dwell on how it was another dead end day gone working a dead end job in a dead end life.
Instead he’d relax under the heat of the shower, then get on his computer, and find some sitcom to watch. It’d be nice, and relaxing, and he could eat a sandwich and sink into a waking oblivion.
“Hello.” The voice was cheerful, and if Arthur had been less tired his mind might have found some more creative synonyms and descriptors. At the moment, though, he was just aware it wasn’t his mother’s, father’s, or sister’s, and no one else had a reason to be in this bathroom.
It wasn’t even a voice that he recognized. His head jerked to the side, eyes straining to see through the shower curtain, but only able to discern yellow, like someone had put up an opaque yellow tarp on the other side. His hand moved to the plastic and pulled it back, his other starting to turn the shower nozzle off.
He was stunned. Should he shout? Call the police? Why the hell was there some stranger saying hello to him when he was taking a shower?
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” the voice continued, in what Arthur misidentified as a slight British accent. It was coming from pretty close by, but he didn’t see a person. All he saw was a great, round yellow shape, two black blobs, and a curved black line underneath them. No. It was a line segment ending in a pair of smaller straight lines perpendicular to it, one on either side of it.
“I have come to you with a great offer of adventure,” The voice seemed to be coming from the giant, floating, paper thin smiley face that was occupying much of his, or his parent’s, bathroom.
Arthur didn’t scream. It was too profoundly strange for him to scream. He stared at it dumbly for a moment, though. “What are you?”
“I am your guide to a wondrous plethora of worlds and adventure,” The smiley face said matter of factly.
Arthur bit his lower lip. This was weird. This was something out of some chuuni anime fantasy. This was a definite sign that he had…
“You’ve not gone crazy,” The smiley face said, “And I’m reading your character more than your mind, though it’s hard to say where one ends and the other begins to be honest.”
Arthur wanted to sit down. Wanted to consider this. Wanted to put some pants on. But what he wanted most was to know…
“What’s going on is simple,” The smiley face said. “You and eleven other randomly selected candidates from your world have been judged by my superiors. We have then proceeded from the most appealing to least appealing candidate to offer you each a chance at adventure. Normally we’d stop once all five slots were filled, which means that as the 10th candidate you’d have little chance to access a slot. However we have decided to extend an additional offer to the least deserving candidates.”
Arthur had the feeling he should be insulted at that bit, but this thing was monologuing an explanation, and while he wasn’t certain he wasn’t crazy, he was smart enough not to interrupt it when it was explaining what this offer was.
“The mission, should you choose to accept it, is to travel the metaverse, visiting those worlds which you perceive as fiction in an attempt to entertain my superiors and the sponsors of your journey.”
“Entertain?” Arthur asked, having the uneasy feeling that he was being given an end users license agreement he really needed to read the fine print of.
“Yes. Provide them with amusement or enjoyment. Delight. Please. Cheer. I am surprised you don’t know the meaning of entertain,” The smiley face’s expression was - at least to Arthur - utterly inscrutable. But it seemed to suddenly realize, “Oh, it was not the word, but my use of it. I apologize. I am still new to this job, and not fully used to conversing with fictional entities such as yourself.”
“Fictional!?” Arthur’s hand moved to the support bar coming from the wall to help ensure no one slipped and fell in the shower. This floating yellow circle, this psychotic break, was calling him fictional.
“Erm well… ontologically inferior? Less real? Yes, I think that might be the best term. I am not accustomed to dealing with less real entities directly, I apologize.”
“What makes you more real than me?” Arthur demanded.
The smiley face looked at him. “I could show you but it would shatter your mind. Suffice it to say that I exist in a higher level of reality, above those beings you would call gods. You are not an ant to me. You are more akin to a fictional character. You lack the levels of psychological and internal existence I take for granted similar to how a picture lacks the spatial dimensions you value so much. Like I said I am not reading your mind, it is still more akin to… well to continue the discussion of fiction, I am observing the tropes that make up your being and predicting the outcome of the cliches that culminate in you.”
Arthur had had enough. “Shut up you pompous ass!” He said, letting go of the bar and swinging at his delusion. His fist, though, passed harmlessly through it, as if it completely lacked substance and he found himself falling forward.
And then everything stopped, and he was floating.
No to be floating he’d have needed a body. He couldn’t feel his. He existed as…
“Disembodied thought,” The Smiley Face said. But it wasn’t speaking. To speak implied sound and to receive words implied something that could hear. Arthur was fairly certain that neither of those existed here and now. And no longer did he seem to be facing a simple smiley face. He was in the presence of something vast enough to squash whales like ants, or break a world in two.
“I have put your world on pause.” And Arthur had an instant comprehension of what it meant. It had frozen time across the entirety of his world. “Now, shall I finish explaining the offer?” The entity asked.
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It was too vast, too beyond him, to call it anything but an entity. It was like something out of H.P. Lovecraft. The gibbering mouth of nuclear chaos. And even before it asked it knew the answer, and before Arthur himself could gain comprehension of that answer it had already explained due to the nature of its method of communication in this place. It wasn’t speaking to him. It was communicating meaning.
Like here it meant it was annoyed that he was wasting its time. And at the same time the concept of the offer entered his mind. A travel across the metaverse, the worlds he would consider fiction but were equally as real, if not a step more real, than his own. The offer was to obtain the chance at his own greater reality. A chance to ascend into a higher level of existence, one which even in this reality of pure thought and meaning he could no more understand than a prisoner trapped in a cave could understand an object from seeing merely a portion of its shadow. But to obtain that chance he would have to entertain the smiley face’s master, and those who were working with it. Whose sponsorship would grant him the ability to ascend.
“Normally there would be a certain stipend given to you in each world, one which would help you fold the powers and nature of that world into yourself to fuel your ascension and metamorphosis.” And that was the offer given to the other candidates, or at least 5 of them.
Arthur wanted to recoil back, to jerk away from the alien intrusion of information into his mind. But he also knew he was going to accept. He was living a dead end life working a dead end job where every day was a dead end day. His existence was meaningless. He produced nothing. He did nothing. He had no impact.
“However, to squeeze in a sixth slot, we have had to make certain cutbacks. You will not be given a free stipend. Instead you will have to perform tasks which the sponsors have chosen to offer a reward upon. For each of these bounties that you complete you will be given a certain stipend of energy with which to fuel your own. To wrap yourself in layers of fiction and meta-fiction in an attempt to become real.” It wasn’t really fiction or meta-fiction, Arthur knew it… but he also realized he lacked the esoteric lexicon to find a better word. That this was just the shape his mind could find comfort in for what it was actually telling him.
“You will be sent to worlds at the whims of my master and the sponsors. You will be tasked as we see fit.” This was why 3 people were turning down the offer, why one person turned down the offer with the stipend and two without it. If these unfathomable gods wanted to see him suffer he would suffer. To say yes was to put his life in the hands of an unknowable, alien being. It was ultimately an act of faith.
And he didn’t have faith.
He did have a tinge of despair. A desire for a different life. A desire for change.
“If you die, or fail to entertain sufficiently, you will be returned to this world as I unpause it, along with the other candidates who will or have failed. And we will take our entertainment by observing the world they make of it.”
That idea was terrifying. Partially ascended failed gods would be returning to his world. If he said no he’d have no power to stop them. No power to do anything. And if he said yes he’d be used by a bunch of Lovecraftian gods watching him for Reality TV putting him through who knew what pain and humiliation, but he would have a chance - and only a chance - at having a meaningful amount of power to change things.
He wasn’t sure it was worth the risk.
“If this happens without you having gained some more than mortal powers, you will resume your tripping fall.” He’d swung at it. He’d passed through it. He’d put too much force on wet feet in a wet tub. He had already begun to fall. And he could feel the information and intent of the smiley face as it spoke, the future that awaited him if he said no. He’d fall. He’d hit his head on the toilet, his temple in specific, and he’d black out. No one would find him and he would die. A sad, pathetic death which would only make certain that his life was a waste.
He would say yes, because he very very much did not want to die. Even as he was terrifyingly certain it had goaded him into punching it at the exact instant he did to put him into a position where he couldn’t say no. If that was how it behaved…
“That was not my intention. To ensure you can influence the world you will end in, you will be given a modicum of power folded into you for free. I will even add a little something extra from myself as a gesture of my own apology for misleading you, and for causing your self-destructive rage in the first place.”
It felt like it was being honest. Like it really didn’t have malice. Like it was honestly apologetic, even if only in the way a human might feel guilty for accidentally damaging a plant, or an animal. He didn’t know if he could trust it or not.
And that actually made him want to trust it. Either this was a psychotic break and he was imagining all of this. Or maybe he’d had an aneurism in his brain or something and this was a dying dream. Or it was telling the truth, and it was a god-like being who could re-write reality with a thought and overwrite who he was with another one.
“But that would be boring. Live entertainment,” By which it meant with free will, but free will as a creation of an omnipotent deity who had blinded its own omniscience through its making so that it could relieve its boredom by observing the ants in its ant farm without knowing deterministically where they would go. “Is so much more fun for our audience than scripted. As such you will merely be rewarded for completing tasks, instead of required to do so. You only need to remain entertaining and alive.”
There was a pause. Arthur felt ready to explode. So much desire to scream. Freak out. Faint. Stress and anxiety bubbling up in a mind that no longer had a body to do any of those things. This felt as unscripted as reality TV, and every bit as rigged to make him say yes.
“Do you agree?” The entity asked him. The implications of the concept pushing into his thoughts. Be their plaything and see where it took him, or fall and see what those who returned from that voyage did with the Earth. “I know you will,” Arthur had already made up his mind and however it was reading him it’d demonstrated the ability to know that much, “but formalities must be followed.”
“Yes.” It was the first ‘word’ that Arthur had managed to will out from himself in this place and the first word of pure thought that he had spoken. It was not easy, taking the force of his being to push it out, and what he felt should have been the loudest roar was an almost inaudible whisper. He would be their plaything and see where it took him. Still it was the chance at fame, fortune, and a better life.
“In that case.”
He still wasn’t in a body. Arthur knew that. But now he seemed to be in a classroom. A scantron sheet was in front of him. He’d not touched one of those since college. Besides the scantron was a stack of test papers. It was like a dream. The old one where he was showing up to a final, realizing he’d not studied, had no idea what it was on, and he’d arrived in the classroom naked.
The smiley face appeared where the teacher, or proctor, should have been, at the front of the lecture hall, between the black board and the desk. “Welcome,” It said in that cheerful, no, disturbingly chipper was the better description Arthur decided, voice. “Behind me is the bounty board, on it you can see the various bounties the sponsors are offering for your first world. On your desk you will find your character which will show you your stat line as currently using human baseline as 1s. It will update to reflect the means in which you have wrapped yourself in the realities you have visited, or gain and develop new skills and capabilities. Beneath the character sheet you will find a sheet describing your options for this new world. Please read them and the bounties carefully, then fill out the scantron sheet for your initial choices to determine your nature in the world. You will be able to review your world options, character sheet, or bounty board at any time with your third eye on your mental HUD, and you will have the option to spend points to purchase additional world options until you enter the next world. Any questions?”
Arthur looked at them, his dream self’s jaw slack and agape. “Yes.” Of course he had questions.