“YOUNG MAN, they’re going to kill you!”

I tore my gaze away from my bloodied fingers, stopped my fruitless attempts to pull out the shard of glass stuck deep into my palm, my dripping red fingernails sliding off it. My eyes lifted. The speaker was a tall and slender man in an old-fashioned dark suit with fancy golden buttons and cufflinks. Weird clothes. For some reason, they made me think of the days of Sherlock Holmes, Queen Victoria, Alice in Wonderland. All the stranger needed to complete the look of a late nineteenth-century English gentleman was a top hat and gold pocket watch. His clothes were entirely unsuited to the weather. Even in my army dress uniform, I was boiling. What was it like for him..?

In the meantime, the odd stranger repeated that phrase of his again, that they were going to kill me. Only this time, he went into detail.

“They’ll knife you twice as soon as you leave the restaurant. A grievous wound to the liver. But the second thrust is worse, the one that cuts through the mesenteric artery. You will bleed out. The ambulance called by your ex-girlfriend will fail to get you to hospital in time, Andrei.”

I shivered. I hadn’t mentioned my name. But then I realized that it had come out a few times during the recent fight, while my girlfriend, unfortunately now ex, tried to shout sense into me and pull me away from her new boyfriend. All the same, this strange man’s words made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. How could he know what was going to happen? With such precise details of future events? But the stranger obviously believed what he was saying to the very end!

He was either a madman or just brave, I didn’t know which… If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t have gotten mixed up with a guy who’d just been in a bloody fight, his emotional state obviously not most receptive to advice and lectures. Nonetheless, I saw no sign of fear in the stranger’s eyes. On the contrary, he emanated icy calm. He was absolutely certain that he could deal with me if he had to. To be honest, that scared me more than his creepy predictions.

He wasn’t young, but was still far from old. It was tough to figure out his age — his dark hair contrasted sharply with his gray streaks and too-youthful skin without a hint of a wrinkle. His eyes stood out — black, sharp, piercing straight through me. If not for those eyes and the gray streaks in his hair, I’d have said he was thirty-five. But no, nobody that age had eyes so piercing, full of the wisdom of long life. Smooth, olive skin. Drawn face, thick brows, aristocratic nose. It wasn’t just his age that was hard to figure out, but his nationality too.

Who was he? Where had he come from? He sure didn’t look like a waiter or restaurant musician — I’d seen the workers’ uniforms at this joint; they were nothing like this. And he was too confident, his voice too used to giving commands. Maybe the restaurant owner? The man stood patiently, awaiting my answer to his warning.

“Um… Why will they kill me?” I said, trying to argue with this strange man after the long pause. “I could call the police, and they’d come and scare off those bastards. Or I can go out through the back door and avoid any deadly knifings.”

The stranger thought for a moment, then shook his head and spoke with a strange certainty in his voice:

“No, Andrei, that will not change your fate. Calling the police will only delay, not prevent, the inevitable finale. As will an escape through the restaurant’s back door. In that case, the killer will simply ambush you outside your apartment building. Karina has already reported your address to your foe’s vassals.”

I got upset. I recalled with crystal clarity that nobody involved in the recent fight had spoken my ex-girlfriend’s name aloud. And what was that strange word, ‘vassals’? Not ‘lackeys,’ ‘stooges’ or ‘thugs’ as any modern person might say. The half-forgotten word ‘vassals’ smelled like musty tomes.

A madman, for sure! Now he sighed as if he really felt sorry for me. He slowly sat down at my table and languidly stretched out, crossing his hands on his belly, fingers intertwined. I couldn’t help but notice the massive golden signet rings inset with large gemstones adorning the man’s carefully manicured fingers. At the same time, for some reason it became unbearable for me to look the man straight in the eyes. I broke off my gaze, looked down again at my broken hand.

What surprised me was the feeling in my gut that he was right. No doubt my ex-girlfriend Karina had passed on the address to her new love interest, so he and his buddies could easily find me. Karina knew which apartment I lived in; we’d spent some time there together. Stupid! Stupid! Everything had turned so stupid! For the last three months of my army service, I’d felt that something had gone wrong in my relationship with Karina. Back when my girlfriend stopped sending her daily string of messages of love, declarations that she was waiting for my tour of duty to end. At some point Karina started giving monosyllabic answers in our calls, tried to cut off the conversation quickly, saying it was an inconvenient time — she was about to do an exam, she had a girlfriend visiting, didn’t want to talk with someone else around…

I swept a crystalline salad dish off the table onto the floor. It had somehow survived the recent fistfight, but now the heavy dish smashed with a piercing ring, sending shards of glass and remnants of Greek salad across the floor. The bouquet of flowers that Karina hadn’t picked up met the same fate — rich red roses fell to the floor and I trampled them mercilessly. The restaurant’s customers turned at the noise and shook their heads in clear disapproval as they observed my antics, but none of them seemed eager to get involved and draw my attention. On the contrary, as my rage-filled eyes crossed the hall, the other diners hurriedly turned away and took to studying their plates. Nobody wanted to try talking me down. Alright! I unclenched my fists.

Only the man sat at my table maintained complete equanimity as he watched me… no, not with judgment at all, but with interest, as if waiting for something. My anger and annoyance was slowly abating, giving way to the fatigue and desolation that follows outbursts of emotion. I followed the example of my surprisingly calm new companion and sat down at the table with him. Then I spoke, tired and indifferent:

“So my fate is predetermined, and Annie already spilled the sunflower oil…”

The strange man suddenly perked up, raised his head, looked at me in surprise. A pleased smile stretched across his thin lips.

“Oh, you should have said! For you see, he didn’t like my suit, and I had no golden watch in my jacket pocket. Excellent, Andrei! It’s so nice to meet someone so well-read, to talk to someone so intelligent and discerning. I also love the meeting at the Patriarch Ponds in that great master’s book. That means I won’t have to introduce myself. Let’s get straight down to business.”

As if by magic, small metal tweezers appeared in the man’s hand, and he offered the instrument to me. Somewhat in shock from his words, I placidly took the tweezers. Grimacing in pain, I somehow managed to get a grip on the shard of glass in my hand and pull it out. It started bleeding again and I stemmed the flow with a napkin the man offered.

“Thank you… But please don’t look at me like that! I’m not usually this violent. I know I don’t come off too well from this,” I said, feeling truly awkward over my recent explosion and especially my appearance; face covered in bruises, hand bloody, dress uniform collar torn, the left shoulder pad displaying my Corporal rank hanging off… “But today was a bad day! My ex-girlfriend’s new loverboy is going to need a trip to the dentist. And probably a surgeon too, since I messed up his nose pretty good. Look at all that blood on the floor!”

The man stayed silent, and I wasn’t expecting him to answer anyway. It was dumb to brag to a perfect stranger (and particularly one of a less than human disposition, if my suspicions were correct) of my daring deeds in a restaurant fistfight. I sobered a little and told him I was listening.

“Good, Andrei. I’m sure you already know the first outcome of recent developments: you can leave everything as it is, and you will die today.”

I gave a quick nod, surprising myself with how calm I was. The man had already mentioned my death, and more than once. But right then, I wanted to hear the other options of how things might go — after all, this chat was for a reason, right?

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The mystery man smiled happily.

“Yes, young man, you are very perceptive. I really do have something to offer you. No, no, I don’t want you to sell your soul,” the stranger suddenly laughed, and I blushed. He read my fears and doubts far too closely. “My dear Andrei, you have such outdated views of our interests. There are almost eight billion people on the planet Earth, and the truly righteous among them can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There are more than enough sinful souls to go around. The deficit of a millennium ago has long since disappeared. No, it is something else entirely that interests me and mine.”

My creepy interlocutor fell silent as a frowning and decidedly official-looking restaurant manager in a severe suit with a bow-tie approached our table. I saw it. He was about to ask me to pay my bill, plus all the property damage I’d done, and then leave his respectable establishment and never show my face there again. I couldn’t fault him for that at all. I was even a little grateful that he and his colleagues intervened in time and stopped the fight, preventing the posse of my defeated and floored opponent from rearranging my face. Four on one, and two of the attackers had knives. How was that fair?!

I was already mentally preparing myself to listen to all the tedious lectures, and even put my hand in my pocket, ready to take out my wallet and pay. But I was wrong. No lectures came. The manager wordlessly placed two shot glasses of vodka on the table — one in front of me, the other in front of the important gentleman in the dark suit — then called over an older cleaning lady and ordered her to clear away the mess of glass, food remnants and blood on the floor.

“Let us return to our conversation,” the man suggested. He downed his vodka, then looked at me in surprise. “You aren’t going to drink, Andrei?”

I mechanically took my glass, held it and… put it back on the table. My mood was too far gone.

“I’d prefer to keep my mind sharp for such an important moment,” I explained. My answer seemed to satisfy the man.

I didn’t bother voicing the second reason, that it was best to stay sober before the police arrived, and arrive they would; they’d have gotten a call about a fight in a downtown restaurant already. That way, when they questioned me at the police station over the fight with the rich kid and his ‘vassals,’ they couldn’t say I was drunk. The stranger seemed to read my thoughts, as another clever comment showed.

“When your flashes of impulse release their grip on you, you become an incredibly perceptive man for your twenty years.”

“People have told me that all my life,” I admitted, since I really had regularly heard similar from all kinds of people. “But I can’t do anything about it!”

I really do seem to be two completely different people at once. One is calculating, careful, not rash, even a little boring. Thanks to his diligence and love for the exact sciences, I was nearly the best in my class in the state exams, and was accepted into the most prestigious university in the city. And the opposite of that nerd is the second me — impulsive, explosive, spontaneous in his decisions. Leaps before he looks. Fun, companionable, very popular with the ladies. He got me kicked out of university in the first year by getting tangled in a bad idea involving fake tickets to concerts and sporting events… Incidentally, my girlfriend Karina was the one that pulled me into that. Oh, well. Didn’t matter anymore. The army draft saved me from more serious consequences in that fiasco.

“It’s great to have two characters. It can lead to the most interesting outcomes… But let’s get back on track. What do you think about starting your life over, Andrei?”

Seeing nothing but confusion on my face, the stranger decided to explain further.

“No, I don’t mean being reborn and living your life’s path again from an ignorant infant onwards. I mean this: keeping your memories and all your knowledge and life experience, but fundamentally changing your life. Sending you to an entirely new world. Unexplored. Primal. Mysterious. Dangerous. And at the same time a hell of a lot of fun, that I can promise you!”

The offer was a great surprise to me. I couldn’t answer right away. First I wanted to clarify a point of some importance.

“Do I understand right that it won’t be on Earth?”

“Yes, you understand perfectly,” the gentleman in the old-fashioned costume confirmed without hesitation. “There’s no sense whatsoever in starting a new life here on Earth. The Great Game on this planet has already reached its final stages, the outcome is already clear. And although this was, as it were, ‘easy mode’ for humanity — no competitors, wild beasts your only danger, all demonic creatures barred from your world — your civilization has nonetheless passed the peak of progress and is inexorably dying, rapidly degrading, and fast descending into a passive consumerist society.”

The man spoke confidently and assuredly, although I immediately noticed a contradiction.

“If demonic monsters can’t enter this world, then why do we have so many fairytales and legends of them, even references to them in religious texts? How do people know about demons at all?”

“Another point to you, Andrei,” the stranger laughed, clearly pleased. “You’re very perceptive. But I’m sure you can appreciate that isolated summonings of lone demons by complex ritual are one thing, and a full-scale demonic invasion is quite another. Incidentally, note that you also have no dragons in your world, but almost all your civilizations have myths of them. Although there were dragons in the last, long since ended Great Game, in which you humans defeated the atlanteans and forced them out.”

The last Great Game? Atlanteans? Oh, right, the dialogues of Plato, ancient and lost Atlantis, the Great Flood that destroyed it, all that stuff… My creepy new friend seemed to be talking about that ancient era of prehistory. So there were dragons around then too?

“I get the demons and dragons,” I said. “But why has humanity ‘passed the peak of progress’? What I see tells me otherwise: advanced computing technology, satellites, spaceflight…”

“You never quite made it all the way out into space. Maybe you’ll build a temporary base on the Moon, but that’s about it. Computers? Fool’s gold that distracts your race from real problems. Science in its purest form has stagnated and now serves only corporate interest and increasing profits. In addition, even over many millennia, humanity has failed to unite. There is far less unity in the world than a thousand or even ten thousand years ago. Alas, you poor humans have lost. And not to some outside enemy or competing sentient species, but to an inanimate object: money.”

That was no fun to hear. I wanted to object, but I knew deep down that the man was right about a lot. Humanity was further away from conquering the stars than it had been thirty, let alone sixty years ago, in the days of Gagarin and Korolyov. Now it was all about money, money and more money. Distant planets and stars were far too expensive to reach, and promised no profit. No good to anyone. And there was no hope of the situation improving; only the richest, most cunning and least principled ever gained power in the ‘developed’ countries that set the policy of humanity as a whole. Countries with no interest whatsoever in changing the situation…

“You have it exactly right, Andrei,” the creepy stranger congratulated me again. I no longer doubted his supernatural abilities. “All we had to do was await a certain stage of humanity’s development, then plant the idea of money in your heads, then of a political structure that gives power to the most cunning and unscrupulous, and your civilization was doomed. Even my opponents in the Great Game admit this and are willing to concede defeat in this round. For this very reason, the conditions in the new game have changed: the human species now has competitors, even several. They will not necessarily be your enemies, although considering your human nature, I imagine that conflicts with competitors are inevitable. That said, players of the Great Game have a whole world of limitless possibilities! Each can become who he wants, and those are by no means empty words! You can grow wings, you can breathe underwater, you can do anything! And what’s more, everyone has multiple lives! This is an interesting new addition suggested by the other side, since it is the very fear of losing one’s only life that has often hindered the brighter side of human nature, the thirst for new knowledge in particular. But the main condition: in order to maintain experimental integrity, only volunteers will go to the new world, with complete knowledge of the significance and immutability of that step. We are not allowed to pull anyone in by hook or by crook. So I await your decision, Andrei.”

A new, unexplored world? Multiple lives..? It sounded interesting! Inside, I’d already made my decision, especially since the alternative was being stabbed to death by gangsters. And why not say it straight: there was nothing in particular to tie me here. My parents were dead. My beloved girlfriend cheated on me and left me for someone else. Friends? My school friends moved away. I never did get along that well with anyone in the army. At least not well enough to consider anyone there a close friend. My elder sister was the only relative I had left, but she had her own family, her own life, and no room in it for her good-for-nothing younger brother. Right now, my sister, her husband and their two kids were vacationing at a resort. They’d left me to look after the apartment. My departure wouldn’t upset her too much. Might even be a relief.

Long story short, I made my decision and told the stranger so.

“A wise choice, Andrei. I admit, I don’t usually have to spend so much time on a potential player. Usually, once they’ve accepted that they’re about to die, they agree to everything without a second thought just to avoid death. You’re somewhat different. It was very interesting to talk to you. So I’m going to give you a gift. Two gifts, actually. Firstly, Andrei, you will have ten lives, not nine like everyone else. Secondly, something even more valuable than an extra life: I’ll give you a day to pack. Those on the edge of death usually aren’t given that luxury. They go into the game with what they happened to have on them. Don’t say I never help you out! Leave your sister’s apartment tomorrow at precisely nine o’clock at night. Don’t forget to bring the kitten you picked up yesterday, or else it’ll starve to death in your apartment. You don’t want that on your conscience!”