“Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is a war room!”
President Merkin Muffley, Doctor Strangelove
Little tiny pieces of confetti flew through the air in front of the man, a few soft pops followed as more confetti was thrown into his face.
“Congratulations!” tiny floating creatures shouted in discordant voices, all slightly off in their timing. What was most notable was their profound lack of actual cheer in offering the greeting, its tone the same as one would expect to hear from a group of waiters celebrating their sixteenth birthday of the night at the local chain food restaurant.
The man froze in place, and forcibly checked his first reaction to pound what could only be tiny pixies into the ground for invading his personal space. He sucked a long-suffering breath in and slowly released it.
Do not pulp the first living things that you’ve seen in gods know how long. Do not pulp…
He repeated the mantra to himself over and over a few times until he was able to regain his senses. It wasn't until that point that he cautiously opened his eyes to look around the new world he'd unlocked.
What he found was nothing like he'd expected, so much so that it left him slack jawed.
This was supposed to be a fantasy-type world! Might and magic ruled supreme! Demons were at the apex of subjugating the world under their awesome might against the combined efforts of the allied races! A lone princess had snuck off in the middle of the night to the forbidden rooms of the royal library, desperately searching for some grand working that could turn the tides against the hordes that battered against the kingdoms walls. In the farthest corner of the library, hidden high up on a dust covered shelf, she'd found the lost Book of Hero Summoning. (‘Cool’ font added for extra emphasis, this author apologizes for those that have problems reading almost cursive writing)
Upon touching the book, knowledge flowed into her allowing her to understand how to summon forth a Great Hero. Legends told of the Great Heroes of old who had similarly beaten back the dragon swarm and brought about the current age of peace and prosperity. Over the course of the next fortnight, the princess gathered the necessary components of the spell, prepared herself and began the ritual to call forth Jude, God of Lost Causes, to send forth their salvation.
Jude, or Judith as she preferred to be called, had indeed responded to this call. She scoured the multiverse for a suitable candidate. Upon finding the man, she had appeared before him. While many gods would have just plucked him from where he was, and “accidentally” grabbing a few innocent bystanders, Judith found that the whole summoning process worked a bit better if she just asked the candidate beforehand.
With that she quickly explained the situation in a way the man would understand. History recalls a few different versions of this exchange. The most prominent comes with a light shining down from the heavens overawing the man as he prostrated himself before the divine grace. Upon seeing his reaction, Judith implored the man to come to her aid and save her desperate people. The man, humbled by a god asking one so lowly as him to help, was overcome with gratitude and a great desire to fulfill whatever the goddess asked of him.
What is not told, except by a very select group of people who for obvious reasons wish to remain nameless, is the true accounting of the events of the man’s summoning. A light truly had shown down upon the man, in the form of a fluorescent light-bulb falling out of its socket to shatter upon his head. Being so startled by this, he'd slipped on the wet floor because the janitor at his office, Harold, had forgotten to put up the “Wet Floor” sign. After nearly knocking himself out, a small woman, almost a child, asked him if he would like to live in a world like so many of the games he played and save a princess. In his annoyance and complete bewilderment at his circumstance he sarcastically answered her.
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“Sure, why not? Couldn’t be any worse than how my day’s going right now.”
With a Cheshire smile and a snap of her fingers, a trapdoor appeared under the man dropping him into his unending prison of a world. With the swirling lights and colors of the bottomless pit he was falling through, the history and reasons for his summoning were told. After falling for what felt like both eons and mere seconds, the man screamed out in his loudest voice.
“TUTORIAL!”
Thus began the man’s decent into complete and abject boredom. For little did he know, while the princess had indeed found the correct spell, she had failed to properly mark one of the runes within her magic circle. The power of the Goddess Jude descending to their plane, was not properly contained. While normally not the worst problem that could arise, the princess had held her grand working at the nexus point of over a dozen ley lines. Where a stream of water can be both a useful tool and force, that same stream when added the power of all the oceans of the world can become an unmitigated disaster. The power brought forth by Jude flowed directly into the planet’s ley lines, saturating them to the point of bursting. All of the ley lines simultaneously detonated, the resultant energy directed straight into the core of the planet shattering the planet into billions of bite sized pieces.
Jude stared upon the shattered remains of the planet she had meant to save, horrified at the destruction that her mere presence had invoked. She quickly scanned the area to see if any of the other gods had noticed, hunching in upon herself as she looked around. In the span of a heartbeat, droves of gods, major, minor, and all things above and below blinked into existence before her. Fearing the scolding that she would receive, Judith did what any sane goddess would do. She ran.
For years and years she ran, only slowing down long enough on one world or another to rebuild her strength until the fateful day when she realized that no one was following her anymore. On that day she let out the greatest sigh of relief she ever had, inadvertently spawning the birth of a myriad new life-forms on what had once been a primordial planet, just entering its ooze stage of creation.
Slowly she regained her power, to the point at which she felt she could find herself another planet to help and watch over. A great number of years after her arrival, she received a prayer from a lonely mouse girl at the edge of one of a vast forests, pleading for a miracle from the goddess, someone that could save her from her plight.
In a true light-bulb moment, Judith remembered about the man that she had summoned just before her darkest days. She shook at the memories that the plea brought up, and cringed upon the realization that she had forgotten about the man that she had summoned. Cursing the void and all that it spawned, she quickly worked up a letter to send to one of the few remaining friends, requesting them to pull the hero from his limbo world.
Thus, the unlocking of the new world for the man occurred, much to the displeasure of the fly that found itself accidentally swallowed by his open mouth.
Before the man was not a vast countryside, nor a grand castle, but instead a massive room. One with a large waiting area leading to a desk that held a handful of creatures at what appeared to be office chairs. Above the desk was a large display read:
“Now serving prospective hero 65432358522221b.”
If that wasn’t bad enough, one of the little pixies flew up to him carrying a small piece of folded paper. At reaching the gawking man, the pixie put the piece of paper into his open maw while another, flew up and pushed his jaw closed so that the paper was held perfectly at the edge of his lips.
“Welcome to the Hero Summoning Grand Junction. Please get in line and you will be helped in the order that you were summoned in.” Another of the pixies stated while attempting to pull off a piece of confetti that had landed on her head.
The man didn’t move a single muscle or even so much as twitch as this transpired. A single phrase began repeating in his head slowly gaining in volume and intensity at every repetition until the words sprang from his mouth knocking his ticket out of his mouth.
“WHAT THE FUCK!”