Her realm was about to become functional. It was quite an achievement. Evelyn thought she might be the first person on all of Earth to reach level four in her soul. Not through her own merit, of course. She wasn’t really the achieving type. Somehow, though, the fact that she did most of her living through her imagination instead of the real world was about to pay off.

Mostly because her dream girl was such a big deal. A huge deal, actually. There were people online who bragged about remembering a meeting with the Sage of Foresight from their dreams. Evelyn recalled being that woman.

Better than that, Evelyn recently experienced the moment that Levinia gained her insight into possibility. In her dreams Levinia was still trying to come to terms with the best way to use her abilities. Fortunately, Evelyn had ideas of her own. She was going to become rich. Card games or lottery tickets or sports betting. How didn’t really matter.

She would make enough money to avoid ever working another day in her life. And avoid marrying some guy who would become an annoying asshole when he thought he owned her. That’s how she’d always imagined her future playing out. Pressure from her parents to ‘make something’ of herself forced her to get a job and move out. Too busy with adulting, she had to drop out of the band and her besties all drifted away. Lonely, she would date around a bit before settling with someone who seemed acceptable. Then they’d both become disillusioned after the courtship ended, discovering themselves stuck in something other than what they hoped for.

No thanks. She would rather be a waste of space than a miserable cog in the machine of society. And, in her opinion, the very best way to be a waste of space was to be independently wealthy. Depending on how successful she was at seeing the future, Evelyn might be able to house all her closest friends under one roof. That would be epic. She imagined their time in that hypothetical house as ‘young Golden Girls’.

First she needed to get her realm working, though. Levinia was a level six when her insight came, which gave her dream girl four times the oomph to build a realm compared to what Evelyn had to work with. Though Evelyn felt that she was relatively strong for a level four. The moment she inherited her insight, the illusory energy of the universe just poured into Evelyn as if she’d been anointed as someone special. Arahant power was funny like that, with the world recognizing the narrative might of individuals. The joke was on the illusory energy, though, because Evelyn didn’t plan to do shit.

When she felt like her inherited insights were encoded into her realm well enough for a test run, Evelyn closed her eyes and let her mental sight drift. She set an intention of her winning money at the casino game with the dice. The random blips of light from behind her eyelids gave way to a brief vision of a dealer pushing chips at her. That was it.

“Well, that does not give me a lot to work with it, now does it?”

A two second vision of her receiving chips. It was technically exactly what she asked for, but it was completely useless. She needed to know how she won. Evelyn drifted into a couple more visions, but she rapidly came to the conclusion that this wasn’t really working. None of the visions lasted more than two seconds. That must be her limit at level four. Honestly, she should be happy her talent worked at all.

So casino games were out. Evelyn glanced towards the tiny powered off television nestled among the random knickknacks decorating her room. She would try to see lottery outcomes. Squinting her eyes closed, Evelyn concentrated on the first number for that night’s drawing. Then the second. And so on. When she finally had all the numbers scribbled down, Evelyn ran to the gas station convenience store to make her purchase.

The hours before the drawing were tense. Evelyn paced her room with the television on, waiting for the revelation of her wealth. When the moment came, she stood way too close and held her ticket beside the screen. The first number was seven. Only she’d predicted sixteen. That… shit, why was the first number wrong?

Evelyn numbly followed along. About half of her guesses were right. That wasn’t enough to win any money. Still better than random guesses? Maybe? She didn’t actually know how odds or statistics or any of that worked. Was her insight not strong enough? Was her level too low? Did she need to use her realm in a specific way?

She hadn’t actually seen much of Levinia’s use of the insight yet. Evelyn leaped into implementing her half-baked plan without waiting for pointers from her dream mentor. After all, she had the true insight. It was an absolute certainty that could not be wrong. It could be incomplete, certainly, but the insight itself glowed with an aura of infallibility in her mind. It connected with something deeper within ultimate reality and was more real than the entire universe. She could never doubt that insight.

But she had plenty of experience doubting herself. Evelyn deflated and collapsed back on her bed. On top of her guitar. “Oh, no, no, no! Sorry, baby! Evie didn’t mean it!” She lovingly stroked at the all-black beauty and its metal strings as she apologized. It hadn’t cost much because it was just a used Yamaha. She still loved it. The arching contours of the instrument was mildly suggestive of devil horns. Perfect for a goth girl playing heavy metal.

Even if her money scheme paid off, she didn’t intend to buy a new guitar. The point of having money wasn’t to have nice things, after all, it was to avoid the drudgery of normal life. And a better instrument wouldn’t improve her playing. She wasn’t very good at her hobby and that fact had an odd comfort to it. She could just have fun instead of stressing about performances. Evelyn and her girls were the absolute worst metal band in town and that was just perfect to her.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“Ugh, so it’s come down to sports betting. I hope I don’t have to watch very many games. That might be a fate worse than death.” Evelyn placed her wrist to her forehead and went limp on her bed as if the thought of watching a football game caused her to faint. She cracked an eye open to look at her guitar as if seeking approval for her act. It wasn’t impressed. That was very metal of it to be so disaffected of its owner’s ultimate fate.

“You know,” she told the guitar, “Levinia got her insight while fantasizing about ways she could get into bed with some married guy. Scheming to get rich is, like, downright noble in comparison. Even if I have to watch sports.”

Evelyn closed her eyes and imagined seeing a football score. Which she promptly did. That caused her to realize that she didn’t know what game the score came from. Hell, she didn’t even know the names of more than a handful of teams. Her eyes popped open. “This is ridiculous. If I wanted to work for my money, I’d have a real job!”

From a nearby room she heard the voice of her mother. “Evie? Did I hear you say something about getting a real job?”

“Perish the thought, mother! I utter those words only as the vilest of curses!”

“You need to get one eventually,” her vicious mother threatened.

It was too soon to use the fainting gag again and she didn’t even have an audience, so Evelyn closed her eyes and looked towards the future. This time she used a rather simple intention: she wanted to see a big news story. The idea was that she could spot ways to make money. Like maybe stock market stuff?

The random flashes of light from behind her eyelids gave way to a stunning image. On a television screen, a scorpion lifted what looked like a toy aircraft carrier with a single claw and chopped it in half.

“What. The. Fuck.” Evelyn blinked up at her ceiling. That had been weird. Had her intention somehow shifted towards entertainment? She knew it hadn’t. That was from the news.

When she closed her eyes again, her intention was more directed: what was the deal with that scorpion? The vision came to her. An angry red tear across a blue sky. Gray pus dribbled from its corners, falling free towards the swelling sea below and morphing into a flock of birds that flew back into the sky. The vision ended.

“This. No. Why? Damn it.” Evelyn scrubbed her face aggressively, smearing her makeup. She would need to reapply concealer and eye shadow before their show that night. If they had a show. Monster invasions might be a joke to the Arahant on Maya, but Earth was an unempowered world. People leveraging the knowledge from dreams didn’t appreciably change that fact. Their world had no real power. They were soft targets. Miasma breaching the envelope of their universe to become monsters… that was an apocalypse right there.

She closed her eyes again and summoned up another vision. The scorpion tore through the aircraft carrier again. If she wasn’t making assumptions based on their relative sizes, Evelyn had to admit that the ‘toy’ aircraft carrier looked awful realistic. How big would a scorpion have to be to snip snip a massive naval vessel? It honestly didn’t even matter. The creature was too big for Earth to handle.

Evelyn saw several more visions before she had to start getting ready. The scorpion would eventually make landfall, she saw. It didn’t even really fight. It just walked through city centers, casually toppling skyscrapers as a mist of miasma poisoned the fleeing humans. Random monsters of more reasonable size joined in the rampage, slaying individual targets with manic glee. The descendants of Tiamat sure hated humans.

She reapplied her makeup and loaded her gear into her beater car while in a daze. The girls embraced her with giddy excitement when she arrived at the venue. Evelyn emerged from her despair to seize the spirit of the event. The bar they were performing at was nicer than their usual haunts. And if history was any guide, they would never be allowed back.

Megan would strip down to her underwear during the show to spice things up and maybe even be caught doing coke in the bathroom. Brittney would suddenly start flirting with random men when her boyfriend showed up, causing him to get possessive and make a scene. Evelyn would drink too much and become a mess falling all over the place. Poor Danielle was always guilty by association. Served her bestie right for being friends with such deplorables.

They set up their equipment in the corner. Evelyn waited until Brittney followed Megan into the bathroom to make her own move. She approached the bar with Danielle and leaned forward far enough to catch the bartender’s attention. “Free drinks for the band?”

The bartender folded his arms. “The owner said one free round.”

Danielle gave her most charming smile. “Thanks! Just a Miller Lite for me.”

Evelyn wasn’t going to be so cheap as that. She was way too sober for the end of the world. “I want a drink with a lot of alcohol in it.”

The bartender rolled his eyes, obviously not impressed. “What do you like?”

“Getting tipsy.”

“Flavor wise, what do you like?”

She considered that a moment. “I want something that tastes like bad decisions.”

The bartender’s annoyed demeanor cracked. He almost smiled. “A negroni, then.”

“Make it three. The other girls need their free drinks, too.”

Oh, boy. The bartender looked almost gleeful at that news. Evelyn suspected this was going to be a massive mistake. A minute later, she tried the negroni and her face scrunched up in agony. “So punishing!” She turned off her brain and slurped down the first drink.

The other two she carried back to hide near her guitar case.

“Love you, E, but you’re an idiot.”

Evelyn threw an arm around Danielle’s shoulders. “Love you, too, D. Let’s party tonight like it’s the end of the mother fucking world.”