In the end I couldn't entirely condemn the grim reaper. Dying saved me from a highly embarrassing situation, even made me a pocket martyr for the Sunday obituaries.

Late morning: my little cousin Ada was tromping around in his long green socks, bouncing a soccer ball on his knees, his arms locked behind his head as if to say, as the devil may please. My aunt had warned him; my uncle too, and the way he was drifting towards the edge of the road left me ill at ease, but since the highway was empty, I let him be.

But when a truck turned a corner and came roaring in, a tanned brown arm hanging out its side, my fingers grabbed the back of his collar. He kicked at the air, flailed his elbows and nearly hit me in the shins with his soccer cleats, forcing me to sway backwards, and somewhere in the tangle of flying elbows and arms, the ball was hit, and it fell, rolling forwards. He tried grabbing at it, but I yanked him back, maneuvering my forearm across his ribs.

"I want my ball." He said.

"Calm down. I'll go get it in a sec."

"I want it now." He said. "That truck's going to--" His arm hung behind me and I knew what he was pointing to.

"If anything happens, I'll buy you a new one."

"But I borrowed it from Andrez--"

"Ada, I don't care." He slumped. I rotated my grip and turned him so he could slip his hands about my neck. I'd seen this kind of setup too many times in movies to let it play out in front of me: kid goes after ball, man goes after kid, truck hits man, splat, the road gets a new tattoo. I'm sure this Andrez will write a soccer ball off his ledger if I give him twenty bucks.

"Balt! Behind! Behind!" Lord, now he was wriggling. What, did he think I was going to-- yeah, I was. Wouldn't cost me anything. I shifted my grip upwards, to his shoulders, and turned. "Did you really think that--"

It was noontime, July 12th, 2017, in West Bay, in that strip where the scrubby mountains fall onto the yawning Pacific, and as we stared at the white eyes of the truck it was as if a hook had yanked out our spirits and left them stranded in a place without weight or time.

I threw Ada. That is all I remember. I threw him. I tried. No reasonable spirit, god, devil, demon, or flying culinary abomination could blame his death on me, and if turned out that I had hesitated, overwhelmed, thinking at a moment that demanded action...really, it was aunt and uncle's fault for volunteering me as free labor. Extended families were such troublesome economic structures...

I woke up in a sea of light.

"How disgusting. How incompetent. How utterly scummy. Tell me, how can you stand telling yourself such convenient lies?" said the woman in front of me. She slouched on a throne, her six arms all well-armed: truncheons, rifles, swords, spears, arrows, and bows. At the center of her brow, north of her glabella, burned a smokeless fire.

Any reasonable being wouldn't blame me. This one? Her slouch, her slack features, the little white pillow she'd snuck in between her back and her throne...the picture of a bored salarywoman.

As for me, somehow I sat on a wooden(?) chair. Ada sat on my lap. His small hands held the web between my thumb and forefinger, and the thumb itself, and no more; curled up as he was, he resembled a baby rhesus with a bigger nose and less gummy eyes. The American comparative psychologist Harry Harlow had thrown many such monkeys, three to thirty-six months old, into a totally isolated pit to study the anatomy of despair. After ten weeks even the happiest broke. And like splintered china, the pieces could be reassembled, the gashes sown with gold, but a broken pot was a broken pot, even if it shone.

"Oi, don't ignore me." She said, the weapons disappearing, the six arms folding into two, and the little flame winking out. "I'm Korrawi, the goddess of heroes, though many also call me the mother of heroes. Heroes! Gorgeous brown hunks who seized the world with khopesh, chariot and javelin; foxy older men who could, with a handful of crane feathers, overturn destiny..."

"Modern heroes must be a letdown."

"Are they ever!" She said. "Firefighters, policemen, high schoolers, the occasional Good Samaritan...bleh. Would've thought you fell into that last category but the mandatory review flagged some seriously unheroic last thoughts." With that she wiggled her fingers, and a mandala blossomed from the tip of her finger. "Have fun in purgatory!"

Ada pushed up against my shirt and I felt my shirt grow wet. "Balt", he said, "I wanna go home. I don't wanna be dead."

"Oho?" She said, leaning forwards. Her mouth opened and a pink tongue slid around marbled teeth. "Blame your cousin over there. If he wasn't such a conniving, cowardly wretch, both of you would get an all-blessings granted, high-birth-ensured reincarnation into another world. But instead you get to wait in a line until the end of this yuga! That's 1,260,003 years, give or take a few months."

[TRANSFER INITIALIZED] rang an old man's voice. [COMPLETION: TEN PERCENT].

I hugged him. "Be brave, Ada. Please." Then I faced the goddess. "You're enjoying this." Informed cold reading made wonderful bait. Come on, bite. Give me something to work with. Don't make me a liar.

"Of course I am. This is the most entertaining display I've seen in at least the last fifty years, and that's including the lives of heroes I've reincarnated."

[COMPLETION: TWENTY PERCENT].

"I find that difficult to believe. Don't reincarnated heroes fight goblins, ogres, griffons, and seek glory and adventure?" Alternate challenge and concession, never let the other party remain in one place. Meanwhile, Ada had stopped sniffling. Atta boy, he could be a handful but he was surprisingly reliable sometimes.

She snorted. Her nose was rhinoplastic; the sort of effortless perfection that other women might spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to recreate. I bit the corner of my cheek. I was a man, after all.

"See for yourself," she said. All around us, a dome of white rectangles appeared, resolving into images. A hero slaughtering goblins by the dozen...another hero slaughtering ogres by the dozen...a third reclining on a backless sofa, being fed grapes by three beautiful girls...yet another one naked atop a pile of--

I clamped a hand over Ada's eyes. Too late. "Balt, what was that man doing? And those girls?"

"They were, uh, wrestling!" Early exposure to such topics could prevent Ada from becoming an economic asset to society. Who knows, he might even tread the dark path of a NEET: a parasitical creature who spent all day ****** off by exploiting friction inherent to the sociobiological underpinnings of the nuclear family.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"Wresting naked?"

[COMPLETION: FIFTY PERCENT]

"It's a...a new form of wrestling. Struggle wrestling. The ancient Greeks used to wrestle naked, but it fell out of--look, Ada, I'll explain it to you later."

The goddess laughed, and I took the moment to scan through the other panels; then, I understood why she was so bored. These modern heroes all had ridiculous powers-- I was guessing that was what she meant by a cheat skill-- and their goody-two-shoes approach to life must have struck her as blandness incarnate. Gilgamesh, Cao Cao and Napoleon would have gone on a conquering spree; Lenin or Pancho Villa would have stirred up the farmers to everlasting revolution; even Hercules and Karna, the most noble of the heroes of yore, would have overturned the world, and all that by the force of their personality and innate might.

[COMPLETION: SIXTY PERCENT]

As soon as I understood that, I realized that I had underestimated her. I mentally slapped my past self for being an idiot. Her harsh words, the loud countdown, and her lengthy exposition...this was a test, had to be. Otherwise, why bother explaining anything? Even if I ran with her nominal reason-- that she was doing this for kicks-- surely she wouldn't have gone into such detail about other heroes...right? Law of least resistance. Also, most mythologies bound gods to their domain. Poseidon was stormy, Hades dour, etc. A goddess of heroes-- a mother of heroes-- couldn't be a sadistic b**ch, right?

[COMPLETION: SEVENTY PERCENT]

Proceeding on that assumption raised several questions. Was a test standard for every would-be hero? Or was it only for borderline cases? The second seemed more likely; again, the law of least resistance. So if it was a test, how could I pass it? Do something suitably heroic? What?

A kind man would beg the goddess to reincarnate Ada even if the cost was personal damnation. A brash youth would yell at her, maybe even charge over and attack her. A ruthless man would offer to feed Ada to hell without a second thought. A Cicero would debate her regarding her duties, using words as weapons. The common thread: in the face of adversity, act.

And act I would.

[COMPLETION: EIGHTY PERCENT]

I stood up. Ada fell off my lap and squeaked, but midway through his fall I caught him and pulled him up by the armpits. "Tell me, o' goddess of heroes, why my final thoughts were deemed unheroic?"

Her eyes narrowed. "At the moment of your death, you blamed others for your own failings, including your hesitation. You justified your inability to keep your cousin safe with convenient excuses and--"

[COMPLETION: NINETY PERCENT]

I took a belly breath, pulling air into my diaphragm, and drowned her words in laughter. "What primitive reasoning! What absurd condemnation! The market rewards specialists who develop skills in their niche and trade the value produced with other specialists; this is the principle of competitive advantage. To condemn me for not possessing soldierly instincts-- you may as well condemn a giraffe for not knowing how to hunt underwater. Furthermore, as unpaid and uncontracted labor employed in contravention of the free market, I had neither duties nor responsibilities that ought to have compelled me to intervene in such a situation. Thus, the actions I took involving my peripheral competencies should not be judged on the basis of result or intent, but relative to my nonexistent obligations! If an electrician rewiring a house for free is kind, and a doctor treating patients without means to pay saintly, then my actions must be heroic!"

[COMPLETION: ONE HUNDRED PERCENT]

My hands held my knees as I panted, my face red.

The mandala in front of me grew until it towered over Ada and I; it spun, and Ada gripped the pockets of my pants, but I stared at her. The glowing lines of the mandala hid her face from me as effectively as a fence, but I stared into that bright light even as my eyes burned.

Had I guessed wrong? My assumptions had stacked atop each other like a Jenga tower. Was this her way of pulling out the bottom brick? The mandala grew and grew, the central hole expanding until it had pushed away all is petals to the fringe. We stared at the pupil of an expanding eye wrought from light and in that smooth darkness I saw myself, but distorted: my ears buzzed by my chin, my eyes floating about my forehead and nose. I saw a failure.

"Ada, come here." And he did. I wrapped my arms around the crook of his legs, my hands on the shadows of his knees. It wasn't easy. He was heavier than he had been a year ago, taller too. But not taller than the pupil, which was as tall as me. Above the pupil was a small gap, maybe three feet, abutting the the delicate filigree of the petal. Too big but maybe if he crouched?

It struck me that he was never going to grow to be as tall as the pupil. He would be his four feet and seven inches forever. My lazy summers in the West Bay, where I'd watch him dribble a soccer ball or talk about how he was going to be the next Pele? Gone. All because I had failed, not once, but twice.

"I'm going to throw you on the count of three." I told him. "You need to hunch your body together and pass through that gap there. See, that one."

He looked at me then frowned. I felt his hand on my cheeks. "Balt bro, you're crying."

"What?" I lifted a hand to my eye, and it was as he said. My hand came away wet. "I'm sorry, Ada. Must be the light; that's why they tell you in school to never look at the sun. One."

"Balt--"

"Two."

"Bro!"

Clapping. The mandala shrunk and faded away. The goddess was visible again, and so was her throne, but gone was the pillow and the slouch. The smokeless fire burned again, and her two arms had become twelve, her one head three. "BALTHAZAR AHU-VAIRYO," she spoke from three mouths and three tongues. "YOU HAVE BEEN TESTED AND FOUND WORTHY."

I dropped to my knees, letting Ada go, and even pressing the bridge of my nose into his shoulder. I stayed like that for a minute or two. I knew the goddess was saying something, but Ada was so warm and I was so tired...

"Bro! Wake up!"

When I came to, the goddess was back to her slouch, and the extra body parts were gone, but she was smiling. Before, she had elegant features: high cheekbones, a pointy chin, eyes with long lashes to compliment her dark skin; while her smile didn't change any of those features, it dragged dimples around her chin, crinkled the skin beneath her eyes and did something to her lips that I liked. Maybe she was a kind goddess forced to be cruel to test would-be heroes...?

"Wakey-wakey, Balty," she said. "Congratulations! You passed! Now jump into the portal and stop wasting my time."

I renounced my former thoughts. This abomination was sadistic and cruel, definitely not cute. Lord Mazda, I knew I called you a figment of Zarathustra's soma-laden delusions, and intimated that you needed to be washed away by the power of the free market, but I would appreciate a heavenly smiting at my position. Broken arrow! Broken arrow!

"Balt, the lady told me about all the cool things we could pick," Ada said.

"And you picked one for yourself?" Without asking me? Why were my hands clenching and unclenching?

"Yep! I'm going to be the best soccer player ever. Better than Pele, Messi, or Ronaldo!"

A soccer player. In a fantasy world where ogres, goblins and worse roamed. Ada was my cute little cousin but I was losing hope for him ever being a positive economic asset. The path of the starving artist is even darker than that of the NEET; while a NEET is a parasite, he at least understands the truth of his nature. The starving artist receives from the market an objective evaluation of his worthlessness and yet rejects its holy dictate in his arrogance. No greater evil can there be.

I glanced at the goddess but she was smiling. Somehow I didn't like her smile anymore.

"Congratulations," I said. "You manipulated a prepubescent boy into choosing a worthless perk."

Her smile didn't waver. "Pick a power, any power! Come up to my throne, and take your pick, Balty."

"It's Balthazar." I said, but complied. As I neared her throne the panels from earlier popped up, but instead of the lives of different heroes, it displayed the name of a power and suggested uses.

Faster learning in any field of study. Invisibility. The ability to become a shadow and effectively teleport short distances once a day. Flight. Becoming a kung-fu master but only if blackout drunk. Being able to invoke an minor astra once a year. Innate prana manipulation. More godly attention if performing rituals and austerities. Being able to transform into a naga. Unnaturally good aim.

The panels went on and on. But...

"Why are all these powers so weak?"

"Budget heroes get budget perks. Balty." She said. "Now hurry up and pick one, then jump into that portal there."

I made my pick. Ada grabbed my hand and looked at me. I nodded. We jumped together, falling deep into a sea of endless light, and on an impulse I looked up. My eyes met Korrawi's and we studied each other. Then all was light, fury, and the groans of a birthing bed.

Thus began our new life in another world.