After exploring my Status, or what was available anyways, I started to look around and get a feel for my new world.

Alright not in a graveyard. At least cloaky wasn’t that cliched. Okay so water, food, shelter. Rule of three… shit do I still need that stuff? Okay well shelter still seems like a good idea. It's the middle of the night and I could end up burning in the sun or something. I mean, that's vampires but maybe floating skulls burn too? I’m already on fire though… fuck it, still want shelter.

I was about half a mile from a pretty large looking city. Didn’t look modern but wasn’t medieval either. I had no idea if I could go there though. Being undead would get me killed in any world i’d ever read about but there was just no way to know. There was a packed dirt road about fifty feet from where I was that led to the city. The road just continued on into the distance however so that wasn’t a great option either. The evil you know and all that.

While floating there trying to go over my options in my head I had to criticize cloaky a bit. He didn’t even go that far from the city and he was just out in the open. It led me to believe that either he wasn’t worried about the ramifications and this was a standard thing in the city, or he was powerful enough to not care about the rules there. Maybe he was just an idiot and thought no one would catch on to his plan if he did it in the night?

These thoughts helped me pretend that I was doing something but really I was just stalling. Hoping someone would come and investigate and then maybe put me in a normal body. I could deal with being in a new world but not as a floating skull. That was just too much. I knew how to be a human. I knew how to get stronger, at least physically. Magic i could probably figure out. The stories i’d read never said it was all that hard. Big learning curve but then the hero figured it out and became way more powerful than anyone else in the world.

I wasn’t a hero. Far from it but i also wasn’t the bad guy. Leave me alone and I'd leave you alone. Great rules to live by. Break that rule and I break you. Better rule to live by. I had no plan in coming here that I'd be a hero or even powerful. That wasn’t in the contract. I just had to come. No expectations other than show up. Nice and easy. However the contract sure as fuck didn’t say i’d be a fucking floating skull with basically useless magic.

Buffing and debuffing are great if you can wait around for the target to drop dead but I had no hands and I couldn't exactly hide. I was giving off quite a bit of light.

I think I should go and try to get further away from the city. There is just no way that some guard or something can’t see me from there… O… fuck is that someone coming? ... Shit they’re running… I should leave, right?... damn they’re fast…

The person coming at me reached me in just a minute and didn’t look winded. I could tell I was screwed if they were hostile. They were tall and very clearly female(big boobs). Dressed in form fitting short cut robes. The robe only went to the knee and was split to make it easy to run. She had thick looking pants and good sturdy boots. The clothing looked what I would expect from a real adventurer mage. Long flowing robes might look mystical but they made it very hard to run and got caught on everything. Good boots are a necessity in any world. That will never change. Well i don’t need them anymore i guess.

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“Hey floaty! Don’t suppose you have seen a babbling teenage idiot around here? Probably going on about conquering the world or something about true justice?” she yelled to me from about 15 feet out. She seemed oddly unimpressed by the fact that i’m a FLOATING FUCKING SKULL. But maybe floating skulls are valued members of society here. Probably not.

“Nope!” I yelled back but she didn’t seem to believe me. Just put her hands on her hips and stared me down. Fucking power move. Jokes on her though. I don’t blink. Game se- o fuck that’s a fireball! She had apparently gotten tired of our staring contest very quickly. However her facial expression didn’t change and other than summoning the fireball, she made no hostile moves. “I may have seen the boy. He might have summoned me. I may have killed him and then used his corpse to form my skull. Hypothetically of course!”

“Much better! Hypothetically or not i don’t care. That little pain in the ass has been my aprentice for three fucking years and he had been making me look bad since day one.do you have any idea how annoying it is when all he ever talked about was raising an army and taking over the world? If he wasn’t so gifted, I would have killed him myself years ago. Now you don’t happen to know why that idiot would summon a cursed skull do you?”

Well at least she’s sorta reasonable. Brutal as fuck but i’m really liking it. “Actually it's Cursing Skull and he didn’t summon me like this. I was a Spirit Flame until I flew into his face. I don’t know why he did it but i think it wasn’t intentional. I think his summoning got hijacked by this goddess that i made a deal with.”

“You were a Spirit Flame. And turned into a Cursed Skull…. AHAHAHAHAH you poor fucking idiot! You could have become a spirit dragon but you ended up being one of the hardest to grow humanoid undead.HAHAHA”

“It’s Cursing Skull and How the fuck am i supposed to know i could turn into a dragon?! All i got was some stupid system messgae that didn’t tell me shit! It's not like I had time to figure out! Your apprentice tried to enslave me with a curse the second i told him that i didn’t want to become his fucking lackey! My world didn’t even have magic! How about instead of laughing at me you offer some information about your world, maybe a welcome to the universe package that doesn’t involve a partially available status and threats of enslavement or death!”

I’ll admit that I lost my grip a bit there but I felt I'd made some valid points. She did too I guess. She stopped laughing as soon as I corrected her on my race. As I continued on she got much more serious and then got a contemplative look on her face.

She didn’t respond for several minutes and just left me hanging there while she was deep in her thoughts. “Cursing Skulls are different. Not by much. Still hard to gain power but they have much better options for advancement than Cursed Skulls. I’m guessing that you absorbed David’s Hex sorcery. That is very good for you. You might actually be of use to me with that.” she finally said.

Well this could be good. She said that she had a use but that could mean any number of things. That use might end up being some material component for a ritual but it's probably better than trying to figure out a whole world for myself. Plus she knows something about my status as a Cursing Skull. “What’s your offer?” I say after some hesitation.

I don’t love the rapid pace that her mind changed about my situation. She knew something special that I didn't and it made me very uncomfortable. Never enter a negotiation without all the information. It's basic but I just had no other option right now.

“It's not so much an offer as a demand. You’re my new apprentice. I need to have one, rules of the college and all that. Since you killed the last one and you have literally no knowledge of this world, it’ll work out great.”

“Do I get paid?”

“HAHAHAHA… no. But I like the effort.”