As 5 p.m. rolled around, I grabbed a box of treats and began saying my usual goodbyes to all the dogs in the shelter. Some took a tad more coaxing than others, but save for the most skeptical, frightened, or aggressive, each one would receive a few seconds of love before I dimmed the lights for the night.

"Come here, ya lil' stinker," I cooed to a particularly shy rottweiler puppy. He looked uncertain for a moment before cautiously waddling up to the gate to accept a treat from my hands. I squeezed part of my arm through the bars and petted his head for a while before moving on.

After finishing up my other farewells, I made my way over to Duke. The docile golden retriever had been passed over for three weeks now on account of his old age, his missing leg, and his notable lack of bladder control. Despite all that, the smelly old beast had managed to weasel his way into my heart. As I neared his cage, he lopsidedly hopped over and stuck his snout through the bars, and I spent a few minutes lavishing him with attention before pulling myself away.

"Bye Duke!" I gave a little wave and started locking up, leaving the elderly dog behind.

In no time at all I left the shelter and stepped into my car, tracking in a new addition to the already-thick layer of dog fur on my seats. Moments later, I began the trip back home.

Now, working in a dog shelter hadn’t been my original plan. After getting a B.A. in psychology and then doing another two-year stint for a master’s in counseling, I figured I’d be a therapist. For a while, I’d even tried it: I had a number of clients, my own little office, and a swanky pair of glasses that just screamed therapy time, baby.

At some point, though, those same glasses had switched it up on me, and each time I put them on they just whispered a very unenthusiastic oof. Not ready to spend my life doing something I felt lukewarm about, I’d quit. For the past year now, I'd been working at the shelter and making extra cash as a tutor on the side. What I'd do next was still anyone's guess.

With a few quick checks to my side mirrors, I merged onto the highway, immediately pulling into the right lane. After all, what was the rush? The only plan I had for the rest of the day was a hot date between me and a bowl of peanut M&M’s.

As was becoming an increasingly more common thought, I realized that my life had gotten kind of boring. That hadn’t been by design or anything, but I’d underestimated how hard it’d be to find friends after moving into the city, and now I was settling into a sort of inertia.

I sighed. The intro to Walking on Sunshine sounded over the car speakers, and I cranked the volume up, letting the feel-good music drown out everything else. Gone were my thoughts. Gone were my worries. Gone was the massive truck slowly moving towards m-

I froze.

Directly to my left, an 18-wheeler had just drifted into my lane showing no signs of stopping. My brain tried and failed to process what it was seeing, and then, finally, it clicked.

“Oh shit!”

Wide-eyed, heart hammering away at the speed of light, I slammed the car horn and stomped on the brakes. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, oh my god, oh my god.” It was okay! I was going to make it! I was so close to pulling behind it. So close!

I didn’t make it.

Only a few feet before the truck would have completely passed me, it connected.

In a din of crashing and crunching and skidding, my car went careening into the guardrail.

It would have been much kinder had I blacked out, but I did not.

Eventually, the world stopped spinning, and everything settled into place. Dimly and through an intense wall of pain, I realized that even with the seatbelt and the airbag, certain parts of my body were bent in ways that they shouldn’t have been. The hood of the car had caught fire, and as the flames licked closer, I screamed at my body to move, to run, but it paid me no heed. When finally the fire reached me, there was only the pain. Nothing else.

After what must have been a century, the crumpled remains of my passenger-side door opened.

Unexpectedly, in stepped a black-haired college-aged kid. Through the smoke, I could see that he was wearing a t-shirt and some baggy jeans, and despite my condition, he simply eyed me over with a slight frown.

“Well, yikes,” he ventured.

Yikes? Yikes? Had I been able to move and not had more pressing concerns, I would have punched the little shit. Why wasn’t he doing anything? Why wasn’t he helping?

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“Maybe...” He leaned towards me and placed his index finger on my forehead, and suddenly a wave of icy relief washed over me, dousing me in a pure, blissful numbness. Not only did it numb my nerves, but also my mind, offering me a level of composed clarity that shouldn’t have been possible under the circumstances.

“Better. Can you hear me?” He calmly sat down in the passenger’s seat, flames dancing all around him.

Dumbfounded and not trusting my voice, I tried to nod and was surprised to find that I could. What on earth had he just done? Did he give me some sort of weird anaesthetic? And how was he able to sit there in the fire?

“Cool. Well, not completely cool, because you’re kind of burning up here, but like, cool.”

I stared at him, blankly.

He coughed and had the minor decency to look a bit abashed before continuing. “So, if you didn’t catch on from the cool pain-numbing finger-thingy, I am not exactly a normal person.” He looked pensive for a moment before offhandedly adding, “not really a person at all, actually.”

I tried to stare at him a bit more pointedly, but if he noticed, he didn’t show it. That being said, he certainly wasn’t a normal person. What was going on here?

“You,” he said with a pause, “are kind of definitely going to die in a few minutes on account of...” He gestured vaguely to what I could only imagine was a charred and disfigured mess. “That.”

His words didn’t manage to fully sink in, bouncing off the thick wall of numbness that had coated my mind.

“Even if an ambulance got here right now, your injuries are a bit too serious to live through. However.” He leaned in conspiratorially, holding a finger up for emphasis.

Was… was he really going for the slow reveal here? While I was frying to death?

“I happen to have a problem that I’ve been meaning to solve, and as it happens, you could kind of solve it!”

Presently, I failed to see any sort of problem I could solve unless he was looking for a chic new way to roast marshmallows. Something told me that wasn’t what he had in mind.

“If you agree to it, I’ll heal you! You’ll walk away with no burns, no nothing. The downside is, I’d take you elsewhere. Like, other-planet elsewhere. Like, never speak to anyone you’ve ever met, never return back to Earth elsewhere. If you agree to that, you’re as good as new!”

I almost laughed at the absurdity of it all. Heal me? From this? And take me to another planet? Who did he think he was?

And yet.

He certainly wasn’t a normal kid. What if he was telling the truth? And at this point, what did I have to lose?

I tested my voice, surprised to find it working, if barely, perhaps thanks to whatever he’d done to me earlier.

“... Duke.” The word came out in a hoarse whisper.

He stared at me for a moment, likely thinking he’d misheard me. “What?”

“I’ll take whatever your deal is.” The boy’s eyes lit up, but I continued before he had a chance to speak. “But,” I rasped. Each word came out slowly, laboriously.

“But?” Instead of the annoyance I’d expected to hear, his voice was filled with an almost childlike curiosity.

“I work at an animal shelter. There’s an old dog named Duke. Three legs. They’re probably gonna put him to sleep pretty soon if no one adopts him. If you make sure he gets a home, I guess I’ll say yes to whatever your deal is.”

He just stared at me, incredulously.

Did it make sense to bargain for the life of an elderly dog while I was slowly becoming crispier than a rotisserie chicken? In all fairness, maybe not. But something about the idea of poor old Duke sitting in his cage wondering why the nice lady never came to pet him anymore made me fully and deeply sad.

The boy just kept staring. He stayed that way for nearly half a minute before abruptly bursting into laughter. “Holy shit!” he laughed. “You’re legitimately bargaining while on fire! That’s so awesome! Damn, I feel kind of bad. If we were already over there, that would have definitely raised your trade skill a few levels.”

I frowned and cocked my head in question, not understanding the last bit. The fact that he was offering to fully heal me notwithstanding, he was kind of an ass, wasn’t he? He continued laughing for a while until eventually settling down.

“You know what, now I feel much better about this. I’m mostly doing this on a whim, but I still think I’m choosing right. I bet I can scrounge up a person or two who’re interested in having a three-legged dog, and if somehow I can’t, I’ll take care of the poor thing myself. Does that settle it?”

Did it? I kind of felt like I should be more emotional. Even if the boy was lying, one way or the other, I probably wasn’t going to see anyone I knew ever again. Mostly, though, all I felt was numb.

“I guess?” What were you supposed to say when a seemingly magical kid got into your burning car and offered to take you to another world?

“Dope!” He grinned and held out his hand. “Name’s Dex!” He held his hand there for a few moments before seeming to realize I couldn’t move my arms.

“My name’s Tess.” It was, without a doubt, the strangest introduction I’d ever given.

“Well Tess,” he beamed. “Good luck.” And with that, he reached out and put a hand on my shoulder, and the world began to fade to black. At the same time, a translucent, blue screen popped into existence in front of me.

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Huh, wonder what that’s about, I thought. And then I passed out.