Lord Zarkoth Wingreaver, the Thrice-Cursed Eternal Trashblight, soared majestically on the roaring ocean winds. Pride burned in his chest, and his greed was comfortably satisfied as he beheld his vast kingdom. It was a flourishing land of water and behemothic steel constructs, the coastline his people had bled to conquer. He now ruled his people with an iron claw. The dawn sun had not quite yet reached the eastern horizon, but the world was brightening.
It was the hour of scavenge, not the hour of the hunt - and yet, this morning, his sharp predator eyes spotted prey.
Lord Zarkoth Wingreaver, the Thrice-Cursed Eternal Trashblight, chuckled darkly as he beheld his hapless victim stagger through his domain. He aimed, tucked his wings, and dove like a dart.
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"F*ck the world. F*ck that guy. F*ck my boss. F*ck my job. Fck my f-ed up sleep schedule." Celeste mumbled in slurred words as she tried to hold her seething, sleep-deprived rage from spilling out of her mortal coil so she wouldn't look insane. She had moderate success, and sighed.
Was this really what the rest of her life was going to look like? She was starting to despair about her job prospects. She had always known that being a professional artist was going to take hard work and dedication, but then, JUST as she was done with an education that put her waist-high in debt, AI art had become a thing and now the job market was just fucked.
Right now, she was an unpaid intern for a job she wasn't guaranteed to get, and she'd slept like eight hours over the past week. At this rate, she might as well have taken her mothers advice and become a brain surgeon. Maybe then, she'd get more sleep.
Calm down. she thought and closed her eyes. It's Friday. ... early Saturday. I can finally go home. Sleep. Decompress. Just.. lets do that. It'll be fine in the end. She inhaled deeply and sighed again, trying to soothe her frayed nerves. She desperately wanted to punch something.
In her hands, she held a coffee - she'd already had enough coffee over the past week to fuel a fatal heart attack, yet it wasn't even nearly enough - and a croissant.
Suddenly, a premonition traced a chill traced up Celestes spine. She felt watched. What was that!? she thought and spun around, but the street was empty. She looked around her for a moment, but it was stupid early and aside from her, the street was empty of people.
A seagull dove in front of her like an arrow from Hell and snatched her croissant. The thinly contained sleep-fueled rage snapped through the dams of sanity, bursting out into her veins and turning the edges of her vision a pulsating berserker red. Weeks of workplace abuse and self torture welled out of her and moved her now croissant-less hand. Before the concept artist intern had consciously processed what was happening, her hand closed around the seagulls neck. Hard. There was a snap, and the bird hung limp from her grasp.
Surprise battled it out with her tiredness and her rage, and Celeste blinked in confusion.
"Uh." she said, intelligently, staring emptily at the dead bird in her hand. She had never killed anything bigger than a spider before. I didn't... mean to do that..
Her brain tried to re-boot so she could have a conscious, deliberate thought about what had just happened. But suddenly, she felt a cold, thin edge pressed against her neck.
"Don't scream, or you're as dead as your bird." said a voice behind her. "Give me your phone and your wallet."
A chill of fear ran up Celestes spine. Her conscious brain may still be rebooting, but her lizard survival brain worked just fine.
"Okay... just stay calm.. I'll give you my things. Just chill, ok?" she said and slowly bent down to put down her coffee and the dead bird so she could free her hands.
"Oh, and you know what? Give me your coffee, too." said the robber.
An uncontainable wave of rage surged within Celeste and she spun around with a deep, furious battlecry. She ducked under the blade, raised the dead bird into the air and feinted into his guard. She fueled all her rage into her arm and whacked the robber with the dead seagull. It was very ineffective, because the seagull weighed like, nothing, but the blood of the bird smeared across the robbers face and stained the white feathers in murderous red.
The robber looked absolutely horrified and retreated several steps. "God damn, you crazy bitch! I'm a vegan! This is a hate crime!"
Celestes viking ancestors manifested as the boiling, simultaneously coffee-fueled and coffee-deprived fury in her veins, and the enraged concept art intern leaped into the first real fight she'd ever been in in her life. She creamed bloody murder and assaulted the man with her weaponized bird carcass. He dropped his knife, and ran. She pursued.
He had threatened her coffee. It was an unforgivable crime.
Her chase continued down the street before Celeste noticed a sinister light from a small side-alley. Some forgotten instinct warned her just in time - she stopped on the spot, just as a truck with 'Truck-kuns Otherworldly Delivery Service' written on the side burst forth from an alleyway like a furious train, and splattered the middle-aged robber dude into a decidedly non-vegan ketchup sauce.
But the warning bells in Celestes sleepy, possibly delirious lizard brain kept screaming at her that it was still dangerous. She felt... watched. Everything was silent for a moment as the truck had come to a standstill, but then the tires screeched aggressively on the asphalt as it tried to turn itself to face Celestes direction. Shit, that's so fucking haunted! Celestes brain screamed at her and she turned back the way she came. Still holding her coffee and her seagull, because her brain was way too fried to remember putting them down, the sleep-deprived intern ran for her life.
There was some more furious tire screeching as the blood-chunked truck drove forward and backwards to position itself straight along the street without driving off the harborside, but far too soon, Celeste could hear the engine roar as it drove straight towards her. There were crashes as the slaughter-inclined vehicle ran into flower pots, cafe tables and street lamps, nothing slowing it down.
Then, the headlights made her shadow stretch out in front of her. Further. Longer. Darker.
She spotted a floating ring and sign with a ladder on it, by the side of the water. She ran for it, and just as she felt the wind of the vehicle behind her, she jumped. There was a ladder built into the pier, for people who fell over the edge. With her dead seagull nestled under her arm - because she felt oddly vulnerable without her only, even if inefficient, weapon - and her coffee still in hand, she clung with her one freed hand to the ladder as the truck sped off the edge with a raging roar. It fell into the water, whipping up a wave of cold water that rose up to Celestes waist. She clung to the ladder with all her strength, shivering from the fright and the sudden cold that seeped through her clothes and skin.
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Holy shit, that was insane. What the hell was up with that thing? It killed that robber guy. The driver was definitely aiming for me on purpose. Was the first one an accident and then they tried to kill the witness? she thought.
She expected a driver to try to climb out of the driver seat, but no one did. The truck just revved its engines ineffectively, and sank into the water until it wasn't visible anymore. She hung on to the ladder for a few more breaths, and then she scampered back up with her one free hand. When she had both her knees up on the ground again, relief and sleep-deprived dizziness flooded her.
I'm resigning from that shitty internship. she she realized. Life's too short for that bullshit. I... lets go home. It's not far. I'll just call the cops from there and they can deal with whatever the fuck just happened when I'm asleep.
There was an odd whistling noise, and she paused. It was familiar. Kind of like those old cartoons, where the whistling signified a large falling object about to crash into somebody. She frowned. That can't be. She still looked up.
A large dark shape whose headlights glared like baleful eyes was falling towards her. Celeste screamed and rolled out of the way just in time for a massive truck to CRASH front-first into the ground, blowing a crater into the asphalt and sending pebbles flying. A door flew off its side. The car alarm beeped angrily.
This was too much. Celeste panicked and scrambled, but a second, then a third, then a fourth whistling soon cut through the relative silence of the morning. She swallowed, clutching her coffee and her dead seabird like lifelines.
With no other shelter, Celeste turned to the fallen truck and jumped in through the broken door, into the drivers cabin.
Immediately, all light died, and it was completely, impossibly silent. Then, glowing symbols appeared from the nothing, runes of power that she could not look away from and that seared painfully into her mind as they dumped the understanding of the universe into her over-tired brain and her heart beat so hard it hurt and-
-and the lights went back on again.
"Hey, I know this scene." she said, blinking at what laid before her.
She stood in a glowing summoning circle, surrounded by dudes with hoods, other dudes with medieval armor and pointy things, and there was a final dude, much fatter than the others, with a fancy red cape, sitting on an elevated chair. He had a crown on his head.
"Oh summoned hero, we have called on you for- uh." the king-looking dude began. There was a long pause. "Why do you have a seagull?"
Celeste just looked down at her dead seagull, then her coffee. This had to be a dream. She had fallen asleep in the office and this was what she got for a week of self-abuse. She gave up on thinking, and just chugged the coffee.
Pain erupted in her chest.
"Argh!" she screamed, dropping her empty coffee cup and clutching her erratically beating heart.
"The summoned hero is having a heart attack! Heal her, quickly!" some robed guy yelled. Some sparkly stuff started to surround Celeste. She felt her stress-induced stomach ulcers heal in real-time.
"It's not working!" someone else replied. "She has been poisoned with a caffeine substance most potent! We need much stronger detoxifying spell to-"
Things went dark for Celeste before she hit the marble floor.
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Celeste woke up to find she was already sitting in a plush red couch, holding a cup of what looked like tea and smelled like chamomile. She blinked at that.
Her overtired brain still wasn't quite processing things as it should. And the world beyond the sofa was a pure white nothing, and the word 'LOADING, PLEASE WAIT' written in big, blue, floating letters.
Her brain wasn't processing things at all at this point.
"Sqwawk." said the seagull. She looked to her side. The white trashbird stood on the sofa seat next to her, looking perfectly alive. Someone had served it a plate of sardines, which it ignored.
Celeste looked at the seagull. The seagull looked back. It was the first time Celeste had seen a seagull look confused, but this one did.
She shrugged, and numbly chugged her tea. She was utterly unable to enjoy it, but it was a really nice tea. She closed her eyes and pretended to savor the taste before she felt ready to face whatever had just become of reality. She sighed, and opened her eyes again.
The empty white space was gone. She still sat on the couch, but it now stood in a roomy, cozy-looking study, walls lines by bookshelves, maps of places she didn't recognize, and what looked like animal heads mounted like like hunting trophies - there were dragons, unicorns, and all sorts of things Celeste couldn't guess the name of. Sunlight filtered in through windows framed by ivy. A teenage girl sat across her, on the other side of a coffee table. The table had a teapot and little plates of very fancy cookies.
Celeste studied the girl. She wore tense smile, and looked immensely sheepish. She was also dressed in what seemed like the single most expensive-looking dress that Celeste had seen in all her life. It was all fancy white silks, burnished silver decoration, and embroidered runes that glowed harshly with the secrets of the universe or something. A headache was building behind Celestes eyes, and she avoided looking at the symbols.
The dress was also oddly, impractically skimpy, in a way that made Celeste - who had some experience wrangling fashion tape - feel a bit uncomfortable.
"I am soooooooo~ sorry about that mess." the girl said apologetically. Her voice was a little strange, high pitched and very sweet. Like something Celeste would not bat an eyelash at if she heard it from an anime, but people generally didn't talk like that in real life.
"Huh." Celeste said, feeling absolutely scraped bare from any fucks she might otherwise have to give about anything.
"This normally never happens, but there was an error involved in your death." said the girl. "You see, us gods tend to use trucks to harvest the souls of potential heroes. Normally, this process happens with pre-approved candidates, and pick people who were about to die soon anyway. But this time, the truck picked up an energy anomaly, and.. well, you were that anomaly."
"I understood like, zero of that." Celeste droned.
"It's because you killed an evil demi-god."
"I killed a what." Celeste said, intelligently.
"Yes, Lord Zarkoth Wingreaver, the Thrice-Cursed Eternal Trashblight." the girl said and nodded at the seagull.
"Skwawk."
Celeste looked blankly at the seagull. It stared back, with a thinly veiled cold intent. Like any other seagull.
"Yeah, so, anyway," the girl continued. "Because you got killed by accident, you will be granted a chance at another life."
"Ok." Celeste said. This had to be a dream. "So, hey, if I'm here, and the seagull is here, what happened to the other guy?"
The girl flinched. "The... other guy?"
"Yeah? The guy with the knife, who got crushed by a truck?"
"....."
"....."
"....."
"....."
"I'm sure he'll be fine." said the girl. "Aaaaaanyway~, now, there are some minor.. complications. Celeste, although this particular evil demi-god was weak, you've still defeated one, before even reaching level one. For most people, such a feat means unlocking an epic quest, and unfortunately for you, they don't allow themselves to be ignored. But, considering your circumstances, I can meddle a bit with which quest you receive. Something easy.. ish. More, I don't know, goblins, and grandmas, than dungeons and dragons, you know what I mean?"
"O... kay?"
The girl beamed at Celeste with all the benevolent gorgeousness of a skimpily dressed anime goddess. Celeste wished she could draw the girls portrait. "Great!" the girl said with her oddly squeaky anime voice. "Then lets not keep you! Now Celeste, you look like you've had a bit of a day, so I'll just send you to the Tutorial area first while I speak with Lord Zarkoth. Take a break before you make any irreversible choices, okay?"
"Uuuuuuh." Celeste said, very intelligently.
The room faded into sparkles and dissolved.
Celeste was briefly aware that she was laying in a bed, and then she went out like a light.