"Holy shit!" I slammed on the brakes in a blind panic. One arm shot out to keep my passenger in place, and the other yanked at the wheel wildly. The world flew by in slow motion as my heart plunged to the bottom of my stomach–which was sloshing with the single drink I’d managed to snag before leaving. Then suddenly my heart was in my throat as the car skidded out from under my hands and flipped several times over. It was the kind of accident you’d see in a movie, the kind where you know, deep down in your heart, that no one could survive, but the main characters still manage to crawl out with a single scrape on their cheek.

This wasn’t that kind of movie crash, though.

The thing that had kickstarted this whole crash was flying through the air with us. The ‘thing’ was a woman, a woman that I just didn’t expect to be crossing the road in the middle of the fucking woods like this. So I’m not saying that whatever happened to her was her fault, but I wasn’t taking full responsibility.

Finally, after more turns than my probably concussed brain could count, the car landed with a thud. A moment later, the woman–the body of the woman?–landed with a less dramatic whud, and the world fell quiet.

"How's Blair?" My weak question hung frozen in the car. Next to me, I could see branches from the tree sticking through my windshield towards where my passenger, Joni, sat. It was unclear how she'd fared. I was a little afraid to look.

In the back, Christopher offered no update on Blair. The car was still absolutely silent.

I started to panic a bit, making weird hysterical crying-breathing noises. It hadn't been fair because Blair had been too drunk and needed to go to the hospital and Joe’s house had been out of service. How an entire house can be out of service is beyond me. Me, having just arrived and only halfway through a black cherry seltzer, was voted the only one safe to drive.

And I was safe to drive. I was! I did not deserve to be made into a drunk driving PSA like this. If that stupid, probably-dead, probably-deserves-to-be bitch hadn't run in front of my car–

I took a deep breath. Okay, Sammi, calm down. Everyone was not necessarily dead.

I turned my light on, looked around the car, and immediately choked back vomit.

Okay, yes, everyone was absolutely necessarily dead. I bolted from the car where the aforementioned vomit made a grand appearance all over the road.

Then I checked on the cause of all this commotion. It was kind of nice to have a distraction from my world-ending accident, even if that distraction was in the form of shimmering, flashing, glowing light swirling around the dead body of a woman.

I blinked at the lights, rubbing the side of my head like I could somehow massage away the TBI. Maybe I was also dead. That'd explain the fanfare. The lights, the sparkles, the atmosphere tingling whooshing.

The dead woman sitting up ten feet in front of me.

She got up in the way cartoon ghosts do, where they kinda sit up but their body stays on the ground. It was very loony toons, but minus anything remotely funny or lighthearted.

The woman looked over at me, face stern. "I hope you're happy."

"I think happy's gonna be a tall order for the rest of, like, ever." I was still massaging my head, hoping that if I rubbed little reverse circles on my temples hard enough, I could just rewind the past ninety seconds.

She glared. "Well, I'm about to vanish for good, so this arguably sucks for me worse."

"Depends on your definition of suck. I could go for some vanishing for good." My voice shook a bit as I talked, that kinda quavery, about-to-cry tone. I knew I was wrong, I knew it would be worse to vanish for good than be alive. I was speaking from a position of privilege. But that didn’t stop me from crossing my blood-stained arms and fixing her with a tearful glare.

A groan slipped from the woman’s lips, not pain or fear, but an annoyed little sigh. "All right, well I'll give you the spiel.” She cleared her throat, shook back her ethereal hair, and took on a dark, foreboding tone. “Beware, oh mortal one, the evil that you have done. For the Gods look darkly upon those who strike down their own. Your life as you know it has forever changed, for this task for which you have strived your whole life–"

"This task? Strive for my whole life?” Was she getting me confused with someone else? “Are you getting me confused with someone else? I was just driving my friend to the hospital–” I stopped, both cause the woman had put up a hand and because I was reminded of Blair’s devastated corpse in my car.

"It's just–" The woman grit her teeth. "Yes. I know. It's just the bit. Usually people don't kill Gods by accident. The speech doesn't account for that. Now let me finish, because I don’t have a lot of time here left, and given your general competence, you’re going to have questions." She cleared her throat again. “Woe be to the one who slays a God, for the curse of the eternal now rests upon you.”

So I was mortally and immortality fucked? Maybe my initial thought was right, maybe dying would have been better. "Is this some, like, death note shit where I don't even get an afterlife now?" That was the worst of both worlds, right? All my friends get to be angels on puffy clouds, and I just vanished into smoke when I died? I was starting to hyperventilate, which wasn’t something my lungs liked at all. “That seems really really unfair. Like, okay, I know, I get it, I’m sorry I hit you, I am. Really. But what happened to look both ways before crossing the street?” I was getting the sinking feeling that whenever this God had been born or created or whatever, they probably didn’t have cars. She probably never learned ‘look both ways before crossing the street.’

The woman sighed. "Oh, you’ll get an afterlife all right. But you're gonna get some stink eyes in there. Though I'm sure my immortal enemies will shake your hand. The ‘curse of the eternal’ just means you're going to have to take over my domain."

I let out a long breath. Knowing I would, in fact, get an afterlife somehow soothed my frayed nerves more than I expected. Maybe it was just because I knew there was an afterlife, which, as a near-lifelong atheist, felt really good to hear. It meant that at least Christopher, Blair, and Joni would get their puffy clouds. I’d get some stink eyes, but let’s be real, I did deserve that.

I was so relieved my brain almost completely edited out her last sentence. "Wait, I gotta what? What's your domain."

"I, oh wretched mortal, am the patron God of Schemes. Plots. Subterfuge and intrigue.” She sighed as she saw the mounting panic on my face. “Military, government, that sorta ilk. You just need to whisper divine encouragement in their ears so that their plans come to fruition. Use your brain, you'll figure it out."

Military and government? The panic was back as my braindead brain tried to summon the name of the current president. "Okay, I’m not saying this is a terrible idea, but I just killed my three friends trying to get one to the hospital. That was my whole plan. Speed down a mountain to get her to the hospital, and now she’s dead. I'm clearly not cut out for this. Can't you just take my soul as retribution and incarnate yourself back on Earth?"

"If I could," she said, her words dripping with venom, "I would. You are the last person I want to see in control of my domain.” Then she looked upward so quickly that I looked up too. Nothing was up there, at least that I could see, but she sighed heavily. “My time here is coming to an end, and you’ve wasted most of your question time with meaningless drivel.”

“Drivel! It’s called a panic attack! And probably brain damage! My friends are dead, and I’m a God now or something. I’m sorry if my panic is boring you!” My heart definitely shouldn’t be beating as fast as it was. Given if a car accident could kill this God, then maybe blood loss could kill me. Was I even immortal?

I opened my mouth to ask, but the woman had already gone pale and ghostly, and the world around us lit with an eerie glow. “Use the Source to guide you. It will show you all you need to know.” She raised her hands, and swirling lights began to flow from her to me.

The energy jumping between us didn’t hurt, or really feel like anything, but the fact that it signified the end of my current life as I knew it was enough to make me sink to the ground. Or maybe it was the loss of blood. Maybe both. Either way, my head dropped to my chest as I started to cry again.

Above me, I heard a sigh, and when I looked up, the God, who was now clad in a dazzling robe, was gazing down on me, pity in her eyes for the first time.

“I suppose I'll use the rest of my waning, dying, perishing soul to give you your companions back." She eyed my car a bit guiltily. “I should have looked both ways before crossing the street.”

I wiped the tears away from my eyes. "You can resurrect them?"

"Eh,” the guilty look grew a bit more intense. “I'll give it a stab.” She waved a hand at the car, and some lightning jumped to it for a moment, before all the light faded away. “Anyway, congrats on fulfilling your lifelong wish and I hope you're willing to lie in the bed you made and eat the cake you spent so long having." With a puff, she vanished.

Then with a puff, three more spirits appeared. These three, I’d recognize anywhere. No amount of pearlescent spookiness could hide the identities of my three, apparently undead friends.

Oh boy, was this going to be hard to explain.

"Wheeee!" Blair floated through the air overhead, backstroking. "How cool is this?"

"Dipshit! Look at the fucking mess we’re in!” Joni said. To me or Blair, it wasn’t clear.

Christoper looked disappointed. "I could have just stayed at the party. Asked Colleen out like you knew I was planning to.” His sad dog eyes shifted to an accusatory what the fuck, Sammi? glare.

So maybe this wouldn’t be hard to explain. Maybe they understood the whole ‘we’re dead’ thing. But I still wanted to defend myself. "Okay, well, you all voted me most fit to drive! So arguably, this is as much your fault. Or at least the responsibility is kinda split." It was a weak protest, if technically true. “Besides, dumb bitch ran in front of the car.”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Blair laughed again as she soared overhead. "Guys, check it out! I’m upside down!"

"Is she still drunk?" Christopher asked. “Or did she get brain damage in the crash?”

“I think she got worse than brain damage in the crash,” Joni said, lips in their trademarked, nasty down twist. “Though honestly, she only seems half a shade dumber than sober, alive, normal-brained Blair.” Joni’s tweezed brows puckered as Blair began whooshing around her, giggling. “Is this, like, my eternal punishment? I’m stuck on earth forever, shackled to you and Blair?”

“Maybe we’re supposed to be her consciences?” Christopher offered. “You know, we can give her shit for killing us and all?”

“Ooh, good idea,” Blair said. She pitched her voice low. “Saaaaaaammi, you are a baaaaad person, and we–”

“I get it! Enough with the ‘Sammi kills people’ shit.” I ran my hand through my blood-matted hair. “Look, I dunno if you’re stuck with me forever. Stuck with each other. I do have God powers, so I can try to…” My voice choked up a bit at the idea. “I can try to set you all free. I suppose I owe you all it. Being I killed you and all. I can do this whole God thing alone.”

“Oh my God, please don’t do the teary thing.” Joni groaned before zooming closer to me, fixing me with an angry look. “Look, you’re in hot water with me for all the killing stuff, but I’m also not ready for pearly gates and all that. Maybe someday, but, like, twenty-six isn’t a ton of time to be alive. I’ve definitely got some shit I was hoping to get done.”

“You do?” Christopher said. “Like, a bucket list? A post bucket list, maybe?”

“Do you really think ‘bucket’ is the death part?” Blair asked. Then she pursed her lips, eyes wide. “Oooooh, kick the bucket list.”

Christopher snapped. “Yeah! Let’s come up with a kicked-the-bucket list. That’s kinda clever, Blair.”

Blair scrunched her face up in a far-too-pleased smile. “I have been known to be clever now and then.”

“Maybe you should just send us all on–”

“You mean you’ll stay with me?” I mopped my eyes. “Really guys?”

"Yeah!” Christopher said. “Joni’s got a bucket list and everything. We’re not just ditching you now. Besides, there’s a ton of shit we don’t know. Can other people see us? Can we touch things? What's our purpose here?"

"Yours specifically?” I contemplated for a second. Technically it was to make me feel a little less sad, but I got the impression that my friends weren’t gonna go crazy for the idea of being my emotional support ghosts. “Uh, to help me pick up in the God’s shoes? She's the God of schemes. Or she was. I guess I am now, which is gonna be a tall order on my own."

"Man, so we gotta help you scheme?" Joni, who’d been practicing her floating, came in for a landing next to me. "We have like, eight brain cells between the four of us. How is that going to work?"

"We'll figure it out," Christopher said. "We probably have time. What are the limits on this? Do you have a timer?"

I threw my hands in the air. "I don’t know! The God gave me some time for questions, but I kinda panicked through it so I didn’t really get the chance to ask too much before…”

That’s when I finally noticed the shimmering at the corner of my vision. It’s not exactly that I hadn’t noticed before, because there had been a lot of shimmering tonight, but I finally realized that this particular shimmer hadn’t gone away. And yeah, maybe it was lingering brain damage, but something felt… divine about it. Not, like, really-good divine but, like, probably God-stuff divine. The kind of Divine with a capital D.

Curious now, I flicked my gaze down to the corner of my vision, but instead of running away from my gaze like black spots, sparks, and those weird oozy floaters always do, it expanded.

I yelped.

“What?” Christopher asked. In my peripheral, I could see him moving, but I was too afraid to take my eyes away from the image that now glowed in front of my face.

~~~

GOD OF SCHEMES

Tier: 1

Powers Unlocked: Verity Tongue

Familiars: Joni Beck, Christopher Ricci, Blair Yan

Familiar Powers Unlocked: None

Attributes: Delayed Sensitivity, Reduced Sensitivity, Heightened Constitution, Regeneration Tier 1, Unaging

~~~

At the very bottom was an expandable… section? It was had to say for sure the right thing to call this because I wasn’t aware being a God came with a user guide. Playbook? Honestly, this was a bit more underwhelming than both. It felt more like a pokemon card than an actual Godhood for Dummies.

I flicked my eyes to the pulsing section, and it opened up.

~~~

New Achievement!

Ascended to Godhood

~~~

And that was it.

I read it over a few more times, just in case there was some hidden scroll bar on the side. Darted my eyes all over the page and everything, looking for any little plus icon or something that would indicate extra reading material. A near-high school dropout like me wasn’t normally looking for extra reading, but right now I’d sit down with a whole-ass textbook if it meant I could learn what was going on a bit more.

When nothing materialized, I sighed, and more on instinct than anything, darting my eyes to the upper left corner, minimizing everything.

“Well that was barely helpful,” I grumbled.

“Kinda like you, yeah?” Joni’s nose was crumpled at me, and it was the first time I noticed how wonked out of shape it was. I guess just cause they were resurrected as ghosts didn’t necessarily mean their forms were healed. That definitely blowed for them.

Then her question registered, and I realized I’d trailed off mid sentence before shouting and then standing still, eyes darting around like I was Blair at a rave, three mysterious pills in.

“Oh. I found a little menu thing that showed me my God numbers.” I rubbed the side of my head. “Like, something that showed me what level of God I was and my powers and stuff.” I left out the part about them being my familiars. Last I checked, familiars were witch pets, and somehow that was worse than being emotional support ghosts.

“Wait, that's fire though,” Christopher said. “Does it give your stats and stuff? Do you have, like, a quest log? Any glowing arrows that tell you where to go? Does it have health bars and shit like that?”

“Okay, cool it dipshit,” Joni said, sounding even more annoyed at his excitement. “She’s not suddenly a video game character.”

“I mean.” Christopher shrugged. “She’s got a level.”

“Technically a tier,” I said, but Christopher would not be dissuaded.

“Tiers are just old-timey levels.” He crossed his arms aggressively.

“You so desperately want to be some side character in a video game.” Joni crossed her arms even more aggressively. “This isn’t that kinda thing. This isn’t the fucking Steam landing page.”

“I do have an achievements tab.”

“HA! I told you, we’re basically–”

“You said you had powers?” Blair, who had been sitting off on her own, trying to get her hair to move without touching it, suddenly rejoined the conversation.

“Uh.” I did say that I had powers, didn’t I. “Yeah.” I checked the page again real quick, just to make sure I’d gotten it right. “Verity Tongue.”

“Yuck.” Blair stuck out her own tongue. “That’s kinda boring. What’s it mean?”

I stuck my tongue out, trying to get a look at it. “Doeth it look ditherent?” I asked, forcing the words around my distended tongue.

Joni sighed. She didn’t look ready to concede the video game argument, but with my newly presented tongue now the center of conversation, she didn’t have much of a choice. Personally, I was willing to leave the debate between them. I was never a big video game player, but Joni and Christopher played a bunch, so if anyone was gonna make the call, it’d be one of them.

“Looks like a tongue to me,” Christopher said. “Your piercing’s all fucked up. Looks painful as shit, dude.”

I pulled my tongue back in fast, face flushing. “Does it look bad?”

“Stick it back out, we’re still looking.” Joni held out her hand, as if I was just gonna fork over my tongue.

I didn’t, though, because as I probed around my mouth, I became a lot more aware of how much my tongue hurt. I must have bitten it or something during the crash.

Thinking back to the numbers page, one of the Attributes hopped back to memory. Delayed Sensitivity. When I’d first read it, I’d ignored it cause I wasn’t sure what it meant, but maybe it explained why, only now, I was feeling any kind of pain. And let me tell you, even though Reduced Sensitivity was also on the list, that pain was coming on pretty damn hard right now.

“Uh, I think I’ll keep my tongue for now.” My voice had taken on a woozy note. “I actually feel a little crappy. Maybe we can think about the power shit later?” Would kinda blow if the God of scheming passed off her powers to a dumb almost-dropout only to have said almost-dropout die from blood loss on her way back to civilization.

"You good, Sammi?" Christopher asked. He leaned in, like somehow being closer to me was gonna diagnose my tongue and other fucked up body parts. With his face so close to me, I could see that, under his thick mop of 2000s-boy-band hair, part of his skull was caved in.

It made me feel a little silly, complaining of a semi-severed tongue, bumps, bruises, and a banged-up but still functioning brain. "Uhh, my leg's a bit screwy, and I'm probably rocking a concussion, but like, I'll probably live, provided I don't bleed out. You had it worse. Don't worry about me."

Christopher seemed immediately distracted by my mention of his injuries. “Yeah, no shit, that was gnarly. Did you look back there? My head got crushed against the ceiling.” He looked over his shoulder at my beat-up beater and shuddered. “Even I don’t wanna look back there again, man.”

I mirrored his shudder at the memory, especially as it led me down a line of increasingly unsettling questions. How much had the three of them remembered? Were their deaths painless or had it been a full, drawn-out thing? I should ask, but that wasn't a conversation I wanted to have. Not with how dizzy I felt.

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that,” I said, guilty feeling sinking back in. “I did try to stop in time.”

“Okay, I’m pretty okay with ragging on Sammi for killing us all,” Joni said, “but we should probably get her to a hospital if we don’t want her to actually bleed out.”

"So what’s the plan?" piped Blair, floating several feet above my head, "Where are we going? Is this a ‘make an appointment kinda thing’ or an ‘urgent care’ kinda thing?"

"Hospital." Joni's flat voice somehow both scolded and grounded the group. “ER.”

"Ooh, smart smart. What're you gonna say? Someone's gonna find the wreckage and our bodies and not yours." Blair covered her once bright pink lips with her long, ghostly white fingers.

"She's gonna Jane Doe herself," said Joni, "until she's healthy or they stop falling for it. Then we're getting the hell out of dodge. Hopefully by then we’ll have figured out how her tongue works."

Joni should be the God of scheming, not me. My brain had lowkey planned on going to the police and bare my soul, sobbing, asking them to call my mom. This worked better. It was sneakier. Involved lying. That was a good first step towards being the God of Schemes.

"Cool," said Christopher. "Except, you know, the closest town's like, ten miles away I think. That’s why Sammi was speeding so much in the first place."

Oh shoot, he also had a point. I wasn't gonna make it ten miles. Then a little lightbulb went on over my head as I watched Blair zooming about. It was the first good idea I’d had since I’d considered (and then reconsidered) ditching the party tonight on account of a headache.

Still. That was in the past. I did go, and since then it had been a bad idea conga line. This might make up for that a bit.

"Okay, dumb idea, but…” I pointed up at Blair. “You can all fly, right?” A grin spread across my face, the first real smile I’d had all evening. “How wild would it be if, like, y'all could carry me."

The space went quiet for a moment.

"That’s a terrible fucking idea," Joni said, in an expression of the group's sole voice of dissent.

And just like that, we had a plan. A scheme, if you will.