"Stop fucking running away from your goddamn healer!" 

It wasn't particularly like me to rage, but today wasn't a good day. Down here in Florida it's hot as balls all day and night, and riding a scooter with protective gear doesn't help the heat at all. Sure, it's five dollars every two weeks to fill it up, and sure, it's great that my college is so close that it's only a fifteen minute ride, but when that shit has been sitting in the sun, baking, it sure as hell pushes all that out of your mind when you touch your ass to the seat and subsequently burn the hell out of it! 

All I wanted to do was get home, sit down, turn on my computer, and play some video games. After all this time, you'd think I'd remember that everyone is getting on past six on a Friday evening.  

Everyone. 

Including idiots who think running away from your healer and dying is the smart thing to do. Thank God I habitually use push to talk, else they'd be hearing me swearing them six ways to Sunday and tilt everyone else on my team. I can already feel it getting to me as I died for the nth time.  

'Patience.' I deliberately thought to myself in a soothing manner. 'Patience is a support main's biggest help. It doesn't matter if we lose. It's just a game.'  

In the dark of my room, doors closed, blackout curtains shut, dog snoring away at my side, I closed my eyes for just a moment.  

'You learned this in High School. Going in with a bad perspective only makes you have a horrible time of it. Even if it's just ambivalence, it's better than negativity. This is de-stress time. After this game, let's just get off for a bit to relax and then start again. That's it. That's all you have to do.'  

That's a pretty nice pep talk there. 

What... My body locked up, unable to comprehend what was going on, as my universe seemed to shrink into the one. Pinpoint. Moment.  

I like it. You know, I like support mains in general? If you treat 'em nice, they'll treat you nice. 

I felt a voice in my head. It was strong, rattling my spirit, something I didn't even know existed until I felt it shudder from the sheer force of this being's core identity. I could feel what it was, what it is, what it wanted to be. It was speaking to me in the most intimate way, and I had no doubt it knew me now as deeply and wholly as I knew it. 

Too bad I couldn’t contain it. I could feel myself slipping, parts of myself just starting to... go away. It was horrific in a way I couldn’t convey if I was given every means of communication, perfectly able to be understood.  

Hm. That's bad. Perhaps you'd like a fix? 

Desperation overwhelmed me, even as I felt the being pulling me back together, gently cradling me in its power. Information flooded through me, and I frantically tried to understand it all as this being knew it, grabbing snatches here and there, feeling it etch itself into my mind yet fade away simultaneously, while everything else just flew through me, unable to be accepted by my puny existence. 

I think I was a little too hasty... Well, hopefully we can put this past us? I miiiiiiiight have a request for you.  

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

I was barely regaining my bearings, wildly trying to merge my new perspective of the world with what I thought I knew before. It didn't help that my actual view seemed to have changed as well. My bedroom… It was blurry. Ethereal, incorporeal, I could see through it. Yet, even as I felt my eyes strain to take in my room, solid in my knowledge, in my innate biological understanding of my very physical surroundings, with my new - sense, maybe? - I could slowly begin to tell that what I was seeing was the essence of the world, only able to be perceived now that I was viscerally introduced to it via whatever my guest was and our new shared grasp of each other. 

Maybe a little time before I tell her about it? 

Gradually this sense consolidated, no longer completely throwing me out of whack.  

"What the hell is going on?!" 

Or not.  

Well, you see, I have a little problem, and you are the first result that came up on my search spell.  

Immediately, I was wary. See, I love fiction. I love the adventure, the action, the escapism. But you know what? I sure as hell wouldn’t actually want to go through what those characters do! Fuck no! Twenty one years of living has put me through enough experience to know that just a modern life is hard! Why would I want to deal with that shit?  

I know you now like no one else does, so I know you like to read a little genre called litrpg. 

'Ohfuckno.' 

Now. Not too long ago, I came across an infant world system, and it made me a deal. I lend it some power to do as it does, and I get to choose a herald among its new... population, so to speak, to spread my word to the masses.   

I could feel myself getting fainter and fainter as the being, no, the fucking Deity continued to speak.  

I've been in need of worshipers for a quite a while now, as across the worlds I have inhabited, faith in me has weakened. And. Well. You've read your fair share of system novels! You know exactly how this goes. What better time to spread my religion than now? 

Panic began to overcome me. System?! The world's fucked, the world's fucked, the world's fu-  

I'm fucked!  

I have no idea how to survive outside of my suburban life! There's little reason to be had in a full blown panic, and I could tell I was beginning to devolve. So did the Deity.  

Calm. 

And I was. Such full and incredibly easy control over me should have terrified me beyond words, and I knew this, intellectually. Yet it did not, forcibly calmed as I was. Rationality and logic were my only tools now, to understand what was going on. 

"Why?" I asked. "Why me? Why this world?"  

My world was going to be completely and utterly overturned, probably as soon as this conversation ended. People were going to die, likely in the millions, and everything around me is going to go to complete and utter hell. Why? 

Because that's what systems do.  

Underneath that forced calm, I could feel my emotions roiling from the sheer finality of that single sentence.  

"That's it? That's... really it?" 

They were raging, but detached as I was from them, I could only look at them clinically. I knew, as soon as this calm went away, I was more than likely going to have a full on breakdown. And I knew, at the same time, if my predictions on how this was going to go were correct, I'd die if I did.   

As for you... Well, as I said, you were the first result. I searched for a random person compatible with my domains, and you were it. At my level of power these days.... I couldn't afford a more specific search.  Now, seeing as we're going to be working very closely together from now on, let me introduce myself. 

I could feel it's pleasure at speaking its name into the world for the first time as if it were my own, and as I realized that it doing so would seal my fate, consolidating its presence on Earth by letting just one person naturally of this world's creation know it, I knew I could do nothing but let it happen.  

I am Eriasson! Goddess of Healing, Protection, and Light! And you, dear Lillianne, are going to be my Harbinger.