Jack was a health and fitness poster-boy. Not in the sense that he was paid to do ads or spread the word of the wonders of a balanced diet, but in a sense that he did his utmost to take good care of his health and wellbeing. So perhaps the better way to put it would be that Jack was a poster-boy for health and fitness.
Jack wasn’t always like this though. All this care and attention he put in looking after his body came from an early realization of his mortality. He was just eight years old when he watched his sickly father wither and die at the age of forty-two. Unlike other teenagers who unconsciously thought that they would never grow old and that tragedy was something that happened to others but not them, Jack was well aware of the fragility of the human body.
He gave up on soda and anything that had sugar. He stopped eating fried foods and anything that contained even a little bit of grease. At this point he could no longer remember what salt tasted like. Jack’s lifestyle could be summarized in two words: bland and careful.
Yet, life is bound to bless and curse us with its irony. Jack Powell, the portrait of living well and healthy, died at the tender age of seventeen with cancer.
----------------------------------------
When Jack came to, he was standing in a wide white room. The place was illuminated with strong lights, but they didn’t blind him somehow. In the middle of the room there was an office desk and sitting behind it was a sexy blonde woman wearing a lady’s suit. There was nothing else in the room other than that, not even a door.
“What’s going on? Where is this place?” asked Jack.
“Welcome! You are number 345928152, Jack Powell, correct?”
“Yes, I’m Jack Powell. What’s going on?” he asked again in confusion.
“You died. You’re now beginning the process to go to the afterlife.”
“Afterlife? There is an afterlife? So, God is real?”
“Yes, I’m afraid,” said the woman with distaste.
Jack wanted to be angry, but he wasn’t able to somehow. His emotions were all there, they were just much more subdued. He remembered reading in a fantasy book about a similar situation. The author argued that all emotions were related to the brain’s chemistry and the body’s glands, something that was no longer related to him, someone without a physical body. It made sense.
“Could I talk to him? I have some complaints to report,” said Jack.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“I’m sure you do. Everyone does, believe me. Unfortunately, he doesn’t give a shit, to put it mildly.”
Jack just shrugged his shoulders. He wanted to shout, to kick the desk and point his finger at that woman’s face, but it all sounded so shallow and pointless.
“Ok, fine. So how is the afterlife? How is my future looking?”
“Right! Let me check here on the document… Ah, found it! You’re going to the Game World. I hope you liked games before dying, because that’s going to be your new life from now on!”
“What? Game world? Wasn’t there supposed to be only Heaven and Hell?”
“That’s just what you humans believe, nothing more than fiction and fantasy. There are many places one can go to in the afterlife. One of my favourites is Cat’s Heaven, I always go there when I have free time and need to unwind.”
“Wait. I don’t know how, but having many places to go to in the afterlife doesn’t sound too absurd to me, but Game World?”
“Are you familiar with Zeus?”
“The god from Greek mythology? Yes. Don’t tell me, is God… Zeus?”
“Like the Zeus from your tales, God likes to travel and fuck around. The last time he was on Earth he became fascinated with this human creation called videogames. He then spent a good amount of time playing all kind of games instead of doing his job.”
“Wow, I don’t know what to say…”
“He was also happy to find some likeminded individuals on this last trip. Before he would always be thrown the side-eye or perhaps even be stoned for some of his views and actions. I believe these new friends were called furries–”
An enormous lightning bolt came out of nowhere, striking the sexy blonde woman and the desk she was sitting at. The light hadn’t even faded when another lightning bolt came down, striking again. Continuous lightning bolts rained uninterrupted on the poor woman for about thirty seconds.
Jack watched the whole spectacle absentmindedly.
Maybe he really is Zeus… he thought.
When the light faded, the center of the room was scorched black and a huge pile of ash stood where the table once was. The woman got out of the pile of ash and patted her clothes. She was no longer a sexy lady in her twenties however, but a kid around ten years of age.
“Argh, I was just sharing some gossip, no need to get all touchy! Look at how much energy I’ve lost! Bu-hu, poor little me!”
“Are you ok?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I’ll have to work for a few more blips to make up for the lost energy, but whatever. I’m used to it at this point, my tongue got a mind of its own.”
“Blips?”
“It’s our unit of time. Think of it like your days or shifts, just on a cosmic scale.”
“That sounds tough.”
The girl just shrugged her shoulders. She combed her hair with her fingers, trying unsuccessfully to fix her hair that was now fuzzy and all over the place due to the electricity. She attempted this for what felt like five minutes, Jack couldn’t really tell, always complaining about God under her breath.
“So, Game World. What is it like?”
“I’m not sure, God called it an RPG.”
“Oh, that sounds interesting. I wish I could get more excited about it.”
“That’s normal. After you get to the Game World it will get better, but your emotions and perception won’t recover entirely to what they were before. God said that if he made everything 100% real, it wouldn’t feel like an actual game.”
“He’s really committed…”
“Anyways, enough chitchat, are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s start the character creation.”