I wake up and immediately fall into one of my favourite activities: staring at the ceiling of my room for a good twenty minutes while I think about what my life has become. Or afterlife, I guess.

  Lying in the half-light of the room, I have nothing else to focus on but the sound. The quiet, distant whistle of wind rushing past, like breathing out in one long, unending breath. Except it’s not going out, is it? It’s passing down, inward, sinking into…where?

  To mark the end of this intense and important self-reflection, Griff stretches out himself and yawns, drops off the windowsill, saunters over to my bed and leaps up to beside my head and nudges my face, purring loudly in my ear. When I don’t immediately take the hint, he gently nips my nose and then miaows directly into my ear. I sigh, and get up to give him his breakfast.

  I reach out to the bedside table to grab my phone and quickly check it, but of course, that isn’t even a thing anymore. Despite all my time here, it’s still a habit I can’t seem to break out of.

  Instead, I open up the menus in my vision, check the time (9am…surprised Griff let me sleep in this late), and glance at the new menu I have available since the arrival of Oliver. It’s a HUD that displays where he is now, so I can keep track of my new charge so and check in on him as needed. Instead, I’ve been using it to see where to avoid on any given day.

  This time, he seems to still be in his own room at the local tavern. He set himself up there when I didn’t offer him the standard room at the Guild Hall, something only I can do as his official Game Guide according to Meph. But hey, he was apparently also allowed to start the game with a massive purse due to his ungodly wealth in life, so it’s not like he can’t afford it.

  Scratching myself as I walk to the bathroom, I stretch and look in the mirror. Despite my new elven appearance and technically being, you know, dead, I have dark circles under my eyes. I guess I haven’t been sleeping as well as I could. I wonder why.

  Griff gives another short clipped miaow to pull my attention back to him.

  “Okay, okay, keep your feathers on,” I mutter, as I head towards the door.

  Instead of the hallway, however, I find myself suddenly surrounded by bright white light, emanating from below. Griff is nowhere to be seen. I sigh, shrug my shoulders and turn around.

  “Xandra,” I try not to let my annoyance seep too much into my voice. I fail miserably.

  “You promised, Russell. It’s been three whole weeks now, and you haven’t even begun Oliver’s training. He’s still just lounging around the town, he hasn’t even ventured out anywhere. It’s really not proving either entertaining or illuminating,” Xandra stands there, arms crossed, a stern look on her face. This time, her glasses are half moons, perched on the tip of her nose, making her look like a frustrated librarian.

  “He’s already Level 10, he doesn’t need me. You can just tell him to move on, I’ll get the next one.”

  She taps her foot in annoyance. I can’t lie, it makes me fill with an enormous sense of accomplishment. I turn away to hide my smile.

  “You made a promise, Russell,” she repeats.

  I spin back on her at that, a sudden burning sense of anger pushing through me from my feet to my head.

  “Did you know? When you made me promise all that time ago, did you know this was who you were going to lump me with?” I jab a finger in her direction, emphasising my point, letting her read between the lines.

  She stands unmoved, though something in her shoulders softens slightly, and she huffs out a breath.

  “Yes, it is true that time moves a little differently here, and it can be a tad more…flexible. But no, it was not my decision to give you Oliver, nor did I know this would be an option at the time. I think you’ve already worked out by now that omniscience is not quite as omniscient as mortals like to think.”

  I pinch the bridge of my nose, and focus on my breathing. Drawing it in through my nose, holding it for a count of five, and then letting it out through my mouth.

  “Wait, it wasn’t your decision…does that mean it was someone’s?”

  Xandra squirms almost imperceptibly. “Yes. The Board decided on it. The vote was almost unanimous, only me and one other dissented. The Infernals seemed to think it would prove especially entertaining.”

  Huh. “You actually stood up for me?”

  Xandra grunts out a clipped laugh. “You may not like me very much, Russell, but I’m not sadistic. I knew this would be upsetting to you, needlessly so. There’s no need to challenge you that way, we all know where you’re going and it’s exactly where you are right now…you just need to fulfil your role. As promised.”

  Ouch.

  I think about arguing some more, but at this point, I’m not even sure what it would achieve…or even what I want it to achieve. It’s a pointless exercise that doesn’t serve anything but to make me more upset. It’s not worth it.

  “Fine,” I say, throwing my hands in the air. “Send me back, and I’ll go and help the troubled billionaire who clearly so desperately needs it.”

  “Trillionaire. And there’s no need to be like that,” Xandra says, pursing her lips. Then she smiles. “But good, on your way.”

  I turn and I’m back in the hallway of the Guild Hall, where I should have been in the first place. But something feels off. I glance out the window and the sun doesn’t look right. I pull up my display and sure enough I see the problem. It’s now 5:15pm.

  I look up at the ceiling.

  “You could have at least sent me back to when you took me!” I yell, not sure if they’re even paying attention to me, or who exactly I’m yelling at.

  I trudge into the kitchen, deciding before I do anything I am still going to have my morning coffee, even if it is now the evening. Griff stands there, looking at me from the countertop. He’s just a grifflet, but somehow I can still see a look of annoyance on his face. As I walk over to him to pet him, he turns, showing his butt to me, and walks away.

  “I fed your little beastie, by the way,” Meph calls from over on the couch, where he’s laying down reading a book. “Where the Hells have you been, anyway?”

  I roll my eyes.

  “Preparing to go and train the newbie. Have to let him benefit from my exceptional natural ability, after all.”

  After I'd finished pouting and throwing a wobbly and, you know, myself off the tallest building in Durrilan all that time ago, Meph walked me through my responsibilities as a Game Guide NPC. Much of the overall role was kind of self-explanatory, but in terms of working out what I was capable of and the tools I had available to accomplish it, Meph was an indispensable guide.

  That, in a way, led to a somewhat interesting discovery. At the time, he was light on details, but Meph's role was kind of like mine, but not for the Players. Instead, he was a guide for people like me, the ridiculously named 'Early Leavers' who would take on the vital NPC roles. He admitted he'd help with Players too, but that wasn't his main function. I asked him if all the people like me, roped into just being eternal helpers, got this kind of treatment.

  "Perhaps," he said, evasively.

  Meph, it turned out, wasn't a human but an Infernal, something he'd alluded to before. Tieflings in this world would always be Infernals who had entered the game, for multiple reasons that he promised would be explained when they needed to be. Divines would be Feyfolk, fairies and the like, which was good to know, though he admitted fewer of them took part in the gameworld itself, much more content to just watch.

  "So how come you're down here then? Up here? Sorry, I'm not sure how it all works logistically," I asked.

  "That is a story for another time," he sighed, before changing the subject back to the latest menu he was guiding me through.

  The various UIs and menus and the general HUD are some of the best I'd ever seen, quite quickly becoming second nature to navigate and never being too obtrusive. In fact, the use of the various skills and spells became second nature fast, and I found myself amazed at how it came as naturally as using my body to move or pick something up, as if I had always had the ability to cast magic at a moment's notice. It was like an extension of my own innate abilities. Even if, on some level, I was mentally running through a selection of spell, power, target.

  Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

  It's like, what do they call it...the autonomic nervous system? The things you're brain is on some level thinking about doing, like the action of breathing or walking, but you're not aware you're thinking about the process. It just kinda happens.

  "Some of that, as far as spells goes, is because of your class as a sorcerer, Rusty," Meph explained one time. "Once you learn a spell from a book or tome, it'll stick with you like an eidetic memory, or muscle memory. That only works with spells, by the way, do well to remember that.

  "But the overall systems have been weaved through your entity, so abilities which were beyond your mortal self will come as naturally as breathing, if it's in your class and you’ve 'learned' it. In your case, that includes pretty much all magic. The source of your magic is naturally occurring within you and as such is pretty much infinitely renewable, though it can be periodically exhausted from overuse. Players that are wizards, however, will have to specialise in an area of magic, generally, and will be reliant on magic replenishing items or external sources. I guess in that way you're kinda OP."

  "Except I can't get past level ten," I sighed. “You know the term 'OP'?"

  Meph looked at me with a flash of sadness, but I guess he didn't want to get into all that again. "Of course. I'm something of a fan of all the wild fantasies your lot could come up with. Honestly, I found it amazing, wilder than most of the bullshit you came up with in your religions, honestly," he chortled at that, honest to goodness chortled.

  "I thought you said we got a lot of that stuff right?" I asked.

  "A lot, but not all. Some of it was just fabricated, often for someone's own ends. Especially what you all often decided to do with it. It was always a bit of a popular talking point round the Pleroma, what genocide or prejudice you'd all justified now from the slightest askew glance beyond your reality."

  Meph was a nice enough guy, for essentially a devil I guess, but sometimes he could sound downright smug.

  "I'm glad the depths of human depravity are so amusing for you," I said.

  "Oh, they're really not," he said, and I realised there was sadness in the smile on his face. "Honestly, how you all treated each other was often horrible. I — we couldn't believe it. We despaired at it."

  "Really?" I asked, genuine surprise filling my voice.

  Meph gave me an appraising look. "Perhaps we're not all what you think of us," he gestured with his thumb over his shoulder, "Come along now, we have magic to train."

  Meph led me down some stairs into the basement of the Guild Hall. I found myself wondering briefly if I was being led into some deep dungeon, as we walked through stone halls, lit sparsely with intermittent sconces of gentle magical light, ever deeper down under the building. I chided myself internally, worried I'd already offended my one and only friend in this new world.

  Eventually, we came to a set of large wooden doors that stretched from the floor to the ceiling above. I had no idea how far down beneath the main building we were now, but judging from how high the ceiling here extended, it must have been deep indeed.

  "Where are we?" I asked Meph.

  "This is the Training Grounds," he declared, placing his hands on the doors.

  "We have a training grounds? Under the building?"

  "Of course. It's just safer for practicing some elements of combat, rather than diving right in to face actual monsters right off the bat."

  With that he pushed at the doors and they slowly moved open with the groaning of weight and age. They opened inward, away from us, to reveal the room that lay beyond.

  Inside was a gigantic room of smooth stone flooring, intricate patterns displayed over its surface, some carved and some inlayed with colourful mosaic work. It was unclear if they were just decorative or served a purpose. The walls were high and curved outward, but not quite meeting the ceiling. Before they did, there was a gap, and I could just about make out stone seating beyond. The room was fit to be observed, and by a sizeable audience. Above us, in the centre of the ceiling, was a massive round light fixture of some kind. Intricate iron-work almost gave the impression of a chandelier, but the whole thing was mostly encased in glasses of many colours, like a stained-glass window in a sharply tipped dome, shaped almost like an onion or garlic bulb. There were even crystals and gems laid into it.

  On floor level, across the room from us, there appeared to be some kind of desk, and Meph started walking towards it, motioning for me to follow.

  As we got halfway, at the centre of the room, he stopped, and waved his hand in a swift motion. Then, from the floor before us, a plinth rose, causing my legs to buckle. As I stopped myself from landing on my ass, I watched in awe as in the centre of the plinth, in front of Meph, a console rose, stopping just above his waist height.

  "This is the Training Grounds," Meph repeated. "Here, we're going to practice some offensive magic skills."

  "Why me? Do I need to know that?" I asked, looking around the room.

  "The best way to teach is to know how to do it. Plus, it's possible you may need to save your Player if they muck up during training. And they always muck up during training," Meph looked over to me, a cloud of something I couldn’t quite discern briefly crossing his face. "Besides, it's always good to know how to defend yourself."

  "So, how is this going to work? You my sparring partner? Going to pull out some dummies for me to fireball?"

  "Firstly, fireball is not an indoor spell, so please refrain from casting that. And no, I'm not your target. They are," Meph said.

  With that, Meph put his hand on the centre of the console and it lit up in symbols. His fingers quickly danced around it, and then suddenly he was flanked by a trio of huge ogres.

  "Whoa," I whispered, stunned. "It's like a Danger Room."

  "What was that?" he asked, his hands continuing to move about the control panel.

  “You know, from…never mind. Nothing. So, what should I start with?"

  "Something simple. Simple spells are actually a lot more useful than people give them credit for. Build up a simple spell, and it can become versatile enough to be effective in almost any situation. People get hung up on the bigger, more complex spells thinking they're better, but they're often just flashy. Simple and effective is the way to go," Meph explained.

  "I have heard that," I mutter, looking at the impressive and frightening ogres behind the tiefling.

  "Well, it's true. Especially in terms of magic. So if you find yourself facing a gang of ogres," he made a motion with his hand, and the ogres changed to about fifteen small goblins, each armed with a different weapon, from a bone club to a tattered looking cat o' nine tails, "or a goblin horde, or," the horde vanished, and in front of me the room suddenly became crowded by a vast beast, it’s bulking frame filling every line of sight, baring down at me with obsidian black scales, steam rising from its nostrils as it glared at me with large yellow eyes, vicious slits of black for its pupils.

  "A great, big fuck-off dragon," I said.

  "Or a great, big fuck-off dragon," Meph said, stepping around the console and smiling at me, "you can use this simple spell to help cover yourself or your Player. Though if its a dragon, I recommend running, if I'm honest."

  He returned to the console and pressed at glyphs and symbols until the dragon dissolved into a single ogre.

  "Tell me," Meph said. "Have you tried Magic Missile yet?"

  Hours later, I sat in the room panting, having spent most of the day running around, blasting missiles at a myriad of monsters as Meph hurled advice disguised as verbal abuse and occasional verbal abuse disguised as advice at me so I could be better at using the spell in a combat situation.

  "Remember, to start off the spell can blast out three bursts of magic power, so pick multiple targets if surrounded," he said as he came over to help me onto my feet.

  "I know," I gasped, "I just...I just thought I could finish that one wolf off before moving onto the next."

  "Eventually, maybe, but remember you're still new," he said with a grunt as he pulled me up by my arm.

  "The spell went up a level, so I wanted to gauge how much of an effect that had on the power," I dusted myself off, even though most of the assorted beast bits I kept getting blasted and pelted with were illusory and vanished as soon as the creature did, or the simulation ended. Strangely, the feeling was still there though, like getting hit by phantom debris. It was...disconcerting.

  "Generally, don't expect much change between levels, but every five you'll notice increases. At level ten, Magic Missile will fire an extra bolt too, and another two at level fifteen, making six bolts per casting." Meph walked back toward the console, before glancing back at me. "You want to go on, or should we take a break?"

  Something was roiling inside me, overtaking my desire to just curl up in bed with a book or lounge in the common room with a coffee. It was challenging, this training, but I also felt challenged. Like something was clicking inside me, opening up something I hadn't felt in a long while. I was feeling excited, despite how tired I was, I had energy.

  I was having fun.

  "Keep going," I said, as I planted my feet ready for another wave.

  Meph fiddled with the console again, and the room became darker. I scanned ahead, but could see nothing. Then, the room got darker still, and I looked up.

  Above me, dangling down from the ceiling and getting closer was a huge, fat lump. I wasn't sure what it was at first, but instinctively I must have, as I felt my blood turn cold and my skin prickling. The shape spun idly in the air, gently manoeuvring itself until long, spindly protrusions creaked out from it, each one ending in a savage point, bristled hairs running along them. One, two, three...eight fanned out from the shape before it finally made a sound.

  It was a gentle chittering noise that sent quakes of revulsion through my body, before a soft hiss joined it, like air escaping a balloon as the whole thing tilted forward until I was faced by several massive sets of jewel-like eyes.

  I had never liked spiders in life. That hadn't changed in death.

  I screamed, throwing myself backward, slamming into the floor, as I threw a hand out and yelled, "Fireball!"

  A massive ball of flames burst out from just in front of my outstretched hand, getting bigger, from the palm of my hand to the size of a large exercise ball, erupting forward to slam into the spider. The creature screamed as gouts of flames blasted off and spread all over the room, catching on spots as if igniting puddles of oil.

  The strand of web the thing had been dangling from snapped, and as it dropped towards me, I shielded my face and screamed again, the thought of the thing dropping on me, whether living or dead, enough to make me wish for oblivion all over again.

  But instead of crumpling on top of me, it just dispersed, flames that were on it either snuffing out with nothing to burn anymore, or dropping down like sparks and hitting me and floor ineffectually.

  I gulped as I stopped screaming, glancing at Meph who was coming to his feet after crouching down and shielding his head, his eyes fixed on me. I stood.

  "Um," I coughed. "Sorry. I, err, really don't like spiders."

  "So I've learned. Lessons all round, it seems. After all, we've learned a few things. First, spiders are flammable, it seems. Second, retreat is a better option than lashing out with a spell at a creature that's bigger than you, especially when it is above you," Meph said, looking down his nose at me, his hair tussled around his horns.

  "And I feel I must reiterate: Fireball is not an indoor spell."