Cauldron of Bitter Discontent Series Archive

Chapter 1: Give Customers What They Want Even If They Want To Rob You

Imagine an empty bar, and then forget it because this one was full.
Full of bankers, or that’s almost what Sarah Richards thought of them. One letter off.
There was a guy in the corner. Well, he was against the bar, but it was in the corner, so he was … in the corner. At least that’s what Sarah’s mind thought about him, and in exactly that way.
Until she lost sight of him halfway through a slightly-too-enthusiastic conga line.
Making her way back to a seat she’d secured in a corner, as far away from the noise as she could get in the small, cramped room; she sat down to think about her employment opportunities.
I chose to work … here?
She hadn’t had this thought before, because she’d never had the time to consider it. She’d been so busy for the past few weeks in meetings that she hadn’t evaluated her progress.
She also hadn’t asked the question because she was brand new here. Second or third day and she didn’t even know anyone.
“Is this seat taken?” she heard a voice and didn’t look around. What seat? I only put this one here? She thought.
“No?” she replied, confused.
“Oh, good.” A man’s face appeared from nowhere, and he sat on a chair he’d definitely pulled over.
“You moved that over here, didn’t you?”
“Not the hardest pull I’ve had to make this evening.”
“What would that be?”
“Well, I mean first of all you have to prove you’re not a bot by, for instance, going for dinner with me?”
“We work together, that’s not appropriate.” Sarah wasn’t uncomfortable, as such. She just … wasn’t sure.
Emmet could slowly feel his manoeuvre going wrong, like the time he’d got inexplicably stuck on a lubricated beam over a twenty foot drop. He only prayed there were similar insurance payouts for broken limbs as there were for being badly injured in a flirting accident.
“No, I just …”
“Saw me here on my own and thought ‘let’s go’?”
“Pretty much.”
“In a corner, by myself, facing away from you …” Sarah wasn’t scolding as such, just a terse version of humour Emmet wasn’t completely used to.
“I thought you’d want a friend,” Emmet exclaimed.
“Because that’s how that works.” Sarah smiled after this, and Emmet understood she’d been messing with him. Pretty well, as it turned out. There was a slightly awkward silence for ten seconds as neither of the two knew how exactly to proceed.
“Well, um, I guess …” Emmet took the lead and stood up, moving the chair he’d brought as he did so.
“Yes, I suppose …” Sarah stood up too, more out of courtesy than because she was moving.
Another pause.
Sarah led this time; “See you at work tomorrow.”
“Well, yes. But we should redo this whole ‘introduction’ thing. It didn’t really work that well for us, did it?” Emmet admitted sheepishly, as close to an apology as Sarah was likely to get.
“It’s … okay …” she called after him as he slunk away, trying to stop existing and hoping she’d forget he’d been there at all.
“What the hell’s wrong with me?” Emmet muttered quietly to himself. He knew what it was, he just wasn’t sure.

“So imagine you’re at a party …” Emmett, now a teller at the Bank of Spare and Unused Jokes, was trying to amuse Sarah, who found herself rostered on the desk next to him. They were a similar age, just older than twenty-five, and they’d been here all day. They had, but nobody else.
“I swear to God, if you tell me the ‘it’s a punch-line!’ joke again, I will throw a briefcase of cash at you.”
“Okay, it’s not that one, I swear.” Emmett lied. It had been that joke, mostly because he knew exactly how much she hated it. He would arrange the perfect punchline. One day. But for now, he could make do with half-assed attempts at a shitty joke that didn’t really work.
Sarah liked Emmett, it was just that one joke. It sucked. They’d been working together for about a week now, and had got past the whole ‘awkward first introductions’ bit; mostly because after meeting at a party, Emmet had bought her flowers as an apology gift. Sweet, except that it was hayfever season, and Sarah was thrown into a ten-minute sneezing fit. Again, not too big of a deal, except that they both worked behind the tills at a bank; very much in the middle of a customer service job.
Their shifts during the week were normally pretty quiet. They’d find about ten customers an hour, and the odd request from a boss; take the bins out, tidy your till, Emmet get down off the desk – that sort of thing.
They passed the time by idly chatting and telling jokes.
“So … did you hear the one about the deaf – ”
“Boring. Punchline is ‘neither did he.’ How about this; Knock, Knock.”
“Fine. Who’s there?”
“That guy at the door.” Sarah pointed at a delivery man that was struggling to carry his packages and open the door to the bank at the same time. Emmet darted out from behind his desk and pushed the button on the bank side of the wall that would automatically open the door. It released suddenly and the delivery man fell through the gap, spraying packages in all directions.
Emmet helped the man gather his parcels then looked across at Sarah who was biting her knuckles and trying extremely hard not to laugh. Failing; every so often she’d let out a snort.
Emmet returned to his seat after showing the man through to the next doorway.
“And that’s how it’s done.”
“What? Making an absolutely massive mess and having to clean it up. Yep.”

“Induction meeting.” The bank manager sat across from Sarah, with papers in front of him. His name badge said ‘Sir’, so Sarah couldn’t tell what his real name was. Emmet was supposed to be there too, but he’d been running late all morning; so he’d be another five minutes or so. Sir had noticed the absence, but hadn’t commented on it.
“I see your friend hasn’t shown up yet. Promising.” Until now.
“Yeah, car trouble, I think.”
“Another man with ‘car trouble’. I don’t believe …” Sir pinched his nose, looking tired all of a sudden.
“He’s a fast learner, he can catch up.”
“I bet. So, um,” Sir said, flicking through the booklet, “first rule is follow the rules. I don’t know why that isn’t a rule in more places.”
“Because most people assume it’s implied.”
“Yes, perhaps. Then there’s all the ‘do your job, take your breaks, and remember good customer service stuff …”
Sir was cut off by the office door opening, and Emmet waltzing in. Which might, under normal circumstances, have seemed like an exaggeration; but he had the receptionist by the waist. She’d really leaned into it. And him.
“Thanks, Barbara. Just leave him there,” Sir said, without looking up; and gesturing at the empty chair across from Sarah. Barbara deposited Emmet on to the chair, but the momentum from his twirling around meant that he kept going and ended up on the floor.
The meeting carried on like this for the next hour, with Sarah and Emmet struggling to pay attention, and Sir talking in a low monotone voice that didn’t inspire them to pay attention. In a vicious cycle so that after the meeting had concluded, Sarah and Emmet weren’t sure what the point of the meeting had been, and Sir wasn’t exactly sure they’d been listening at all. Which wasn’t of much consequence because he’d just told them the rules of the bank.
But who needs those, right?
Emmet and Sarah spent the rest of that first day sat behind desks filling in forms. Indemnity and suchlike, for if they were to die while at work. Notably there wasn’t a form forbidding the breaches of any of Sir’s rules; or at least Sarah and Emmet might have noticed that if they’d remembered what any of the rules were.
“This bit says we can’t make up a joke and put it in the bank without following the process.”
“Wouldn’t want joke fraud.”
“Although their definition of fraud is a joke.”
“The rules did seem to tiptoe around without actually saying anything.”
“Although tiptoeing around while yelling does kind of defeat the purpose.”
“So they forbade joke fraud; which makes very little sense as to how that would even happen. But they haven’t actually forbidden the theft of jokes, which would be quite easy to do.”
“I suppose they want a joke to have a certain … quality. And fraud would devalue a joke, but theft wouldn’t.”
“Although theft would too, right? Because then people just say other people’s jokes and it becomes worthless.”
“You’re right. This bank is a mess.”
“Don’t steal any jokes.” Sarah looked across at Emmet, and he nodded.
“I’m not an idiot.”

After two weeks of working in the bank, Emmet had got the hang of the systems and how the tills were supposed to work. He was mildly proud of himself, even though it had only taken Sarah three days to master the same skills to the same level.
“So can you put that transaction on the account for …” The customer continued talking but Emmet stopped paying attention as his focus shifted to the buttons that he needed to remember which order to press.
He hesitated just long enough for the customer to sigh in an overdramatic and exasperated way.
“When I ask for unreasonable things, I expect them done ten seconds before I’ve finished the question,” he seemed to say. Emmet might have overwritten his actual complaint, but that was the gist.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, sweetly, while still focussed on the buttons, “but your joke’s not even that good so you can take your joke of a joke and stick it up your ass, you ass.”
“I – I – I” The customer stammered, clearly not expecting the tellers to fail at customer service quite so badly. Had Emmet been thinking about what he’d just done, he might’ve been shocked too. But Sarah walked in the door just as Emmet looked up, so he didn’t have to bother.
“Excuse me sir?” She took over, seeing that Emmet was distressed.
“Yes?” the customer seemed wary of Sarah.
“Can I help you? What are you waiting for?”
“Waiting for him to stop fucking around.”
She completed the request quickly because she knew where the buttons were and how to use them. This warranted an exasperated “you’re a fucking psychic’ from Emmet sitting on the sidelines.
After the conclusion of the transaction, Emmet chipped in from the sidelines. “And would you like fries with that?”
“Oh, yes please.”
“Not serious; working enthusiastically as a team, we only just got through the paperwork for a loan. Fries is well beyond us at the moment.” Sarah’s sarcasm could melt a steel beam.
About an hour later, Emmet had just returned from his lunch break as he saw Sarah dealing, rather unsuccessfully, with the same gentleman. He wanted to cancel the loan and regain complete ownership of his joke.
Not possible, Sarah was saying, you could only withdraw jokes from the bank after undertaking the regular monthly payments, and that there was no batch payment option.
The customer seemed perplexed by this rule, in much the way that a cat that doesn’t understand how to solve a Rubik’s cube would be perplexed by what a Rubik’s cube is. Which may or may not have been a fair criticism, because the rule was, Sarah would admit, fairly silly. But he accepted it, from Sarah, who he trusted because she’d solved his earlier problem.
She looked across at Emmet, pleased at her swift problem-solving.
“And that’s how it’s done.”
“… Fine. That is how it’s done. I bow down to you, master.” Emmet replied sarcastically, then dramatically bowed his head and hurt himself on the desk.

“Your birthday’s just around the corner, that’s what the system was saying.”
“Was it? Oh, God. I hate my birthday, it just reminds –”
“Me about the fact I’m aging. I know, right?”
“But I might’ve been about to say something else …”
“Were you?”
Emmet smiled. “No, you’re right. Just wanted to panic you a bit.” He moved over to his desk and started his shift without noticing that Sarah had tracked his movement before carrying on with her own task.
They both pretended they were busy, while acutely aware that the other would notice their boredom, but no customers entered the bank.
Emmet cracked first. “So, uh …”
Sarah sat up in her chair, and paid Emmet as much attention as she could.
“What do you do for fun?” Emmet seemed awkward, and should perhaps not have bothered with the question at all.
“I spend my Sundays intimidating young men into initiating awkward conversations.”
“Oh, so basically what you do here. That’s … repetitive.”
“So’s this conversation.”
“Wow. Should I stop?”
“Please don’t. It’s either this or the emptiness of silent contemplation, and I’d rather talk to you.”
“Awwwww, that’s sweet.” Emmet made a sarcastic heart shape with his fingers. Sarah blushed a little, as if she’d slightly misunderstood.
“Is it hot in here?” Sarah asked.
Without particularly thinking, Emmet replied; “No, that’s just …” he paused and the words he had been about to use flashed across his mind. “… actually, it is rather warm.” He stepped out from behind his desk, to open both the window at the far end of the room, and the door.
“Where are you going?” Sarah asked.
“I’ll be back. Attached, much …” Emmet walked out the door, and felt slightly bad as it closed behind him, because the tail of his shirt got caught in the frame.
“Ow. Sarah …” he called, and waited a minute for her to free him from his very literal prison.
“You okay?” Sarah seemed concerned. Genuine?
“Yeah, it just … stung a little.”
“Wait, you have feelings?” They moved back to the desks as, for the first time in the day, there were customers.
“What are those?”
“The things that get in the way of … not having them.”
“Ah. Well, you see, I try to avoid them because they get in the way.”
“But?”
“Wait a second; I’m sorry, which customer’s showing you his what?” Emmet looked across at Sarah and the customer she was serving, both of whom blushed.
“No, I just …” Sarah started talking, but Emmet headed for the door again.
Before he reached it, he was confronted by another customer. “I have a job for you if you want it …” a voice Emmet had heard before.
“Can I have some details?” Emmet replied, and was passed a business card.
“The money’s not bad either.”
Emmet looked up, and saw the guy he’d help with a pizza delivery. The guy winked, then moved on.
“I’ll be in touch, if you’re interested.”
Emmet muttered to himself. “Not the kind of pickup line I was expecting, but I’ll take what I can get.”

The following morning, the queue of people that were waiting for the bank to open seemed uneasy. Something was brewing, and not just the one guy in a corner making craft beer. Dickhead, Sarah thought. This seemed like a crowd that could turn and easily make the bank look like a joke. The bad kind. She fought her way to the door, and managed to get inside after careful negotiation with a customer and a proposition from her boss. Wait, no. The other way around. Less problematic. Still bad, but …
She sat down and realised with a slight sinking feeling, that her chair was broken.
And that Emmet wasn’t working today, so she’d be at the till on her own, and bored. And that was the only reason for her melancholy. There wasn’t anything else, at all.
A phone rang and she answered it, expecting a customer. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Absolutely not.” Hung up.
The customer had asked for a loan, then gone through some terms; then tried to flirt. Try to select the point at which she was flirted with.
She still felt as though something suspicious was brewing, and heard the whispers herself, just after lunch. “Jokes have been going missing from the vault.”
She passed it on to her supervisor straight away, and thought little else of it. But she’d get an increasing number of odd phone calls that she’d pass on to her boss after being unable to answer the question.
The customers seemed more annoying today, as well.
At about three o’clock, she talked with her supervisor about the suspected joke leakage from the vault, to see if there was anything else she could do; and whether it (if it were even true) was the result of a teller error that she or Emmet had unwittingly caused. He said there wasn’t and that he was still looking into it, but she kept thinking about it until she found herself sweeping the front porch of the bank and picking up rubbish idly without really thinking about it, and she was tapped on the shoulder.
“Can I get a withdrawal please, Ma’am?”
At least he was polite.
Her shift concluded some time later, but without any further incident, and as Emmet walked in, to take over, she felt the need to brief him. And also a confusing desire to de-brief him. And anything in between.
“I heard from some people that there’s been jokes going missing. Passed it on, but that’s all we really know. Just thought you’d … want to know.”
“Ah yeah, I imagine customers will have questions.”
“Like why you’re wearing a skydiving costume?”
“Oh. That. I need to do laundry.”
“Well, that’s your business,” Sarah replied briskly as she packed up her things then walked towards the door.
“See you tomorrow, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Then she left and Emmet found himself alone in the bank.

Emmet turned the guy’s offer over in his head, and the guy’s card over in his hand. For about an hour, because there was no customers. Odd, for a Tuesday.
And then there was what Sarah had said.
He couldn’t investigate any of it because he was stuck behind the desk, due to getting his shirt caught in a particularly vicious till drawer. And doing his job, but who really cares about that, hmm?
After that uneventful hour of staring at the door and willing it to open, Emmet served a customer and managed to release himself from his personal trap; leaving him able to deal with his slightly-less-personal quandaries; what were the guy’s plans, should he accept the offer; and who knew what about the suspected theft of jokes. He only had Sarah’s word for it – but he trusted her word, so that was fine.
His supervisor said that only three people knew what was actually going on, but he wouldn’t say who they were. Emmet guessed the main point of that was to limit the number of people, rather than the specific identities of those who knew.
They liked to keep lids on things like that. A similar mentality applied to a text Emmet received half an hour later from his pizza delivery guy friend. Meet me in half an hour.
Emmet met the man in an alleyway outside the bank. Which wasn’t dodgy at all.
“Will you accept my offer?”
“Sure. Why did you pick me?”
“You seem like a hard worker that will help when we ask.”
“What do you want me to do?” Emmet needed some description of his role, or he might agree to dressing in a penguin suit and giving posh businessmen favours.
“We want you to dress in a penguin suit and give posh gentlemen favours.”
“Wait what, really?”
“No.” Half a smile. “We want you to steal from the bank.”
“Steal how much of what for whom?”
“Good that your first response wasn’t to report me. I see I’ll be able to trust you.”
“And how much will you pay?” Emmet decided to add to his Jenga tower of unanswered questions.
“Enough for you to ask that girl out, or whatever it is you want to do.”
“Well, I want to go to magic school, but I mean …” Emmet replied, but the man wasn’t listening. He didn’t really care, and had already moved off, and fallen down a pothole.
Emmet sat back at his desk and thought about the situation. They knew about the stolen jokes, and he was going to be paid to steal more. The worst bit wasn’t the fact that he’d get caught – it was Sarah and what she’d think.
But he’d already decided to do it, as he looked down and turned over an old, but well-kept piece of paper in his hand. A gust of wind snatched it from him, he then had to bend down to pick it off the ground.
The joke on the paper wasn’t even that good.

The next month passed in a blur of sameness. That is, the work was dull, the office was dull, and both employees entirely lost the ability to determine what a ‘day’ actually represented. Life became a cycle of work-eat-sleep-work-repeat for both of them, and they became steadily more familiar with each other’s blind spots. Emmet’s included using the computer system and dealing with difficult customers. It turned out Sarah’s included the fact that she was … blind.
Sarah began to notice, as June became October (because, as has been said before, both people lost total track of time) that there was something wrong with Emmet. Worrying him, and it wasn’t just the customer standing next to him behind his own desk, that had managed to smash down the barricade in much the way an angry rhino would flatten a fence. Which isn’t to say the guy was horny – he may well have been but Sarah wouldn’t judge.
In this time, Emmet was getting used to Sarah, too. He’d notice when she took her breaks and how they always followed a pattern; she’d leave, have her break, then come back. He’d notice that she always logged out of the computers when she needed to do anything away from the desk; common sense, he realised, after the Great Rhino-Customer Incident of 2017.
Emmet’s slightly erratic (or more erratic than his normal) behaviour carried on for several more days, and Sarah started to worry. Only low-key worrying, though. Wondering if he was okay. High-key worrying would be equated to smashing down a door in the middle of the night and bellowing at the other person to see if they’re okay, while the other person is sound asleep and none the wiser.
While Sarah was low-key worrying about Emmet, Emmet was high-key forgetting that Sarah formed a unique part of the environment they worked in, so he would start leaving customers unattended as he thought there was no other employee around, or books open on the desks when Sarah was not around, forgetting that she might come back and see them.
Sarah returned from a lunchbreak, with a skip in her step because she’d been leaning on her right foot for three hours and she couldn’t feel it anymore; and was limping as a result. Emmet was helping a customer in the door, and mostly failing because he still hadn’t mastered the pull-to-open mechanism for the door. She noticed a file open on the desk, and that it was the visitor book; a book they did not use in any kind of regular fashion. She saw the fact he wasn’t even filling in the form, just using it as note paper. She saw the fact he’d scribbled ‘perform a heist on Saturday; 100 jokes’ on the page, and she saw that he’d freshly signed something.
Whatever it was that Emmet had planned, it sounded very much like he shouldn’t have been involved in it. And if he shouldn’t have been involved in it, then it was only a matter of time before the whole bank stopped working (and went for lunch, because that would happen a reasonable while before the heist.
She closed over the folder. He need not know that she had seen it.

Heist, Saturday. 100 jokes. Emmet considered the job he had accepted. Emmet just had to find a way to pull it off without Sarah finding out. Not because she’d destroy the plan; she probably wouldn’t. Just because she’d … care. And then treat him differently. He didn’t want that. He wanted her to like him, but he couldn’t articulate why. Not because he fancied her; they worked together, that was all – but …
That was always as far as he got, and his pizza delivery friend had managed to get him to assemble at the meetup point and kitted out with an earpiece and toolkit, all while Emmet had been completely lost to the world and not paying any form of actual attention at all.
“So this is the plan,” crackled the guy’s voice through the earpiece, and Emmet snapped back to reality.
“Get the jokes without doing anything funny.”
“Emmet, just listen. The jokes are located in the third vault, which is on top of the second vault, so you’ll have to –”
“Vault over it?” Emmet interrupted, as he still hadn’t quite got hold of the ‘Emmet just listen’ rule.
He’d get the jokes, then leave in their place a scrawled note. And hopefully whomever found it wouldn’t be too badly pissed off. Although, in his experience, the people who would find it cared more about their bottom lines than the actual jokes. But that probably didn’t help him much.
Neither did the way the vaults were organised. He’d have to navigate across two hastily and extremely safely (he’d been assured) constructed bridges, made from balancing metal offcuts then using duct tape. But after three wrong turns, two wrong punchlines and one bruised face (from one of the earlier joke misfires) he arrived at the correct place. To find the vault he needed to open bolted into place, and the boxes inside tied together.
Sarah called him while he was distracted with undoing the cable ties after smashing open the lock. So she distracted him from his distraction from the main task.
“Gotcha,” he muttered under his breath, forgetting for a second that the phone would connect halfway through, and then …
“Sorry, what?” Sarah replied to Emmet’s muttering
“Now you need to leave as if you were never there.” The voice in Emmet’s other ear started up again, as Emmet finished removing the jokes from the vault.
“Yeah, yeah, I got you.” Emmet replied quietly to the voice.
Sarah was pissed off by this half-hearted response. “What’s that? I just need to talk to you.”
“Just hold on a minute. I’m doing something in the vault …”
Sarah muttered under her breath, “well at least you have the nerve to admit …”
Emmet heard half a voice on the phone in his ear, and half a voice very much in the real world. He looked up, with the box of scrawled jokes in his hand, to see Sarah standing in front of him.
Sarah held up her phone and dramatically clicked off the call.
“Gotcha.”

“I still never told you the joke about the party,” Emmet tried deflection first.
“Our office ‘do’ was a joke of a party”, Sarah countered. “Any idiot could see you were going to steal from the bank. So why do it?” She was annoyed at him now, exactly what he’d been avoiding and he found it slightly scary.
“I, I just – um –” he stammered.
Then he told her about the man, and she gasped, remembering that insignificant detail; and the money he’d get paid, and she gasped because of the amount (a very significant detail indeed)
“And also how do we take them down?”
“I’m sorry, what? I thought you were mad?”
“Well, yeah, but I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“Well I’ve already stolen the jokes, so …”
“… so do you think that’s good enough?” Sarah questioned, but seemed to already know the answer.
“We’ve worked here long enough to know what it’s like. I’d rather have the money than them have it.”
“… and you’ll get away with it?” Sarah asked the question, then stopped and thought. “Oh yeah, you want to go to magic school. Of course you’ll get away with it.”
“What? I never told you that.”
“What can I say? I’m a fucking psychic.”
“Oh yeah, I remember that.”
They left the vault, and moved on with their lives.

By the following day, the news had spread like wildfire, and Emmet had been paid in cash, in a briefcase. Sarah had known this, and kept the case on her desk, as a reminder that while Emmet was good at sleight of hand, he couldn’t beat her in … anything. Lines of customers started forming to retrieve jokes before anyone had arrived to open the bank, and Sarah had to push her way through to open the door.
Her and Emmet managed to cope well with the onslaught because she seemed able to predict what they were asking for before they asked it, and he seemed able to conjure what they requested from thin air. They worked well as a team … too well, especially considering that Sarah never mentioned the crystal ball she had in place under the desk, and Emmet never acknowledged the staff he’d wedged into the umbrella stand, although it tried to get his attention by humming. Unsuccessfully.
Emmet’s attention was caught by a commotion from outside. That is, a louder commotion than the commotion that was already … commotioning.
Sarah knew without even looking up. “A werewolf’s started a fight in the queue.”
“Ah, that’ll really stick in the vampire’s teeth.”
“Don’t be … racist.”
“Wait, what did you say?” Emmet had been paying more attention to his joke than Sarah’s reply.
“A fight seems to have broken out in the queue.”
“How’s that for a punch-” Emmet prepared to say.
He never started the sentence before she threw the briefcase of cash at him.

Chapter 2: Rich Person Rides A Fucking Boat

Magic could be forced to obey, and made to do almost anything. It didn’t really mind, although often it would find a way to make you regret asking it questions. This in-built sense of snark could be harnessed as a fuel source, and used in much the same way as petrol, or harnessed as a fuel source and used in much the same way as a battery, or harnessed and used in much the same way as a housekeeper. The executive management at the Joke Bank (an ironic name at the start which now felt slightly too on-the-nose) were all rich enough to afford magic-powered cars, torches and brooms that swept the stairs at random times without warning. The executive management of the Joke Bank were also currently in a meeting, on a boat powered … by … magic. Crew of five, passenger count of four. One of the executives, called Stevens even by his friends, was being served a drink by his own personal member of staff. A drink that, as he sat in his chair, would reach barely above the tabletop. A drink that wobbled as if it had been balanced on something. It had been balanced on the member of staff’s head. Because the member of staff was a gnome.
“Sorry about this, sir.”

In the weeks following the heist at the bank, the executives had met every week to try and contain the crisis, always seeming to end up with more crises than they started with. So, as a result of their cumulative unsuccessfulness, they booked the company cruise ship and a skeleton crew (which they legally weren’t allowed to call it because two of the staff members were technically skeletons themselves) and decided to set sail until they could find a solution. The crew were fine with this plan because they’d lost everything in the currency crash that followed the heist. This was the best opportunity they were likely to get, so they’d be happy to be there, wherever ‘there’ was, and for however long they were needed. Better than being on the streets. The crew of the ship comprised a vicar who’d become a vampire after an inconvenient accident with a church organ and a misunderstanding about the word ‘afterlife’; a mermaid who’d passed through a boat’s propeller system and was wheelchair bound, two skeletons (Kelly and Tony) that were only just managing to hold themselves together (quite literally, they would often pick up the other’s spare parts) and a gnome who had nothing better to do and wasn’t high up enough in the hierarchy (or in general).

Stevens stepped off the boat without so much as an unnecessarily invasive pat-down at their first stopover; on an island about a day south-east from Falkland City, where they’d started. He was confronted with sunshine, humidity and the soft singing of birds in the trees. He was also confronted by the absolute lack of anything else to be confronted with. It was nice here, compared to the city; with all its cries of ‘you stole our money and now we’re homeless’, and ‘die, pig’.
He heard a small voice clear its throat behind him to see a small mermaid in a small wheelchair.
“Oh, hello there.”
“Have you ever thought about what the bank did to us?”
Taken aback by the directness of the question, Stevens turned around. “What do you mean?”
“How we lost our money because of your pyramid scheme.”
“Pyramid scheme?” He was confused, they’d kept the plans for the new headquarters well under wraps.
“Hold the jokes for people and then, actually, you haven’t held them at all; you’ve passed them on to make more profit.”
That wasn’t a fair assessment of the system or how it had gone wrong, but Stevens didn’t have the time to drill into the details. And she didn’t have the time to actually listen.
“Look, I don’t agree, the culprit should be killed as far as I’m concerned …” but he stopped talking as the mermaid had clearly decided her confrontation had been registered.
“Good talk.” The mermaid wheeled off into the sun for a while, and after a brief look back at the deserted island, Stevens headed back on to the boat. He’d seen all he wanted to. As he boarded the ship, he saw the mermaid tentatively shuffling forward out of her chair to paddle in shallow water. Probably the best she could do, in her situation.

The whole ‘in her situation’ thing stayed with Stevens until the next morning. So did the curry the ship had served up for dinner; thereafter the two expressed themselves in … rather different ways.
Some time later, and feeling a little lighter, Stevens headed to breakfast and passed a pair of people taking novelty photos outside the dining room.
“Do you want a photo with the ….?” One of the skeletons, Kelly, was stood next to the vicar, who was dressed as a shrimp. Gasp.
“I, uhh,” Stevens was preoccupied and found himself colliding with Kelly before he noticed that she’d tried to establish contact. He’d succeeded in making contact, anyway; just not the contact she’d been expecting. For one thing, Kelly wasn’t expecting to have to pick herself, quite literally, up off the floor.
“Sorry, what was that?” Stevens asked Kelly again, who’d been so surprised by the collision that her jaw hit the floor.
“hhhhhsssssdddddyyyyyywwwww”, Kelly tried to ask again, but found that difficult with only half a mouth.
Stevens looked away, until …
Click.
“I said, do you want a photo with the shrimp?”
“I, uhh, he’s a vam – you do know how that works, right?”
“Don’t do that. We’re an equal opportunity employer.” Kelly said that as though she didn’t really believe it.
“Opportunity for a vampire to humiliate themselves by posing for photographs all day that they’ll never show up in. Although I suppose that does explain why he looks dead inside.”
“I can think of a couple of other reasons.”
“But anyway, no, I’m good.” Stevens moved off, as a conga line of the other executives had formed behind him, and he was singlehandedly stopping them all from reaching the buffet. Where the gnome was attempting to shove a six-foot long sandwich into his two-foot tall body. And succeeding.

Stevens followed the vampire around at the next stop, simply because he thought he was acting weird. Although, in hindsight, for a human; the best thing to do when a vampire acts weird is to run. Fast.
The town they landed in sprawled itself along the coast of the Central Sea – a sea that ran through the middle of three continents that enclosed it so it essentially became a lagoon. On the eastern side, closer to the equator of the world, it essentially became a tropical lake. So the town made the most of its natural resources and became a fishing and tourism town, with infrastructure that might have been a little bit run-down, but still broadly functioning. The older buildings were clustered towards the centre of the city, and it had clearly been built outwards in a radial manner, much like the rings in the trunk of a tree. Exploring the city centre for an hour was all Stevens needed for his own purposes, then he returned to his recreational stalk of the ship’s contradictory vampire.
He was sneaking about as if he were plotting something. To bite someone, probably. Stevens found himself in the pews of a 15^th century church while the vampire was off talking to the vicar. A redundant distinction, of course, because the vampire was, himself, a vicar.
They talked for about an hour, in which time Stevens thought about the bank and its role in the collapse of society. He could fix it, he just wasn’t sure how.
At the end of their conversation, both vampire and vicar re-entered the main hall. “Angelo, that would be enough.” The church’s vicar declared, and with a jolt, Stevens realised that the vicar’s accent was fake. He hadn’t, up to now, thought about how much people’s identities would have to change to work on a ship like this. And they couldn’t just change as if by magic. Would have to work at it.

At about half past seven, the engines groaned and the boat came to a halt. Worrying, because it was hovering a metre off the surface of the water. After a short, sharp and terrifying drop into the ocean, the boat bobbed in place, as if someone was keeping it there by magic. Or a complete lack thereof.
“Uh, guys,” the gnome was the first to become baffled by the situation. “Where’d all our power go?”
“Tell me about it,” replied the mermaid as she wheeled her chair around to look out the window.
Stevens tried to manhandle the situation. “So here’s what we’ll do –”
“You’re a passenger, sit down and relax. We got this,” the gnome interjected while jumping to reach an emergency ripcord, and still failing.
Stevens pulled the cable, then looked down at the gnome, whose face was at Stevens’ waist height.
“You’ve got this, have you?”
“Yes. Now go away fast and go away now.”
“Fine, scrub.”
“What did you call me?”
“I didn’t use a name, I just meant the floors need a clean.”
“And I’m close to them?”
“Well …” Stevens swaggered away slowly and with arrogance, clearly pleased with his treatment of the service staff. The gnome looked down at his shoes, and noticed they were filling with water.
“Oh! I know! Use magic! You can expel the water!”
“Did … did you just …” Tony seemed unamused by the suggestion.
“Expel. Yes. Spell, like in mag –”
“I know, now shut up before I knee you in the –” Now Kelly found herself frustrated.
“Forehead?”
“… true.”
The gnome muttered an incantation, and the water disappeared from around his feet.
“And now for the rest of this mess of a ship.” He muttered, as he moved on.

They arrived back in the port about a week later. The journey should have taken the a day, but the gnome had small arms, so this had to be allowed for.
“And the ship’s onboard security footage has a picture of the culprit”, Stevens said, passing over the paper without looking at it.
“This is a photo of nobody.”
“Is it? Oh, shit. Well, I guess that means we were robbed of all our magic by absolutely nobody, right?” Stevens got unjustifiably annoyed at Kelly’s simplistic description, and snapped. Although the word ‘snapped’ is perhaps an inappropriate vocabulary choice when addressing someone made entirely and exclusively of bone.
“So that’s why he disappeared right when we had problems.”
“So we know who did it …”
“But we don’t know where he is.”
“And we still don’t know what he was using the magic for.”
Stevens was cut off by a loud bang from the rear of the ship, as some projectile was launched about a hundred metres into the air by a jet of pure magic energy. It reached the height then fell, without much control, on to the roof of the university, about three blocks back from the port.
“Ah. That. He wanted to reach Heaven, I think. Well, at least we know how to kill a vampire, I guess.”
“I suppose that’s true, but it only adds to the University’s suicide rate. And the suicide of an undead is … an event.”
“The university, did you say?” Stevens had already moved on from the cruise, and back to reality. Because he, himself, wasn’t sure how they were going to fix their problems. But now he had an idea of who to ask.
“Already done it,” said his secretary, a psychic who’d appeared by his side. “We’ll hear back from the university by the end of the week.” 

Chapter 3: Day Declared A Write-Off At 9:15AM

An uneasy calm. Alice Sharma noticed the subtle tension in the air, as if something might explode if the wrong button were pressed. She then proceeded to immediately, and with no real sense of the irony, press the wrong button. She rang the doorbell of a fraternity house. With no idea what to expect or how to prepare for the wall of noise and body odour that would inevitably crush her senses when the college students finally opened the door, she waited anxiously, in much the way a person might wait for a jack-in-the-box.
A student in crumpled, but otherwise presentable, formal shirt opened the door. He’d been drinking, but was otherwise cognisant and didn’t immediately humiliate himself. Unlike one of his friends; who ran out of the open door and emptied his stomach into a hedge.
“I’m from the bank of –”
“Oh, so that’s what they’re doing now, is it?”
“Well, actually we don’t know what we’re doing.”
“Sorry, what? Say that again while I record you on my phone.”
“We’ve extensively modelled solutions to the economic situation and concluded that we don’t know.”
“Well, that’s what happens when you write them on a dress.”
“So we’re canvassing the university to see what you guys think.”
“University students? Think? You’ve … seen our academic records, right?”
“We respect you enough to –”
“Respect, pssshht.” The college student laughed. “The bank must be really desperate…”
He stopped as someone in the house turned on a TV and a new ad blasted through the hallway.
Knock knock … who’s there … nobody … come down to the bank … please.
“You’re right, we …” Alice wasn’t quite sure how to respond.
The student just smiled, and moved to shut the door, before remembering his friend who was still face down in the hedge.
“Oh, um, professor, you might wanna …” he helped the stricken academic (Head Lecturer of Memes) back into the house, during which time the drunk developed a taste for baked goods.
Between the muffled cries of “Pies! Pies! Pies!” the door closed, and Alice stood back on her heels, taking stock of the situation. Overall, all things considered … she really needed a vodka. At 9am. But it had gone … well, or well-ish.

“That face when you …” an ad droned in complete monotone, totally unaware of the point it was actually trying to make. It would go on to show a cliff face doing a thumbs up and implore anyone that hadn’t committed some form of suicide after the crappily repeated motif to invest in the Bank of Spare and Unused Jokes. Spare and unused? Perhaps they were unused because they were no good. Raj felt like crap, so he understood the mentality of whichever piece of human garbage had written that Bank ad. He’d woken up just after sunrise. Entirely too early for sane and sensible people that called themselves sane and sensible to mask all of their unhealthy coping mechanisms. He rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, but the image of the cliff face kept doing a thumbs-up in his mind. The universe was not on his side this morning, it seemed. But a few years back, they’d all had implants into their brains. It was like the internet, but better; because you didn’t even have to do anything. Just think about surfing (literally surfing) through a file room of pages until you find the page you’re looking for and that was kind of what it worked like. There were forums that he liked going to because they welcomed him there, and he’d made some friends. A guy called RogueWarlockMage69 … couldn’t decide what magic he wanted to study. Not that there was any study going on anyway. The temptation to browse user-created viral content (including ten or so images that were so contagious they classed as computer viruses, and a further ten or so actual legitimate virus cultures). Eventually he gave it up and decided the real world needed his attention. Why he decided that, he wasn’t entirely sure. His dreams were better than his current situation; failing at existence. Well, university. But they were the same thing when you couldn’t get laid. Or at least that was the argument he used in his head. He’d secured a dorm room, and it wasn’t much, or big, or really worth the money he was paying for it; but he’d been assured by a guy with a twirly mustache that the rent was cheaper than anywhere else on the market, so it must have been legit, right? He looked around the dorm room. Well, from the window to the wall. Which took about ten seconds. As did tidying the room while he got ready. There wasn’t much space, and putting a dinner plate and cup on the floor would effectively use up all the carpet space. But he had bigger, more important things to worry about than his small, insignificant flat; his small, insignificant face needed to show up at a small, insignificant class that was confusing and made no sense. If he could even find the rooms …

The windy, narrow corridors did little to mitigate Raj’s fear of getting lost. Mostly because, quite apart from simply being small and windy, the high concentration of magic in the air meant they actually moved around, more or less on the whims of the faculty they were a part of. The School of Ticking Clocks could at least map out where their corridors would go; but the Faculty of Magical Compasses found themselves, ironically, completely at a loss. Raj found himself walking down a corridor that looked like it went somewhere, then; ten seconds later, unexpectedly colliding with a wall that definitely hadn’t been there a minute ago. Raj walked past the School of Thought, which, it could be argued … but no. That would require mediation. There was a student commons area just around the corner from there, currently. Knowing the University, it wouldn’t be there tomorrow. Due to both the moving of the towers and the fact it would be Saturday tomorrow and nobody at all would be there. Except for maybe the Dean of Daylight Saving Time who’d forgotten it was midwinter.
“Some of these clubs have interesting names …” Raj observed, to one of the students sitting behind a desk with ‘Students Standup Association’ written on it. He hadn’t noticed the irony and Raj wasn’t about to point it out. Raj couldn’t even queue to sign up because a green boy rode past on a unicycle and cut him off.
Raj watched the boy keep going. Seemed like more work than it was worth, riding a unicycle, but so did University in general, especially since most of the Psychics in Training knew they wouldn’t get jobs at the end.
The School of Magic had a portal just around the corner from Raj’s current location. He walked through it, into the same room he’d just left. One important difference; there was a large wooden desk along one of the walls serving as the reception area, and a door leading through to the faculty’s offices. All of the University’s cleaning supplies cupboards were also around here for some reason, although the magicians mostly used them as their own personal storage lockers. So the offices were for the faculty and the supplies cupboards were for the Staff. He headed back through the portal and found himself in the middle of a field. The magic concentration at the university meant that nothing stayed in place for long, including the young magicians’ trains of thoug – what were we saying? After ten minutes of pointless wandering, he found where his next class – innovation studies – should have been, but the room had changed. He’d have to adapt. He’d be able to find out how in the class.

Innovation studies. Taught by a guest lecturer with more hair than face. They seemed interested in fixing the Bank’s problems, but with no actual knowledge of what the problems seemed to be. Oh, well, Raj thought, they’d make something up. The first lecture was about … something. Or maybe it was like one of those infomercial type things where the topic of the ad keeps changing because the marketers don’t really have a solid idea what the ad’s actually about. Because the class kept changing topic almost as if there’d be an answer somewhere if only the students could … find it. Raj sat in the lecture struggling not to fall asleep from confusion and looking across at a guy seated three rows in front. Sucking on the end of a pen. Suggestive. He’d seen him around before, and that was the kind of thing he’d remember because the guy was green. One of the special brand new mutant hybrids that the Science Institute had spat out as a counterargument to some conservative’s view of what having a life meant. Although as far as Raj was concerned, having a life consisted of bland tasteless food in a bland, tasteless existence, filling bland and tasteless time until he could get back to the ShareMind. There were decent memes on there. But the bank ads were drowning them out at the moment. So maybe … best to … do … work? Raj resented himself for thinking that sentence. The lecturer that Raj called, for brevity, Mr Mop-head, issued an assignment at the end of class. His brief for the essay was ‘something on politics or something. Extra marks for a joke.’ But the whole political system was the joke. As was the class. Raj was so lost he didn’t even know how lost he was. Like a drunk hanging upside down on a set of monkey bars about five minutes away from home. So close, yet so far. He packed up with a confused head shake and set off to his next destination.

An hour’s break. Finding somewhere to sit and eat. Both tasks being difficult, given the corridors were narrow and barren of seats, and the cafeteria was narrow and barren of eats. Raj gave up after ten minutes and ate his imaginary sandwich on the way to the imaginary office of the Senior Tutor in Hallucinations.
“Hello, where can I find the office of –”
“It’s around the corner, past the gargoyle, up the stairs, on the roof and then you jump off the top.” The receptionist seemed … oddly unwilling to play games.
Raj stepped back in shock. “I just wanted to ask the tutor a question, there’s no need …”
“No, the University, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to suspend his office seven floors up and about six inches separated from the rest of the university.”
“Which is a problem because there’s only normally six floors?”
“Yes, that’s why you need to go up to the roof.”
The Senior Tutor himself was sat at a small desk in a medium-sized room. Not as though he had much choice. The door was open, so as to stop unwary students falling to their deaths, so Raj was able to just hop over the abyss and into the office. Stepping over the void to speak to a lecturer. Hardcore. Parkour.
“So you wanted to see me.”
“Nah, I just thought I’d try doing the jump.”
“What was your question?”
“I just wondered, after going to your lecture … what the fuck?”
“What specifically do you mean?”
“Just … what? The? Fuck?”
“The world we live in is complicated and sometimes makes no sense …” the lecturer started, well, lecturing. “The systems that people have put in place will be tested every so often and we might be expected to come up with …”
“I don’t mean politics or the Bank, or whatever they’re trying to do with the ads they’re putting out,” Raj interjected as a muffled ‘knock knock, who’s there; nobody, come down to the Bank’ filtered up from the courtyard below the office.
“Not really what I meant, but … you wouldn’t happen to know how to use magic like electricity; only I have a tutorial in ten minutes …”
“I’d get there if I were you. I don’t even exist,” the lecturer said, before disappearing by gently fading into the background. Gah, hallucinations.

The Professor of Magic led a tutorial, which promptly went off the rails. By going … on to some rails. He was trying to prove some point about the morality of using magic to solve problems. Some philosophical debate of some sort. He’d wired up the train to work through some magic-powered pistons attached to the wheels. The specifics of this wasn’t important, he was instead teaching about how magic could be used as a power source, and a major part of fixing what he perceived to be the world’s problems. This particular guy, who looked thin and pale, was prone to preaching his views, so Raj didn’t bother to write them down. This particular lecturer was being shadowed by a vampire (unfortunate word choice?), who seemed to be conducting a staff review. He had a flashlight that was powered by magic; so proof of concept at least that the ideas this guy was spouting were not complete fantasy. If magic was an energy that passed between objects and allowed them to change states, then it could be used like a fuel to power a piston. Or like electricity to power a Bank … but the guy was probably just spouting rubbish by this point. He freely admitted to binge-watching the ads all afternoon. Had a paper due on the fastest way to distribute real estate for no profit (a paper commissioned by the Head Lecturer of Memes while he’d been facedown in a hedge). Meanwhile the assessor roamed around with his magical torch and tried to look busy, although he already had all the information he needed. Raj knew the feel.

Raj was paid for staring at a wall and dissociating. Well, he worked in the fast food industry but the industry was neither fast, nor provided free food; so what was the point? ‘What was the point?’ being the question Raj pondered while staring at the wall. Until he realised it was a particularly large gentleman who had ordered a small fries, small drink and small all-you-can-eat buffet. In the downtime, Raj paid attention to a small fifteen inch screen above the counter, which was stuck on a TV channel that played ads from the Bank. Well, it often played other things, but it seemed as though the ads from the Bank were the best that was on offer. And perhaps they were.
He’d serve most of the staff at the University over any given week. From the snobbish, yet poorly dressed Psychic tutors that knew what you were going to say about their order before you knew what their order even was, to the smartly dressed and arrogant magic students that acted as though learning incantations was more sophisticated than rote learning and that there were complicated systems in place that nobody else would understand. The Divination and Hallucinations students were … odd. They seemed stoned or spaced out, and maybe they had a right to be, but the Elixirs majors always seemed so much more interesting, and interested in Raj and his job. Perhaps because they were essentially chefs themselves and keenly aware that the only thing keeping them out of a customer service job was the fact they didn’t have a job at all.
The viral ads were a welcome distraction, and so was the HiveMind, but he wasn’t allowed to surf it at work.
The Senior Administrator for Biscuits spent about twenty minutes trying to organise a function of some sort, with the proviso that the biscuits never run out (it being rude to take the last one, and all). An algorithm was drawn up and incantation recited by a helpful magician that happened to be passing by, on his way between the offices of the Personal Assistant to the Head of Department of Self-Sufficiency and a class on speed reading taught by the Senior Tutor of Blindness. Spoiler alert: both used magic to avoid hypocrisy. The shift would continue in much this way until his boss, a practising time traveller would wind back the clock for him. At least he didn’t lose the study time. Or … he went to a party. Of course he’d rather do that than study. Or look at the ads.

After the shift at work, sensory overload in a nightclub was a welcome relief. From the ads, too. Although some of the more egotistical partygoers would stands round in circles and sneer at the Bank’s failing marketing attempt and how the crass monopolisation of viral culture was an unsuccessful marketing strategy. Or at least that’s what Raj thought they meant. It had been in his class, so it made sense. He thought they actually said something like ‘hahahahaha bad ad make me sad’. He shook his head at that. All this education, and they couldn’t even string together a sentence. Simple talk for simple minds, and all that.
He didn’t stay long, though. There wasn’t much point if he didn’t intend to ‘get wild’. You could practically smell the fact that everyone that was here wanted to have sex, or wanted to look like they wanted to have sex, or …
He lost the train of thought as he ordered his second drink. Hoping that maybe altering his mindset by force would make the situation more endurable. It did not. So, just after ten in the evening, he bowed out. Not having talked to anyone. He saw the green boy he’d seen around uni, ride off on a unicycle. Surely there was a joke there somewhere. Or at least a reason to have seen him around.

Thin walls did little to impede the noise. Perhaps a better strategy for drowning it out was to drown in it, rather than attempting to banish it from personal space. The bank’s ads had really caught on with the students, working their way around the university in a circular clockwise motion (interesting description given the university was laid out with clocks in mind – or at least that’s what Raj thought the guy had said).
The partying was in no way winding down, and for all intents and purposes kept going around the clock. So did the screens on full blast in the communal areas. Raj didn’t think he was sleeping much tonight, if at all. Much like the time he’d got daylight hours wrong on a day he had a test. The supervisor had been quite rude about waking him up, though. So Raj sat through the cacophony of alcohol-fuelled yelling and drug-fuelled advertisements (what other excuse would the bank have for their most recent campaign?)
Or, at least he sat through it until he couldn’t anymore.
There was, oddly, some relief outside, in the hallway. Must have been something to do with thin walls between rooms, or something.
He stood in the hallway, trying to escape from the incessant drone of the viral material that he couldn’t even escape inside his head. In fact, he tried so hard to escape from the clickbait that he didn’t even notice the hand that tapped him on the shoulder, and then the voice that shakily begged his attention.
“Um, excuse me,” said the voice when Raj had turned around to look. Raj had only been half paying attention and had spun around to quickly, so he crashed into the wall, and the boy that had wanted to talk to him had to help him up. Accepting the offered hand, Raj stood back up and dusted himself off – noticing the hand was green. The boy had leaned a unicycle as nonchalantly as it would be possible to lean such a thing against the wall.
“I just wanted to ask if I could store my unicycle in your room because I have no space.” The kid said breathlessly, and Raj got the feeling this particular kid didn’t get to this part of the conversation (past the beginning) very often.
“I’ve – I’ve seen you around, haven’t I?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Sorry, I’m Raj. And you are …”
“Tired, for a fucking start.”
“But what will I call you?”
“I hope you call me.” The boy made a cellphone movement with his thumb and index finger. “You could probably call me Andersons”.
“Andersons? That’s a little weird.”
“Well, ‘Raj’ is weird to me. I came from a lab, then went to a circus. ‘Mistress Beeswax and her sons’, the act was called. But the mistress isn’t around anymore …”
“Seems lonely.”
“Yes. Anyway, if you don’t have the space, I’ll just …” he moved to pick up the unicycle.”
“No! Wait, come back! I’m sure we can …” Raj bustled past the struggling kid and threw open his room door, then invited the kid inside, unicycle and all. Maybe there was a light at the end, after all. Or maybe it was yet another magic examiner with a homemade flashlight.

Chapter 4: How To Get Cool New Stuff At The Expense Of Other People’s Insurance

Andersons liked the city during the day, because of the noise. Sometimes if there was a crowd of people, he’d forget he existed for a bit. Although, of course, sometimes if there was a crowd of people he wanted to die inside. And sometimes, on very rare occasions, if there was a crowd of people fighting over a pizza. Andersons had learnt to stay clear of that one. The hard way. The people in this city were, in general, loud, obnoxious and uncomfortable. And so was the black eye he’d gotten from fighting over the pizza.
But for now, on the bank of the river, down by the dock where a cruise ship had slid over the water and parked up, nearly ready to disembark, it was quiet. Well, the kind of quiet where it … wasn’t quiet, but it wasn’t immediately loud either, so … Andersons thought for a minute. Peaceful. That was the word he meant. He’d gotten used to speaking the language but it didn’t come naturally to him, because he … wasn’t natural. Not that he had to remind himself of that.
He looked back from the waterfront across the city – a sprawling mess of low one and two-storey buildings that arranged themselves radially around the Bank, the spires of which rose hundreds of feet above the surrounding landscape in a constant and mocking reminder that the current financial mess was their fault.
After about an hour of sitting on a low stone wall and dangling his feet over the edge so they were maybe two metres above the water, he walked back to the university. And struggle for about an hour finding the exact door to his apartment building because some Magic student had been practising a spell for a lab assignment, and the magic energy had messed with the fabric of the universe. And university. He could hear television sets on quiet, still playing that Bank ad that started with ‘knock knock’ and ended with most sane people taking their own lives out sheer boredom. Opening the door to his flat, he could tell something was wrong. And he was right. Because his flat was empty. Not the ‘only has the bare minimum to survive’ empty. That had been his starting point. He opened the door to a completely clean and tidy windowless box with nothing in it at all. At least the nice guy in the flat next door had held on to his unicycle. “So …” Andersons mused to himself as he walked across the hall, “time to test out this friendship for real …”

“We need to find out who.” The guy, Raj – Andersons thought that was his name – seemed very interested in solving the problem. Perhaps too interested.
“Uh, can’t we just get insurance and get my stuff back? We don’t need to go looking for justice all the time.””
“I’m sorry, you what? In this environment? Do you really think insurance will be of any help? And, aside from that, how the hell do you have the money for insurance anyway? You’re a student …”
“Done judging my life choices?” Andersons looked across at his new friend.
“I, uh … sorry, dude. I didn’t mean …”
Andersons smiled. “It’s okay. Besides, studying at a magic University is hardly the worst decision I’ve ever made.”
“Oh, really. What is?”
“I can’t work it out. It’s either the shoes, the hair or the fact I’m gay.” He used it as a punchline to a joke. Raj respected that, just a little.
“The shoes. Definitely. But it’s easy enough fixed. Just go around with no shoes on.”
Andersons looked around at his empty flat. “Are you trying to steal my shoes, because I’ve already been robbed in a more or less complete way today so …”
Raj seemed taken aback by the suggestion. “No, I just meant showing the world your feet wasn’t the worst possible outcome.”
“Calm down there, kinky.”
“A – anyway, we should go downstairs and check with the landlord for CCTV footage.”
“He’s a vampire and it’s just gone past lunch, so he’ll be … asleep.” Andersons pointed out, and gestured at the faint line of salt along the floor of the doorframe. “Also there’s that.”
“What? I don’t like being disturbed.”
“But he might not like you all that much.”
“I don’t much like all my stuff disappearing in the middle of the day, yet here we all are.”
“Against all the odds – and that includes me; what with being solidly in the ‘very odd’ category.”
“Here, still sitting in an empty room instead of checking the footage.” Raj kept trying to convince Andersons to move.
“But the stairs though.” The real reason Andersons was against the idea.
The building receptionist unlocked the Security Cabinet with her mind. Then told the two boys that actually they didn’t keep footage in there because they didn’t at all need to, what with her being a psychic and all. (And also, just for your information psst; you did remember to lock the apartment door, Raj; no matter what you try to tell yourself).
She could remember the men walking in, knew it was the ones she’d been thinking of because … it’s surprisingly difficult to steal a whole apartment worth of furniture unnoticed. She presumed the rest of the inhabitants just thought someone else was moving in, but she knew there hadn’t been any new arrivals since the economic crisis – partly because of the house prices and partly because an angry wizard had made all the doors of empty apartments vanish. Angry and politically motivated. Or motivated by something, at least.
“So it was a guy that got fired from the Bank.” Raj dictated to the empty room when they returned to it, even though the woman’s analysis had very much not confirmed that at all, and got a confused look from Andersons.

“What guy that got fired? I’ve heard about the poverty, but why would an unemployed banker want to steal from a random citizen?”
“As opposed to an employed one? Oh, having a job completely erodes your moral compass, I’m sure. Or rather, being unemployed restores it.”
“Either way, I don’t … have any stuff.”
“Well, true. But who has the money for possessions in this economy?”
“Me. Until ten minutes ago. But how does that equate to it being a banker?” Raj countered, then tried to get the thesis of Andersons argument out of him.
“Just a gut feeling. Or at least someone that’s been affected in some way.”
“That would, in turn, make me someone that’s been affected.”
“True. But I guess we’ve all been affected.”
“So, in this little detective mystery we have going on where we think it’s someone affected by the economic crisis, that leaves everyone in the whole city as suspects.”
“I just –”
A knock at the door pulled both Raj and Andersons from their conversation.
“Sorry, I just, uh …” A small man stood at the doorway. Teenager, he was a teenager. That’s the word humans had for those … people. “Sorry, I panicked.”
“Panicked? You mean just now?” Andersons was first to recover some form of wit.
“No, like I stole all your stuff. I panicked and stole all your stuff.”
“What?”
The boy opened his mouth to reveal fangs. “I’m a vamp –” he started talking without closing it, then realised what he had been doing, realigned his jaw and started again.
“I’m a vampire, and I remember the last time this happened to the economy and how bad it got and I panicked.”
“Good motive, still murder.”
“Murder?” The vampire, whose name neither Raj nor Andersons had bothered to ask, was confused now.
“It’s an expression. What was your point? Also, come in” Raj took over the conversational reins, and remembered the rules about vampires, as the kid slunk in.
“I … uh … here’s your stuff back …” the vampire moved aside, and a stone wall stepped in.
Wait, no. That was a troll, and the generalisation Raj had just made in his head was … racist? If you could call it that?
The troll set down a table, Raj’s table. Then a chair, and then … everything else. One by one.
While he did that, Raj and Andersons talked with the vampire (whose name was, even by his own admission, unpronounceable – something Latin – so he let them call him Vam) about his situation; he seemed nice enough so Raj didn’t judge too harshly. Andersons was more cautious, but accepted that Vam had returned everything. Vam was reticent with his details, mostly because by this point the troll had finished moving the stuff back in, and Vam could leave. They kept talking right up until Vam and the troll walked down the stairs. Well, start walking, and then … and then the idiot had the good sense to fall head over heels. All things considered, probably the best form of head over heels fall.

A funny thing about being a vampire is that you can’t die by most of the foibles that screw up normal humans. For instance, a hundred step bounce down five floors of a building. Petty annoyance.
But Raj and Andersons put a cold towel on his head anyway, just in case.
Vam was confused for a second after waking up.
“What … what are you doing that for?”
“The towel? That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
Vam found himself … almost touched by that. The vampire approach to healthcare worked more along the ‘stick it in a hole in the ground and if it comes back up again then cool’ line. So, shockingly similar to most hospitals.
“Well, I guess. It’s just … nice. Not really used to that.”
“Anyway,” Andersons was relatively new to humanity (the phrase ‘I wasn’t shipped in on the last freighter’ wouldn’t apply – because he had, in fact, been), and he didn’t yet understand the whole ‘social norms’ business. He needed to find Norm. Get some notes.
“Anyway, the bank gobbled up all your investments?”
“Well yeah, because I thought buying jokes was a good idea. I remember the good old days …” Vam paused, and the other two were left to consider how long ago exactly the time period was that Vam was referring to, “… when Governments were made to abide by the Joke Standard.”
“That was hundreds of years ago. Being made to adhere to a Standard form of joke is just … archaic. So many other constructions get better results.”
“Which is where the risk comes from. And with it, higher profits, I guess …”
“But then the robbery happened and the whole market decided to just … throw a temper tantrum. So the value’s way down and I’ve lost my house to settle up on the investment.
Raj had paid attention in class, so he piped up, “they are looking at ways to fix the problem, so hopefully you’ll get all your money back soon.”
“Now that,” Vam cut in, “is the best joke I’ve heard all year. And I used to trade in jokes.”
“So … dinner?” Raj offered, it wasn’t like any of them had anything better to be doing.
“Need to go get some. We aren’t exactly swimming in … wealth … at the moment,” Andersons gestured at the meagre furnishings in the room, despite Raj’s indignant expression.
“We can’t all be freshly minted like you.”
“Well, you could at least have tried to lock the door.”
“In fairness,” Vam interjected, “I’d have just kicked it down.”
“Oh yeah. Vampire. Forgot.”
“So, are we going?” Raj moved to put his shoes on, and the others got up as well.
“And then after …” Vam started, and the other two looked at each other.
Raj finished the thought for him. ”You could stay here, I guess? It’s not like we sleep at the same time …”

Chapter 5: Customer Misinterprets Returns Process; Claims Warranty On Partner

You know how sometimes you meet someone and it just clicks? Mostly it’s just clicked because you tripped over something that definitely wasn’t where it should have been. It was kind of like that. Raj and Andersons … Emmet and Sarah, the world seemed full of couples that just fitted together. Or at least that was how it looked from inside the lab, looking out into the hallway and seeing people walk past day after day. But, occasionally, choosing a lonely life with nobody else anywhere nearby was worth it. Because, occasionally, a sad scientist in a lab all by himself will press a button, and a machine will come to life. Not in a Frankenstein’s monster type of way, but the normal ‘and then it turned on’ kind of way. Better than any sex he’d ever had, he thought. Neglecting to mention that he’d never actually had sex. But the machine started up with its dials all bright and shining, and then the world changed. Because the machine he’d got to work when it shouldn’t have was … well, he called it a rebirther. Basically it opened up a phone line to the afterlife, and anyone you wanted could come back. Easy fix to life’s biggest problem, he thought. Existence, check mate. Soon the whole city would be using it. And it would be his. He would be so powerful. And famous. And … not lonely. Because the person that this scientist considered his soulmate had died in a fire.

The bank was growing restless. It had been six months and the crisis was still ongoing. No investigation, nobody guilty. Not even close to an answer, although they’d vaguely figured out a solution to the actual problem – just don’t be in it anymore, essentially – but their egos were still bruised, and they didn’t know which chair leg they’d tripped on. An intern read the news one morning, as they always did just to check if their problems had been massively and completely solved by nobody in particular, just so they could return to sitting in circles in darkened rooms and massaging each other’s … egos. Yes, egos. Or salaries, which is really only a metric for an ego, if you think about it.
The bank were pleased with the new invention. It would mean they could recover their debts from dead people and use people that were still currently alive as collateral damage. Imagine what might have happened if this had been the Government instead.
So they advertised. And the people … didn’t listen. But that was more to do with the fact that the Bank hadn’t mastered advertising than that the people didn’t want the invention.
Those that used the system said they liked it … from beyond the grave. Liked being able to watch their loved ones live their lives while they rotted away in purgatory. It wasn’t … bad, it just also wasn’t much of a life. Because it wasn’t a life at all.

Things got interesting for Emmet when he was executed at his desk. There’s something to be said for essentially blacking out while standing up in a customer service job, but it isn’t exactly subtle. It’s also probably against several of the more important clauses in the employment contract; but so was indirectly causing a global meltdown. Arguably the two cancelled each other out. The shift was quiet and there was nobody around to see. Well, there was nobody around to see it before it happened, which didn’t exactly happen on purpose; and there were no people around to witness it after it happened, because the bank bosses locked the doors as if they had something to hide.
Emmet himself just looked around the room; other than the whole ‘being dead’ thing, very little had changed.
“So, that’s ten past eleven on the twelfth.” A voice from behind. Emmet turned around and beheld a small man in a lab coat.
“I’m just gonna assume you’re whichever deity I believe in?”
“Not deity, no. They tend to be tied up with bureaucracy these days. I’m just … well, I’m Time. Basically, I do the admin.”
“What admin is there to do with death? ‘Are they dead? Yes? Good’?”
“A lot more now than there used to be. What with the new system and that doohickey device that the hack scientists invented.”
“Wait what? I’ve worked the last ten days straight and I’ve not seen the sun, so I probably missed it.”
“Someone might decide to swap with you, then they can … you know …”
“Can keep on living? But nobody would …” Emmet paused, and looked down. He was slowly dissolving.
“Oh, don’t mind that. This is only a lobby, you can’t stay here forever.”
“Wait, but then what happens if someone decides to swap? Do I only have ten sec – yes, seconds,” Emmet paused to consider measuring his remaining time of life in limbs, but thought better of it. With the brain he still definitely had.
“Oh, no; you move on to somewhere else. This whole bit,” Time gestured at the small office-like room, “is just because the Administrators are lazy shitstains that don’t like being made to explain to people that they’re dead. So they get me to do it. At least I negotiated my own contract …”
“Oh, what was in it?”
“Dude, I’m Time. This job costs me literally nothing. I sometimes even make friends --”
“Aw, thank –”
“–But then there’s people like you –”
“- fuck I’m not staying here.”
“Well that was Rude. And I set this all up special for you. Cost me an afternoon, which I claimed in my wages so they wound the clocks back then it hadn’t cost me anything. Point is that yes, this is a game to me but also absolutely go fuck yourself.” Time seemed somewhat bitter.
“Not much time left to enjoy it,” said Emmet, who had dissolved to his head.
“There is for me,” sighed Time, as he shuffled through another file. “Oh! You’ll like this!” He looked up, excitedly, and discovered to his … dismay, but by no means surprise, that Emmet had completely dissolved.
“… one of your workmates wants to save you …” he finished off, quietly. Then he sighed at the empty room.

Sarah knew something was wrong when she started her shift. Like, as in before she’d even got to work. Because preparing for a shift with Emmet was counted as part of the shift with Emmet. Her hunch was proven correct when they wouldn’t open the doors for her or any other customers (although the fact the bank wasn’t serving customers didn’t bother her too much).
It bothered her slightly more, however, that her bosses seemed to give no thought whatsoever to the fact they’d murdered a member of staff in cold blood.
‘He was identified as the source of the crisis’, was all they’d say, as if that either justified the murder or solved the crisis. As Sarah could see, it did neither. They gave her just enough information on the process used to kill Emmet that she could do her own research. She took the rest of the afternoon off (not difficult, the Bank was – as per normal – not doing anything important.
“I’m here to sign up for death.” Sarah stated with a straight face.
“There’s a ten year waiting list. That’s just a judicial system of one of the outdated islands.”
“I don’t mean because of a crime, I meant the Rebirther?”
“Oh, yeah. Of course,” the technician fumbled around for a really small and flimsy-looking contract.
Then he hurried around for a medical kit that she presumed would be used to kill her, almost as if she’d change her mind.
“So where do I sign?” Sarah asked as the technician pulled a massive needle from inside a robe and proved the whole contracts business rather unnecessary; although that is generally how big business looks at documents designed to dictate the ethical treatment of their staff or customers.
“Just the verbal is fine.”
Then she blinked.

Emmet blinked. That was all it needed, and Time’s voice faded into the distance. He looked around. The sky was dark … in fact, Emmet wasn’t sure there was a sky at all, but the white sand beach he was stood on was well illuminated so he could see that the landscape was empty and there were no other people. It was as though the beach was moonlit except there wasn’t one. It … it was the afterlife. They probably did it with mirrors.
He saw a piece of paper on the ground, and bent to pick it up.
[Hahahahahahah look at his nose.]
Emmet scrunched the paper, and his nose. How dare … whoever they were.
He walked around for the afternoon. But there wasn’t much else to see. He thought he could pick out some pale, ghostly creatures in the background of his vision, but he wasn’t really all too sure. Maybe that’s how he looked to other people. Not all that much different to real life, then. He’d just been a customer service worker.
He wouldn’t miss the job. He would miss Sarah, though. And pizza. He wanted pizza. He already missed it, even though he’d been dead all of ten minutes. Well, an afternoon. His perception of time was … interesting. Always had been. Although Emmet thought Time seemed nice enough in the … flesh? Convincing perception-based hallucination?
[We should order one online]
That wasn’t how that worked, Emmet thought; while wondering who the fuck was sending him meme notes. Like a love note, but … made no sense. So, exactly like a love note. Obviously, you could order pizza online, but he just … wasn’t sure how the papers were reading his mind. Or where they were coming from. Time? He could be flirting, thought Emmet. Sure enough, as soon as he had done;
[That Time prick sure has got his dick out for this guy]
Wait, what? Really? That’s sweet. Emmet wasn’t even gay, but points for effort, he supposed. No, he had his heart set on a girl he knew. Or pizza. But that was being taken care of. The other one …
“Emmet?” A familiar voice. He looked up and around, finding the conspicuous owner of the inconspicuous voice straight away.
Sarah. Looking … Emmet hesitated before even thinking the word ‘beautiful’, mostly because he knew she’d hunt him down if he ever told her that, but … you know …
“Um, hi. Did they get you as well?”
“No, but I’m here to get you.”
The implications of this sentence made it in one ear and out the other, then somehow managed to turn around and re-enter. Second chances, and all that. Emmet stood up with the shock of the final realisation.
Aghast, shocked and confused, he could only manage “… you didn’t …”.

“Of course I have. It’s what friends do.”
“Not my friends! The only time we’ve ever said anything non-negative to each other is when we’ve been blackout drunk so we won’t remember it anyway!”
“Well that’s a you problem, this … I felt like I needed to do this.”
“Needed? Why?”
“The bank were so unsympathetic, it just … got to me.”
“So? They hired us to do a job, they don’t need to be nice.”
“There’s a kind of understanding that they’re not allowed to just kill you at you desk.”
“For starting a crisis! It seemed fair at the time!”
Sarah wasn’t quite sure the world Emmet was living on. “Fair at the time? Do you think about anything at all?”
“I’ve been in purgatory, there’s not a lot else to do.” Emmet gestured at the empty landscape.
“Oh, but there’s been …” he gestured at the paper.
“Ah yeah, Time said the Gods get drunk and they do this for fun.”
“Wait, we have Gods? Like, actual proper Gods?”
“Apparently so,” answered Time, who’d shown up out of nowhere. Disappointing when that happens. “They just sit around playing board games these days. But there’s this one … he calls himself C@$#m0nie$$, but that’s mostly because he’s drunk. Drunk on power. His actual name’s Keith. He’s a nice guy, when you talk with him.”
“So … would there be a way to solve the world’s problems and fix this God’s … drinking problem?”
“In theory, solving one would solve the other.”
“How does that work? Is Keith linked to the Bank?”
“Well … yes. Most of the buildings in the city are dedicated to Gods, because years ago, a guy built it in his honour …” Time made out as though he was going to start a monologue, but Sarah nudged him in the ribs.
“We don’t have the time.”
“Oh yeah, right, and you know that but I don’t.” Time replied sarcastically.
“Yes. Thing is though that both of us can’t stay here and there are scientists waiting for a body to be returned to real life, so in fact – you are wrong. And we do not have time.”
“So then make a decision.”
“I decide …” Sarah started, then she paused; looking at Emmet. “I decide that I should replace Time and release him; and Emmet should go back.
“That’s not the rules!” Time objected, but Sarah could sense that he didn’t really have an objection to the idea.
“What are the rules?”
“Someone stays, someone goes …”
“And the Clash get really pissed off?”
“No! And then there’s me. But, uhh, I guess it works out …” Time had already packed a bag, despite the reluctance.
“… so I guess I have to stay here.” Sarah said it as if it was final, and Time pressed a button on a dashboard that opened a portal. Proving that it was, in fact, final. And that Sarah and Emmet had no time left.
Time spoke as the portal opened, and they turned to look just as he faded away. “Thank you for setting me free. The admin was killing me. But you’ll have to be quick if you want it to stop killing other people.”
Sarah and Emmet took each other’s hands, and crossed the threshold back into reality. If Time could be believed, there wasn’t a lot of Time left (mostly because he’d probably finished dissolving by now).

Chapter 6: Benevolent Overlord Only Punishes Staff Breaks With Death

Pieces of paper got passed down from the Gods. Like notes in a boring class, but the class was real life, and … no. It was exactly like passing notes in a boring class. Sometimes the people that received the notes understood them, and carried out the wishes dutifully. But sometimes they didn’t. This randomness could be made perhaps more upsetting by the fact that sometimes the responsible God was … not all that responsible. For example, any Deitic order by C@$#m0nie$$ could be immediately discarded because he had written it while drunk.
So the paper fluttered down from the sky, and found its way into a tree.
[Give me some money please. Just $5. For a taxi. Come onnnnnnn dude …]
Guess which God had written it.
Luckily for him, his drunken plea for cash was answered.
Unluckily for us, it was answered properly.
A single farmer picked it up one afternoon. Middle of the day, he was happy. Short but well-built, wearing a straw hat and little else because he wouldn’t see any other people so what really was the point.
But the thing is, the farmer knew, at least vaguely, what these bits of paper were for.
And he knew that if he made a temple to fulfil the prophecy, some kind of God would show up to claim its prize.
So … All he had to do was find a way to … build a temple that gave Gods money.
The farmer struggled with that. He made a small hut for his produce, selling some of it when he found he’d plowed too much. Then a larger hut … then a trading scheme … which then caught on in another city. At about this point, the farmer was tapped on the shoulder by a guy. Short, greying. Humble looking, although it became obvious relatively fast that this was not the case. The guy demanded a share of the profits, and the farmer handed it over without thinking. Without thinking who the guy was, or what he’d contributed.
When the guy returned a second time, about a year later, the farmer asked him his name.
“Keith.” The guy said; knowing that this would not be enough, he showed the farmer a small piece of paper. The note the farmer had acted upon.
“Ah, so you’re who they sent.”
“You seem … disappointed.” Keith shrugged his shoulders, and the farmer found himself sat in a meeting room above the clouds, where the world could be seen as a holographic image on the table. People … yes, people … were yelling and playing a lively game with the pieces on the board. Keith shrugged again, and the farmer returned to his reality. “So that’s what Gods are like.”
“Them. Not me. I … at least try to be normal.”
“Oh, good. Tell me; is this an adequate set-up?”
“Well …” Keith looked uneasy for once. “There is a catch; eventually people will misuse it.”

“When we destroy this place …” Emmet mused, in the middle of a shift. A dead quiet shift where he could count on the fingers of three hands the number of customers he’d served. Three hands because, after reaching a deal, he’d wired up a communication channel with Sarah, and she was keeping him company. From the afterlife. She’d just done a four-dimensional crossword.
“You mean if. It’s … gonna be hard –”
“… for me? It’s gonna be hard specifically for me to do? That’s rude …”
“Not what I meant! I just –”
“One person can’t do the job. I know, I know …”
There was a pause while Sarah started the crossword, referring to her already completed version for reference.
“Sorry, these four-dimensional crosswords are easier on the first attempt than the second.”
“Hopefully that’s not an omen for …”
“But it would work, though, I think?” Sarah mused, while she struggled to piece together the fourth dimension of her crossword.
“Time knows everything, he must be able to help.”
“Honey, I am Time now. Remember, we let the other guy dissolve.”
“Oh yeah.” Emmet’s memory of the time they’d technically killed a man was hazy. Well, they’d changed the clocks back. Well, changed the clocks over. Terminology wasn’t important, the important bit was that Emmet couldn’t remember it. Then he’d been sent back to reality, like a weakling. Sarah had stayed behind like someone who’d been metaphysically tied to the chair … because she’d been metaphysically tied to the chair.
“So then you have his repository of anecdotage …?”
“What in the fuck is that.” Sarah might have been an all-powerful deity (arguably she’d been that even as a human …), but she still had time to call Emmet out on his bullshit. Which, it turned out, she needed a lot of.
“What the fuck is your … being Time, but not all the time, business?”
“Hey! I’m allowed to choose my identities when I want.” Sarah chose to identify as ‘Origin Non-Deterministic’. At present, she was only Time when she was on the job. Which, it could be argued, was always. Also never.
“Anyway, you have access to Time’s whole … being. List of stories. Stuff and things.”
“That list got less intelligent as it went on.” Then the two of them looked up, and said at the same time so the other could hear.
“Just like you.”
“I’m smarter, obviously.” Sarah tried her hand at banter, but Emmet didn’t pick up the ball, for once.
“I mean, yeah I’m small with the wrong face and I look like a doormat, but …”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Sarah replied, with just a hint of compassion.
“Aww –”
“One of the luxury doormats, at least.”
“Oh.”

The bank’s profits hadn’t stabilised for a year. Anderson didn’t personally mind that too much; he was still making money and nobody actually knew what the bank’s profit margins were. Because there weren’t any. In theory, the Bank shouldn’t have been making profit at all. Profiting off other people’s humour indirectly meant they were profiting off suffering, and that … well, morally, it didn’t stand up to scrutiny. Compare that to his side-venture; creating mutants to sell as slaves. See, far more morally sound.
Someone – sorry, something – knocked at the door.
“Your ten o’clock is here.”
Anderson didn’t even bother crediting the mutant creature he used as a secretary with a response. If it made it better or worse, neither did the man who had booked the appointment, who knocked the secretary over as he barged into the room. (By the way, for the avoidance of all doubt, it definitely made it worse).
“The profits are falling, your money or your life!” It seemed the upper management were getting just a little annoyed at the situation.
“We’re working on it,” Anderson replied calmly, because he’d seen this sort of thing before, “there is a plan in place.”
“Is it a good plan, and is it in a good place?”
“I mean, look around …”
“You won’t be able to look around if your plan doesn’t work.”
The executive left the room in much the way he’d entered it; by taking the door off its hinges. Anderson smiled to himself. He had a backup plan, a mutant sweatshop that would make him money.
He didn’t need the Bank. They needed him.
He checked his emails, where an alert (fairly recent) had said that one of the Free Mutants – who weren’t as it turned out, in any way free – had escaped.
Disappointed but not surprised (like anyone that’s ever taken home a business major), he checked security at all the facilities he had them stored in, but with much the same intensity as a middle-aged man flicking through a newspaper. Because he was a middle-aged man, and he got a publication printed every morning that looked much like a newspaper. But with less text, because eww reading, amirite? There wasn’t any security in the factories the mutants got stored in, there didn’t need to be. For one thing, they had no background knowledge of where (or, in some of the more extreme cases, what) they were. For another, each prisoner was microchipped. Andersons thought of them like dogs, but less fluffy. He mobilised his … he called it a Peacekeeping force, but basically they were kidnappers, to try and get back the mutants. One of them seemed to be at the University ….
“Hmm, ideas above its station …”

Raj had always thought his theology lectures could’ve done with being livened up. He hadn’t exactly meant that his best friend should be kidnapped in one. They came for Andersons while the lecturer was showing a video … instead of doing his job. The room was dark, and Raj was pretty sure that everyone behind him was making out with the person sitting next to them and not at all paying attention to the video.
Nobody even heard the shuffling. Although, people were paying so little attention to the video that they were also simultaneously paying very little attention to anything else.
They came in one at a time, and waited at the end of the rows. Didn’t engage until the class was dismissed, probably out of fear of what the Gods would say in response to that specific brand of blasphemy. Raj and Andersons weren’t expecting there to be trouble, so the Bank’s agents were able to sweep in, in a pinch-like formation and bamboozle the two boys with their united and sophisticated display of suits and hats. Which is to say, the uni students were puzzled by the fact some people in the lecture hall were dressed up. Even the theology lecturer wore a toga to class. And the club. Raj had seen her slut-dropping. The lecture finished abruptly, and Raj and Andersons were able to evade the men in suits out of the lecture hall, ducking into a nearby bar (there were more bars per square metre than students per class). After ten minutes of mindless bopping, somehow, miraculously, they’d lost the specially trained and sent- specifically-for-them kill-squad. And somehow located, against all the odds and random bodies of strangers that should have known better, Vam; who was taking the evening and just chilling out at a bar drinking something red through a long straw. They thought it wise not to ask too many questions, mostly because repeated use of the word ‘what’ may possibly alert the kill squad as to their location. Although, surely the microchip in Anderson’s neck would do that more efficiently.
Eventually, the three boys decided they’d been at the party long enough (about ten minutes), and that they could venture out. Only at this point did they ask Vam what he’d been drinking.
“In theory, it’s cold medicine,” he replied with a sneeze, “but it doesn’t seem to be working.”

“You can’t destroy the Bank on your own.” Sarah was coaching Emmet again, as was common these days.
Emmet seemed less interested than normal. “But we know how to do it.”
“Or rather, we know that if we do it, the economic crisis will be solved too.”
“Because the God will be … less happy with us, yeah.”
“Less happy, perhaps, but more able to see sense, and that’s worth it in the long run.”
“Keep telling yourself that, it might get you laid more.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing.”
“But we need a plan. Or at least a starting point. You’ve already tried to just annihilate the vault, and bring it down. That didn’t exactly work, I don’t know if you remember.”
“No, what we need instead is to take out the executives without destroying the bank.”
“But how? By definition, they’re linked.”
“So is a slave and their master, but the link is easy enough to break.”
“Odd analogy, but okay. How would we do that?”
“You’re the one with the records.” Emmet answered, then Sarah remembered the research that she’d done through the Life Books of the bank executive. She grabbed one and read from the front, while an animatronic pen scribbled on page 50 (this particular gentleman’s present day – he was having a shit time).
“They mentioned a slave trade a couple of times …”
“Oh. Sounds promising. And explains your subconscious leap from earlier.”
Sarah found herself grateful for the fact Emmet hadn’t seen her try to get up to switch off the lights without getting up (in theory astral projection was possible, but that, too, was a bit of a subconscious leap …)
“So if there was a way to interfere with the slave trade somehow … to make it come unstuck, the guy would lose all his money?” Sarah was thinking things through as she spoke.
“You’re the psychic, you tell me.”
“Wow, drop the attitude, buddy.”
“… I’m sorry.” Emmet paused, as if he’d only just heard his tone of voice, and Sarah felt bad. She’d been joking, mostly. “But like, what do we need to do to get that to happen?”
“I’m Time, dude. We’ve got whole piles of stuff we can do.”
“And all of Time to do it in?”
“… I need to go ask someone something. Hold on a sec.” Then the afterlife put Emmet on hold. For future reference, the Bee Gees played as holding music. As this happened, Sarah put on a sash, and stopped being Sarah, becoming Time instead. Just for a bit. Casual dissociation, you know?

Time barged through the double doors leading to the Meeting Room of the Gods acting as though he had the right to do that. In general that was a good model for life; if you just showed up as though you were meant to be there, then in general things would work out. In this case, however, the god of Snakes was … exactly how you’d expect a god with that description to be.
“You’re not allowed to just walk in!” he chirped (ironically). The room then splintered into warring factions of Gods, not completely dissimilar to people who’d been stuck in a room together and were sick to the death of each other’s faces. Which was … exactly what they were, except that they couldn’t die at the end. They could die in the middle, of course, but then they’d come back (what with theistic determinism being as it is, the number of Gods is held essentially as a constant. Which is good for any mathematicians trying to figure out the meaning of life, as there’d be one fewer assumption to make, but bad for literally everyone else as nothing ever changed.
This would prove an issue for Time … time and time again.
In the present, the Gods continued to act as though Time wasn’t. Because time as an abstract concept … hadn’t quite reached the Gods yet.
“Hey, pizza boy,” one of the louder, more obnoxious Gods that was probably, on paper, more ‘important’ yelled across the room, “did you bring the special herbs?”
“Thyme, you mean?”
“No, whatever that other one’s called. The one that’s not special at all.” The god sat down, as though he’d rearranged Time’s head on the wall behind him, and was now done. A band of crony Gods, probably lesser beings, hooted and guffawed. It did help that one of them was the God of Birds.
Time headed across to the god of mechanics, one of his favourite Gods because he actually listened. Mechanics that were worth the name were, in general, pretty humble. So their God was too.
He updated the kid, who was – by God standards – pretty young.
The God of Mechanics listened, then opened up a notebook and took details. One of the only Gods that too proper admin. He made the mistake of passing the book to the God of Hot Air, whose actual name sounded like a balloon being deflated and whose ego was … that of a highly egotistical gentleman whose skills perhaps did not quite match up (what, were you expecting me to say ‘full of hot air’?).

Vam had always wondered if or how his life would end. He just hadn’t quite banked on (pun) it being quite so hopeless. He stood in the bathroom of his house, and reflected on his failures (not in the mirror, obviously). He did all this while holding a stake.
You see, he’d developed a cold. But all the doctors were on strike. Well, having stuff thrown at them by the Government, but same difference.
All sense of proportion had more or less left the room when Vam got sick, so he’d booked an appointment with the only medical practitioner still medical practitioning in the city.
It just so happened that the theoretical answer to all his problems was a necromancer.
“If you’re still alive, it’s not serious enough for my time,” Vam read from the door to the surgery.
“Don’t worry about it, it just means he can only heal you if you’re dea –” Raj got a sharp jab in the ribs from Andersons, who’d picked up what the problem was, and also a stick from beside the road.
“He’d have to kill me to be of help. And I’m a vam –”
“Oh, I get it now,” Raj spluttered, like an idiot that was being hit with a stick. A surprisingly accurate description given that he was, in fact, an idiot being hit with a stick.
So the doctor’s preliminary advice was to … die. And that involved a wooden stake.
Vam requested he at least be allowed some privacy.
Although, in many ways, the ceremony was unwarranted. Time greeted him in the afterlife with a cheery ‘what’s up?” as if she’d looked at his records and knew they very much didn’t end here.
“Just – ” Vam cut himself off with a sneeze. “Got a, well …”
“Not well, it sounds like.”
“Hey! I do you the favour of coming here …”
“And giving me paperwork. Thanks.” Time didn’t smile. Mind you, that would be true generally.
Fine, then. I won’t go back. I’ll just …” Vam sat down, on Time’s chair. Power move. “I’ll just sit here.”
Raj and Andersons waited for three hours for Vam to come back.
“Sometimes I do get it wrong …” the necromancer mused feebly, while the teenagers left, dejected at the thought they’d lost their friend for no reason.
And then the Gods decided the two boys had had enough good fortune. Which is to say that the God of Science rolled a six.
Men in suits appeared as if from nowhere as Raj and Andersons rounded a corner. They wouldn’t have seen it coming. Mostly because neither did anybody else. The men led them, in a vaguely confused way as if they’d been randomly plucked from doing other things and/or people, towards the University, for them to partake in a Government funded study. Although neither student was filled with confidence.

The test subjects arrived just as the University was preparing for its lunch. Not the staff, the actual building. Some groundsmen fed it trees. The subjects had been called to the University for some tests. Apparently they were ethical, but that could just be an admin error that had occurred because the subjects were mutants. ‘Error’. They marched in lines in between the buildings, which creaked happily, and occasionally burped. Eventually they were shown to a large hall with around 500 seats (one could have mistaken them, in poor lighting, for teeth …). Sat down. Made to agree that, quote; “your lives don’t actually matter to us, but it’s kind of illegal if we just straight up kill you, so what we’ll do instead is make you sign a waiver that says your death isn’t our fault, then we just do the tests and be damned the consequences.“ Any God watching the testers would perhaps have amended that last sentence to be ‘be damned because of the consequences’, but semantics don’t necessarily matter to an omniscient being that is present across five dimensions, the fifth of which being Sleep.
Raj and Andersons found themselves in a small room, with a red pill and a blue pill.
“I just feel like this is a test. Like there’s a correct answer that won’t kill us.”
“What good would that be for the University. Our deaths have been approved, they can do what they want and why would they want us alive?”
“The memes?”
“But our existence is the meme.”
“True. Well. Here we go then …”
Raj took the red pill, and Andersons the blue. It seemed like a trap. Like the kind of thing that, at least, Raj might have been able to trick the sponsors by messing up their data. Like Andersons might be saved from whatever fate awaited the people who took the ‘bad’ pill. Like …
“I’m so sorry about that.”
Raj heard the voice. Female, but reassuring, as if she’d been there all her life. Plainly, she had not. A small, blonde girl was sat at a desk, typing at a computer.
“Sorry about …?” Raj wasn’t sure the nature of the enquiry.
“That shouldn’t have happened.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for a start …” a third voice cut in. Andersons. Raj looked around, and for the first time took in the ‘small bureaucratic office in a building which was largely focussed on other things’ vibe that the afterlife had gone for.
“Oh, I see …” Raj got the picture rather too quickly, and Andersons never finished.
“I can try to send you back, if you like …”
And so she played with switches and fiddled with buttons, then the two boys disappeared.
Sarah consulted their Books of Life.
“Ah.” She exclaimed, completely without humour, as she read their future. Then she heard the gunshots.
“Here they come now …”

C@shmonie$$ knew something was coming. But he didn’t really care. Relaxed high on the mountain that housed the House of the Gods (pardon the pun on the word ‘high’), he felt as though he could just let it happen. Sometimes Gods did that. Saw something silly going on and just went ‘you know what nahhhhh, I’ll just leave that’.
There was a boardgame set up in the middle of the Meeting Room of the Gods. A boardgame of the world. And had he bothered to look at it (it would’ve required moving, and just … nah), he would have seen the mutant hybrid slaves at the University. And he would have seen the magical testing go wrong, destroying two-thirds of the currently-left-hand-side of the University and sent a ball of raw power straight down the main road.
At this point, for the first time in … millennia, Keith sobered up – like there was danger imminent.
Keith felt the weight lift off his shoulders. His enforced delirium lifted, as did his permanent headache, and he could see the world clearly for the first time since the wide adoption of the Bank. The first thing he saw was the aforementioned Bank collapsing in a ball of rogue magic, then a ball of rogue … rogues following it down the main street of the city.
“Well, that was a rager.” Keith muttered to himself, as he reached for some ‘Oh, God’ branded painkillers.
In the path between the University and the ocean lay the Bank, all ready to get plowed down by a ball of raw magic.
“The staff culture here,” Emmet had a customer on hold on one of the phones, so naturally he had to entertain them somehow, “is probably the worst bit. I get thanked at the end of every shift by this girl – beautiful girl – I work with but that’s – what, no of course not,” he cut himself off to respond to a customer query. Not about the job. “But that’s literally all I’ve ever got here. Otherwise we’re treated like sla –”
At this point, Emmet, unaware of the irony that would follow, was promptly squashed by a massive ball of pure magic as it coursed through the city and destroyed literally everything in its path. Seems the mutants had been too much for it.
Keith surveyed the destruction from above. “Oh. Makes sense.”
The ball of raw power reached the ocean, then dissipated like the vape steam emanating from the village idiot. No idea what it had just done, and no remorse. As if the Gods had shrugged, and gone; so what?
This was perhaps especially true for Emmet, who simply carried on talking with Sarah in the afterlife. Because, in fact, he had died. Time took notes, more on what not to do, but notes nevertheless. Time always took notes, even when Time and Sarah were, technically, the same … being. Time took notes, or else history would repeat. It tended to do that anyway, but at least this was an attempt to mitigate.

“All I’m saying is,” Emmet and Sarah had wasted no time starting off their discussion, “this is how I felt. How’d you feel?”
“Well, I have legs now, which I wasn’t expecting.”
“Not what I meant. I meant in terms of sharing the world with … people … how’d it make you feel?”
“I think you’re missing the point of the expression. You’re … a good person? I don’t actively hate you? But that’s about as far as it goes.”
“So then we’re –”
“Friends.”
“Right, but seeing as we’re –”
“F –”
“ – to pay respects, yes. But, maybe in time …”
“I am Time, dude.”
“But …?”
“No. And you have a whole domain to watch over, anyway.
Emmet paused for a while, then did perhaps the most honourable thing Sarah had seen any man less than forty years old do. He nodded.
“One last question, then,” he said, one foot out the door leading to the endless wasteland.
“Yes.”
“Are you really a psy … oh. You were answering.”
“Yep. See ya flat.”
“Flat?”
“Normally it’s ‘around’. But this … isn’t,” Sarah gestured into the wasteland as Emmet left. She picked up a gold sash from the back of a chair. ‘Time’, it read. Maybe that was all the difference between a human and a God. A golden sash. It was worth a thought. Or at least, worth the beginning of a thought. Until Raj and Andersons crashed through the door between the worlds and stumbled into the grey afterlife wasteland, together. Mumbling stuff about needing a room. Sarah shuddered at the thought, then forgot both about it, and about her old identity. She was Time now.
And Time had taken the opportunistic approach to fortune-telling, and proceeded to pull Scrabble tiles out of a bag. Scrabble tiles that would, due to the delicate nature of the theistic structure of the world at the current time, decide the direction of the world at the current time.
[R – O – A – D – T – R – I – P]
And so it was that while the Meeting Room of the Gods (in full session, as you might expect when there were angry Gods throwing stuff at each other) squabbled over what to have for dinner, or whose turn it was; or any of the litany of other petty issues that plagued Gods on a regular basis (such as deciding whether to cause a plague of pets), that on the board of the world on which the Gods played games, a small coach set off on a journey without any specific deity requesting it do so. Because sometimes, odd crap just happens and the Gods call it insolence. Anybody else looking at the situation might call it a miracle, or at least a Severely Unplanned Event. By all accounts, you could sue for those.

Chapter 7: Not Content With Messing Up City, Gods Move On To Whole World

“The picture you probably have of the world right about now is a place that’s a bit of a mess. It’s not that well-formed, kind of a sketch. Bit all over the place, sometimes the biscuits show up on the table, and other times …” Time stopped talking and burped, glancing quickly and then away from a nearby, empty plate.
“But that’s just because all you have is your perspective. Your experiences. The rooms you sit in that set off events you can’t control …” she paused, realising she was talking about herself.
“It’s always going to relate to bigger issues and things you can’t control, though. Because otherwise, what is it? Rent? Work? Sleep? Sex? But how does it link up? And, that of course, is where I come in.”
“If you’re offering what I think you’re offering, then very much and with the most possible respect, no thanks.” The recently-deceased college student that had arrived suddenly and without an appointment after a party had gone horribly right (in a manner of speaking …) looked across the table he and Time were sat opposite each other at.
“Well, it’s been a while, but all the bits still work in the way they’re supposed to, I believe …” Not something the old Sarah would have even hinted at, but since becoming Time, words had slightly lost their meaning.
“Uh …”
“Anyway … was that your question?”
“I just wanted a biscuit before I moved on.”
“Oh. Well, I’m sorry but you’re shit out of luck.”
The boy’s spectre faded from view. Emmet would take care of him now. Emmet. She should talk to him.
Shrugged.
Eventually.
Time looked around her office. “It’s always me and small rooms, isn’t it?”
Then the pens in the Life Books started moving all at once.
Frantically, Time leapt across the room and opened a page of one of the books at random. Sentences seemed to be writing themselves rapidly, and while they formed subject-verb-object levels of coherence, they weren’t … good? It was just ‘cat jump over dog’ and ‘man become hypnotist’.
Wait what?
These random errors shouldn’t have been causing this kind of mess. Mostly because randomness should, in theory, balance itself out and cause no mess at all, or because the messes it caused should have been unpredictable, or at least not made sense.
Like ‘man become llama’.
Oh, no, wait, there it was. In another Book.
Time would investigate the random writings. These shouldn’t have been happening. Mind you, neither should anything else. So perhaps this was all part of the plan …

“Buy some Joke currency …” Hypno Tist, whose parents weren’t enormous fans of subtlety, was … well-named. He was, in fact, a hypnotist. A psychic had decreed it, so he had no choice but to obey. Except that free will by definition grants a fairly large amount of choice, but Hypno was a determinist who didn’t believe in that sort of rubbish. As opposed to market economics or, you know, believing in a God. Apparently those were different. Talk about spiritualism and you were respected. Talk about the economy and you were revered. Talk about ethics and you were laughed at. Or, at least, that was Hypno’s experience. There might have been another compelling explanation for the laughter when he discussed ethics, like the fact that he might, maybe, have been wearing a handkerchief as a hat. Hatkerchief. After the incident, he’d made it his life mission to hypnotise everybody he met into forgetting that specific detail. Something about being called ‘tissue boy’ by the press must have got to him.
And yet, here he was; making adverts and cutting them out neatly with the same razor he used to shave his beard, then hoping to … whatever God happened to be listening that his plan would be successful.
Advertising campaigns using nonsensical rubbish seemed to have worked for the Bank. Or, at least, not caused them any major issues before the mindless and massive ball of rogue energy squashed the building flat. After that, of course, there had been … relocation problems.
The same kind of issues he was having now because, no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t gloss over the fact that he was attempting to hypnotise a group of ten people into believing they could go on a roadtrip in a bus while being paid as if it were full-time work. And he couldn’t seem to convince them (quite rightly) that the wheels on the bus hadn’t just fallen off.
Minor setback.
Much like the Mayor’s new ‘only people shorter than me are allowed to live’ Bill. Although at least there was some room to move in that, because the President liked to climb ladders and yell his policy. Not a fan of the written words business. Too much bureaucracy, which was a job left to … nobody else to do. Which is to say it just never got done.
The current ad Hypno had been working on – the one that had attracted all of these passengers – stated that a secretary (just somebody random) had been sent ahead as a scout. To look for recruits. Or something. Maybe the guy just needed a holiday and bullshitted really hard. Nobody else was gonna do it, though. At least that’s what the guy said, while wearing a tropical hat and smelling of sunscreen.

The Elder Fate rolled a two. Not the worst of outcomes, but three busses, a taxi and a couple of short-haul flights away from a good one. An interesting analogy, given that busses, taxis and flights weren’t … things that had yet happened. She looked across the table at her sister, the Younger.
“Interesting …” she proclaimed, in a high, whining voice that proclaimed her either a deity that had been raised on superstition and the ideas of dark magic, or a middle-aged white woman with a request to see the manager. I’m not saying there’s a link, no. And you can’t speak to my boss either, Patricia.
“How’s that interesting?” replied the Younger Fate in a slightly deeper, but no less annoying, voice. “It’s just a robot playing at pseudo-random numbers. All very exciting; I should think not.”
“Did you get up on the wrong side of the world this morning?”
“Nah, it’s just some guy’s been sending me unnecessarily passive-aggressive direct messages over the internet.”
“Oh, remember they’re more scared of you than you are of them.”
“That’s spiders.”
“I thought we were talking about snakes.”
“Nah, just some posh-as-shit secretary that forgot he just promised not to get mad.”
“But that whole thing … shouldn’t … be happening.” The Elder Fate nibbled on a cigar (she hadn’t figured out how they worked, and so, as a consequence, they didn’t).
“Now that you say it,” called Keith from across the table, “we control what happens down there. Why … do we seem to not control what happens down there?”
“What if someone else has a say in how the game is played?”
“Like who?”
“No idea,” Keith took a small mug of tea from nowhere, and downed it like a shot. “We should investigate.”
The room had been unnaturally quiet until this point, with the whole Disappointment of Gods (disappointment being the plural term) groaning after the word ‘investigate’ as if on queue.
“But do we have to…” the God of Complaining whinged. He didn’t even hold the portfolio, he was just very good at it. The portfolio-holder for Whinging was, ironically, the quietest God in the room.
“It must have been one of us …” Keith stated, just trying to solve the problem.
“IT WAS YOU,” a unanimous yell from all twelve Gods at once, that made Time jump in her chair in the next room.
The in-fighting would, of course, carry on for the next three hours while paperwork it might have been beneficial the Gods signed slipped past unnoticed. Paperwork that might, maybe, have contained permission for a roadtrip to be allowed in the game. Paperwork that was planted by a spy. At least that was probably the logic Paranoid Pete (the God of paranoia and an unrelated portfolio for people called Pete.
In fact, as a result, the game became more heated (possibly due to the summertime).
In the healthy-definitely-unhealthy competition, Keith may have slightly lost focus and/or track of himself, and there may or may not have been a crash as his hand swept across the board in a maddened frenzy to reach the dice, and especially to steal them off the God of Mechanics; who had done nothing wrong, was genuinely nice and needed to be protected. So, basically he wasn’t fit to be an actual God.

In the city, the bus started to move. And moo. Such were the occupational hazards of powering devices with magic. Or cows. It could honestly be argued either way. In fact, it was argued both ways … by the van itself, due to the sudden and … inexplicable … lack of working wheels; but a strong moral desire to do the right thing and work anyway. The conflicting magical opinions on whether this strategy was workable ground it to a halt, much like any reasonable discourse on the internet.
Dante, a conveniently placed mechanic, looked at the motor; as the only person with an even vague understanding of how these things were supposed to work.
“I think,” he said, and he wasn’t lying at the time, “that if we power it with some other source, it should work.”
“Like what, would you think?” Hypno was, at this point, so done with the whole situation that he would honestly have complied if the solution had been ‘donate your firstborn’. Although he’d already gambled away his firstborn to a warlock to let him be a bus driver. A waste. He’d been a very silly fifteen year old.
“Um, vampire blood?”
“Wait, what.” Not even a question.
“Why not? It’ll work.”
“Will it though?”
“Only one way to find out.”
“Is this what all you warlocks are like?”
“Cool and handsome? Nah, that’s just me.”
Hypno really wished he had his coin, for a number of reasons. The bus could, at this point probably be convinced it was alive and well, the passengers could be convinced the bus was alive and well, and the warlock could be convinced that … he wasn’t.
“And where would you get vampire blood from, anyway?”
The warlock procured some from inside his coat. Of course.
“But, but, but, but …”
“Nah, the four-butted cyclops lives in the mountains, sorry. Got its anatomy a little bit wrong.”
“You got it wrong?”
“Yes.” The warlock was injecting the vampire blood in much the way you would do with engine oil, but the added complication that on completion of the job, the van tried to kill him. So he wasn’t completely paying attention on his reply. “Oh, and I paid for it, too. Just because I know that’s what you’re thinking.” He chucked Hypno something, while attempting to get his legs out of the way of the bus’s muffler, which seemed to have become a jaw.
A coin.
After the bus had calmed down, Hypno got on board, both with the bus, and the roadtrip as a whole. He had a coin now. He was unstoppable.
One of the passengers, Dante; the passenger roster said, piped up, “what’d he do to the bus?”
“It’s not a bus anymore. But we can leave now.”
“What is it?”
It’s a vampire. The answer had come from inside his head. As well as putting vampire blood in the bus, the warlock seemed to have accidentally given Dante his own personal demons. Free gift, no need to thank him.

“Hold my beer and watch this.” Sarah stuttered her way through the sentence, mostly because a) she was holding coffee and not beer, and b) it was quintuple shot and she was the wring side of halfway through it. She’d called Emmet in from the wastelands he patrolled on a giant elk skeleton he’d reanimated. (In fact, the whole afterlife public transport system consisted of reanimated skeletons. Pity the guy that was forced to ride the mouse).
“That’s not …”
“Hold it, then, puny mortal.”
“Neither of us is …”
“Do ya wanna see my trick or not?” Almost slurred, she was definitely at the point most people would have told her to stop drinking and called her a taxi. Emmet just sat back and listened. He’d not seen her like this before. It was probably the stress or something.
Sarah threw her pen at the bookshelf, and in theory, it should have solved everything. She’d practised it before. Wait, no, that was all a sleep-deprivation-induced hallucination, and those sorts of thing didn’t work like that.
She tried it again, which, unfortunately, worked exactly as expected. Which is to say, nothing happened at all, except for a small amount of inkspatter when the pen hit the page with an undignified thwack noise. Then slid down the rack, bouncing off every shelf on its trajectory.
“I don’t know what you wanted to happen.”
Sarah composed herself before speaking. “I wanted to essentially use magic to re-write all the books in one go, but it seems like we have to do this the old fashioned way.”
“Do what?”
“Basically sit here and cross out words with pen. And rewrite the words with a different pen. For all the books in the library.
“Wait a second,” Sarah snapped her fingers and the clock stopped. “There. No time will pass while we do this. It’s bad practise to install updates while the system’s still running.”
“Why are you acting like the world’s a massive hard drive?”
Sarah decided not to tell him about the fact that the Afterlife Plains’ technical name was the Hard Disk Desserts.
Then she held on to that secret all night while they fixed the books, wondering slightly why the fuck the whole mess had happened. But they didn’t mind too much, hadn’t seen each other since … the last time Sarah had opened the door. Emmet had been gardening. Well, sweeping, but same difference. They had much to catch up on, like the fact that the ferryman hadn’t been paid in three weeks, and the RIP servers that copied deceased individuals from the main office to one of the Hard Disk Deserts for permanent storage, were down.

Time’s progress report made most of the Gods very angry. It mentioned the subtle not-passive-passive-aggressive behaviours, and exposed the highly inefficient governance system the Gods seemed to employ (blind following) for what it was (bullying). The other reason it made the Gods very angry, of course, is that they were used to the idea of things they don’t want being done just … not getting done. And yet, despite their best efforts, this one had happened more or less completely by mistake.
Keith put the paper down on the table, and then through it. Didn’t know his own strength.
“She recovered from our little … prank … rather well.”
“Pity, that. She got the … boy. The one that … likes her, to help.” The God of Stating the Obvious spoke up, obviously.
“But we can’t let her succeed, then anyone will think they can do the job!” One of the meathead Gods (who happened to hold the Godship portfolios for Meat and Heads, among others) spoke up.
“What would you suggest we do?”
“Set the clocks back!” A blatantly stupid suggestion from the meathead. “Leave it to Fate!”
The Fates weren’t listening, they hadn’t really figured out a position within the argument; so they’d stayed out of it. In fact, it was their move in the game, anyway.
The Younger Fate rolled a four. “How so? Let Time mess herself up? Normally she just does that to everybody else …” She cut herself off, grimacing as her sister rolled a six and moved the roadtrip bus forward three squares. Just quietly, while nobody else was watching.
“What do we have against her, anyway?” The main roundtable discussion had gone … around the whole table by now, and also done a complete lap of itself.
“She’s a female, she shouldn’t be allowed to …”
The Fates looked up from the game, suddenly interested.
“So, any female …”
No answer.
“Even a God?”
Awkward shuffling.
“Did you ever … do that to us?”
Shuffleshuffleshuffle.
The Fates had received the answer they were looking for. Stopped listening, and made eye contact around the table. It seemed their positions were less tenable than they’d thought, too.

“They’ll get to the village at a quarter past Doomsday”. One of the Fates currently looked like an old woman typing at an old computer. It seemed likely that her wires had got crossed, and that if she were to … calibrate somehow, she might make more accurate predictions. Maybe, it could be hoped. Or, alternatively, the machine learning algorithms involved in predicting destiny were just a little off.
People had looked at the Elder Fate to see if they could fix it by switching it off then on again. Nobody had, as yet, succeeded; and the God of Mechanics was still in bed; the morning wasn’t part of his belief system.
“The bus cannot be allowed to leave!” The God of Misplaced Stubbornness seemed emboldened by … something. But he wouldn’t tell anybody what. Surprise, surprise.
Or maybe it was the God of Unnerving Smugness that had caused the whole … situation. Further evidence needed, Keith noted as he wrote names down on paper. Most people (ahem, Gods) wouldn’t perhaps have cared quite so much, but curiosity had killed the Keith a while ago, so he needed to be sure.
“And the catering will serve snakes.” The Fates were still spouting rubbish.
“Yessssssss.” Guess which God.
The God of Mechanics tinkered with a knob around the back of the Elder Fate’s left ear.
“The bus will …” There was a pause during which everyone in the room stopped breathing. “… stop breathing,” finished the Fate to the confusion of all the relevant Gods, but not the people on the Bus; who suffered a momentary loss of magic and slightly fell out of the sky. But, somehow, it managed to keep going and recover, so the journey proceeded
“Yes, this investigation is not closed.” Keith muttered threateningly, at nobody in particular. Which slightly killed the tension of the moment. “She can’t possibly be allowed to succeed.”
“Fair investigation, then.”

So, I sit down with clients – well, they’re not really clients and I can’t really sit and they don’t stay for long, but we … debrief. And then, after we’ve had whatever fun we planned on, the meeting’s over. I joke, of course, it’s the afterlife, the meeting’s never over. Relax, I’m only joking … I’ve only ever had sex with proper, alive people. I think.
And normally there’s five or six. Like, it’s manageable. But the day I’m talking about there were literally hundreds.
That seems like a low number, but I’d just hired someone that found a way to take care of the vast majority.
And the vast majority was very, very vast.
No, I’m not talking about the fat guy that was sat in (and around) my office chair. I’m talking about the millions of people the Gods had just decided to spontaneously kill, along with my hopes and dreams. Shush, of course I have hopes and dreams.
Anyway, this story takes place … normally a time marker of some sort would go there; but of course it can’t because the concept of time is an illusion. A conveniently woman-shaped illusion. An illusion that would punch you in the face if provoked. Or unprovoked. Square up.
I’d used that joke on Pythagoras easier in the day. Or whatever it was you’d call it.
Most clients were fairly agreeable, after the initial shock. But I had gotten black eyes from a particularly violent raccoon keeper that seemed convinced his animals were in the next room. While marching into the Room of the Gods as if they were disobedient pests. Which they were, but I at least try not to tell them that.
In fact, speaking of the disobedient goats (maybe I’ll keep the name …), it seemed that they were at least unintentionally making my life harder. And Death’s life, which is a tautology, so never mind. I noticed this change in patterns at one point on an otherwise quiet ‘day’ by looking up and seeing that people filled every available space in the office. Where normally, I’d have one meeting at a time, you know, like a normal and functional bureaucracy. If such a thing were to exist.
So I dealt with as many people as quickly as possible, to try and decrease the backlog. But this one asshole … I got that one wrong, and it haunts me. Because the guy won’t leave. Typical first date, am I right? I don’t even know what his relationship with Keith was, but there must have been something. And he was, quite literally, ghosting me. While also not ghosting me at all.

The bus sputtered to a halt in the town square, and there was a cheer from the people inside, who were now no longer imprisoned. A small, vaguely welcoming crowd had gathered outside the bus, which were completely stone dead silent. Perhaps because a Medusa had run through the throngs about a minute before.
Weaving through the obstacle course that had been their welcome party, the voyagers found themselves in a small town square, in the middle of a small town you could walk from one side to the other of in under a minute.
“Well, all in the name of innovation.” Dante wasn’t impressed or convinced by the plan.
Or in the name of something else.
“Shut up!” he exclaimed out loud, despite the previous comment being a thought, which drew the kind of looks from his fellow passengers that he was … used to getting from other people.
It occurred to him that they didn’t know him all that well. That he’d scared them. And that none of them had worked out the pun on his name, and that it meant he was possessed, quite literally, by a demon.
Or I could just not. A demon who was a dick.
“We need to sort this out,” he said, aloud. Again, not quite used to the idea that nobody else knew he was possessed; while also drawing reactions to the tune of ‘yes, you do’ from the passengers.
Negotiate what? It’s comfy.
“I’ll blow you up, if I have to.” Mistake. Akthough at least the bus had arrived, so the passengers were free to run for their lives, leaving Dante and his demons alone on the bus.
“Thanks, dude.”
No problem. But don’t you have a competition to be getting to?
“Shut up. And get out of my head.” Dante packed up his things and exited the bus, hoping that the fairground that it looked like had been set up and then destroyed, and the fairground atmosphere that had hopefully created would distract him.
Spoiler alert: It wouldn’t. In fact, that’s the beginning, middle and end of the sports commentary.

You’d think stepping on to a bus was easy enough, but at least two of the six victors struggled with it. ‘At least’ because a couple of the people who tripped managed to style it out, so they almost … didn’t trip. Wild. And a couple of the others had more than the mean average number of legs, and didn’t fit through the door.
After deciding that the most reliable fuel (magic) would need the warlock to accompany them back to the city, Hypno used his coin to get the warlock to think he was moving a flatbed truck full of miscellaneous junk. Which he was, in a way. Dante seemed to have settled down, despite a tripping incident that he insisted was just one of those things that happened.
As far as was possible in a small, dysfunctional bus, in a small, dysfunctional town, with a small, dysfunctional band of passengers, all was well. Except for the three competition victors, who had never been on a moving cart before and were violently motion sick. They were not well, but this couldn’t be helped. Much like the warlock. Not ideal, but moving in the right direction.
The Gods looked down on the bus as it moved in a city-wise direction.
“How did that all still manage to happen? I thought we were Gods!” Keith, leader of the Ego Brigade, spoke louder than he needed to.
It seemed from the muted response around the table that the rest of the Gods were getting really sick of Keith’s indignation at the proceeding events, and corresponding inability to do anything about them. Or maybe, just maybe, that they knew things that were happening, which Keith did not.
No, definitely the first one. They’d just preferred Keith drunk.
The God of Mechanics took his turn. A perfectly unremarkable four.
Somehow, as if by magic, the gears in Keith’s brain started to turn as he sat back in his chair, eyes wide with the realisation of the scheme that had been at play.
He watched the board, and the effect of the Mechanic’s move; that the devices spawned copycat movements and technology took a flying leap into the future. All sorts of uses for the devices, too. Some of which even the Gods hadn’t thought. But … Keith could see … something.
Not sure what.
Wait.
Some people had … no. They wouldn’t be that rude, right?
But yes, Keith confirmed as he leaned over the board, checking carefully the consequences of the latest roll.
The devices were being used to blaspheme.
Keith looked up in a mild panic. “Guys. There’s a thing. We’ve been worrying about the wrong thing.”

Since you asked me for a story about the gender pay gap … why’d you ask me for that? Read the fucking news. Easy; problem solved. Go away. No? Okay … well, see this all started … how could you even measure time when you have no concept of time … this all started … when I last opened the door. It creaked then fell off its hinges, because the Afterlife Lobby budgets had dropped dramatically since the changeover, much like how I transfer myself from desk to couch at the end of a long day. Gotta do the theatrics, you know? Oh, also, they didn’t give me a bed. Anyway, this tale takes place when the days were long (because of the whole lack-of-a-day-night-cycle thing), my temper was short (because of a particularly arrogant recently-deceased lawyer; cause of death: just randomly during a court case after one too many uses of the word ‘objection’), and my mind was frazzled, because the Gods had attempted to make me take the fall for an office-politics mess up. Mostly because they made there … be … an office politics mess-up.
Or at least that’s the polite version, the one they told me. They’d said nothing of the meetings. The secret, back-door conversations that I wasn’t a part of (not saying I wanted to be …) that seemed to singlehandedly determine my effectiveness in the job.
Unfortunately for the rest of the Gods, it normally pays to close the office door when meeting about something. That way, the ‘something’ in question can’t hear you.
I knew, at least, what their plan was. Lucky for me, there was a large gap between their planning skills and their execution ability. For every time I was sent a hundred new clients because the Gods were making me suffer, I’d throw weird moves into the Game while they were arguing about the other weird moves that had been thrown into the Game. Neat trick, and neat circles. Or, at least, it had them running in circles – no claim to neatness there, though.
But they didn’t know it was me doing it. For some reason, I was beating the Gods at their own pettiness without even really trying. And they bought it, because they all thought they were above pettiness. Which they were, being the Gods that controlled it.
So, I had them chasing their tails, trying to investigate rogue movements in the Game (the invention of mobile devices despite the Gods’ wishes being just one of the things I’d done)
At least the Gods had stopped peering over my shoulder. This new technology was going … to cause problems. For the Gods, but at least for now, it had solved mine.
[Elsewhere, of course, Emmet was starting his new job, a thought that scared me to … whatever it is we replaced Death with. So … scared me to Emmet. Which doesn’t work as an expression.]

Chapter 8: Man Approaches New Technology Like A Frightened Cat

Doomsday had apparently happened last week. But nobody had noticed. Mostly because only five people had records of this sort of thing, and they were all, understandably, very hung over at the time. The interesting thing seemed to be that the world had carried on after. And before. And during.
Reading the report generated by the Great Compiler Error at the End of the Universe, Time ascertained that Doomsday had been caused by spam mail.
But not just any old spam mail. Oh, no. This was spam mail direct from God.
Because, Time mused, it was a fact well documented that the Gods sent notes down to humans. It was a fact significantly more well documented that, sometimes, the people didn’t listen. And it was exceedingly well-documented that what the Gods tended to do, in these situations, was simply to send more notes.
Time wondered if maybe she should have told that to poor Timothy Smallwood, a tree sapling that had … had a run-in with a warlock at a bar, and was forced to leave.
Timothy had designed an app. The kind of app that made the Gods very angry.
And he was currently struggling to get to his front door. Hadn’t even got to the whole ‘unlocking it’ bit yet. Wading through a pile taller than he was (not difficult, he was a sapling, remember?) of notes saying something in the range from [Stop doing this it is a bad idea and you’ll regret it and so will we thank you keith] to [STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP LOVE AND KISSES FROM SMASH THE GOD OF BREAKAGES (like my heart what you just shattered)]. Oddly enough, whether in lower case or upper, the Gods hadn’t yet mastered punctuation. Or punctuality, but that’s the punchline of a later joke, showing up early.
Timothy continued work, against the better judgement of literally everyone he’d ever met, and a couple of people (ahem, Gods) that he hadn’t. And before long, he had a prototype ready for testing. And the punchline to the joke ‘how many clueless idiots does it take to change a religion’ is …
It didn’t seem to matter.
The Gods sat around, watching this in disbelief. He’d just done it. Not even listened. The ungrateful fool. They’d show him. Eventually. Or, at least, that seemed to be the prevailing thought; until the God of Impulsively Bad Decisions decided to strike him down with lightning. And then continue with godly business by opening an investigation to sort out which damn FATE had rigged the damn GAME. With yelling and stuff. You know, things they could do. Although, of course, no God would be willing to take credit (except maybe the god of Snakes), so that was a separate issue.
Meanwhile, as the Gods were squabbling about mortality, and the humans were squabbling about mortality; Emmet found his first day on the job as Death to largely involve … refereeing other people’s squabbles about mortality. He’d broken up a fight between a spectre and its former body (long story, involving rubber bands), then dealt with a recently deceased munitions expert. It should be noted, he’d only become an expert very, very recently. But, as his last job of the day, he had to extract Timothy from underneath the human-sized pile of notes from the Gods that functioned for him as a doormat, and then formalise the actual death … process. Like a baptism, this mostly meant pointless ceremony. But baptisms favoured pointlessly pouring water over some poor fool’s head, and the death formalisation was mostly just waggling a stick over some poor fool’s head. Well, scythe; but that’s just a stick with a vengeance.
He swung the scythe, which missed. “I’m new at this, sorry.” Swung again. “Wait, I’m supposed to decapitate you, right?” No response. As predicted. Mostly because the scythe didn’t actually matter and the guy wasn’t there anyway. Already gone, much like Emmet’s sense of pride in the job. This was just like working at the bank …

The app prototype spread like … wildfire? Herpes in a pre-colonial settlement? Wildfire in a pre-colonial settlement? But, of course, not at all like herpes in a wildfire. Everyone was playing the game. Even your mother, although obviously she was mispronouncing the names and misunderstanding the social impact of the thing. But hey, she’d taught you to use the toilet, so maybe she’s allowed ignorance just this once.
Although, of course, the first realisation that there was profit in the app was immediately followed by the first attempt to profit off it. By the Bank who had completely failed to become irrelevant despite the complete theoretical solution to all their problems. They wanted more money, or some other such bollocks.
Another meeting was called, by shining the Bank-signal against the darkened night sky.
Obviously, due to the small inconvenience of being dead, Anderson couldn’t make it. So, his second-in command henchman, Jones (because the only successor to a guy with a generic sounding name was another guy with a generic sounding name) stood in for him.
It was a meeting explicitly designed to bore the shit out of everyone involved (so, it was a meeting), but eventually Jones stumbled quite accidentally on the key concept. He’d been actively dancing around it for most of the past hour, and was understandably disappointed at having got something right, for once.
“So you’re saying we make the app give users rewards for telling it jokes?”
“Yeah.”
“But that means they don’t invest them here …”
“Conflict of interest?”
“Sorry, what? I wasn’t listening.”
“I said doesn’t that make there be a conflict of interest.” Jones yelled the words slowly and clearly, as if he was talking to a brick wall. But the troll they’d hired for security (presumably the kind of being his tone would regularly have been aimed at) was … outside. Like all good security. There’ll be no shit-talking of trolls in this house. Or meeting. Or whatever.
Time watched all this, feeling vaguely detached, but also interested as to where it would go.
Her phone rang, loudly. Interesting. Only one … person … had a non-silent ringtone. She answered the thing, and Death’s voice crackled through. “So I’ve collected the guy and he should be on his way to you. He was killed by receiving some post, so at least the paperwork’s done.”
“That’s a death joke. On the job. Nice, you’re learning fast.”
“I think the Gods were mad about him making an app or something. Might be worth following up.”
Time stopped to consider this, just in time for the ground to literally shake in response to a particularly taxing round of twenty questions in the Room of the Gods next door.
“I … don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Yeah, in general it’s also a good idea to listen when Gods tell you to stop doing something.”
“Not if you’re me – I’d be out of a job if I did that.”
“Hey,” Time mused, “so, De – Emmet, that app …”
“… yeah?”
“Wanna play it?”

The bus arrived in the city with minimal incidents. Only one minor van-tried-to-immortalise-a-completely-innocent-statue-that-was-just-passing-by moment clouded the jolly atmosphere of celebration (although one could also call a funeral atmosphere celebratory, so different standards …). The first thing the passengers noticed was the townspeople moving around quietly while fixated on new electronic metal devices. Occasionally a nameless denizen would stop for a few seconds and look up as if where he found himself was somehow surprising, then continue walking as if nothing had happened.
The sirens found this change in atmosphere so surprising that they stopped singing. Although, as it turned out, they needn’t have been singing in the first place. Dante had settled down, similar to the other passengers. Certainly he’d stopped the wriggling about nonsense, or that one time he’d got up and asked the driver, calmly, to drive the bus off a cliff. Basically, if he’d at any point seemed possessed by a demon, the moment had passed. Lucky for some.
The passengers disembarked. Crazy, insane, definitely-not-demon-possessed people first, obviously. The bus terminal was next to where the old Bank had been. Now it was just a hole in the wall. Fenced off with metal. Probably silver. ‘To keep out the grave robbers,’ a passing-by denizen explained to the person they were walking next to, not at all in response to Dante’s confused expression. Dante added up the minutiae of that remark and figured it was probably a slang term for vampires.
But what, then, Dante thought (or was it the voice – no, definitely not), was this game that people seemed to be playing?
He tried to ask several people, but they looked at him like he was an … object? Obstacle? Then they made a bizarre flicking movement with their fingers on the device, and moved on.
He reached a sign, halfway between the crater where punchlines had gone to die, and the waterfront. It was one of those fancy new ones, all printed rather than handwritten. He read the sign, and it didn’t necessarily help with his confusion.
There’s a quest, whatever that means, in this game, whatever it is, that the end goal of it is to … meet God. Or something. That’s what they’re promising. Not sure I believe it.
Still completely unconvinced about the mechanics of this game, but prepared to humour its grandstanding, Dante moved on. The voice in his head seemed quiet still. Perhaps the confusion had shut it up. Not long after, a couple of the sirens from the bus, as well as a couple of the nicer passengers (ahem, not the werewolves) drove past in a somehow-suddenly-acquired fancy, new car. They’d also got their hands on some of the metal devices. They yelled out of the windows of their car, which had one spare seat, as if it’d been planned.
“Get in loser, we’re gonna go yell at God.”
“Or sing, whichever is easier.”

“So you’re saying … if I press this spin this thing,” Time had picked up a free, developer’s copy of the App (the name of the thing was forbidden in the afterlife), “then I will, what? Collect some points?”
“Yeah,” Death replied, as if he’d been teaching Time about this video game for several days (he had). “Thing is, you’ve also got quests and ‘wild’ Gods you can catch …”
Time was trying out the App because the Gods had seemed to take issue with the thing, but she hadn’t been quite sure why. At least she knew now.
“Picture this,” Death explained, patiently. Death would have to be pretty patient. “A man walks into a church …”
“Discriminatory to … almost everything, and also I don’t like the joke form anyway.”
“Let me finish. Basically the idea is you ‘collect’ altars by going in to a church and spinning them in the app. And there’s wild Gods you can collect just roaming around outside.”
“I can see already why the Gods are mad.”
“Why? Am I dressed wrong?”
“No, that’s … no. You’re fine.” She took stock of his vaguely formal attire, which contrasted with the frankly massive scythe he had slung over his shoulder. Businessman with a big-massive knife.
“So what shall we say? First to finish the game … ?” Time started the proposition, but couldn’t finish the deal.
“Nah, don’t bet, let’s just make it an honour thing.”
“Interesting, honour. It’s like dignity, I lost it all at college.”
“No honour, no dignity …” muttered Death as he opened the app. “What have you got left?”
Time didn’t even look around from opening her own copy. “Enough time to kick your ass at this stupid, godforsaken game.”
“You’re on. Starting now.” The world changed and Time and Death found themselves in a church. Cheating slightly, but meh.
“Now?” Time had, ironically, lost track of time. As well as that she had no idea how the game worked. Meanwhile, Emmet was making flicking motions on the screen of the device across the room.
“Wait, what, what’s that?”
“There was a Keith, I’m just throwing a cross at him.”
“That’ll make Keith very cross.”
“Nice pun.”
“What pun? He’s standing right behind you.”
Death jumped so noticeably he dropped the phone. “He fucking what – you’re evil, you know that?”
“Nah. Time’s a dispassionate bitch.”
“Bitch, certainly. Dispassionate? I wouldn’t … hey! You’re not allowed to join a Crusade without me! Also I thought you didn’t know what you were doing!”
“Of course you thought that, how else am I gonna win?” Time quipped as she stole Death’s phone out of his hand and ran off with it, out of the church door. Death followed, growling.
He stopped suddenly after crossing halfway over the graveyard and hearing a scream.
“Oh no, I’ve just given a priest a heart attack. Hang on …”

The next update of the App suggested the Gods that were available in the wild evolved into different Gods … that were also available in the wild? Given the limited number of Gods and cyclical nature of the game, it seemed the developers hadn’t thought it through. Although, Time and Death would ponder on one of their late-night church scavenges, given the clear and present danger of eternal damnation as a direct consequence of the App’s invention, it could be argued the developers hadn’t thought it through anyway.
And, indeed, it was argued. Intensely, while Time and Death stalked a graveyard at 3 in the morning.
“All I’m saying is they could have made it more worthwhile! It just goes around in circles!” Death, forgetting the concept of reincarnation for a second.
“You know what they say. History repeats.”
“Yes, well so does Keith and holy damn I’m getting sick of his smug grin.”
“It’s not a smug grin,” countered Time, “it’s a smile, and you’re just too far up your own arse to see it.”
“Smiling is the same as a smug grin when you fake it, obviously.”
“And you’d know all about what it’s like when somebody’s faking.”
“Hey, that’s … uncalled for,” Death’s tonal shift suggested that while uncalled for, it probably wasn’t untrue.
“You know what else is uncalled for,” Time muttered, staring at (and still getting used to) the metal square in her hand, “the fact the fucking cross won’t fucking land when I fucking throw it.”
“Woah. You okay? That’s more than you’ve sworn, ever. Also, which God; asking for a friend.”
“It’s this piece of shit game.”
“And you’re trying to win the quest? Why, we’ve met the Gods.”
“Not trying to win, just … experiencing the thing, you know? I don’t get to experience stuff now that I’m …”
“Essentially an immortal abstract concept due to several human fuckups that mean you’re not alive any more, yeah I get you.”
“Hey, you’re not allowed to empathise. For a start, we should be trying to beat the surely genuinely hundreds of other kids trying to play the game.” Time gestured at the phone in her hand, using the hand with the phone in; which backfired and meant she had to scoop it up off the floor.
“Yeah, maybe work on holding the phone first.”
As Death and Time were stood in a church after dark trying to blaspheme correctly so that they’d earn points (is it obvious why the Gods have an issue with this game yet?), Dante and his band of vampires and werewolves had decided they’d just mess around in the city centre, and had largely given up on their transport. Mostly because it had abandoned them due to a better offer of ‘machine oil and chill’ from another vehicle. Which, of course, left the passengers of said other vehicle similarly betrayed. Of course, neither vehicle-deprived party would know this, but the two groups were the only team of people still playing the mega-quest. They also wouldn’t know that their activity could be tracked, and they certainly wouldn’t know that there was a news crew on standby for the final event.
Mostly, they wouldn’t know it because the news crew was hideously murdered mid-report by an Annabel doll with a grudge (although it’s possible I’m mixing up my horror franchises).

“Fill in the forms, and we’ll let you know if your application is approved,” Time spoke calmingly, and in a very practised way that suggested the whole ‘you’re recently dead, but let’s see what deal we can make you’ monologue had been practised. Way more than you’d think.
“I’m the Dope, of course my application’s approved.” The customer Time was dealing with currently appeared to be an old man. All in white. With the little hat … oh. Sometimes she didn’t notice these details until halfway through a conversation.
“Says here you … ‘played “Going To Hell For This”’. Doesn’t seem all that bad to …” Time paused, “oh, that game. Yeah, sorry, that’s Hell.”
“That’s what the congregation said, but they’re all hypocrites. Saint Dumbo’s, of course …”
“Ah, the Church of the Unenlightened.”
“No need to rub it in. I always thought they were wrong anyway. They had this weird policy about setting hair on fire instead of cutting it …”
“Not on this one issue, no. The hair cutting thing, however, is … weird. The Gods singled out ‘Going To Hell For This’ as an app that would send you straight to Hell.”
“What’s even in Hell?”
“It’s sort of the same as this, but you sit and listen to Fate telling some stories. I think it’s the stories of everyone you know or have met? Something like that …”
“Doesn’t seem too bad?”
“No, like all of it. Even the mistakes, especially the mistakes. I think she slows down for those.”
“Oh.”
The door to the afterlife opened, and Death stuck his head in. “Is he,” gesturing at the Dope, “done with his forms?”
“Has a slight God complex, but understandable in the circumstances. He’ll probably be another ten minutes with the forms.”
“Oh, great. Time to complete a quest, do you think?”
“Well,” Time snapped her fingers, and everything that wasn’t either her or Death paused. “I should think so.”
She looked down, to see the rap-sheet for the rest of that day. A news crew. Hmm.
She’d deal with it later.
But for now, she really wanted to capture some Gods. Mostly to beat Death at his own game.
The game was … uneventful, this time. Seemed slightly more like commitment grinding, rather than … something enjoyable. There’d be some form of joke in there somewhere, but Time didn’t have the time to work it out.
Eventually, Death and Time had finished standing at an altar together while not looking at each other, and needed to get back to the actual life-and-death business of their actual Time and Death jobs.
The news crew they returned to had been waiting for the whole … three … seconds … that time had been stopped. But they weren’t even bothered; and were still mostly interested in the winners of the competition, although now they had front-row seats. Especially when Dante crashed through the door with two vampires and an equal number of werewolves immediately behind him, yelling “YOU GUYS CAN’T WIN BECAUSE THEY WON’T LET YOU!”
“Well, if it’s any consolation,” Time replied, “I won’t ‘let’ you win either.”
Then, aimed at Dante, “Hi there! Fill in the form and take a seat! What’s your day been like?”
“Hit by a horse-drawn cart, but in fairness to the horse, I should have been looking. In fairness to me though, the horse was very interested in the game …”

“I don’t know what’s causing all this nonsense.” Keith looked up from the board, expecting to see at least one face of one God looking at him as if what he’d just said was stupid. Instead he found thirty faces of twenty Gods (the God of Extinct Animals and the God of Betrayal counted for the … excess).
“So what would you suggest we do?” The Elder Fate still had a twinkle in her eye, as if she knew what would happen; or she had something stuck on her eyeball or contact lens or whatever, and just couldn’t be bothered to get it off.
“Easy,” replied Keith, as though he were re-inventing the wheel with his solution. “We flip the board.”
Needless to say, the tidal waves were felt in the middle of the inland deserts, whose nomadic gypsy tribes had forgotten what water looked like when it wasn’t murky, brown and in small desert reservoirs. Puddles. I mean puddles. They only knew about puddles. Until they suddenly had no house and a big fuck-off wave to show for all their trouble.
Luckily, of course, for the people completing the game’s quest as well as the news crew diligently reporting that Dante seemed to be having demon-related issues again, even though he wasn’t – the team had already reached the Lobby of the Gods and were sitting in the Reception Area of the Gods, with a cup of Tea of the Gods.
“That should have sorted them out,” Keith jeered, with no real idea or understanding of what he’d entirely failed to stop.
At this point, as could only happen in exactly this situation, two humans, two werewolves and two vampires walked in. “Wait what, where are we?” one of the humans hadn’t caught up with the fact that he’d completed the quest.
“The lady outside said to introduce ourselves as your ten o’clock appointment.” The human spoke, as the only one that was actually able to walk into the room it made a certain kind of sense.

The Room of the Gods seemed bigger than either of the two humans were expecting; but given that it turned out a literal Heaven literally existed, the pair’s standards for what the Room of the Gods might look like were pretty low. It also seemed more chaotic, given that the twenty Gods that occupied the Room were fighting about some humans that had taken on a quest. Hang on … that was them …
They slowly turned at the sound of the flung open door, then turned slightly more quickly when the door’s unique sound gave way to the equally unique sound of more than one person entering a room. Specifically, a prolonged round of after-you-no-after-you’s. At the conclusion of the diplomatic negotiations, the team of six found their way inside. Turned out just … putting one foot in front of the other was a strategy that worked rather well.
“SO,” boomed Keith, as the only God who’d been actually paying attention and gave even the most remote smidge of a fuck about the game quest, “YOU WIN THE QUEST. DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY FOR YOURSELF?”
Like anybody who’d just met Gods they didn’t know were supposed to exist, the humans were silent. The vampires and werewolves, slightly more accustomed to the idea that God had abandoned them, spoke up.
“Well, we just think that it’s somewhat hypocritical of you to demand belief from us, when you never believed in us.”
They weren’t looking around, but they might have seen twenty Gods performing the same shuffleshuffleshuffle dance they’d performed earlier, and Time sneak in the door while nobody was watching.
“It’s not just him,” Time’s voice rang out in a room that had suddenly been overtaken by the sound of shuffling feet, and the slow realisation that a group of the more popular Gods had shuffleshuffleshuffled themselves out the door.
“You!” Keith seemed unable to contain his anger, yet similarly unable to do anything productive with it.
“Me what? Me … have to deal with the systematic fuckups of the Gods in every context I’ve ever been placed. Me having to fix the whims of the Gods because you lot struggle to do pretty much anything, but are happy to sit, plan and laugh. Although even that’s being charitable, isn’t it. The Gods basically just sit and bicker. Which says nothing to the number of unreasonable and unfair deaths you lot have sent me, I just …”
“You just …” Keith repeated, as if he were standing over a powerless victim.
“I just wanted you to know that’s how you come across, and that this is what human belief has done to you.”
“Well, actually,” Keith began, and Time had to fight an eyeroll.
So, he’s one of those guys.
“Well actually, this is a lack of belief, or do you not remember the magic disaster.”
“Oh, true. I had forgotten that one. It just seems odd to me that Gods such as yourselves would construct and then entirely fail to maintain complex and easy to mess up systems; leaving that to humans that would completely fuck them up. I guess my point is, given everything bad that’s ever happened, or that you’ve let happen, why would we bother to believe in you at all? Personally, I wouldn’t.”
There was a slow clap from behind Dante, who suddenly remembered the camera crew. Powerless to stop Time’s angry ranting, it was being broadcasted quite accidentally to the occupants of the world below who now knew everything.
Oddly enough, it was the buff-seeming Gods that became unwell first.
“And if we all just believe, then maybe everything will be okay.” Time continued, staring directly down one of the cameras, and presumably straight into the eyes of some unlucky viewers. Unlucky, of course, because they weren’t Gods.
“I can tell someone’s not doing it because we haven’t fixed the economic collapse. You know, the one we all magically forgot about.”
“Forgot about? It’s not possible to keep track of everything and there was the Game …” Keith seemed feeble, almost as if begging for his life. If that was what he was indeed doing, he was doing it wrong. He just seemed like a weak man dispensing excuses. Made a certain amount of sense.
Around half of the Gods had vanished by this point; Time stopped ranting to survey the damage she had caused.
“Death?”
“Yes.” Death had appeared as if by magic.
“Was this the kind of overthrow you had in mind?”
“Something like this. I mean, I’d just thought the Bank execs …”
“But this is so much better.”
“H – help me,” Keith spluttered, the absence of belief in him having quite a literal impact on his wellbeing.
“You didn’t help us, so we won’t help you.” Childish, perhaps; but religions seemed to be constructed this way. Time dismissed the fading God with a wrist-flick.
Keith vanished with a pop, leaving the Room of the Gods empty.
Dante looked around at the ring of vacant seats. “Well, that was unexpected.”
The group of four’s attention was drawn across the room by the large board on the table. So it was, in fact, in a way nobody had noticed before, the Boardroom of the Gods. Or it had been.
“So they did play games …” Dante whispered in the pin-drop quiet of the room. Eerie quiet, in fact. It wasn’t so much a lack of noise as the absence of noise, if there is a difference between the two.
He picked up the dice. Normal, six-sided. Rolled them down on the board.
Nothing happened.
The group of four made for the exit.
With Dante at the back, the four crossed the Room of the Gods, slowly. Carefully, taking in the whole … experience. The room seemed to have been here for thousands of years and yet no time at all.
They crossed into a small administration office that seemed to function as more of a passage than a room.
A phone rang.
Dante looked around, confused. Waiting for someone to answer it; that is, pop up out of nowhere and answer it.
Nobody did.
So he did the only thing he knew how.
“The Gods’ Residence, Dante speaking; what the fuck do you want.” Ah. He’d started so well.
There was no reply, so he almost hung up. Then, quietly; “We’re from the Saint Dumbo’s Church of the Unenlightened; do you want to talk about –”
Dante slammed the phone down, and the enormity of his predicament set in. There seemed to be no way back to reality, and nothing else to do. Wait. There was a freezer with ice cream. Maybe he wasn’t in quite so much of a mess as he’d thought …