“The time has come. Once more, we must summon a TRUE HERO”

  “I still think we can just dump a ton of Crusaders on the problem-”

  “TRUE… HERO.”

  “Eh, he’s got a point. I’m still getting my own Crusaders to stop huffing gasoline. They keep hallucinating and thinking it’s me talking to them.”

  “Day by day, week by week. More Pretenders to the Throne emerge, and the Bureaucracy’s hold on them grows weaker…

  “Soon, those fetid imps will fail, and when they do, a Demon King shall emerge once more, wiser and richer than any before him. We must have a hero before that day, one who can push upon the scales, and weigh Oath yet higher above Debt.”

  “Don’t you mean lower? If he’s trying to weigh ‘scales’ in our favor, I mean.”

  “With the power of a foreigner, granted an Eldritch Soul by our realms, we can nurture one who is beloved by all, and capable of striking down the ambitions of the Pretenders…

  “...And truly, neither man nor god can know who we shall receive.”

  –

  “I mean we can just check,” Eris remarked casually. “We’ve had void-viewing for what, a few eras now? Just like… See who we’re getting. Window shop a little.”

  A long suffering sigh emerged from Zeus’s iron throat, sounding more like the huff of a brazen bull than anything human. “It would not change the end result. No ordinary mortal would do. It must be one who can withstand the eyes of the world. If there were two men-

  “Or women,” Eris interjected

  A glance from Zeus marked another furrow on his brow. “...If there were two men or women upon creation who could bear the Trinity’s curiosity, I would feed my beard to the dwarves.”

  Ares blinked. “Is it not infinite? Infinite void, infinite individuals who could bear it,” he pointed out.

  Zeus’s hand chopped up. “Enough modern wit! Does my exaggeration sound like an Oath to you?!” he barked.

  “I swear, ‘Flamewars’ and Discord have ruined the two of you. Attention span of a gnat, split between two who wish to buzz in my ears like one,” he grumbled.

  Uranium threads straightened like fine silk, curling back as the god soothed his beard with a pondering hand.

  “Very well. We shall glimpse the chosen one, for but a moment. We haven’t the time to scour infinity itself, so banish the thought. It is Chosen One, not Chosen Many, after all,” he chortled lightly.

  “Nay, we shall witness the salvation of Mundanus, so that we might steel ourselves for the waves a hero is sure to make. To ponder for a moment, the surety of the friends he shall take.”

  Reaching into the air, the lightning-deity pushed at the ozone around him, a gust yanking a black mirror to his hands.

  From the back of the mirror, undulating wings began to unfold, black, heavy metal perching upon the table between the deities.

  “So swore you to Olympus, that you would see what we did not, and so swore you to Lethe that you would see what we could not. So swore you to I, that you would serve us within sane, common bounds,” he began, as the Angel of Void began awakening.

  He poked it.

  “Wake up. I want to see a hero,” he commanded.

  The mirror shook and stretched, groaning with the deep rumble of stretching cable. Its surface swirled, a transparent nothing pouring into it as reality left its polished form.

  –

  “Hell yeah. Bedputer,” Rhett said, laying on his stomach, his computer and its three monitors dragged in front of him.

  Around him, the signs and symptoms of a life more ‘lived in’ than ‘well lived’ stood tall and proud. Empty cans, dishes, mugs, glasses, and more stacked atop an unused desk, and below, a tide of empty water bottles clattered haphazardly.

  Where once, the concept of a workspace was held together by a single office chair, a storm of chaos had unraveled from the broken feng-shui of the room, the moment it broke.

  Once it had, Rhett opted to just put his entire computing setup at the foot of his bed instead, where he could cruise the net and snooze at will.

  Completing the life-support-system that was his mattress, a nest of pillows and blankets formed a cozy buttress around him, like sandbags lining the trenches between the outside and his den.

  All of this, each crumb and scrap, was carefully calculated, placed in the optimal position for a single purpose…

  Raising his battlerank in Smash of Mans.

  “Ah… Well, I mean, we’ve had worse. Give him his Soul’s True Form and he’ll be fine for the job.”

  Rhett blinked. He could swear he heard something.

  Shaking his head, he returned his focus to what was truly important, the controller in his hands.

  “What do you suppose that might be? A burly fellow like that, and that odd warfare on his screen… He seems quite the fit for the two of you. Oh imagine if he were an angel of war… That would be quite the fortune.”

  Comboing his counter, he grit his teeth. Distracted right as his opponent countered his combo, his Mans went flying, knocking his entire Clantress right off the stage, and losing him precious Econ.

  He quickly opened his crafting menu, and started punching together a new one, blocks slapping together as he hastily tried to rebuild his empire.

  “Pops… That’s a videogame. He’s a gamer, not a warrior. That said, judging from the big poster labeled Fabricave, perhaps he’ll end up a goblin of some variety. It would do their kind some good to have a hero raise them up.”

  Grimacing, Rhett’s craftmenu shattered, a large mingetraption from his opponent glitching into it and causing it to explode from the physics objects jammed into it.

  His fingers reflexively snapped to the Alt-F4, as he quit out of the game with a huff.

  “Goddamn hackers,” he grunted, sure that something had been messing up his groove...

  “No, brother. Goblins tinker with tools and trinkets, not simulacra. See his isolation? His nerdy pursuits? No, his soul clearly yearns for the life of an Elven Towermage, where he can trickle new discoveries into the world around him.

  “Not the best for a war on evil, but hey, we’ve worked with worse.”

  With a grumble and a heave, the young man shoved himself off his bed, shuffling into the kitchen where he began culinary crimes. Honey and barbeque mixed together in a sauce bowl while several handfuls of nuggets slapped into the oven at his command.

  The barely clad creature scratched himself with more irate grunts as it began to cook, and he yanked a chair out from under the dining room table, plopping down in it as he grabbed some leftover coffee, mixing it cold with the contents of a pilfered creamer packet.

  …Two creamer packets.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “Hmph. We’ll see. It’s about to happen.”

  Whipping out his phone, he started to watch cute animal videos, scrolling through them lazily until he happened upon one that caught his eye.

  In it, a pair of fancy rats scurried over a person’s hand, their eyes boggling with joy as they lapped bits of peanut butter and jelly off of spots hidden all over the hand.

  It was a game that both rats seemed all too familiar with as they took turns scurrying around their cage in excitement and then pouncing on the hand for yet more of the sweet droplets.

  Rhett chuckled. “Man, you’ve got it easy. Wish I could sit around in a little box eating snacks and napping all the time. Talk about a life-goal,” he mumbled, to the dawning horror of the gods.

  Taking a withering slurp from his mug of cold coffee, he cringed as bitterly as his drink, grimacing for a moment. His eyes landed on the two empty cups of creamer.

  Glancing instinctively from side to side, Rhett grabbed one and started to lap the sweet liquid out of the plastic, greedily getting the last drops of sweetness out of the french vanilla additive.

  “Oh what in the hellscape is he doing?!”

  At the loudest noise-that-wasn’t so far, Rhett jerked, and the tiny cup he had been shotgunning over his head slipped down his throat, his eyes widening as he choked on the plastic chunk.

  Pushing back in a panic, he clapped his chest, and his legs kicked out in a panic as his chair tilted backwards with the motion.

  His head smashed into the tiled floor, and in an instant, Rhett Fency was braindead.

  Well, moreso.

  –

  The moon hung overhead in the sky, and around it, stars twinkled and shone in impossible, chromatic colors. red, blue, even green and magenta found themselves painted onto the night sky, alongside strange, triangular trios that glared into one another.

  Like astigmatic illusions painted on a light-polluted city, stoplights of iridescence, starburst out from their silent places.

  The sky wasn’t full of dots, or even little twinking points. Instead, it was filled with writhing, paintlike triangles, interwoven between hexagonal starbursts.

  Rarer, more unusual phenomena made themselves apparent to any who gazed up long enough. Stars that did not want to be looked at, that shone in impossible purpleish-yellow hues. Ones that shone not with color, but with texture.

  One, in defiance of the gods and all sense, glowed in plaid.

  Below, an equally striking sight held the earth, a village, filled with huts made of wood and straw. What made it striking wasn’t the quality, however, and neither was it the quantity.

  Instead, it was density that made this village noteworthy.

  Grassy hay huts, stacked on top of one another like a god’s building blocks, a pyramid of humble hamlet life, crisscrossed with little barns and arches that led into what could only have been a veritable hive of farmers and ranchers.

  Like a termite’s mound, scaled to the size of several city blocks, the people here seem to have lost all sense of horizontality, instead focusing their efforts into erecting a dune of huts, where grains of people in humble clothes prowled the night, rare individuals who saw the dark as a time for work, instead of rest.

  The innards were equally strange. Lacking rhyme or reason, there seemed to be entrances dotted all over it, streets poking out of the towering piles of houses, bridges of wood or leather strung between them, like tunnels of lumber and straw.

  The verticality was solved, it seemed, through even more excessive chaos. Bridges, ladders, and stairs of improvised wood, hammered into the edifice itself served as quick transit between the loosely defined layers of the civilized cake, and within, like the rings of a tree, layers of these segments of transit could be found inside as well.

  Each layer of the town was like a paper wasp’s nest, houses stretched up and around until it formed an oblong orb, with breaches in the surface revealing more layers within.

  Around it, half a moat stretched out like more of a manmade lake, an oblong bean of seafaring carved around the Village-Arcology, dotted and sprinkled with highways of docks strung up like streetlights between wires of hewn rope and planks.

  For all of this though, there seemed to be an explanation. Around this obelisk of humbleness, trees taller and taller surrounded it, like meaty fingers trying to squeeze civilization out from its surface like a clay-shelled wooden pimple.

  If any farms could be seen to feed this monument, they were utterly hidden beneath the growth, and secretively squirreled between bushes and vines, or buried in the core of the Hive-village.

  It was what wasn’t seen through the high torches and dangling lanterns, or exposed under the exotic night sky, however, that was the most worthy of note.

  Instead, it was a pile of newspapers, streaked with blackened pockmarks of fading oblivion and the deep scent of caustic, divine ozone. One that dared to rustle as if it had something underneath it, trying to escape its papery prison.

  This was noteworthy, because by all accounts, nothing had left evidence of having entered it in the first place.

  Well, that, and the fact that moments ago, the utter howl of oblivion had torn open within it, wind whipping as the Void Between Worlds was exposed by the divine, almighty power of divinity, air rushing into the Nothing like a black hole.

  This lasted mere moments before a figure was spat out of it, the nightmare fading until only bubbles of unexistence remained, popping with eradication on what they touched.

  The sheets unfolded like a trashy blossom, and a nose poked out from it. Then, a head.

  Finally, to achieve the goal of looking at it, a fuzzy black body pushed its way out of its birth-news.

  Looking down, the rat-person donned an expression like that of a dog whose owner just blamed them for a loud fart.

  Thoughts churned in their mind, as their expression danced with a variety of tells.

  Minor moments of horror, existentiality, practical, everyday fear, and the deep sadness that came with lacking underwear or anything else among the thousands of things they once owned, large and small.

  His body was covered in black fuzz. His hands, an even darker shade of black, tipped with tiny pads, and tinier claws.

  His vision was overtaken by a large cone of the same. One that twitched and wriggled alongside his expression.

  Behind him, a dull purple tail sat dead on the floor, lacking in any animation.

  The fact that he was still male was fairly useless, in light of everything else.

  He felt hollow for a moment. A bottoming out of his stomach as he felt like he was falling, every moment he stared down at his inhuman hands.

  This was a man who was used to spending his life in utter comfort. Someone who was perfectly content in getting angry at videogames, eating garbage, drinking strange liquids, and sleeping.

  The feelings he experienced were new. The fear, the immediate longing for his comfortable little home…

  Rhett was someone who hadn’t ever really experienced misfortune. The rapid amalgam of so much of it threatened his core in a way he had never experienced, in a way someone so abysmally sheltered would never experience in their natural habitat.

  The feelings threatened to overwhelm him. He shivered involuntarily in the lukewarm air. His throat tightened. His eyes ached.

  Eventually, however, one feeling rose above the others. A black, petty thing that reigned supreme in his personality.

  One by one, the other feelings all gave way to a grapey sourness that puckered his face and put a smirk’s antithesis on his face, lip curling down as he huffed.

  “...Whatever, Smash of Mans was a shit game anyway.”

  –

  “He is a rat,” Zeus intoned, as still as his metal flesh should have been.

  Eris smirked. “Don’t get me wrong, this is pretty horrible, but it’s a little funny.”

  “He. Is. A. Rat!” the deity bellowed.

  “A Ratperson, pops. A bit better, considering he’s still got the thumbs for a sword,” Ares noted, already considering ways to improve the killing potential of a rodent of usual size.

  “Thumbs will not help a weasel, nor a hedgehog, nor any other miniscule mammal of a lowercase mortal withstand the eyes of the world!” the god of thunder exclaimed, hand in his face.

  “Perhaps he can, if we take the time to see how. The ritual wouldn’t have worked if he didn’t have some way to deal with Fate watching him for funsies,” Eris stepped forward, putting a hand on the king-god’s shoulder, firm enough to pull him from his growing panic.

  “You gotta remember, Eldritch Souls are the world’s tourist visa. If the world was going to be worse for him in it, he wouldn’t have been let in like this,” she calmly reiterates.

  “Besides, it’s Earthrealm. That place craps out nuts like a squirrel. Let him get into trouble, deal with some baddies, and get a saint over there to talk him over when he’s good to go,” the discordant goddess explained, step by step.

  Zeus sighed. “Well, the prophetic portion of the Ritual stipulates that we only get to communicate with the would-be hero once, or risk severing the thread of fate that would lead him to glory.

  “Shall we tell him of the saint to be sent? Or command him to train himself for glory?” Zeus finally asked, having slowly given up on his fanciful idea of a descending demigod of promethium and gold come to solve their problems.

  “Well, if I may,” Eris trailed off, an idea already in mind.

  Ares, meanwhile, was still pondering the sight of the confused, former human. If he was not mistaken, Rats were surprisingly friendly, social creatures.

  They hadn’t watched long enough to say, but there was potential there. Friendship, after all, was a brutal nightmare to deploy on the battlefield, as many traumatized loners could attest to.

  Surely, this “Rhett” would make many friends indeed, and the next demon to call themselves “King” would be murdered to death by a damned rat.

  That, Ares mused, would be worth any inconvenient quirks this otherworlder might have.

  --