“Excellent. Now that we have that figured out, all that’s left are the details.” Betty stated, giving the woman a fanged smile. “The world you will be going to, along with your vessel and ability.”
“That sounds good.” The woman replied. “Will I get to choose any of that?”
“It costs tokens, unfortunately. You’ll have to go spin the Wheel of the Tokenless to have those assigned to you.”
“The Wheel of the Tokenless?” She questioned.
Betty nodded. “I can’t give you any details, but you’ll understand when you see it. Are you ready?”
The woman nodded, and Betty reached down to press some sort of button. A vibrant blue vortex materialized next to the woman, causing her to jump and let out a high pitched yelp. It was large enough that two people could have walked through it holding hands, and had streams of white and blue light swirling continuously within it.
“You could have warned me!” The woman accused.
“Sorry,” Betty replied. “But it’s best if you stay on guard for this next part.”
“What do you mean?” The woman asked.
Betty looked around before whispering, “He’s not like me or the other clerks. He chose to be there.”
“Who?”
Betty gave her a sad smile before saying, “I hope everything works out well for you. Step through the gate when you are ready.”
“Thank you for all the help.” The woman responded, then stepped through the blue vortex…
And onto a stage.
Her surroundings had changed drastically. No longer was she in the largest afterlife DMV she had ever seen.
Looking around, she noticed that the floor consisted of crisp white tiles, and had an elevated circular platform in the center. There was a large unlit sign hanging above the circular platform that read, “The Wheel of the Tokenless!”, and had a large arrow pointing down. Directly below the arrow there was a single podium with “Contestant” written on the front.
She looked across from the raised section of the stage, and where she expected to see a large screen divided into numerous small green squares, there was only darkness. Yet, it wasn’t like any darkness the woman had seen before. It was an all-consuming, endless void. She gulped nervously.
A large clanging sound echoed through the strange set, and the pale white lights of the sign began lighting up. They flickered on and off, which vaguely reminded the woman of various horror movies she had watched in her previous life.
Slowly, the lights on the arrow began to alternate, giving her the impression that she needed to stand at the podium to begin whatever this was.
The woman hesitantly walked across the tiled floor, her footsteps echoing over the faint buzzing sound the lightbulbs from the sign made. making her way to the steps that led up to the elevated platform, she noticed that the circular portion was a wheel.
The wheel was large, and separated into thousands of different sections. It began to light up as she claimed her spot at the podium. The majority of the sections on the wheel were grey, some were green, and there was a single blue tile. Other than color they were completely blank.
An odd cracking sound broke her attention from the wheel, and she looked towards the sound. The air across from her - on the other side of the wheel - was twisting and contorting, as if space itself was trying not to sneeze.
A tall, humanoid form pulled itself from the twist in the air and immediately bent over to dust its black dress pants off. As it stood up, the woman realized that this man was very tall. He had an unusually long tophat on, which obscured his face as he finished brushing off his suit coat. Then he looked at her.
The woman’s breath caught in her throat as she gazed into the empty black pits in the man’s face where his eyes should be. His skin was off-white, a dull grey that looked as rotted as the teeth that made up his wide, face splitting smile.
“What are you looking at hag?” The man spat with a voice and face made for radio, before smoothly walking to stand next to the wheel. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
As the words left his smile - which never moved even as he spoke - more lights lit up around the wheel and the stage. He stood there, unmoving, for a moment before his form burst into animation as he gestured to the wheel and projected his voice into an old fashioned microphone.
“Welcome back to Wheel of the Tokenless! You’re favorite all-stakes game show, where you can scout for your favorite mortal. Our contestant today is a frail old lady with the mind of a young adult!”
While he was speaking, the woman felt one - then many - presences fill the void beyond the stage she was on. She tore her gaze away from the man, and towards the vast abyss. She could see numerous shapes moving in the darkness, and while she couldn’t make out any specific forms, she could feel them pressing against her soul. It was terrifying, and unlike anything she had experienced before.
“Will she be lucky and have an ideal next life, or will she be one of the many, many beings sentenced to yet another mundane and unimportant existence?” The host paused, “Personally, I think it will be the latter, but let’s find out!”
The wheel lit up, and each section glowed with a faint underlight. As the woman looked at it, words began to scrawl across the many different green and white sections of the wheel. She tried to read some of it, but was interrupted by loud and unsettling game show music. It was discordant and ominous, sending a spike of ice down her back.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
“First up, spin for ability!” The man proclaimed.
The woman didn’t respond. She tried to tune the music out as she looked back down to the wheel, and was able to glimpse some of the words. She noticed that the grey sections of the wheel had things like, “really good at making tea”, “can put keys into a lock on your first try”, and “time travel: +1 second into the future at will” written on them.
She glanced back up at the host and asked, “These are abilities?”
“That’s right!” He said to her with his wicked grin, before turning back to the amorphous shapes in the void. “Hopefully the old bag will get, ‘can remember where she is’ as her ability!”
A mixture of laughter, hissing, and deep booming guttural clicks came echoed across the stage at his words.
“Well go on, spin it already!” The host demanded, an edge of irritation creeping into his voice.
Shakily, she reached out her hand and grasped the wheel. With a light pull, she sent the wheel spinning.
As it rotated, the needle in front of the podium clicked loudly against the edges of the wheel. She watched the colors of the wheel blur into a single dark green color as it spun faster and faster. As the wheel continued to spin, the host addressed the audience once again.
“What will the decrepit old woman get as her ability, I wonder!” He loudly asked the abyss. When hardly any of the creepy sounds came back in response, he turned to the woman. “I suppose I can’t keep calling you an old woman - what’s your name anyway?” The inflection in his voice when he asked the question clued the woman in to the fact that he knew.
Anger and frustration pulsed through her mind at the fact, and made it difficult for her to respond. Her face flushed an angry red. The host didn’t wait for her to recover, before jumping on her hesitance with glee.
“Oh that’s right! You can’t remember!” The host cackled vindictively.
She looked back down to the wheel amidst the demented laughter, and noticed that it had finally started slowing down. The needle was currently ticking past a grouping of green panels, and the woman peered at the words. She was able to read “musical prodigy” and “calm mind”. At least those would be more useful than the grey options.
The wheel looked like it was going to stop at a grey ability that read, “moderately good at tying knots”, but at the last second it clicked over to the only blue space on the wheel.
“Wheel upgrade, spin again.”
The colors and words on the wheel shifted, blended, and briefly went dark before it lit up again, having undergone a drastic change. The grey and green spaces were replaced by blue and purple. Instead of a single blue panel, there was a single gold one.
The woman’s eyes darted up to the man, who’s posture had become strained, but he quickly flicked back to his normal domineering bearing.
“Well. It looks like this old crone will get something a little more rare, but will it matter? Even a smart pig is still a pig. Well go on, spin it again.”
She repeated her previous action, and sent the wheel careening around again. While the host continued to mock her, she tuned him out and focused on the wheel, trying to pick out the words as it spun by, but had trouble picking out specific characters. The wheel had a hypnotic quality to it as it spun, drawing her attention but not letting her focus on any one aspect.
Before long the wheel had once again slowed, and the pin was sliding over and almost past the only gold tile, pressing up against the outer edge of it.
The needle bent, and seemed like it was going to tick over to a purple tile that read, “begin next life with one wish”. She thought that wouldn’t be bad, but the force of her spin wasn’t able to push itself out of the gold panel. It once again read, “wheel upgrade, spin again.”
“FUCK!” The host screamed once the needle settled, causing the woman to jump. Her eyes snapped back up to him and she took in the overbearing silence and tension that filled the stage. The host froze for a moment, before slowly turning back to the abyss. With what sounded like forced joviality, he said, “Well it would appear that she was given ‘great at spinning life altering wheels’ in her previous life.”
Two loud clacks burst from the abyss, but other than that it was completely silent. The woman did not speak. The host turned to her and said, “Well?”
She looked down at the wheel in front of her, and she realized that she had missed its transformation. The separate spaces on the wheel were now all brightly glowing gold or red. The spaces were also much less in quantity, having gone to what she would estimate as thousands down to a few hundred.
This made the words on each tile much easier to read, and she urgently scanned the new abilities. While she didn’t understand all the terminology, she did immediately realize that they were amazing. No matter what she spun, her next life would be vastly different to the life she had lived previously.
She looked back up to the host, and gave him a big smile. “Are you having fun?” she taunted. She was feeling good, her fear at the situation, the host, and the abyss having faded to the back of her mind.
Well maybe not the abyss. She mentally corrected.
The host’s posture visually tensed, giving his wide smile a somewhat feral look to it. She looked at his hand clenching the old-timey microphone, and saw that his fist was clenched so tightly that the metal on the microphone had begun to dent.
“Just spin.” He hissed.
Not wanting to push her luck, she spun the wheel yet again. As it spun, she looked at the potential abilities with excitement. Why wouldn’t she, when she could be starting her life with “stop time without aging”, “plant growth”, and “true prophecy”?
She held her breath. The obnoxious music that played when the wheel spun earlier was absent, and no sounds were coming from the host or the abyss beyond the stage. The only sound was the needle clacking against the edge of the wheel as it spun.
Finally, the wheel came to an abrupt halt, stopping directly in the middle of one of the red spaces. It read “Ecdysis”. A moment later, a blue window popped up in front of the woman’s face.
As soon as she finished reading the message, another replaced it.
She glanced up to see the host, wheel, and abyss dissolve into small motes of golden dust which swirled together and blue off into the distance. She thought she heard the host swearing but as she looked around, she realized that she was completely alone and surrounded by darkness. The only light present was the faint blue glow of the system message.
The woman idly wondered what the message meant by ‘starting vessel’ as the system was calculating. Clearly the ability she had gotten was powerful, and she couldn’t help but feel thankful to it that she didn’t have to be around the host or whatever lurked in the abyss beyond the stage. While she was still floating in darkness, this one felt… empty. Safe.
Her thankfulness did not last long, however, as another system message ballooned into her vision.
“A snake?!” The woman yelled, her mind reeling. “You’re telling me I’m going to be a snake? Are you kidding?”
Unfortunately, the next system message did not answer, or even acknowledge, her outburst.
This is insane, the woman thought, I couldn’t even live a good life on Earth! How am I going to- Her thoughts were cut off as the next message appeared, and her perception faded to black.
