It began with a buzzing drone. Sylas was in darkness and he felt as though there were over a thousand bees behind him, slowly approaching. Accenting it was the screeches of fax machines and the beeping of airplane intercoms. All of which repeated endlessly, as it continued to layer on top of each other. The buzzing got closer and closer. The screeches exploded. Then it stopped. Sylas could only hear the soft breathing of some entity behind his ear.
A chill fell over him. He could not move, he could not see, he could not think. He simply felt everything. He felt as though his entire body was dipped in some kind of slimy solution. It was like he had just woken up with a cold sweat, but the actual sweat just wasn't there. He had an itch all over, like tiny mosquitoes biting every nook and cranny.
[Calibrating…]
[Entity: Sylas Peters - Species: Homosapien - ID: #116,103,742,069]
Suddenly, Sylas felt his lungs fill with water. He gasped for air, his body convulsed.
[Calibration Complete]
Light returned to Sylas's vision. He saw himself, blood dripping out of his mouth, his skin gray, and dirt covering most of his body. He felt a force slowly reeling him backwards. He stretched his arms out as far as he could before he could start feeling pain. He could not reach his body. A pile of dirt flew and landed on top of his face, covering it completely. His eyes widened.
He wanted to scream, but he felt his mouth being sewn shut. A muffled screech bombarded his ears. Followed by a massive tug, pulling him back. As Sylas flew back, he saw his body getting smaller, and the surrounding area of where he was being buried came into view. It was in the middle of an unknown forest. Large gusts of wind accompanied him as he felt himself crash through a glass wall. He blinked, then found himself in outer space looking down at Earth. Moments of appreciation and longing passed. He watched as a black skull made out of mist consumed the Earth.
[Soul of Sylas Peters. Welcome to the Good Loser System.]
"Good loser?" Sylas was unsure if he was thinking this or saying this. He attempted to deduce which it was, when a brown spotted moth landed on the tip of his nose. Sylas crossed his eyes to look at it. It grew a human mouth and stood up on two of its legs.
"I've seen your death." The moth said with a deep glitchy voice. Its teeth were stained piss yellow.
Sylas felt another powerful tug reeling him backwards. As he flew backwards once more he heard a musical accompaniment. Jazz, rock, pop, breakcore, dubstep, and more. As he flew past Mars, the moth split itself in half, the halves then regenerated the other half, creating two separate moths. Both moths started harmonizing with each other, singing an arrangement of popular songs and nursery rhymes from across all of human history. As he flew by Jupiter, a long red dragon flew alongside him. Sylas looked at the dragon, it smiled. The singing moths duplicated again.
The two new moths began speaking in unison. "Sylas Peters. You are being reincarnated." They both hopped off of Sylas's nose and duplicated. The four moths hovered around Sylas's head, taking turns to dive near his ear to speak. He had passed Saturn.
"You'll begin at level 1."
"As the future Queen of Demons."
"The Devil of Dracaelfia."
Sylas had passed Uranus.
"Your first quest: Say your name." When the moth uttered the final syllable of its sentence, Sylas stopped. He was next to Pluto. All of the moths had stopped making any noise. They stared at him.
"Uhm. Sylas Peters?" Something said.
A moment of silence. The moths split in half, then duplicated. Followed by every moth duplicating again. They continued to duplicate until there were enough of them to recreate the shape of the black skull Sylas saw earlier. The skull made out of moths, blew a soft wind.
BOOM
The moths dispersed as the black misty skull rushed towards Sylas like a living train, it swallowed every planet in its path. Once it reached Pluto, Sylas was finally pushed back, glass shattered behind him. As he saw his solar system disappear in the darkness of space, lights from other suns began overwhelming his vision. He was hit with a white flash, as the moths caught up with him and began screaming. It reminded Sylas of the screams of zombies in a game he once played. He then heard the chugging of a steam train, followed by the whistle of one. A flash of white washed over him as a deafening explosion blew his eardrums out. Everything was muffled. He saw a rainbow that curved and contorted into a rollercoaster of the light spectrum. Glass shattered behind him again. The moths that flew near him began growing randomly, some large and some small. Then they began stretching, like a TV glitching and stretching the image on screen. They glued themselves to him.
Finally, Sylas forced his mouth open and yelled, "Help me!"
Silence arrived. He had shut his eyes. When he opened them, he found himself naked on a golden floor. He had no injuries, the scars on his legs remained. Mist covered the ground of the room he found himself in. As he laid on his back, he took a deep breath. He looked at his right hand, no glass shards punctured it. "Huh? Why would there be glass shards?" He said as he got up.
"Where am I?" There was glistening mist as far as the eye could see. The walls of the room were pure white.
[You are in God's room.]
He jumped. He looked around and saw no one around him. "Who said that?"
[It is not a who, it is a what.]
"What said that?" He said, grabbing his head.
[The system. I am the system.]
The system's words came into his ears as though he was recalling them by memory. Though it was the first time he ever heard the System. The voice was an amalgamation of familiar voices: his mother, father (which stuck out the most), Mark, Valentina, May, April, and others he could not recall the name of. "Who are these people?" He thought, he felt as though he knew them, but their names and relation to him is all he knew of them. He didn't even remember the feelings he had for them.
[Are you ready?]
"Ready for what?"
[Your tutorial quest.]
"I guess? Do I even have a choice?"
Silence. "Yes." He said.
[Starting your tutorial quest.]
[Would you like for me to read the description?]
"Yes."
GONG!
An entity appeared before him. It had a large body that filled up his field of view. Its face was small, it had no nose, mouth, or pores. The face reminded him of a tragedy mask. What emotion did it have, he thought. Its eyes were twice the size of its head. The beady eyes were pitch black, with a tiny circle in the center that were assumed to be its pupils.
[An entity appears before you. It carries many names. You know of its false names, Maat and Minerva. It beckons you to stare. Tutorial Quest: The Blind Staring Contest.]
[Win the staring contest: 0/1]
He rubbed his eyes.
[3]
He gulped.
[2]
He kept them closed.
[1]
He opened them. The entity before him had changed. The beady eyes remained the same. It didn't look human. It had all the curves and structure of one, but it lacked a crucial detail. He could not deduce where it was at, as he could not move his eyes. It shined, which strained his eyes, but it wasn't enough to make him blink. It then got closer. There was no movement that he could have tracked, it just simply slowly moved away. Perhaps he was moving, he thought, like the force that pulled him to this location. Where was he coming from? Who was he? Its eyes widened, or the better way to describe it would be, its pupils rotated clockwise like a hatch opening into an underground bunker of sorts. Within its pupils were a starved man and woman. Blood poured out of their eyes like waterfalls. Their mouth agape, they held onto the outer parts of its eye like a ledge. They stared back. He resisted the force that pushed his eyelids shut. His upper lip curved, his chin wobbling, his nose twitching, his brow squeezed together. Sweat ran down the side of his face as he felt a wave of heat brush past him. His eyes were dry. His throat twice as much. Had he coughed at that moment, sand would rush out. He felt needles puncture his fingertips. His eyes became bloodshot as he let out a scream. He closed them.
By the time he opened them again, the entity had disappeared. The dryness of his throat and eyes were gone. His fingers, normal. He fell to his knees. He didn't touch the ground, but rather felt the touch of a soft pillow. No, it was more of a human. He let his head rest on the human's shoulder.
"Sylas?" The soft voice reminded him of his mother. He looked up. The entity in its original form stared at him. This time its face had grown a mouth.
CRACK!
The mouth detached itself from the featureless face, and fell to the ground. Its pupils disappeared, red vein-like strings appeared from the corner of its eyes to the center of each eye. It threw its head back, held Sylas, then launched its head back at Sylas then screamed. "Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiillleeduh!" Spit, acid, water, and sludge flew out of its mouth and covered his face.
[Commencing Reincarnation.]