Lucky Rabbit

Pandy remained tucked beneath Augustus’s arm as he raced through the halls of the palace. He didn’t seem to be going back the way they’d come, but rather moving deeper into the building. Where were they going?

All along, your presence and everything that happened has seemed like one cosmic coincidence after another.

The kinds of coincidences that only happen to god-chosen heroes.

Yet there seems to be nothing special about you at all.

Pandy winced. <Thanks.>

Sorry.

I deal… dealt with many souls.

Many ‘heroes’.

Even with my fairly restrictive requirements.

Which you somehow met precisely, bringing you to me in spite of the fact that anyone born on your planet never should have been released from your god’s influence.

I admit, I was perhaps just a bit… dismissive.

It was only your use of the gacha button that even reminded me of your existence once you were gone from my sight.

I believed it must all be due to your incredibly poor luck.

But when I think about it, nothing truly terrible has happened to you since your arrival on this world.

Pandy thought about her experiences over the past several months. It was true. She’d gotten into situations that seemed absurd even at the time, but she’d always gotten out again. She hadn’t been fired, never lost anything she couldn’t get back, and had even managed to form real relationships for the first time in her lives.

And there’s one thing that has always bothered me.

The prophetic dreams.

Pandy blinked. Not just because Augustus had just emerged into an open courtyard that somehow still seemed to be fully surrounded by pink palace walls, either. <The ones Ismara’s priests had?> The priests that produced the sketches of Pandy Saving the World? Well, the country, but that just didn’t sound as impressive.

Exactly so.

If you were just phenomenally unlucky, what were those dreams about?

How could Ismara have known not only that she would need a Hero, but also what that Hero – or Heroine – would look like?

<Uh, she’s a goddess?> Pandy said, feeling that she shouldn’t exactly need to point this out to another god.

Does it seem like I can tell the future?

Time is linear, though some lines are straighter than others.

Being able to predict the future doesn’t come with godhood.

Being able to influence a world and its inhabitants in order to make it look like you can predict the future does, though.

At least it does if you’re a World God.

<You think Ismara set all of this up?> Pandy was jostled around as Augustus made a beeline for a Cloudmane that stood loose in the center of the courtyard, its pale eyes looking oddly worried. Augustus strode right up to it, grasping the elemental steed’s saddle with his free hand so he could swing them up.

The Cloudmane Strongly Objected to this at first, but a few words from the chancellor and they were up in the air, flying over the top of the palace while somehow also running over an Airy road. Augustus had been right before, when he told her not to look. It was disorienting, and Pandy pulled her head back into his coat.

I think something happened two years ago that forced Ismara to change her plans very, very quickly.

She did something to set all of this in motion, then sent the ‘prophetic’ dreams to her priests before disappearing.

We know…

No, we believe she’s trapped in Thaniel’s heartstone, and perhaps she is, but some part of her is obviously still able to reach out well enough to manipulate events.

Or perhaps just manipulate you.

Pandy thought about the woman she’d seen in her… what, vision? Sure, call it that. The flash of temper when Pandy didn’t think fast enough, followed by the Big Reveal and the gentle smile. Had it all been an act? Just another way to manipulate Pandy? Was Ismara actually one of the bad guys? Did Bryan know? Was that why he hadn’t wanted Grace to go to the temple for help?

But no. Keros was right that Pandy wasn’t anything special. She was, to put it nicely, a bit of a wimp. She’d learned a long time ago that events were never going to go her way, and the more she fought against that truth, the worse things would get. But the one thing she’d honed to a razor’s edge was her intuition, specifically as it related to other people.

Pandy knew which people would judge her as soon as she tripped and fell into a box of open ketchup packets, and which ones would help her get cleaned up, even if it meant they got messy too. She knew which salespeople to go to with insurance claims on her phone, and who would hire her when she was dripping wet and smelled like goldfish, even if they were forced to fire her a few days later.

Ismara was one of the good ones. She was exhausted and overwhelmed, that was obvious, but when a moment came where she could assure Pandy that she was loved, she took it. She didn’t ignore Pandy’s pain in order to push her own agenda. Whatever was going on, Pandy was going to give the goddess the benefit of the doubt.

Rather than following up on Keros’s obvious cynicism, Pandy asked, <What does that have to do with her knowing who my parents are?>

Your former world is under quarantine, Pandora.

How would a god from this world – a god who has theoretically been trapped in a rock for two years – know who sired or birthed a babe from a world where the god doesn’t allow any magic other than their own?

How was Pandy supposed to know? That seemed like a god sort of thing to her. All-knowing, all-powerful, yada yada yada. But she’d come to know Keros well enough to be certain omniscience and omni- What was the other one? Omnimpotence?

Omnipotence!

<Stop reading my mind! I wasn’t talking to you!>

Then stop thinking so loudly.

It echoes in here.

Look, we know – or believe we know – that two years ago, a woman who may or may not have had Ismara’s token – which, I remind you, would make her Ismara’s Champion – asked Ismara to save her children.

Ismara did so, in the process expending a great deal of power, given that one of those children was at least mostly dead at the time.

Even for a god, returning someone to life is not a task to be undertaken lightly.

A Creator God might do so without great effort, but not a Transitional God like me, or even a World God.

Which Ismara technically isn’t, because the contest between her and Zhery has not yet concluded.

So what could she do?

The Cloudmane was descending now. Pandy could feel it in her pancreas, or whatever lay somewhere behind and right of her stomach. Really, who knew studying preserved body parts would be so helpful in describing the sensation of urgh?

<I have no idea,> she thought, bouncing back against Augustus as the elemental horse’s hooves struck the ground. It sounded like windchimes.

She sent a soul from this world to another world for safekeeping.

It explains everything!

Your luck: souls that don’t ‘belong’ in another world often experience strange and unusual events.

Sometimes the world itself seems actively out to get them, especially if the World God isn’t accepting of these strange spirits.

Augustus wrapped an arm around Pandy as he leaped down and began running again. She could feel the pounding of his heart against her side.

<Isn’t your whole job to send souls to worlds where they don’t belong?> Pandy demanded, trying not to freak out as she realized they must be approaching wherever Bryan had been stashed.

We usually have a waiting list of worlds that need heroes, villains, monsters, saviors, and lynchpins.

The gods of those worlds welcome the reincarnated spirits, knowing that their alien nature will change the course of events.

That’s exactly what they need when it becomes clear that they, ah…

Well, that things are not going as planned.

Or perhaps they are going exactly to plan, and the god has become bored.

In any case, that’s obviously not what happened with you.

Pandy squinched her eyes shut. He was just coming right out and saying now, was he?

Ismara stored you in a world where Zhery couldn’t find you, and where time runs much more quickly than it does here.

Then brought you back just in time to fulfill her ‘prophecy’.

I’m certain you were meant to appear as one of the main characters in Gacha Love, which was probably created specifically to tell you exactly what you needed to do in order to complete Ismara’s plan.

She even made certain that your death matched the requirements of a particularly distracted Transitional God.

But she didn’t count on my interference.

<How does allowing Thaniel to die and Lian to become a mass murderer ‘save’ Grace’s children, exactly?> Pandy asked. Augustus was talking to someone, his voice tight and clipped, but she couldn’t focus on his words with everything happening inside her own head.

But they didn’t, did they?

You arrived in time to save Thaniel.

Without his death, Lian has no reason to become a killer.

If you had appeared as any of the main characters in the game, or even a secondary character, as a human, with a name and role known to you, what would you have done?

Honestly? Popped some popcorn and waited for the show to start. She definitely wouldn’t have run off to save a little boy whose death she just accepted as part of the plot of the game. Would she? Assuming she came in as a fourteen or fifteen-year-old, probably not. So Thaniel still would have died, and Lian still would have been on the path to become Killian.

Unless Pandy became Clara herself. As Clara, she would have done anything she could to avoid having to fight murderers and demons. It was one thing to go through dungeons she knew better than her own tiny apartment, but quite another to see one of her favorite characters go full evil and kill people, including one of the main love interests. Pandy-as-Clara absolutely would have tried to stop Thaniel from dying, and since she’d arrived a few months before he was meant to die, and the Reedsley estate wasn’t actually that far from where Thaniel lived, she should have had time to figure out what she needed to do and then do it.

Exactly.

You might have been excited to be here at first, but you’d only really want to live through the romance aspect of the game.

So the most reasonable course of action would be to prevent Thaniel’s death, which in turn prevents Lian’s corruption and his death, as well as the rising of the Demon army.

Then you could go on to Condor, meet all of the boys, pick one, and live happily ever after.

Yeah, Pandy wasn’t certain Ismara had thought that part through. Pandy would have known exactly what to do to woo any of the boys and avoid the worst pitfalls of dealing with the various villainesses, but she didn’t think she actually would have done it. Besides the fact that she still would have been a twenty-seven-year-old on the inside, the little she’d seen of the various real-life love-interests hadn’t been attractive in that way.

Edgar was too stand-offish, and might not actually be interested in females of any description. Kaden was bossy, and Dorian was, well, Dorian. Pandy liked Bastian, but he’d always been more of the little-brother-slash-friend-type than someone she wanted to be with. That might change when she met him in real life, but she didn’t really think so. Still, she would have enjoyed going to school with them and experiencing all of the events and, yes, even the dungeons, just without the murdery bits.

In any case, the point was that Keros was right. Even though Pandy was a limp noodle of a human being in her first life, given the knowledge and magic she needed to do it, she would have at least tried to save Thaniel, if only to stop ‘Killian the Villian’ from ruining the rest of the game with his bloody vengeance. Drawing in a deep breath so she could use the warm, musky scent of Augustus to fortify her against what she was about to do, she thought, <You believe I used to be Grace Conroy.>

Words appeared in front of Pandy, though whether they were confirmation or denial – she could only hope – she didn’t know. Augustus’s hand scattered them as he opened his coat and reached in for Pandy. “You’ll have to walk from here,” he said, pulling her out. His face was stern and set, but she could see the relief in his gray eyes when he saw she was intact. She wiggled her ears just to reassure him further, and the corners of his mouth twitched upwards, just a little.

“Do you have any time left?” he asked quietly as he lowered her to the ground.

Did she? Checking her status, she saw that she did, indeed, have about twenty minutes of human-time remaining. She nodded, then waggled a paw uncertainly.

“Not much, eh?” He was still crouching beside her, and there were people standing behind him. From the little she could see, they all wore long white skirts and sandals, but she couldn’t make out anything else. She nodded again, and Augustus let out a puff of air that blew his tangled hair away from his forehead. “Just follow along, and if you feel uncomfortable at all, stop and wait for me.”

Standing, Augustus turned and ran off, jogging easily down a hall built from rugged stone and filled with people wearing simple, dress-like robes. To a person who’d been abandoned on the steps of a monastery, it all screamed one thing. They were about to enter a temple, and judging by the familiar face smiling down at them from the frescos on the walls, that temple belonged to Ismara.