The Dark Lord of Crafting

After I got out of prison, the first place that gave me an interview was a Subway. They needed someone who could work during school hours, and I needed to tell my probation officer that I had a job, so it was a win for everybody.

The owner was extremely chill, and everybody ate more of his food than we were supposed to. We didn’t say anything to him about it, and he didn’t say anything to us about it. Once I got used to being on my feet all day and I knew where everything was, it was one of the easiest jobs I’d ever had. Things could get crazy during the lunch rush, but I could have made the subs with my eyes closed.

The only thing that would really get to me, aside from the laziness of the teenagers I had to work with, was the customers who were especially particular about their sandwiches. Subway is a weird place. I don’t know of another restaurant where you can customize your order as thoroughly as we did there. Or maybe you can do it anywhere, but most people would never think to behave that way anywhere else. Regardless, the business attracted persnickety customers like a Buffet attracts health code violations.

This isn’t putting the sauce on the side. That certainly happens, and fine, whatever, I’ll put your sauce on the side, or cut your tomato slices in half, or in the case of one grumpy old man, cut a single slice of jalapeno into quarters to spread across the sandwich. Great, keep it moving. But some days, you get those people who genuinely seem like they are being wildly specific out of spite.

One night I was closing with a couple of teenagers. Ben and Andy were okay as long as you didn’t expect too much from them. We could joke around a bit, they would help when it got busy, or when it was time to close, and otherwise, I ran the place myself. There was no manager at night, unless you counted me, and I really didn’t count.

It was a slow evening, my favorite kind, and they were tossing a bread knife back and forth.

"Hah," Andy said, "I almost got you."

"It poked my palm. I felt it poke my palm." Ben squatted down to pick up the knife and flip it back to his friend. It spun in the air, and Andy caught it half on the blade and half on the handle.

"You’ll never beat me," he said. "I am the god of this."

It wasn’t a very sharp knife. After a thousand sandwiches or so, none of them are. Still, I had declined their invitation to join in the fun, and when the doorbell rang, I slid down off the prep table where I was sitting and went out to the front. It was only one guy, tall and bald, and probably about seventy. His clothing was bulky, like he had on a flak jacket under his shirt, and that was odd. It made me think of somebody strapping a bomb on themselves in a movie.

I said nothing. If you think someone has a bomb strapped to their chest, there’s no reason to antagonize them.

"I’m going to have two sandwiches," he said, "and they’re going to be exactly the same."

"What can I get for you?"

"I have a coupon." He showed it to me. "Do you honor these coupons?"

It was a buy one footlong get one free coupon, the bane of every franchisee. Not that it affected me, but I liked the store owner, and I knew he made zero money off of these sales. The idea behind coupons is that it brings new customers in, or they come in for the coupon and buy other stuff also, but in practice, you end up getting a lot of people who only buy the deals, so it just erodes the profit margins of the stores while corporate still gets to take its cut off the top. Also, coupon people are some of the most particular about their sandwiches, and I could already tell I was in for it with this guy.

"Yeah," I said, "we take them."

There’s always a bit of a litany with every customer. What kind of bread would you like? What are these going to be? What cheese would you like? Will it be toasted? I’d gone through the list so many times that I didn’t really know what I was saying, my mouth just went through the formula so I could think about other things. I was supposed to see my PO the next day, and he was alright. He’d never given me any problems, but I expected a drug screen, and that was always an ordeal. It’s not that I was doing drugs, I just had a shy bladder, so I needed to drink a bunch of water and wait until my kidneys hurt to pee in a cup in front of an officer. Still better than prison, but not my favorite morning activity.

Two Subway clubs. That was turkey, ham, and roast beef with provolone cheese. Not toasted. I slid them down to the vegetable line, and he started giving me instructions.

"Okay," he said, "first I want tomatoes, pickles and lettuce." I grabbed the lettuce, and he stopped me.

"No, it needs to be in that order. Tomatoes, pickles, and then lettuce."

"Okay," I said, and put it the way he wanted.

"Put a single line of sweet onion on the vegetables, not on the meat."

I did.

"Now put cucumbers, and then olives, on top of the cucumbers."

I did.

"Now salt and pepper, and oil and vinegar, and a single stripe of mustard."

"Sure thing." I splashed it all on there and started to close the sandwich so I could cut it, but he stopped me again.

"No. You have to put some lettuce on top. It needs lettuce on top." It already had lettuce on it, but I didn’t feel like pointing that out, so I did what he said and he let me finish and wrap that one up. There was something off about the guy. Aside from whatever was under his shirt, he had really deep circles under his eyes, and he kept twitching his nose like he was about to sneeze, but he never did. I could hear the teenagers laughing in the back, and I wished I had gotten them to come out front instead of me.

"The second sandwich is exactly like the first," he said, and waited, like he expected me to have memorized his formula.

"What would you like on there?" I asked, and he twitched his nose a few more times, but then he went through the whole thing again, in precisely the same order. Once the second sandwich was wrapped, I scanned his coupon, and the computer shot up an error.

"Oh," I said, "it says it's expired."

The man’s face froze. "You said you would honor the coupon."

"I’m sorry," I said, "we take coupons. But this one expired last month. The computer won’t accept it."

"It’s not expired." he leaned forward over the counter, his eyes wide. "I just got it in the mail."

I looked at the scrap of paper more closely. Sometimes the computer did weird stuff, but in this case, the program was correct. The coupon was even older than I had thought. It was from last year. It looked like something that had been dug out of the trash. I scanned it again for show, and the same error message popped up.

"It won’t take it," I said. "I’m sorry."

"You won’t honor it?"

What a crazy turn of phrase that is. Honor the coupon. I always felt like that was an oddly formal way to talk about discounts. I guess on some level coupons do represent a kind of promise, and you honor promises, so there’s a logical connection there, but in this case, the offer was void. There was no promise to be honored. It was possible for me to override the computer and give him the free sandwich anyway, but I wasn’t going to. We weren’t supposed to do that, and anyway, I didn’t like the guy. Even if he got so angry that he left and never came back, that was fine with me.

"It’s expired," I said again.

"Very well." His voice had changed. It sounded like he was using some kind of synthesizer. "You have broken your compact with me, and you will suffer the consequences."

I just looked at him.

"Do you not want the sandwiches?"

Then his shirt burst open, and it was like his chest was made of lampreys. Circular mouths with bright little teeth, more than I could count, all on the ends of long, slimy bodies with pinkish, human skin.

It was worse than a bomb. Way worse. I had about two seconds to stand there with my mouth open before the lamprey things snapped out and latched onto me, cutting through my Subway shirt like it was paper, and scissored their way into my body. He grabbed me by my shoulders and pulled me across the counter. It hurt like nothing I had ever felt before, but it was over pretty quickly. My last thought was that I hoped he at least ate the teenagers too.

***

Absolute darkness.

As a lifelong atheist, the only thing I found surprising about oblivion was that I was still around to experience it. The memory of my death was still fresh in my mind, but it lacked the visceral punch of trauma that should have come with being devoured by a creature out of H. P. Lovecraft. While it was happening, I was terrified, but it felt far away now.

Floating in nothing, being nothing but an awareness of nothing, was disorienting. Maybe that disorientation was preventing me from being properly upset about what had happened. Had a servant of the Elder Gods killed me, or was I suffering from a malignant brain tumor? Was this what comas felt like? If being in a coma meant being trapped in interminable darkness, that really sucked. I knew I wasn’t hallucinating. People have a crazy idea that hallucinations are fully immersive experiences indistinguishable from real life. They are not. People who hallucinate can think the television is talking to them, or see their dead grandma or something, but no one goes full Jumanji.

Gradually, my personal oblivion solidified into a chair. I was sitting on a chair in a realm of infinite darkness. That was…better?

"Mortal! Behold!"

The darkness split like the dawning of the universe. I heard ringing bells, and babies crying, and maybe a wombat, and I was no longer alone. There was a girl, and she was sitting on a plain wooden chair just like mine.

She had dusk blue hair and huge, glowing cat eyes of the same color. Her face was a perfect oval, a perfect everything, with a dainty nose and full lips and skin that looked like it had been AI generated with prompts in all the right places. Her dress was something a movie star would wear to the Oscars, but also somehow comfortable and kind of simple in the most elegant way possible.

I mustered up my best game. "Hello?"

She smiled at me, and my heart almost stopped. My spirit heart? Soul ventricles? I’d played the role of a simp more often than I would like to admit, and I could easily see myself developing a pointless and unrewarding relationship with this woman, assuming I wasn’t dead and I ever saw her again after whatever this was.

"Hello, William," she said. "Do you know where you are?"

"No?" I ventured, and then before she could say anything else, I went on. "Well, I don’t know, but this feels like the beginning of an isekai. Like, I just watched this anime called Konosuba something something, and you actually look a lot like the goddess that the main character met after he died. So…yeah."

She sat up in her chair. "Perfect. That is what’s happening. This saves me having to explain. Thank the Source for anime."

Well, this was crazy, but it was a relief to know I wasn’t in a coma.

"Does everyone who dies get isekaied?"

"Oh, no," she leaned forward, and I had to make a mental effort to pull my eyes back up to meet hers. "Transmigration like this only occurs under special circumstances, and if you agree to participate, I’m going to have to ask you to promise me something."

"Agree? You mean I don’t have to be isekaied?"

"Uh-uh. You could go to the regular afterlife. But it’s pretty boring there, if you ask me."

"So I can’t go back? I can’t have my old life again?"

"Nope," she said, "It’s forward or nothing, I’m afraid."

"If I get a second life, when I die, will I still get to go to the afterlife?" Now that I knew I had an eternal soul, or whatever this was, I didn’t want to risk losing it. As for not being able to go back, I was going to miss my family. They were awesome. But I’d significantly messed up my life with the whole prison thing, and the way things were going, it looked like Subway was as good as it was going to get for me. If I had to die, these were pretty much optimal circumstances.

"Yep. No problem at all. Whenever you leave the other world, you’ll come back to a place like this, and you’ll go on your way like you would have if you had died under normal circumstances.” She straightened up. “But like I said, if you want to do this, you’ll have to promise me something."

"Okay," I said. "What do I have to do?"

"Great!" She clapped her hands, as excited as a kid about to open presents on Christmas. "All you have to do is promise to fix something for me, and also, don’t tell anyone how you got here."

"You mean the way I died?" The image played through my mind one more time, and I shook my head until I got it out. "I’d rather forget that, anyway."

"That can be arranged," she said, and crossed one leg over the other, “you won’t remember your deaths. So here are the terms: I, Mizu, goddess of the infinite ocean between your old reality and all the others, will grant you a second life, as long as you accept a geas preventing you from sharing the circumstances of your death with anyone, and requiring you to fix a problem of my choosing in the world where you are reborn."

"Why the secrecy?" I didn’t care, I was getting isekaied, which was kind of a dream come true for me, if I was being honest, but I still wanted to know the reason behind it.

Mizu sighed dramatically, and her shoulders slumped. "Well … you see, the way you died … it wasn’t supposed to happen. Part of my job as the goddess of the infinite ocean between your old reality and all the others is to stop things like the one that killed you from slipping through and making messes. If my supervisor finds out, it’s going to be a whole thing, and I really don’t need that kind of noise in my life."

"You have a supervisor?"

"Duh," she snorted. "I told you—the afterlife is boring. If you could compare the reality to any of Earth’s religions, it’s pretty close to traditional Chinese mythology. Heaven is an endless bureaucracy, and I would much rather sweep you under the rug of another world than have to deal with the paperwork of letting my supervisor know I messed up and let a koroshai into your universe."

That sounded exactly as Lovecraftian as the thing had looked.

"Okay," I said, "I can do that. But how does the geas work?"

“It’s simple. If you actively seek to break the terms, you will gradually sicken until you become incapacitated. If you don’t remember how you die, you won’t be able to tell anyone about it, so that solves itself. As for the task I assign you, as long as you are working toward it, even in the most general sense, the geas will not be triggered. There is no ticking clock, but you can’t decide to abandon the quest entirely.”

“That works for me, depending on the quest, I guess. What kind of world are you sending me to?”

"That depends. There are a lot of options. What video games do you play?"

Was that how this worked?

"I don’t play a lot of video games. Uh…I used to be all about Starcraft. And every once in a while, I get really into Maincraft. Then there was World of Warcraft…now that I think about it, I guess any game with ‘craft’ in the name is for me."

Mizu closed her eyes and hummed. This went on for some time, but I didn’t want to interrupt. She was a goddess. I figured she knew what she was doing.

"Starcraft?" One of her eyes popped open. "You don’t want that universe, let me tell you."

"Wait? Are all video game universes real?" I suddenly wished I had played more of them, or paid more attention to the ones I had played. This was the sort of decision I really would have liked to be more informed about.

"No, not exactly. I’m just using them as a reference to find realities that are similar to something you would appreciate."

"I like fantasy books."

She laughed. "That covers basically everything, but I can work with it." She closed her eyes again and went back to humming, but this round was shorter than the last.

"Oh!" She was so enthusiastic that she hopped a little in her seat. "Do you like the Lord of the Rings?"

That was an almost embarrassingly accurate statement. I had once written an eighty thousand word fanfiction about Arwen taking the One Ring and getting friended by Sauron, but there was no need to go into too much detail about that with the goddess.

"I’ve read them," I said. Smooth.

"Great, you can go there."

"To Middle Earth?" It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about living there before. But that was a setting where the time period really mattered. If I showed up after the War of the Ring, magic would be fading and I’d essentially just be on medieval Earth.

She rolled her eyes.

"I told you, it’s not the same world. It’s similar, but legally distinct."

"So like, magic and elves and an evil dark lord?"

"Yep, all of that."

"Okay, that sounds good, but what else do I get?"

"What else do you get?" Her voice rose in pitch. "I’m giving you another life in your ideal fantasy world. What else do you want?"

She was somehow so much cuter when she got upset.

"Hey," I said as reasonably as I could, "that’s how this works. I get transported to another life, but I have a cheat skill. If I’m just a regular person, what’s the fun in that?"

She flapped her hands at me in exasperation. "Fine, jeez. You can have, ummmmm…Maincraft powers."

"Maincraft powers?"

"Yep, you said you played the game."

I had. A lot. And depending on how the mechanics played out in real life, real second life, that was actually a pretty good deal. I’d spent some time thinking about superpowers and magical systems, and most of them weren’t really attractive in the long term. A lot of the stuff people thought was cool, like pyrokinesis or telepathy, was really kind of limiting. If you could have anything, really anything, there were too many choices to make a sensible decision. Just general sorcery would have been amazing, but that also depended on what systems were available. The stuff players could do in Maincraft didn’t seem all that impressive compared to DBZ style energy arts, but they were more accessible, and I liked the idea of having a power set that would have a lot of opportunities for lateral thinking applications. If I asked for wolverine’s regeneration, would she have given it to me? What if I then got trapped under a rock? Being immortal sounded awesome, but that can get problematic real fast if you don’t have other powers to back yourself up. Still, I had to ask.

“Can I have unlimited, godlike powers?”

Her expression went flat.

“No.”

“What about Planeswalker stuff, like in Magic the Gathering?”

“Think smaller. You will not go into this world as the most powerful being in existence on your first day.”

“Can I be like, a Pokemaster? Or a summoner?”

She thought about it. “This world does not have Pokemon,” she said. “As for summoning, that is possible, but problematic. It would come with severe restrictions.”

“How severe?” I’d played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons in my life, and even run Pathfinder games in prison. That had been an exercise in frustration for a lot of reasons. The Summoner class in Pathfinder, and summon spells in general, were obnoxiously overpowered.

She closed her eyes for a moment.

“The slow corruption of your soul.”

"Maincraft stuff is fine,” I said quickly, “but can I be immortal too?"

"Do you want the Maincraft powers or not?” She was getting annoyed. “I’m a busy goddess."

"Okay." I accepted before she had too much time to think about it. If my abilities really worked like they did in the game, they were going to be pretty exploitable, especially in a Lord of the Rings type setting, which had always been low on useful magic. I was going to build so much cool stuff. That left one more concern.

"I don’t have to start as a baby, do I?"

"What?" She looked genuinely alarmed. "Do you want to start as a baby?"

"God, no. That would be a nightmare. I just wanted to make sure that wasn’t where this was going."

"Nope," she said, "you’ll pretty much just be you, but in a different world, and with Maincraft powers."

I wouldn’t have minded being in better shape if that was an option, but overall, this sounded good. There was a pent-up feeling in the non-air of dark space, and the hairs on my arms were standing on end.

"Will I ever get to see you again?" I asked.

She shook her head, abruptly somber. "If you get strong enough to tear the fabric of reality with your will and word alone, maybe. Other than that, no. When your time on Plana ends, that’s the name of the place you’re going, by the way, you’ll go through the normal channels, and a lesser entity will process you."

Challenge accepted. Now that I knew that it was possible, figuring out how to tear the fabric of reality with my will and my word was going to be on the to-do list, for sure.

"Is this it, then? Are you going to send me there now? What about my quest?"

Mizu stood up, seeming much taller than she had been before, and she crossed the space between us with the steady grace of flowing water.

"That’s right," she said, "this is it." She bent down, and time slowed. I felt her lips brush my forehead, and then she was gone, the chairs were gone, and I was gone. I was rushing across nothingness at a sickening speed.

Then my spirit hit the border of an alternative reality, passed through it like a bullet, and exited on the other side with a bang.