It had been a full half-year since I’d taken over Corny’s life, stepping into his shoes, because he was no longer there to fill them.

Considering that I had his face and his memories, and pretty much everything else that made him ‘him’, it felt like it was expected. I paid his bills. I sent cards to his mom and dad on their birthdays.

I helped pay his kid’s tuition. In essence I pretty much was Cornelius Dacre Douglas now. I didn’t mind it, and it’d been so long since I’d been a somebody, rather than just a ‘something’ that I found myself just willingly falling into the role.

I couldn’t forget that the real Corny had died, but sometimes it felt like there was just so much of him left.

So much of him was floating inside of me, mingled within me that it almost felt like his life and death were just question of perspective. A tiny nitpicky, detail, that was lost in broad strokes of my everyday reality.

I’m not sure when it started, but at some point I even started calling myself Corny in my head.

*****

I wandered into the Hunter Association Office almost by accident, it had been roughly three months since I’d last been there.

It was filled with the same ordered, disorder as last time, filled with the sound of ringing phones, and clacking keys, and calls for the next person in line.

My dust up with the Rattler Gang and the Diamond Wolf Cartel that had been behind them was ‘not-coincidentally’ also three months ago. I almost turned to leave because in all honesty I wasn’t hurting for money at the moment.

Without even talking about the looted gear, and equipment, gangsters, (especially the high level ones), tended to have all sorts of lucrative goodies in their houses and hideouts. And before I was satisfied with my job of clearing the issue I hit quite a few house and hideouts.

*****

The only reason I left my house today was because I sort of felt like I had to. The first month away from the wastes had been intended to be some distance and due diligence.

A way of staying clear just in case anyone looked into things. Then months two and three came and went, and as I stared up at my ceiling counting the dots in the tiles and listlessly wondering if I should maybe pop open my laptop or just go back to sleep I realized, oh shit, I’ve become a shut in.

I genuinely couldn’t remember when was the last time I went out to do something that ‘wasn’t’ groceries. I wasn’t depressed or anything. At least I don’t think I was, but I had a feeling that I was slowly losing motivation.

Or maybe I was just finding myself at a stand still. Lacking direction or any connections to this world save the one’s I was borrowing.

I found myself thinking that it might not be the worst idea to just, close my eyes and sleep for a few centuries. I decided it was probably best if I got out of the house before I did anything rash.

*****

I ended up accepting my first hunter request today. I think I might have already explained how the hunter association was strikingly similar to those adventurer guilds in video games.

Besides making sure that the monsters didn’t knock the source towers that kept the subspaces of the inner-territories whole, hunters also did requests.

Mainly generic mmo stuff. Fetch quests, gathering quests, courier missions, escort missions and special subjugations, that sort of thing.

*****

My first ever hunter request was a fetch quest. Apparently some big time so-and-so, had died out in the wastes.

Usually if you die out in the wastes, if you’ve paid the insurance fee and you’re not too far out, they’ll send a retrieval team to pick you up and try to resurrect you.

This guy was big time but he’d bit it too far out for even the boys in rescue and recovery to find. Thus the Association was paying us freelancers to take a shot at it.

*****

“Alright, Mr. Douglas. We’ve got that. All set up. Just had to the location point to get the effort reward.” said the clerk.

Today’s clerk was a redhead. Agnes wasn’t in, she had a parent teacher thing to attend, over at St.Vincent’s.

“Er… Thanks.”

I was lead over to a lobby, where a little girl and an old geezer, were waiting. I might be being rude here actually.

The old man, wasn’t ‘that’ old, maybe late fifties, early sixties at most. And as for the girl, she was probably between fifteen and seventeen. She was just really young faced, and skinny, I guess.

They had a certain disreputable aire to them, which was expected for all hunters, kind of. But theirs was still very raw.

With a single glance I spotted battered, mismatched second-hand equipment and scruffy clothes. Like the kind of gear you’d wear to do yard work, mixed with a bit of what you’d wear to a medieval fair.

Don’t think me a classist. I wasn’t looking down on them or anything, I’m no snob.

I was merely viewing them with the eyes of an operator, like any person would in a game-like situation, like the hunter association pretty much always was. They stank of noob, unreliable and desperate.

The clerk made us shake hands like we were kids in kindergarten. She smiled, sounding surprisingly genuine as she said,

“Alright Mr.Douglas. Meet your new party!”