I was whistling to myself for the past few minutes. The few minutes before that I was twiddling my fingers and the few before that… I can’t remember… For the past hour and a half, the idiot Dwarf who thought it was a good idea to attack the boy-toy of five overpowered Raid Bosses had been learning the hard way that yes, he was in fact an idiot. It was a quick yet endless cycle of gutting, bone-breaking and healing and one that was intermittent with the screams of rage and despair of the Five-Clawed Paw and the screams of agony and despair of the Dwarf.

“Enough of this…”

I leaned over and gently kicked Chuu in the back, which was not a smart move on my part. In her grief and fury, she grabbed my leg and hurled me across the room by accident and only realized she had done so to me a moment after I had entered the air. Time entered slow motion, or at least it seemed like it, as I hurtled towards the gore-covered wall.

“Well, fuck,..” I thought as I hurtled in seeming slow motion towards what I assumed to be terrible, terrible damage.

When at last I impacted the wall, I only heard for a short bit of time what sounded like a sack of meat slapping against a hard surface before my vision failed.

…

{RESPAWN IN 24 HOURS, OR WAIT FOR TEAMMATE TO REVIVE YOU}

I was in a pitch-black void with only this damned sign in front of me. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak and were it not for the utter lack of sensory input I would have assumed that I was under the same type of spell that had robbed me of my movement and speech several hours earlier.

{RESPAWN IN 23 HOURS, OR WAIT FOR TEAMMATE TO REVIVE YOU}

“This is both terrifying and concerning. Do I even have a Respawn point in this world? Will one of my Tamed Beings revive me? Why is it that I have no mouth or ears, yet can hear myself talk? Is this what death in this New World is like for everyone? I have so many questions!”

{RESPAWN IN 22 HOURS, OR WAIT FOR TEAMMATE TO REVIVE YOU}

My nonexistent voice echoed off into infinity as the abyss gobbled up the utter lack of sound that my lack of a mouth created.

{RESPAWN IN 21 HOURS, OR WAIT FOR TEAMMATE TO REVIVE YOU}

“God this is disturbing… Rez Plz!”

{RESPAWN IN 20 HOURS, OR WAIT FOR TEAMMATE TO REVIVE YOU}

It was then that I saw a light. It was as though someone was shining a spotlight through the sea from above. There was a calming and pleasant feeling to the light, a welcoming feeling. It was calling me somewhere, and while I wanted to go to the light, I knew deep down that if I did go to it, I would never come back. It was a haunting feeling, and almost subconsciously I began to move towards it.

{RESPAWN IN 19 HOURS, OR WAIT FOR TEAMMATE TO REVIVE YOU}

As I neared the light, I felt something else. It was a force unlike the light, and yet at the same time it was like the light. It was pulling me, no, dragging me in the opposite direction. As I began to be yanked away from the ever-shrinking light above me, I looked below to what was pulling me down.

{RESPAWN IN 18 HOURS, OR WAIT FOR TEAMMATE TO REVIVE YOU}

There was a hand. It was a clawed hand like you might find on a twisted mockery of both human and animal. Its claws were digging into my formless form and as I screamed without a mouth more hands erupted from the growing rip in the void and pulled me towards the rip with ever increasing force. I struggled as hard as I could as a monstrous noise echoed from the rip in the void.

{RESPAWN IN 17 HOURS, OR WAIT FOR TEAMMATE TO REVIVE YOU}

“This is the end…. I am going to Hell…”

{RESPAWN IN 16 HOURS, OR WAIT FOR TEAMMATE TO REVIVE YOU}

The countless clawed hands dragged me into the rip, and the soothing blackness of the void was replaced with the eerie blackness of something familiar. I felt heavy and tired and….

{REVIVAL COMPLETE}

I felt….

There were noises that sounded distant and yet were also very close and they…

They sounded familiar…

WHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAP!

“I’m up! I’m up! Stop slapping me!”

As I shot up after being repeatedly slapped awake, I bumped into the snout of a very concerned Snikty Cut-sew. We stared at each other for a bit before Snikty pulled away and straightened her outfit. I cleared my throat and looked around. Where the hell was I? I wasn’t in the room I had been in before, and I certainly wasn’t in the cramped and confined corridors of the sewers and Rattan tunnels. This place was too different and filled to the brim with some kind of strange contraption that thrummed with a power that made me question if it wasn’t alive.

I was on some kind of flat, bed-like piece of metal and my hands and feet were held in place by clamps. Over my heart was a device that looked like a makeshift defibrillator and on my head was something that Doc Brown might have worn. I could feel the charge of static electricity and magical power in the air and my hair was standing on end. For the second time I was aware of I was completely naked and what made the Frankenstein-like lab that I was in more disturbing were the piles of Rattan corpses that looked like they had died incredibly brutal deaths. Their faces were contorted into silent screams of pure agony and I could almost feel the mixture of pain and hatred that they must have felt in their final moments.

I stopped looking around and noticed that Snikty was now accompanied by Grima who looked even more like a jubilant mad scientist than she did when she had donned her exo-suit.

“It works! It woooooorks! Yes-Yes! It wooooooooooooorks!”

Grima was bouncing around the place like a Rattan possessed. After her victory jig went on for a few more minutes my eyes settled on something on the chair next to me. It was a copy of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein….

“How the hell did that end up in here?”

I looked closer at the book and realized that the author listed was not Mary Shelly, but in fact someone entirely different. The book was still written in English, which was NOT an in-game language, which is what made the fact that the book was in this world even more bizarre. Grima continued to prance about for a few more minutes and didn’t stop until Snikty pulled a lever.

“No-no! Not yet! I wanted to celebrate a bit-little more!”

Snikty was having none of it and kept her weight on the lever, preventing Grima from pulling it back to its original position.

*Ding*

“Nooooooooooooo!”

Grima wailed as the wall behind her opened up and Chuu, Rippa and Skwiik walked out.

“Another failure? We need-need him alive! Stupid-fools! We cannot keep this secret for much longer!”

Rippa was obviously angry at the two of them. Had they tried to revive me several times before? Couldn’t they have used magic?

“Chuu would have gladly revived our Husband-King, but you told Chuu that you could handle it! Stupid Grima! Stupid Snikty! Should Chuu kill-die you like Chuu did those pesky-nasty Dwarf-things?”

Chuu was obviously upset as well.

“Ahem…”

“Maybe Skwiik should investigate-spy on you two. Skwiik might uncover more failures, more mistakes. Maybe treason, maybe more?”

“Ahem!”

“We are disappointed in you two! For two of the Council to fail so bad-terribly is a mark of shame-humiliation that we may never recover from.”

“AHEM!”

The five Rattan females looked in my direction and yelled out in unison.

“WHAT?!”

We stared at each other for a while before I broke the silence.

“For ten thousand years I lay dormant, awaiting the day that some fool would unleash my twisted and divine power! Stupid rats, you have set free a force you cannot hope to deal with! I! AM! OZ! THE GREAT AND POWERFUL! KNOW MY MIGHT AN TREMBLE IN TERROR! THE ONLY WAY TO APPEASE ME AND SAVE YOUR PRECIOUS LOVED ONE IS TO BRING ME THE BROOM OF THE WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST! DO NOT RESIST!”

The five took up a battle stance as they yelled at each other about how reviving me using a machine was a terrible idea and how they knew that from the start. None of them wanted to take the blame for awakening some kind of evil god that had, through the Rube-Goldberg Machine that had harvested the life force of countless Rattan, possessed the body of their precious…

*Snnnrrrkt!*

I was ultimately unable to keep a straight face and my façade gave way as I cracked up. The five realized what had happened and how foolish they looked and as they straightened up I could honestly not tell if they were more relieved that I was fine or disappointed that they couldn’t fight the ‘evil god’ named ‘Oz, the great and powerful’.