Death is apparently unpleasant.

That’s probably no surprise to anyone. After all, not many people want to be dead. When I say that death is unpleasant, I don’t mean the process of becoming dead. No, I mean being dead. Not that the process was much better. It was relatively quick for me, but it still wasn’t a slice of cake. It actually involved cake since the truck was a bakery delivery truck rushing to a wedding, but I never got a slice and what I ate was more asphalt and sidewalk than delightful icing.

I can’t even claim some kind of manly act of bravery rushing forward to save some child's life. No, I was playing on my phone while walking home from the pub after a few too many drinks over the weekend. A midday drinking binge, an untucked shirt covering my belly lapping over my too tight belt, hair disarrayed since I didn’t have a wife or other to direct me to get it cut, a quick squint at the screen while walking through the crosswalk and…splat.

In my defense, I had the right of way, and the driver was speeding, but still. I was hit by a bakery truck while drunk and disheveled and I didn't die with a phone displaying a rather delightful image a mate sent to me. No, I died hours later in the hospital, having survived just long enough to see myself reported on the news as ‘man hit by a truck while looking at porn on his phone’.

If I hadn’t died from a bleed in my stomach that the doctor hadn’t detected I think I would have died from embarrassment soon after.

So here I am. Floating in a grey nothingness.

I say floating, but it’s not really floating since I could be inches above some floor and never know it or falling at thousands of miles an hour and also never tell since I can’t really feel anything. Certainly not gravity.

It’s not actually grey either. It’s the closest I can come to explaining it, but there isn’t really anything either, again, certainly not color. It’s just…nothing.

Unpleasant like I said. Not bad, not good, but it’s like a bit of used gum with no flavor left over. It’s not good by any means, and I don’t really want it, but it’s not actively harming me either. It’s just something there and aggravating enough to get my attention but not actually being something to hold my attention. Grey. Nothing.

I still don’t know how long it was. It could have been hours, minutes, years, decades, seconds. The entire thing was very disconcerting and I could sort of feel myself drifting and I think if it had been years I would have slowly lost myself. It had probably only been minutes, but even minutes of a not-grey grey nothing like that was enough to make it an unpleasant experience I would not recommend. Like that gum, that I definitely didn’t eat on a dare, that was found on the bottom of a chair when I was in elementary school. Definitely not.

My next awareness, beyond the not-grey grey, was blue. A large, square blue window that was hovering directly in my mind. If it had been hovering in front of my eyes it would have been one thing. Odd, but I could have pretended to myself it was some miracle invention of the hospital. A new way to charge far more than was reasonable perhaps. But no, it was in my mind, directly into my head, no eyes, ears, or other sensory devices. Boom. Smack dab into the thinker without any interference.

Worse, it was without words or sentences or number, but it had concepts and ideas all nicely organized and outlined within that mental box construct. How a collection of concepts could be placed on a blue background, bordered by a box, and for these ideas not to be words, I can’t comprehend, but I still comprehended the box and the concepts.

Whoever created this box, and there was no way there wasn’t someone who created this thing -some software monkey reject perhaps- they also included a nice delightful happy sound to go with it. Somehow they included the mental construct of a joyful signaling sound but did so without sound at all. They included it in the box. A happy sound, without sound, in a blue box, which wasn’t blue, filled with words, which were not words. If I had eyes they would have been crossed.

Ding!

Congratulations on your birth.

You have been born as a ‘Dungeon Core’.

Go forth and level, explore, and live!

Worse than the horrible mental intrusion and the confusion it caused was the disconcerting feeling like the entire thing had been built in a very low budget way. The message itself felt like someone had constructed it with loving care, presenting it with every bit of nuance and articulation they could…then directly inserted the concept ‘Dungeon Core’ in an obvious cut and paste job. It felt like a form letter that someone had just inserted a keyword in when needed. It was like listening to a warm message of welcome said in your mother's voice but when she says your name it sounds like an old computer. It’s more horrific than if the whole thing had been done by the computer in the first place.

So, not-blue blue screen, happy sound in my brain inside a box that doesn’t exist, wonderful voice that scared the beer that was no longer inside me out of me…and then I’m looking in every direction at once while I’m inside a delightfully large cut gem, and stuffed inside what can only be magical lines of force, while a pimple-faced young man is running his hands over my surface.

Dying had not been what I had expected, death hadn’t lived up to my admittedly low standards, and now birth was also feeling particularly unpleasant, the fact that those three came in the wrong order didn’t make me feel much better about the whole thing.

“Yes! Yes! It worked! You are just lovely! I’m going to pass for sure.”

Ok, it sounded nothing like English or French, the two languages I liked to pretend I understood despite what my grades had said about the matter. I was hoping though, even though I didn’t actually speak the language, and even though I wasn’t sure how I was actually hearing it - gems not being well known for listening - I still hoped I was right about what he was saying. Whatever he was saying I just wanted him to stop stroking my facets, it was causing me to freak out in more ways than I normally would when some guy started rubbing on me and talking about how lovely I was. Something inside my…brain? Stone? Structure? Something…whatever I was using to think anyways, whatever it was, it came with instincts, and those instincts were saying that I should kill this guy using every method possible. Normally when a buddy at the pub got a bit handsy after a few too many drinks, a simple chuckle and shove was enough to move on, but no, my instincts were screaming at me and telling me in no uncertain terms that I needed to kill, destroy, maim, and eat this pimple faced groper.

Not my normal experience in any way.

Worse, I couldn’t do a thing to him. The stone room I was in came with odd glowing lines of force that kept me from doing anything to him, not that I could imagine what I was able to do as a gem, but every instinct was saying that without those lines of force I would definitely be doing something.

After a few more mutters and lightly rubbing my top facet, he moved from the room leaving me laying on the top of a stone pillar in an odd stone room. I say ‘laying’ but the truth was I was strapped down by the glowing magical lines of force. What was strapped down? No clue. But it was most definitely strapped down.

I looked around, again with what I had no idea, but I looked around the room. Dark grey stone with tiny bits of quartz stuck in it, covered with a lightly glowing structure that was carved into the stone. Intricate glyphs that connected every square inch of the room with structure. Some glyphs were deeply carved and connected the lines of force to me, while other glyphs were smaller and seemed to connect the larger glyphs together. The only area not covered in my magical straight jacket was the plain wooden door the pimpled groper had rushed out.

After a few minutes looking around and trying to figure out what was going on and what I was going to do, I had only one clear shining idea.

I thought ‘shit’ really hard and sulked.