Ticket

Sometimes when you play baseball, the people on the other team try to kill you.
It’s usually some mean bastard of a pitcher throwing fastballs right at your face. Or a batter who’s not aiming for the stadium walls, but right at the center of your chest. A good umpire should stop things like this. But good umpires are hard to come by.

Needless to say, I’ve come closer to death more times than you’d think. Not super often, but enough to know the feeling of the Grim Reaper breathing on my neck.

That feeling was about half as intense as standing within three meters of Half-Sword Dave.
I could feel the hate radiating off of him as he continued to sharpen his blade. Swipe, swipe, swipe went the stone across the glittering edge. With each pass, his ire grew and it felt like I was listening to an executioner sharpen the blade of his axe. 

And then it stopped.

With one final swipe of the stone, one final exhale of breath, Half-Sword Dave put down his sword, stood up, and walked away.

My heart was racing at a hundred kilometers an hour. Gina’s wide eyes indicated she was fairing the same. The whiplash from being at the brink of death to standing there in the woods nearly made me pass out. 

“What? Is that it?” Gina called out. Half-Sword Dave paused and I was about to kill Gina myself. But when he looked back, his once burning eyes were dull and tired.

“In the past, I would’ve gone on long tirades about truth, justice, and Players. Or I would have killed you,” Dave said with an eerie grin. “But I’m an old man now. And I know a lost cause when I see one.”

He resumed walking to his camp, back to bed, and now I saw the weight of his gait, the strain on his joints. This was a man who had lived too long and seen too much.

“Best of luck with whatever it is you’re doing,” he said without looking at us. “But whatever it is, quit bothering me.”

He retreated into his tent. He closed the flap door like a curtain closing on the final act. 

Gina looked at me, her face half-lit by the still-burning campfire.

“Well,” I said. “What now?”

“We set up camp.”

“Camp? Where? Why?”

“So we can rest here and try again tomorrow.”

Her words didn’t register at first.

“You heard the guy, we’re not gonna bother him anymore! What good would it do us? At best he would ignore us and at worst, I don’t want to even think about what would happen.”

“Coral’s visions are never wrong,” Gina said. “I trust her and her abilities with my life. With your brother’s life. If we’re supposed to be here, then we’re supposed to be here.”

She set her pack down and laid out the camping materials on the ground, as if the conversation was over. But I knew there was no point in arguing just yet. I squatted and helped her set up the rest.

“I wonder why he was so mad,” I said. I didn’t even mean it as an actual comment. It was a stray thought that exited my mouth on a whim. 

Gina, holding a few sticks to start our own campfire, sighed.

“It’s a long story…”

~⚔~

Morty also saw the scythe pass through the door like his own did no less than an hour ago.
“Quick, play dead!” he said.

Chouji did not do that. That would be silly, and Reapers could probably tell if you were faking it anyway. Instead he pretended to be asleep. Lying still with his eyes closed, Chouji felt a little relieved. Being awake was quite the strain. Now the morphine could do some more of its magic.

The other Reaper stepped into the room. Unlike Morty’s clumsy footsteps, this one’s were inaudible. Chouji didn’t even know that the other Reaper had entered until he spoke.

“Oops. Didn’t know you’d be here.”

Chouji couldn’t see it, but this Reaper was on the taller side and also on the rounder side. He had square-rimmed glasses that sat on a wide nose. His bald head glistened in the stagnant lights of the hospital room. He still had hair, but it was graying and relegated to the sides and back of his head. His suit jacket and trousers were a matching gray. Were it not for his scythe, he would pass for an average Japanese salaryman. In the past, he was one.

“Oh, hi Shimada.” Morty gave him a little nod.

Shimada cleared his throat.

“It’s Shimada-senpai,” he said.

“Huh?”

“We’re in Japan, and I’m Japanese. And I got more experience than you, so you oughta call me Shimada-senpai.” He tapped the ground with the butt of his scythe, which would have been threatening of Morty didn’t also have a scythe.

“Um, okay… Shimada-senpai.” Morty blinked. “Sorry, but I think I’ve got this one. So you can… uh… leave…”

“Boss ain’t gonna be happy about this,” Shimada said, readjusting his glasses.

“I know!” Morty said. “I know. That’s why I’m here. I gotta redeem myself. Prove that I’m worthy.”

“Buddy, I think you’ve proven enough. But if you insist.” Shimada gave a small bow, turned on his heel, and exited.

A few beats passed wordlessly.

“Okay, you can open your eyes now,” Morty said.

Chouji’s eyes, freshly rested, settled on Morty’s face with newfound frustration.

“Great,” Chouji said. “If you don’t reap me, someone else will.”

Morty looked a bit like he was about to cry, but that was true from the moment he entered the room. But now his creased brow got even more folded up.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t expect others to come so soon, I thought we still had a week,” he said.

“A week?”

“That’s when your ticket gets escalated.”

Chouji was no stranger to strange words in strange orders. That was a key feature of almost all of his hobbies, like video-games and trading cards. But even he was befuddled by that sentence. The expression on his face must have been clear because Morty continued. 

“What happened to your brother, which was a tragic accident by the way, is considered by us as a life service provider as bug. And to fix a bug, we open a ticket. There’s lots of tickets, which is why no one’s bothered to reap you just yet. Except for Shimada. But he’s always a workaholic. I think that’s just his Japanese upbringing bleeding through.

Anyways, the point is that if a ticket is left unresolved for seven days, meaning no one’s gone out and righted that wrong, it gets escalated into a full-blown bug bounty. Then it becomes a much high priority. Every Reaper is on the lookout for those. And resolving them also comes with a salary bonus.”

Each word made Chouji’s head squeeze tighter and tighter.

“You said that the ticket gets escalated after seven days,” he said. “Assuming the ticket was opened after you murdered my brother in cold blood, that means I actually have less than seven days until shit hits the proverbial fan. How many days have I been unconscious?”

“Um… two?”

Chouji looked at the ceiling with dead eyes.

“Fantastic. We have five days until we are royally screwed, and we’re already decently screwed.”
Then his eyes widened.

“If Shimada figured out where I was, then so could other Reapers.”

What Chouji hadn’t noticed was that Morty clutched his scythe right under its curved metallic head, staring into the reflective surface and occasionally tapping it. Almost like it was a smartphone with a misshaped screen.

He continued to mutter to himself for a minute, then looked up at Chouji.

“How do you feel?”

Before any quip could leave his mouth, Chouji felt his body shimmer. It started from his toes, then spread throughout the rest of his body like sunlight pouring over the hills of a new day. The foreign sensation was a little uncomfortable, but overall pleasant. His body felt like it was vibrating with slow energy. The various tubes attached to his circulatory system shot off from his skin with a startling amount of force, yet no blood followed in their wake.

Chouji felt at the former injection sites. Nothing but smooth skin.

“Just another little thing us Reapers can do as game mods,” Morty said with a smile equal parts shy and proud.

Chouji sat up, actually sat up this time, and looked down at his body. His extremities were still wrapped in casts and bandages, but they felt whole again. He patted his chest. Nothing was tender or aching. He looked down at his hands. All digits were aligned and accounted for.

And he noticed that he could see properly.

“I don’t need glasses anymore,” Chouji said out-loud. Hearing himself say the words didn’t make them feel any more real. But it was real. He looked at Morty’s face and saw him clearly now, his big blue eyes with long lashes and messy bone-white hair. He also saw him pouting.

“Aw. You looked cuter with glasses,” Morty said.

“Wh—”

“Come on! Now that you’re healed we can get out of this hospital! Here, I’ll help you get out of these casts.”

Morty raised his scythe again, and this time Chouji trusted him. Mostly.