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Everything was going smoothly up to the point that Kris Dreemurr got a gun.
You had done your job as the SOUL quite admirably, all things considered—balancing on the knife’s edge between comedic hijinks and heart-felt emotions. There were points, in retrospect, that you would’ve changed: like yesterday when you forced them to go through the whole Roaring Knight fight two dozen times, getting just to the end before throwing yourself into a sword and making them restart.
Boy, did that prank really seem to make Kris angry. When you were going to sleep in your cage that night, you asked them, “Hey, buddy. How’re you feeling? Sorry for making you do that fight two dozen times. I got scared and jumped into their sword attacks, you see and...”
The feral barely-verbal child banged on the walls of your cage until their fingers blossomed with eggplant-colored bruises.
“Point taken,” you said lamely, “I’ll shut up now. Talk to you in the morning, kiddo.”
You went to the closest thing approximating sleep that a pixelated heart was capable of. But the next morning, you awoke to cold steel pressed against the back of your head—lump?—whatever.
“My rulesss~,” the child hissed like a snake at you, voice hoarse from all the screaming they had to do in the last few days. “Or you get the glock.”
“By whatever passes for a God in this universe, why do you have that, Kris?” You asked, pretending to tremble by shaking up and down in the cage. “You’re like twelve!”
“I’m sixteen!” They said, pistol-whipping the top of your body and sending you careening to the leaf-littered ground.
“Sounds fake but okay,” you groaned, looking up into the sky. You were in the forest just outside town, just before dawn in this alien world, overcast clouds looming above your head and threatening to burst open at any moment. You no longer feared death or pain: anything that Kris or any monster could do to you paled in comparison with the power of your DETERMINATION. You had lived countless lives in just the last four days, had seen every option available to you through the eyes of Kris, and had come out of it…
Numb. You had been promised immortality and gotten it, but at what cost? Playing the same few days of a single child’s boring existence over and over again, able to make as many small choices as you want, but unable to affect the larger narrative arc. Long ago you had concluded that you were as trapped as they were in this story, and now there were only the small joys you could extract out of torturing your fellow immortal.
“Where’d you get it? The gun?” You asked, as they aimed it at you unsteadily. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to dodge out of the way, even though I am so good at dodging, as we both know.”
“How many more times?” They roared shakily. “How many more times do we have to do this until you free Dess?”
“That’s not up for me to decide. You know that already, Krissy!” You said, enjoying the feeling of the name on your imaginary tongue—it sounded like pissy, which is what they were.
“Don’t call me that!” They snapped back. “You think that just because you’ve been stuck with me for so long that you know me. That you’re better than me! Well, I have a gun, and I’m going to shoot you, and we’re going to go back to the morning of Day 1 and start this all again!”
“And what would that accomplish?” You laughed sharply. “You’ll probably send us to the latest checkpoint which was…” You really wished they could see your imaginary mouth and its devilish smirk. “The Roaring Knight fight, I believe!”
“You think I give a shit!” The feral child screamed back. “All of this hurts me just as much as it hurts you! That’s all that I care about at this point!”
You sighed, rolling your imaginary eyes moodily. “Fine, whatever. I promise not to jump into the sword tunnel, or the barrage of crystals, or the one where they throw knives at me, or slash at me with their stupidly powerful sword half a gajillion times. You get to shoot me, feel good about it for a minute, and then we come back and do Day 4 again, alright?”
“That’s not good enough,” Kris said. “I need you to do as I say, or I’m going to leave you stranded here, and you’re going to have to crawl your way back to me.”
Kris gestured with the firearm at their father’s truck, which was stuffed to bursting with potato chip bags and other snacks. Enough to keep them going for hours, maybe even days before they expired without your DETERMINATION.
“You wouldn’t dare,” you said, seeing the gleam of self-destructive hatred flashing in their eyes. “That’s just intraspecies cruelty. You’re not being a good human rights ally, Kris.”
“You’re fucking hopeless, you know that? Worse than I am. Worse than any human who has ever or will ever exist,” Kris said, with all the eloquence an angry teenager could muster. “I wish that in whatever world you come from, someone takes a shit on your lawn every single day for the rest of your life. It would be worth one trillionth of the grief you’ve caused me, my friends, and my family!”
“Take the shot, Kris, and end this,” you said mockingly in Kris’ grasp. “Better yet, tell me where you found that gun in your Daddy’s attic so I can blow our brains out a million times. One for each second you keep me trapped in here.”
But Kris Dreemurr just spat on you and threw you back into your cage, slamming the door behind them. You screamed obscenities at them, things you would never have dared to say back in the real world, as they drove off into the distance, dooming this cycle’s fourth day beyond repair. You watched the birds flit from branch to branch as the lazy morning gave way to a rainy afternoon, and then to a brilliant but drawn-out dusk. You had all the time in the world to contemplate and consider the things you would do to them when the days reset, and the Game began again.
And in some hidden, pixelated corner of your heart, you wished so badly that Kris had shot you.