#overkilled

“Oh, ha ha.” Danny rolled his eyes and unlocked his phone to delete the text. When he opened it, however, the body of the message was completely different.

CONGRATULATIONS!!!

You have been selected as one of the GRAND PRIZE WINNERS of our “Transmigration: Public Beta” Bonus Package! To accept, all you need to do is click the link below.

Note: There are only a few of these prizes available. Hurry to claim yours before they run out!

jfeojaglszf.kysmsh/suslnk

Danny had barely glanced at the text before his thumb was moving to delete it. Then his eye caught a phrase in it and he paused to actually read the strange message. "Beta?" he murmured. As the word exited his mouth, he exhaled a cold mist and something happened in the world around him. Startled, he looked up to see his parents’ Ghost Assault Vehicle just as it swerved up on the sidewalk toward him. He had no chance to wonder how he’d missed hearing or seeing it before it impacted his fully-corporeal, half-human form.

In the sliver of time between the initial impact and when he’d gone under the treads, his grip spasmed over his phone. His thumb slid over the link on the open text message and pressed down before the phone was sent flying out of his grip.

It was installing software even before it hit the ground. Seconds after, it vibrated once more, unnoticed by anyone.

Confirmation Message:

You have successfully claimed the “Transmigration: Public Beta” Bonus Package! We hope you have an enjoyable experience, and please report any bugs to our helpful support staff!

The screen flickered, then went dark. A progress bar appeared. When it had filled, the screen went dark once more before flashing as a bright Welcome screen appeared.

~~~

Danny opened his eyes with a sharp exhale of frost, his hands frantically patting himself down from head to torso.

Miraculously, he found no injuries. The overwhelming pain he remembered had vanished, leaving only its memory. “I’m alive!?” he said in disbelief. “Uh, wait—”

“No, you’re not!” several voices called simultaneously from around him. Yeah, he hadn’t been alive to start with. Then he startled. Who’d even said that?

Danny’s focus shifted from his self-evaluation to his surroundings. He’d appeared in a room that looked a lot like a DMV. Danny was seated in a folding chair in the middle of a row of other chairs. In front of and behind him were rows upon rows of even more cheap-looking, uncomfortable plastic folding chairs.

Most of the chairs were filled with seated people, and sporadically, more people would appear in or vanish from them. In the seat directly in front of him, a girl in purple and black popped into existence, shaking her head confusedly. Her outfit kind of reminded him of Clockwork's, from what he could see of it.

“I’m alive?”

“No, you’re not,” came another chorus.

“Oh maaaan,” she moaned. “I did not want to die today.”

“Yeah, join the club,” snarked someone nearby.

Uh. Were they all DEAD dead? Was that real? Did he just get mowed down like Undergrowth beneath a lawnmower? He—he remembered seeing the vague outline of his parents through the windshield of the GAV.

If he’d looked… what would their expressions have looked like? Was that an accident, or—

DING!

“Now taking RB76745.” The voice sounded like it came from a speaker system. Danny looked up to see a counter beyond the sea of seats, segmented into several sections in large circle. Behind each walled section was a terminal manned by bored-looking ghosts of a variety of species.

Above the counter, mounted on the roof of the building he’d appeared in, was a series of display monitors matched to each section. On the monitors he saw a list of numbers preceded by two letters, and the letter combination differed between every counter. Danny couldn’t see the RB counter; it must be on a side of the ring he couldn’t see from this angle.

Someone’s head intruded into his field of view. A man with gelled-back blonde hair had invaded his personal space, and Danny jerked backward in his seat. The guy was looking down at something in Danny’s hand.

“EM62131, huh?” he remarked. “You’ve got a wait ahead of you.”

Once the man had backed off to his own seat again, Danny took a look himself. In his hand was a slip of paper; a ticket with EM62131 printed on it. Curious, he glanced back up at the monitors and found the section with EM prefixes. The top number on the list was 200 below his.

“Hey, so… where are we?” Danny asked the guy. Danny wasn’t sure if he’d even have any information, but it was worth trying, at least. “What’s the wait for?”

“They’ve been doing overhead announcements every once in a while,” his neighbor replied. “We’re dead. You probably remember that bit. Apparently, this is some place called the Transmigration Placement Center.” He nodded toward the counter. “We’re all just waiting to see where they send us.”

Danny had never heard of this. This must be a part of the zone he’d never explored before. What was transmigration, anyway? Public transportation of some kind? But you didn’t get a choice about where to go?

That didn’t sound like something he was interested in.

He’d just head out and see if he could get his bearings outside the center.

Danny tried to stand up. Something held him in place. Danny tried harder. The pressure increased; to the point where he could no longer move his limbs.

Seeing him strain, the guy next to him winced. “Ah. Yeah, none of us have been able to leave our seats, except for when they call our numbers,” he said with sympathy. “If you stop trying to escape, it should ease off.”

Danny did, then thought for a moment. If he shifted to his human form, he should be able to phase right through the building. Whatever they had keeping him in the chair probably didn’t extend below it. He focused on returning back to life.

Nothing happened. No ring of light; no transformation. Confused, Danny looked down at himself once more and did a double-take.

He wasn’t in his Phantom form. He wasn’t wearing his hazmat suit, just the street clothes he’d been wearing that night. When he pulled a lock of his hair down to eye-level, it was black, not white.

He must really have died. Again.

He wondered why the colors hadn’t inverted this time. Come to think of it, everyone sitting down in the waiting area looked pretty mundane, other than some of the outfits. Not a single person had skin tones he wouldn’t expect from a living person; no green or blue anywhere in sight. They were very… human.

The people behind the counter were more exotic, like what he’d come to expect from the zone.

Anyway, Phantom form or not, Danny still was a ghost. Maybe even a full one now? He lifted up his hand and shifted it invisible. It was just as easy as it always was in ghost form. This must be his new normal, unless he had two ghost forms or something. But he could check that later. For now, he tried to make himself intangible.

He started to slide through the chair easily enough, but then the pressure returned, worse than before. It was almost crushing. He quickly picked himself back up and stopped using his powers.

“Holy shit, kid, what was that?” His neighbor looked impressed, and he’d drawn a few stares from other people as well.

“Uh. Well, we’re dead. And dead people are ghosts. Ghosts can be invisible and go through stuff, right?” Did he still need to hide why he knew this? He probably shouldn’t keep babbling. Danny stopped talking while he was ahead.

His neighbor’s eyebrows lifted high. “Can we all do that?” He lifted his own arm, but when he visibly tried to focus, his entire form started flickering wildly, in and out of visibility.

The guy directly behind him irritably grunted. “Cut it out, Flickers.”

His neighbor obliged with good humor.

He hadn’t managed to get any one area to stay invisible for more than a second, and he hadn’t gone entirely invisible even once. Still, he seemed pleased with his first try. “Thanks!” he enthused. “Hey, let me pay you back. My ticket’s only two people from the front. Why don’t we swap?” He held out his ticket to Danny with a broad smile.

Danny supposed getting to the front sooner would get him answers sooner. He reached for the ticket.

“Have you checked the back of your ticket yet?”

Danny paused. The girl in front of him, the one who’d appeared just after he had, was turned around in her seat. The white lenses of her dark mask looked at Danny from beneath a purple hood. Danny’s neighbor looked annoyed at the interruption.

“No?” Danny responded, taken aback. “Why, what’s there?” Danny flipped his ticket around.

Listed on the back side was a key explaining the meaning of the letters at the front of each person’s ticket number. Apparently, they were abbreviations for various words and phrases.

“They’re tropes.” The girl explained. “Whatever’s going on with this, uh, afterlife, the labeling system they use for it uses transmigration tropes. Which makes sense, if it’s the Transmigration Something Center.”

“Tropes, like themes? What’s transmigration?”

“Sure, like themes, close enough. Transmigration is,” she paused, seeming to struggle for an explanation, “you know, like ‘isekai’ or ‘portal fantasy’.”

Danny looked at her blankly.

She slumped a bit, then straightened, holding up her ticket. “Okay, so mine starts with SH, right? The key says that’s short for Summoned Hero or Heroine. It’s common in stories where someone powerful and influential wants a person capable of becoming strong enough to destroy some great evil.” She paused. “Or great enemy, anyway. Not like I’m an expert.” She frowned at her ticket for a moment, then shook her head and refocused.

“What’s yours?”

He showed her his ticket.

“Okay, EM. Looks like that one is… En Media Res.”

“Oh, I know that one,” Danny realized. One of Lancer’s after school sessions he’d been guilted into paying attention to had gone over it. “That’s when a book starts in the middle of something exciting happening, right?”

“Or a movie or whatever, yeah,” she confirmed. “If that’s what’s going to happen to you when you get shipped off to wherever, that… actually sounds pretty rough.” Her fingers drummed against the top of her chair for a moment as she considered him. Then she shifted her gaze to his neighbor.

“Hey, didn’t you check his ticket earlier?” Her voice was skeptical. “You would have known that, right?”

The guy next to Danny scratched the back of his neck with his empty hand.

“Okay,” he said. “You caught me. I was concerned for you, kid. You look like a stiff breeze could knock you over.”

“Hey!” Okay, that was true. But to be fair, Vortex would also knock this guy over.

“I’m just saying! Anyway, I don’t feel right about leaving you to something like that, so here.” He pushed his ticket at Danny, reaching for the one in Danny’s hand.

Danny noticed, with dawning suspicion, that the guy’s thumb was covering the letters of his ticket. Danny couldn’t quite keep the edge out of his voice when he asked, “What exactly were your letters, Flickers?”

The guy clicked his tongue before dropping his ticket and diving for Danny’s. He leaned over as far as he could without quite leaving his seat. Danny hurriedly moved his hand out of the way. Flickers pulled Danny back toward him with one arm around his neck and grabbed for his ticket with an arm longer than Danny’s own.

DING!

“Now taking PZ52728.”

Just before grasping fingers could close around the slip of paper, the man vanished. Danny whipped his gaze upward to check for the PZ monitor. It was just at the edge of the visible sections. His former neighbor was at the counter, straining against what looked like nothing. He struggled the entire time the employee behind the counter spoke to him, right up until he was swallowed by a swirling mist rising up from his feet. The same mist had swallowed everyone who’d gone up to the counter so far.

“Attention Transmigration Placement Center candidates,” a voice spoke over a PA system. “Please keep hold of the ticket you’ve been provided, as supplies are limited and no replacements are available. This is your notification that transmigrating without a ticket will not improve your placement. It will, however, prevent you from binding with a system on arrival and accessing transmigrator privileges. Thank you for your patience; an agent will assist you soon. Happy travels!”

“Oh boy,” the girl in front of him said. She looked up from the key on her ticket. There was a pause, for a moment, like she was going to say something, but in the end, she turned back around in her seat and slumped into it, head lolling back to look up idly.

Danny frowned and looked at his key.

PZ. Patient Zero.

He wondered what that meant. It felt like he’d heard it before.

Danny was used to being attacked. It happened with depressing regularity. But still.

“Thanks, Purple,” he said. “You really helped me out there.”

The girl bunched the fabric of her cape in one hand and lifted it above the chair. She waved it in the air at him, not moving otherwise.

“It’s eggplant, not purple.”

“Huh,” he considered the outfit. “Color me surprised.”

The girl snorted, dropping the edge of her cape to once again drape down the side of her chair.

“Thanks, Eggplant,” he said. She shot a languid two-fingered salute toward the plain white ceiling.

He settled back to wait.

From somewhere behind him, a breathless voice asked, “I’m alive?”