When Cinch came to, she was lying on her long green couch.
“Water?” a voice asked, and a glass appeared before her nose. She realized about then that she was extremely thirsty.
Without stopping to think, she grabbed the glass and drank the whole thing. The water was ice cold and refreshing going down her throat.
She sluggishly stood up and rubbed her aching head. “What happened?” she asked the person kneeling beside her. Then she faced him and remembered who he was.
The man from before smiled and said, “you panicked when I said I was going to kill you and blacked out.”
All the memories of what had just happened flooded back. At about the same time, a feeling of exhaustion hit her like a brick and she fell right back down onto the couch again. Cinch tried to work up the energy to be scared of the man, but felt too tired. She told him this.
He nodded. “Yeah...that'd be the sleeping pills I put in the water so you wouldn't freak out before I could properly explain things to you,” he looked genuinely proud of himself. “Looks like it was a smart way to do this.”
She jerked at the mention of sleeping pills, but it took too much energy to do more than that. “You drugged me?”
“Ye...es. And poured some salt in your mouth so that you wouldn't turn down the water the pills were in. It worked pretty well.”
“I'm not going to lie. That's really creepy,” an inkling of suspicion found its way through the exhaustion. “You aren't some serial killer or something, are you?”
He looked puzzled for a moment, and stood. “No. Well...not exactly. I do kill people, but I don't discriminate when it comes to who I kill. And I'm not...a murderer or a killer. See, I'm...a Reaper.”
She gave sort of a half of a snort of disbelief. “A reaper. Like the Grim Reaper or something?”
He clapped his gloved hands once. “Yes! Well...not exactly. I'm a Grim Reaper. Not the only one. Though at this point I guess you could say that I am the only one...”
Cinch mustered a small amount of firmness to her voice. “Stop. Obviously you're going to tell me all about yourself and I can't exactly move from here, so just start from the beginning.”
The man looked at her concernedly. “Are you okay? I didn't put too much of that stuff in the water, did I? I'm not all that accustomed to human medicines.”
Cinch rolled her eyes. “You probably put way too much in the water. But I am too tired to care. Just talk already. That's why you put it in the water in the first place, right?”
“What? Oh. Right,” the man looked at her again. “Are you sure you'll be-”
“Talk.”
He jumped nervously. “Okay. I was trying to kill you and you ran away, but now I need you to come with me because you have my dead boss in your head,” he looked at her face for signs of recognition and probably found none. “No, wait, that won't work...”
“You think?”
“Oh shut up. Let me try again,” he closed his eyes and murmured to himself for a moment. “Okay...”
“This had better be a better explanation than the last one.”
“You're too tired to be scared of Death but not too tired to be sarcastic towards him?”
“Point taken,” Cinch shut up.
“Okay. Explanation. I am a Reaper. It means that I deal death to people on the days that they are supposed to go as dictated by fate. It doesn't mean that they won't go before that; it just means that that's the day that Reapers are supposed to kill them. With me so far?”
Cinch moved two fingers. “Yeah, sure. Keep going.”
“Well, I'm not the only Reaper out there. There's a whole corporation of us who live on our own plane of existence called the death plane. Got it?”
“Your believability factor's gotten a little shaky, but I'll stick with you for a bit.”
“A few months ago, there was a bit of a problem. Well...a lot more than a bit, actually. This one Reaper, named Grene, he killed our boss, Graye, with a weed wacker. Still with me?”
“I'm not an imbecile. Just tell the damn story.”
“Okay, fine,” he rolled his eyes and began to speak more quickly. “This Grene guy took over the company and started telling Reapers to kill as many people as they could, but only ones who weren't supposed to go yet. I thought that was wrong, so I stole the Skull and Crossbones and the Crystal Skull and escaped to this world, where I've been hiding under a bridge, fighting my old coworkers when I find them and killing as many of the people who are supposed to go each day as I am capable.”
“Stop,” Cinch said. The man stopped. “Two questions. What are those things you stole and do you have a name?”
The man looked sheepish for a moment. “Oh, right. My name's Keve.”
“Hello, Keve. I'm Cynthia Shannon. My family calls me Cynthia, but my friend calls me Cinch.”
“Um...the Skull is this,” his right glove glowed for a moment and then the silver scythe from before appeared in it, “while the Crossbones is this,” his left glove glowed and a wooden crossbow with bones carved into the top appeared over his left arm. “They're the weapons to be held by the president of our company, and I just didn't feel like Grene deserved them. I wasn't going to use them, but then I broke my axe while escaping, so I've kinda had to.”
“And the other thing?”
“The Crystal Skull? It's just the thing that tells Reapers who's supposed to die each day. It also beeps when there's a lot of Reapers together, so that helps me protect people.”
Cinch summarized what she just heard. “Okay, so you're going around killing some people and protecting others because your boss was killed. And that has to do with me how?”
“Well...you registered on the Crystal Skull as being fated to die today, so I followed it and was very surprised when I saw how young you were. Then, when you blacked out, my old boss showed up and told me that she's kinda...” he fumbled for the right word, “living in your head. So I need you to come with me so that my boss can help me get things sorted out.”
Cinch stared at him oddly for a moment, then arched an eyebrow. “You know what? I was willing to believe your story right up until there. I can believe that there are grim reapers and that you fought them, and that you have magical weapons and skulls and whatever else, but I can promise you that I'm the only one in my head.”
Is that so? a voice came from the back of her mind. Do not be so presumptuous as to think that you know everything about you just because you are yourself. Things don't always work that way.
“No way...” Cinch whispered. Keve looked at her for a moment, concerned again. “I'm...I don't...you...my...but...”
Oh shut up. the voice surfaced again. You sound like a blithering idiot. Look, I need you to help this poor pitiful example of a Reaper because if you don't, no one will and then you and your race will go extinct. Cinch felt her own eyebrows furrow menacingly at...herself... and we don't want that, do we?
Keve smiled awkwardly. “You okay?”
Cinch smiled weakly back. “I think so...I just need...to...rest...”
She blacked out for the second time that day.
