NOT FAIL to enter this competition
Awww, I was kinda counting on everyone who didn't enter being declared the automatic winners.
Unfortunately, you have to at least say that you intend to enter in order to fail to do so.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Job Experience
He knelt behind a hedge and peeped through the window slightly above his head. It might have been a rather undignified position, especially for someone of his standing, but he tried to ignore the feeling. What had to be done had to be done.
His long black robes stuck to his sweaty skin and gave him the impression that he was being cooked alive. But he didn’t care. Well, he tried not to care. The same held true for the pollen irritating his nose and the inviting screams and laughter from the pool just a house away.
He adjusted the thick-rimed glasses that always seemed to be askew and tried to listen for the thousands time to the voices in the room he spied on but there were too many other sounds and the glass was nearly as thick as that of his glasses. There was the banter of the couples by the pool, the buzzing of the bees, who really did not want him there, and the even more annoying buzzing of the mosquitoes, who had already decided that he was an inviting meal. He swatted at them but they always came back. Once, he squished one of them under his palm just to get rid of it but of course the voice of his supervisor immediately droned through his head, reminding him of his position and of the fact that he only had one try – and killing a mosquito was not part of his job. And the little bugger got up again as if nothing had happened. Of course.
All in all, the day did not go as he had wished and imagined it.
He was told that he would feel it when the right time came, that an indescribable and unmistakable shudder would run through his very bones. That was the only description he got and it was not very useful, especially not for someone just starting the job, who got already sent out on his first mission all alone.
He was just about to fish the silver pocket-watch from the depths of his robes – why did it always slide down to his crotch? - when a shriek and the unmistakable feeling of a handbag connecting with the back of his head startled him from his musings.
“Pervert!” The woman’s screeching was loud enough to get the attention of the pool party and probably the noisy neighbors of the whole street and he had no choice but to scramble up to his feet and run, accompanied by some more hits of a handbag that had no right to be as heavy as it was.
He stumbled over the hem of his robes, fell over the hedge, desperately trying to reach the street and some semblance of safety, and his scythe slid out of his sweaty hands. Somehow, he got up again and then he just remembered running and stumbling for the next few minutes.
Behind the safety of a shed in some random garden he wondered not for the first time how he was supposed to stay inconspicuous in the traditional clothes he wasn’t supposed to remove.
“Screw it!” he cursed between heavy breathes and a coughing fit. Why couldn’t at least his asthma go away now? Wasn’t it bad enough that his eyesight stayed as before or that he was still slightly overweight? It just wasn’t right.
He couldn’t do anything about the things he always considered shortcomings of his body, but there was certainly something he could do about the stupid robes that even shackled his ankles when he just tried to walk in them, let alone run. He dragged the heavy cloth over his head, nearly knocking the glasses from his nose, and revealed shaggy red hair, yellow shorts that had seen better days and a multicolored shirt that would hurt even the eyes of the most fashion-challenged person ever. He considered removing the heavy high boots that were also part of his uniform but decided against it. It was late in the afternoon and the summer sun had cooked the asphalt for the last ten hours now. There was no way he would walk bare-food over the hellish ground.
He took a deep breath and steeled himself for the walk back. Fumbling for the silver pocket-watch again, he started to walk: slow, as was proper for his standing, but missing all the dignity his teachers had tried to install in him.
Even though he did find the watch, he did not really look at it, only letting it wander from hand to hand and finger to finger. He was proud of his skill to let a coin dance on the back of his hand like it was nothing, but even a small pocket-watch is not the same as a two-euro piece. The watch was thicker and the clockwork made the body rounder and heavier. The silver chain entangled his fingers and the trinket slid through his shaking palm. It bounced a few times on the ground – right into a dog’s poop.
“Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn it all to hell!”
Of course he had to pick it back up. There was no way around it. He would lose his job immediately if he lost the watch or destroyed it.
He had no handkerchief or even a rug, though he desperately needed one for his runny nose as well, and so he wiped the silver on the flap of his shirt, adding a distinct smell of shit to an already slightly off-putting odor of sweat. Luckily, he couldn’t smell it. His nose felt like it was filled with a whole field and he was breathing through his mouth anyway.
Also luckily, the watch was not damaged. The silver still shone bright and blinding in the afternoon sun, the lines of the engraving were just as impossible to make out as before, and the single hand of the golden inlay of the face still ticked mercilessly closer to its destination. Which it had about reached.
“Oh, shit!”
He started running again. At least, now there were no robes to make him stumble or angry women behind his back. When he reached the street again he sighed with relief. Apparently the screams of the woman hadn’t been loud enough to drag all her neighbors onto the street. As a matter of fact, it still lay there as empty and uninteresting as before. The houses all looked the same from the front-yards: A hedge, a driveway, a brown door, a white wall. There was nothing to distinguish one from the other. Even the house numbers seemed to look the same through the hazy gaze of the exhausted runner.
He looked down on the face of the clock again. The hand had nearly reached its destination and he just couldn’t remember what number his client was supposed to live in. He had done the research all alone, as was expected of him, he had planned the operation, he had learned the ins and outs of the people living there, but now he didn’t seem to remember any of it.
The hand reached its highest point, where on a normal clock twelve would be, and where one of the many markings on his clock was, but he still didn’t feel what he was supposed to feel. Hadn’t he attuned himself properly to the aura of the man he was supposed to collect? Had he missed a step in his preparations? He couldn’t tell what was wrong, just that something didn’t go as it was supposed to.
He was out of time. If he didn’t reach the client at the appointed moment, everything could go awry, the very fabric of the universe was at stake. At least, that is what his teachers had told him. But the feeling didn’t come, the unmistakable and indescribable shudder just didn’t run down his spine. He started to run again, without any destination in mind.
And then he heard the scream. He was never so happy to hear somebody scream. And it even came from the right window! Finally, his luck had returned and destiny would be able to proceed as it should. And for the first time that day he felt like somebody who knew what he was doing.
With an audible plop he appeared in the room facing the street and the hedge that had served as his hiding spot. With nothing but his will he made himself manifest behind a young woman sitting in front of a computer and playing a game. White headphones pressed down the pink spikes of her hair and blared music into her ears that he only heard as distant babbling. She didn’t react to his sudden appearance.
He stretched his body to the full impressive size of all his 1,71m and intoned with the deepest voice he could muster: “
Do not be afraid, for I am your destiny.” It wasn’t his fault that his voice sounded slightly squeaky and nervous, was it? “Fear not what is the way of all life!” He was so proud of his words. He had rehearsed them over and over. “
I am to be your guide on your path through shadows and...”
Unfortunately, the girl didn’t seem to hear him. At least, she didn’t react right away. Apart from him speaking, the only thing happening was the game going on. The girl furiously mashed buttons on her controller and only when the tiny figure on the screen turned in a circle and fell to the ground in a sea of red, did the girl take a deep breath and sighed. “Not again.”
“
... death. Fear not the way all must take sooner or later, Link, for I am death incarnate.”
The girl wrinkled her nose just as she was about to select
Save and Continue on her screen. “Jimmy?” she called to her dog, “Did you poop in the house again? How often do I have to tell you...” She stopped in the middle of the sentence when she finally noticed the stranger in her room. She hesitated, then she took off her headphones, leaving the game and her dead character behind.
“Who are you?” she asked.
He was a bit peeved that nothing seemed to work as it should but he tried to keep calm and dignified. “I am Death –
I am Death Incarnate, Guide through the Underworld and I am here -”
The girl cocked her head and held up her hand, stopping his speech. “No, really, who are you and what do you want in my room? I’ll scream and my mom has a really heavy handbag.”
“I, I am –
I am Death Incarnate, tasked to come to guide you, Link, through a world of...”
“Wait, wait a second. Link? As in Link, the hero of Hyrule?” A part of her told her to be afraid of a stranger who just appeared out of nowhere in a locked room with a closed window, but she just couldn’t bring herself to fear him. He looked too ridiculous with yellow shorts and black boots and a shimmering scythe in his nervously shaking hands. She started to laugh instead.
“What?”
“Zelda?” And when he didn’t react: “You never heard of Zelda?”
“I, I loved
A Link to the Past when I was still alive.” He shook his head, trying to clear it. What she was insinuating just couldn’t be, could it? A quick look to the screen confirmed his greatest fear. A fairy fluttered on the continue screen. He scrambled to find the right words to salvage the situation. “I am,” he squeaked, “I am –
I am Death, I am – I have to reap a soul or else I’ll lose my job. Help me, please.” His words ended in a desperate whisper.
The next thing he saw was the darkness of the realm of the reapers and the next thing he heard was his supervisor yelling at him: “
We do not reap the souls of video game characters. They die over and over again. They fall under Paragraph 67 a, Exception 88, Immortal Beings in Virtual Environments. Did you not read the handbook? Did you not notice that the clock had millions of end points? Did you not realize that you could not connect to his soul? How ignorant can you be? How dare you show yourself to a mortal still alive and well? How dare you remove your uniform and desecrate our position with such undignified behavior? How dare you...”
Show Posts
Your ending implies that the time travel failed because of three points: 1. rotation of the sun system around the Milky Way (ca. 280 km/s) 2. rotation of the earth around the sun (ca. 29,78 km/s) 3. rotation of the earth around its own axis (depending on latitude between 0 (North and South Pole) and 1670 km/h - this makes for London as the example I will use because it's a likely place for your story: 1039 km/h or 0,289 km/s) The character was gone for three minutes: 3x60x280 + 3x60x29,78 + 3x60x0,289 = 55812,35 km That's how far away the accidant should have happened. Even if we only take the rotation of the earth axis into account (assuming a fixed point of some kind), it is still 3x60x0,289 = 51,95 km (And I really hope I didn't make a mistake somewhere in my logic here and made of fool of myself) Anyway, my point it that your protagonist cannot leave the party and walk, or take a hansom and reach the town square in a reasonable amount of time. Besides, the town square would not be 51 km away from a house in the city and nobody would walk that far for a visit (you can reasonably walk 5 km/h; 50 km would therefore take 10 h). In short: 
(Sorry, I just noticed that the distance seemed off when I casually read your story and did a bit of research.)
)
