Death After Death

When Simon woke up in bed in the cabin as he’d done two dozen times before, it was with relief that bordered on disbelief. He just lay there unmoving for several minutes as he stared at the ceiling. Finally, he worked up the courage to turn his head, which somehow managed to feel climactic. After that, he flexed his hands and wiggled his toes before he finally tried sitting up. He’d feared that after the years or decades, he’d been lying beneath the sand, he would have forgotten how to move, but that wasn’t the case.

The first thing he did was look in the mirror and consider asking it a question to see if he was still capable of speech. That was a silly fear, of course, and he shrugged it off with a forced laugh as he reached for the wine.

“Fuck that,” he muttered as he decided the last thing he wanted to see right now was his character sheet. His experience was probably at like minus a million right now, and honestly, he was better off not knowing. Besides - he was sure his skills had dropped since he hadn’t used them in such a long time, and that would probably hurt more, given how much he’d suffered to improve them.

Instead, after he took a long drink, savoring the lost sensation of taste that had been restored before trying a bit of the food and reveling just as much in that. Intellectually he knew the bread and cheese he had was mediocre at best, but that didn’t stop it from tasting amazing in the moment. “Well, what now?” he asked himself once that was done.

From here, he could see all the gear he usually took on his quests into The Pit, but that was the last thing he wanted to see right now. There was no way he was going down there right now. Honestly, he wasn’t sure he was going to that deep ever again. As far as he was concerned, level twenty was a no-go zone. Level six might be, too, honestly.

He wasn’t sure he had it in him to be a zombie or statue again. Getting stabbed to death or dying of exposure was fine. Normal deaths could be painful or humbling, but the crazy ones where he died and kept living? He was completely over it.

Simon looked around for literally anything he could do besides gearing up for a fight. He opened up the dresser and saw nothing of interest. Still, in the top drawer under a stranger’s small clothes, he finally found something promising: a handful of fishhooks. At first, he didn’t realize what they were because they were made of bone, but eventually, his brain decided that was the only thing they could be used for. He looked around the room for a fishing pole or at least a little string he could tie to the spear.

Fishing would solve nothing, but that was precisely the point. Right now, the last thing Simon wanted to do was solve or fix anything. He just wanted to be for a while and remember what that felt like.

Fishooks in hand, he went outside with nothing but his dagger, waterskin, and a little food. He didn’t recall there being a shed or anything, but he hadn’t exactly looked for one, so anything was possible. A quick look around showed him that there was no shed, but a few tool pegs were built into the back wall of the cabin.

There he found a shovel and an axe meant for chopping down trees instead of the one inside that was obviously meant for chopping up monsters. Above those, though, just below the eaves where he almost missed it, was a simple wooden fly-fishing rod. It lacked a reel or any other fancy bits and pieces he was used to, but it had plenty of line and looked like it would do the job.

While Simon walked to the part of the stream he thought was the best place to do this, he contemplated the pole. It looked so like his grandfather’s that for a long time after he sat down in the shade by the water, all he could do was look at it and remember what the old man had tried to teach him before his PSP had monopolized his attention. His parents had used the man as a free babysitter for years. Still, Opa, as he preferred to be called by his beloved grandchildren, had always tried to get him to take an interest in being outside more.

At the time, he figured it was pure perversity: the kids wanted to be inside watching TV, so why not take them fishing, hiking, camping, or literally anything but sitting on the couch. “He was probably just trying to keep me from getting fat,” Simon said with a wry smile.

His grandfather had been a strange guy in a lot of ways. As Simon turned away from the bittersweet remembrances about how old-fashioned the man was, he was as surprised as anyone when he looked down and found that he’d tied the Palomar knot without even looking.

That made Simon smile. “How the hell did I manage that?” Simon asked himself as he baited it with a small piece of cheese before making a half ass cast into the water.

After that, he just waited. After all - the fishing itself didn’t really matter. It was just something to do. All that really mattered was sitting in the shade and stretching his limbs or turning his head whenever he wanted. It was something he had no idea he’d ever appreciate, but after he’d lost that ability for longer than he’d been alive, he certainly did.

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He spent the next hour or so just enjoying the breeze before a deeper question finally tugged at his psyche. How long had he lay there frozen? How old did that make him now, mentally speaking? Would that have made him as old as Opa? Older? Of course, he didn’t know for sure, but it was an interesting question.

“How old was Opa anyway?” he asked himself, trying to do some mental math. If he was 30, then his dad was like 50, which would have made his grandfather like 70…

“No, that can’t be right,” Simon corrected himself. “He was seventy-something when he died, like what? Four years ago?” He started counting on his fingers when he suddenly felt a pull on the pole that made him lose his train of thought as he struggled to catch it before it was yanked out of his hand.

There was no reel on this ancient fishing pole, so he had to pay out the line and then pull it back in over and over manually, letting the fish tire itself out until he could drag it out onto the land. That took several minutes, but when he finally had the foot-long fish flopping around on the grass, it felt like a more significant victory than just about any of the floors he’d conquered to date. It was up there with the first time he’d killed the skeleton knight, and he whooped in response.

“Take that!” he yelled triumphantly before he moved the flopping fish onto a large rock. He lacked a bucket, so he would hold off on gutting it just now, but once it suffocated, he could put it back in the water until it was time to gut it and take it home. Gutting some strange brown trout species wasn’t exactly something he was looking forward to. Still, Opa had always made him do it himself, and he was sure he remembered how to do it at least, as well as how to tie those damn knots.

Of course, remembering how hard he’d always tried to get out of gutting fish as a child brought an unexpectedly awful memory to mind. When Opa had died, Simon had been so busy with his guild on the latest MMO that he’d done everything he could to skip the funeral. It had felt shitty at the time, but in retrospect, he felt even worse about it now. Given the number of hours he’d spent playing that stupid fishing minigame in World of Spellcraft, you’d think it was some kind of homage to the old man. It wasn’t, though. It was just him wasting time chatting with online friends and collecting achievements.

That made him look at the fish differently when he finally put it back in the water and cast his line again. How many years he’d wasted as a statue didn’t matter nearly as much as how many years he’d wasted doing stupid shit like that. Not all his time playing video games was a waste, of course. He’d learned a lot about almost anything you could think of. Regardless, nothing he’d learned on his PSP would help him nearly as much as the few lessons his grandfather had tried to teach him while Simon struggled hard to get out of them.

He spent the rest of the day fishing and almost caught two more fish, but they both got away. That was fine, he told himself. How many fish could he really eat before they went bad anyway? It wasn’t like he had any way to fry them. Even though he’d only caught one of the slippery little bastards, this was still the most peace he’d known since he decided to come to the pit.

It was almost sunset when he finally decided to call it a day. He was enjoying the nostalgic moment as long as he could. With a grunt, he got up, dusted off his ass, and then after winding up his line around the pole, he picked up the fish and found a nice flat rock, making quick work of the thing. His dagger was shit for scaling, but no matter how many bones he was going to have to pick out of his dinner tonight, he was determined to enjoy it.

“Thanks, Opa,” he said quietly as he started toward the cabin in the darkening twilight.

The fire would be out by now. He’d forgotten about that, but he should be able to fix that with a half-assed fire spell if he was careful. It was fully dark by the time he could see the cabin by starlight. It was only when he was 50 yards away he watched a pair of goblins skulking out of the nearby forest.

It wasn’t hard to see him. The little bastards had a crude torch with them. That surprised Simon, but mostly because they didn’t usually try to burn the house down around him until the third night. He crouched down on the path and watched them get closer and closer, but they didn’t try to light the wood alight. Instead, they tested the closest shutters.

That at least made sense to him. They weren’t trying to burn the place down yet. These were the ones that had made footprints trying to break into his place in the past. “That means they’re going for the door,” he whispered to himself, rising to his feet as he advanced purposefully. The last thing he wanted were goblins in his house. They smelled like shit.

Simon intercepted them just before they reached the door. The goblin without the torch noticed him and screeched in alarm just before he brought the fishing pole down on the little bastard’s head, hard enough to crack it. The second goblin responded by waving the torch back and forth in his face like a weapon, but Simon wasn’t scared by this. He dropped everything he’d been holding, pulled his dagger, and waited for an opening.

When the goblin swung too far to the left, Simon responded with a vicious kick that sent it flying against the cabin wall so hard that it bounced off it. He was on it before it could rise again, stabbing it until it stopped squirming. Once that was done, he did the same to the first one, making sure it was dead too. After that, he cleaned his knife on the long grass before finally standing again with their torch in hand.

“That’s what you get,” he said, spitting as he looked at the two pathetic monsters.

It was only when he fetched his fish and his pole that he noticed that it had cracked, just like the goblin’s skull from his attack.

“Oh well,” he shrugged. “No more fishing in this lifetime. It was fun while it lasted.”

He tossed the pole aside and then went inside. A little fire and a lot of fish would go a long way to making his life a better place. Besides - trying to go fishing two days in a row would have been boring as hell, right?

“Tonight, I’m going to eat, finish off that wine, and chill the hell out,” he told himself, “and tomorrow, I’m going to find a way out of this hellhole.” He’d tried it before, of course - but he was a different person now.