Chasing the Rabbit (A DC SI OC! Story)

[Leektheratking]

Reborn, reincarnated, isekai'd so many names for such a simple concept.

To be remade anew, merely elsewhere, a new chapter in the adventure called life, most often granted by some extant divine, graciously gifting this experience to us mere mortals out of kindness or entertainment.

'and yet, the fucker I got was nothing but an asshole'

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"wha…where am i?" the flash of my memories the last thing coming to thought as I stared at the frankly…disgusting environ I found myself in, memories of a middle aged woman caught in the headlights of a speeding truck running into the street and my body acting on its own running in front of another vehicle to try and save her; too late it seemed as the sound of cracking bone and the smell of the rancid intestinal contents came to my senses as I in tandem felt the cracking that of the expensive sports car slamming into my mid thigh with a speed that seemed far too fast, head impacting the windshield with a blinding flash of pain before it was over.

Yet now where I stood, in a palace of filth and detritus, moulding books stacked high to the ceiling with a familiar smell of a college room, empty alcoholic cans with a strange name caught my attention as picked one up.

"Hetap?" I questioned with a sense of genuine surprise, the name familiar but dodging my tongue like a tag champion, a piece if paper sticking to the can. Peeling It off quickly revealed it to be a business card for Tv rental services.

Yet as within an instant of my voice being freed from my lungs for a second time, I heard something strange, a click.

It was as if a sound I had always heard was stripped away, having been so present in the back of everything, pervading into every cell like clockwork, a simple sound familiar to many children.

That of anime.

What?

"who's there? I swear I have a ____" I couldn't clock the final word, as my brain felt like it scrambled as it came through, hitting channels of sense that a word had no right reaching as flashes of light burnt themselves through my smells, as I felt the taste of the word, it was horrible and strange, stunning me to a stupor as I tried to answer the question as plainly as I could.

"i…I'm ___" once more however I spoke, hand gripping the card tightly, the word made no sound, I said a word I know I did, yet nothing came out, not even recollection of what I had said, my name. what it was, was gone, how? I didn't know it wasn't possible to just…unlearn ones name like that is it?

"Reveal yourself! Are you from the Buddha's? Fomalhaut? The T.V licence agency?" the voice roared with crackling trepidation as even through my stupor I moved forward through the filth that carried to the impossible high ceilings of what appeared almost a endless bastion of unwashed mania, amongst the piles fruit snacks made with ingredients I knew no longer existed, bags of chips with expiration dates millennia beyond my date of death and even then I saw amongst them brands just off from what I remembered.

Yet trying to blink away the flashing smell signals my eyes received of that horrid word, I turned a corner, a rapid gasp coming from within what now appeared as a clearing in the filth, setup with a small T.V, blanket and table covered in yet more filth this time more cans of Hetap and what appeared to be a beef dish…looking closer…nope, that's pork that's just gone bad and turned black.

With that, as I turned my face to see the singular inhabitant of this forest of filth, a woman wearing naught but a singlet stained with suspiciously crusty stains and a pair of shorts that seemed like they could have been white once, yet no longer matched their once pure looking state, rendered some strange brownish blue with splotches he was certain were a mould of some kind.

"uh…" somehow, despite everything I had prepared for in death, bleak nonexistence, judgement, karmic reawakening. This, this filth ridden person stumped me and for a moment as words failed any kind of description I could truly give.

In that moment, that split second of neural failure, she began.

"I REPEAT, WHO ARE YOU AND HOW DID YOU GET INTO THIS REALM, IM NOT AFRAID TO USE THIS" she screamed with utterly visibly failing confidence as she took a strange broad legged stance, holding nothing in her hands I could see, her screaming bringing me back to a sense of reason as my body reacted with the years of experience I carried of being yelled at as a cashier.

And so, using the years of experience working in waffle house and muscle memory, my body reacted on instinct when she came closer, a hand dashing out like a viper trained to slay meth-heads, crashing into what felt like a solid wall of meat weighing far more then it appeared, a subtle crack felt from my hand it struck forward.

Jumping with a start, both me and her leaping and howling in pain as we each clutched injured parts.

"what the fuck are you made of?" I all but screamed as my knuckled flared angry red, clutching the hand like I could choke the pain from the limb.

All the same the strange woman hopped around, none of the prodigious weight that seemed hidden somehow within her body and rendering her nigh unmovable shifting the environment in the slightest.

"son of a bitch, you asked for it" she once more screamed as she readied the nothing in her hand, beginning to swing it with practiced movements that seemed strange; non traditional, as a war cry left her lips, some vague sentence said.

"EX-CA...wait you're human?" she stopped, in an instant the filth and grime disappearing as she seemed to finally take a better look at me.
Instead of the lived in filth, everything was replaced by pristine and clean, at least seemingly so. As the crunching of the now renewed form of the woman moving caught my notice underneath a blaring hymnal tune that seemed to now pervade the space.

Of the woman herself, not much could be said I fear. Lacking in all the things that matter on a purely sexual scale even, when dressed as she was now. In flowing robes that barely covered what little she had, did not do much for the little me downstairs.

"I can hear your thoughts jackass" her renewed voice, some legion of whispers and shouts that work in concert to form coherent sentences from her 'be not afraid' form came like a canon, vibrating my eardrums without much effort.
Coughing slightly, the woman restarted.

"Welcome human, you have died...as you probably know..." she started, caught off guard as she looked through a book that appeared as she turned to her side, looking through the book with incredulity until suddenly breaking up, her composure shattering as she began to laugh.

"hahaha, you got to be kidding me? You're the loser that last lady saw before dying? Are you kidding me?" the lady giggled out as she snapped her fingers, returning everything once more to the filth and detritus it once was, the lady herself flopping with a huff back onto the ground. Playing rerun episodes of some old anime.

"h...hey what the fuck was that?" I could only gasp out, shock overflowing from my brain as I stared out in incredulity.

Sighing, she paused the anime.

"you died dude, shit death too. But, you're not my department, I only reincarnate people who earn it, so scram" she muttered before pressing play once more, the anime blaring out as a super attack of some kind was being screamed, the lady almost shaking in her position as she sat, cracking open another drink before downing it and throwing it onto the ever growing piles.
"Where would i even go? Through all this rubbish and bullshit?" I asked almost angry as the lady flinched.

"Its not rubbish, its lived in!" she said defensively, looking around the room with perhaps more then a little shame.

In every direction piles of rubbish taller then human sight could allow spanned, reaching towards unknown locals.

"lived in? By what! Raccoons and a deadbeat?" I yelled, anger beginning to burn through my reason and sense of propriety.

A silence persisted between the two of us, for a moment I felt bad as it seemed my words did genuinely hit a sensitive point in the woman, yet . Just as quickly as the sadness flashed on her face, was it replaced with anger, a thumping pulsing in my ears as she stood.

There is a quote I used to laugh at in my previous life, something I found ridiculous as a notion to the insignificance of mankind in the face of reality.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

And standing there, as I saw this woman, no. Thing. Stan's up, to reach beyond everything that is anything.

To know for but an instant that I was a fly on the wall of damnation, and had just been noticed, it was terrifying, a terror that pulled the nerves from my body, leaving me shaking like a leaf in the wind.

"do not think I am some petty mortal you can insult and demean, I have been gracious so far to tolerate your petty existence and complaints, but now you step too far" she spoke, words quiet, yet I remember them, these words have always been, never once have they not existed, she I'd beyond such a petty thing as time.

"You wish to leave these realms behind? To go to another? Fine, I will cast you to the outer dark then, see how you like it!" her anger was liquid fire in my veins, as she spoke everything began to shift, a single instant before annihilation.
I don't know what came over me, whether desperation or stubbornness or mere human malice, a desire born in long dead epochs where cavemen sought to make sure the predator died alongside it in blood and viscera.

I felt to my pocket, a phone forgotten still sat there, pulling it quickly, I looked as it was unbroken and with service, and I felt my heart harden.

"Fine miss bitch! Want to play that game? Let's go, I think the rental place might want to know about that Tv of yours" I spoke, voice shivering as I began to type in the number, I found on the business card in my hand.

And just like that, everything changed, as within a second, The booming voice that always was dropped to instead be replaced by the screaming form of a filthy woman kneeling in front of me futile shaking my shirt to get my attention.

"Noooo, please please don't do that, I'm only on my six-billionth run through of 'princess magical mega I haven't even gotten to watch the movie reruns yet, it's too soon before I have to give it back you fiend!" she spoke, each word shrill and desperate.

"...fine, but I want to get sent to a decent world...with powers of my own" I said with a small smile, trying not to laugh at the desperate display in front of me.

"Done!" And with a snap of her fingers I was gone.

...

...

...

"Prick, I'll show him" she finally spoke, after a long silence, shuffling over to a small pile of anime DVDs, looking for the perfect power yo ruin the man's day.


"I'll make sure he rues the day that he ever fucked with the great goddess Tina!...God I really do need to get out more"