The girl wakes up in a white void. Well, perhaps void is a bit inaccurate if the void contains someone else.

“Where are we?” he asks.

“I don’t know! This is obviously your fault!” It’s not like she’s ever wrong. It’s not like she’s ever been wrong. Therefore, he caused the problem. It’s fine. She never liked him anyway.

“Hello! You have been chosen to be reincarnated in another world!” a voice from nowhere says perkily, like some sort of receptionist. She recognizes it as the customer service voice. Evidently, so does he, but he says something she doesn’t expect.

“Like an isekai?”

“Oh, god, please, no.” She’s never actually read one, but they’re all dumb, sexist wish fulfillment fantasies, right? That’s the impression she got.

“Very much like an isekai, the both of you!”

“No! I would rather go to hell than stay any longer with this piece of s…trash.” Don’t swear, please don’t swear.

“You don’t have a choice in the matter.”

She points one dramatic finger in his direction.

“I hate him. Can the…celestial bureaucracy please reassign us? Or just erase our souls right now?”

“Aren’t you terrified of dying? You know, that was the topic of one of our assignments–”

“Shut up!”

“You two must stay together, as your souls have been linked in your death.”

“W-what even are we supposed to do?” No. Do not stutter. As an intelligent woman with her life put together, even if currently it’s more like being dead, do not stutter.

“Have another life. Obvi.” Shut up, shut up, shut up, stop smirking like you know everything!

“How do we even know we died? I don’t remember–”

“That’s because deaths are automatically erased from memory to make transition easier.”

“Great, so now you’re not just ripping off every single isekai ever–”

“Not every one.”

“I don’t care that you’ve probably read a hundred isekai light novels, shut up. Now you’re just ripping off The Good Place? That show is good and I will not have you slander it.”

And as soon as her mouth shuts for even a moment, she’s promptly thrust into a flashback, with a sort of wavy feeling like she’d seen in movies.

She did not care what the flashback said, she had definitely looked both ways before crossing, and so had he. Wait, no, that’s giving him too much credit.

“Did we seriously have an encounter with Truck-kun?”

“Yep!”

“You are so annoying, you know that?”

“Yep!”

“Are there any further questions?”

“Will we be able to contact you after this?” Huh, that’s…actually a good question.

“Of course! We’re always listening!”

“Well, that’s not creepy at all.”

“Then there’s nothing else for us to worry about. You can let us go now.”

No. No. Oh god, oh no. This is the opposite of dying, apparently, which is her soul–do souls even exist?–going into her body and it is just as terrible.

She doesn’t miss a beat when she fully realizes that she is, in fact, no longer in the void, and looks up at him boredly, like they’d just experienced a smooth transition instead of…whatever that was.

He needs to take a moment to steady himself, but then jumps up with his casual smirk again. “So, what do you say we do?”

“I say we screw off. I don’t know about you, and frankly I don’t really care, but I don’t want any part in this whole adventurer thing. Death is crossing a line.”

“How are we gonna get money?”

“Oh, f–”

“So, are we gonna be adventurers now?”

“Fine! Whatever you want!” She thrusts her hand out, and a gigantic explosion bursts from it, scouring the few metres of ground in front of them black. He just blinks at her, unscathed.

“We really are OP, huh?”

“No, we’re supposed to think we’re normal until–not the point. Um. Isekai tropes. You read more of these than I do. OP? Check. Harem? Wait, since I’m a girl, do I get a reverse harem? Or does this mean we’re getting together?”

“Depends. Do you want us to?”

“Shut up.”

Photo: Jason Hafso on Unsplash.com