Private Finished Life And Death

Phoebe had had the same name pounding in her head for a couple of days now. Googling the word vespa had returned a type of motor scooter and wasps. Apparently it was the Italian word for wasp. Why you would name a scooter after a wasp escaped her entirely. But that wasn't the point. The point was that she needed to find this person because they needed her. What they needed her for was a fucking mystery, but she'd figure that out along the way. She had to, since there was nobody to really help her with her duties.

She was at the library, both to return some books that she had checked out previously - needed to try and find anything about this Cycle she kept hearing about, and to find some new material to check out. She'd also been reading some of those self help style books to try and give herself a baseline of where to start when confronting someone else's problems.

That was when the voice in her head screamed louder for a second. VESPA. "Ow, okay... nearby then?" Phoebe looked around, taking a chance and taking off her head to hold it up above a shelf.

There was a girl who looked kind of wasp-like, surrounded by books. It was worth a shot.

Approaching (after reattaching her head properly), Phoebe was about to say something when the girl looked up and addressed her very bluntly. Okay, wow. "Bug... person..." she said back, realizing that that retort had a lot less punch than she wanted it to.

"Are you Vespa? I think... I'm supposed to help you with something."

"Uh, no? Why would someone pull a prank on you by getting someone to..." No, that wasn't important. Phoebe shook her head, nearly dislodging it in the process. She took a seat uninvited, setting her head down on the table and allowing the black mist to begin leaking out of her neck before continuing.

"Dullahan are like grim reapers. But we don't just kick people into the afterlife, we-"

Phoebe cut off again as she noticed the topics covered by the books. All about death and reapers and the like. She would've nodded, but trying would have sent her head rolling across the table.

"Uh, anyway. I get these... messages? It's really just a person's name. Sometimes it's cause they're dying or recently dead. But mostly it's been things like... helping them come to terms with a loss or a big change in their life. And I guess it's my job to try and help them."

She shrugged, knowing that it probably sounded kind of crazy. But that was the simple explanation out of the way, at least.

Phoebe tensed up when Vespa grabbed her, pushing her arms away as her head glared from the table. "Don't touch me like that. I'm not here to be an ass to you."

Just to be safe, Phoebe grabbed her head and pulled it back, holding it to her own chest to make sure that Vespa couldn't snatch it from her as she continued, "I don't know. I don't know anything about reapers. There's no mentor, no real guidebook for this stuff."

Her eyes lingered on the books that Vespa had been reading and she frowned a bit before going on. "-unfortunately. But I know that my job isn't always about people dying. Or even mostly about people dying. So yeah... but you said you've... got a short lifespan?"

Phoebe visibly winced when she looked down at the scythe that Vespa pointed out. Her lips drew together in a thin line, and she couldn't really form the words that she wanted to say at first.

It took her a few seconds to gather her thoughts. There was a lot to unpack there, least of all how casual this girl was being about everything. When she did finally speak up, Phoebe's voice was quiet and sympathetic.

"I'm sorry that you're going through this. I can't imagine how stressful it must be to know your death is coming like that... when I died, it was... entirely an accident, over and done with before I even had time to process what was happening."

She took the book that had the image of the scythe in it in her hand, sliding it closer to her disembodied head to get a better look at it. "But, if I can be blunt... I don't know that this will work. One of the few things I've been able to actually learn since I started doing this is that... death is a part of life. Even people who think they're immortal aren't really. Nothing is."

"I'm not saying don't try. But, ya know. Keep your expectations realistic. If preventing death was as easy as buying a fancy magic gardening tool, we wouldn't still have graveyards here on Manta Carlos."

"I definitely get that," Phoebe said, her own mood lowering a bit as she realized that she might have come across as harsher than she meant to. She absentmindedly tried to rub the back of her neck, only for her fingers to meet the empty spot where her shoulders stopped. She shivered at the weird feeling and the tingle that the mist gave her, and put her hand back down.

"Like I said, I'm not telling you to give up. But I guess also... let's assume for a second that there's nothing to do about it, yeah? Just, for the sake of argument, say you will die in two to five years and there's no way you can change that. If you spend all your energy trying to, then you won't really have lived at all."

"I died at nineteen after spending most of my life under my parents' thumbs. I had a lot of regrets, things I didn't do. I got a second chance because of this," she said, patting the top of her own head like one might a cat. "But if I could go back in time and talk to myself, I'd still have rather done the things that I wanted to with the people that mattered to me."