A Slip of the Tongue
by Yoo C. Chung <wacko@laplace.snu.ac.kr>
Hi, my name is Yoo. It can be both a guy's name or a girl's name.
Once, someone visiting my home page thought that I was a girl, since
she knew a girl with the same name as me. I had to point out that she
was wrong.
Anyways, before I got my current job, I was an undergraduate student
at SNU. My major was in Electrical Engineering. This had a broad
coverage of areas such as electronics, electrical engineering, control
systems, and computers (this last thing was the only thing I was truly
interested in among those areas, unfortunately). I would probably
have had gone on to graduate school if I hadn't got stuck with my
current job.
How did I get my current job? Well, it was one rainy day at the
boarding house I lived at, and there was a lot of lightning. Being
the idiot I was, I was hooked up with the school network with the
modem (despite the fact that I had lost several modems due to
lightning strikes).
I was reading posts from the fanfic mailing list (there are a lot of
fanfic mailing lists, but I consider fanfic@fanfic.com, an ML for
anime fanfics, to be THE fanfic mailing list) while downloading the
Sunday Dilbert comic when the lightning struck the phone line
connected to my modem.
Now, when lightning strikes a phone line and sends a spike through a
modem, you might expect the modem to get burned out along with maybe
some other components in the computer if you're unlucky, but you
usually don't expect a visible electrical breakdown around the
computer, with sparks flying all over the place. Which was happening
to my computer, including my monitor. (I fell backwards on my chair
by reflex. The fall really hurt.)
The first thought I had was that I was losing all my precious
irreplaceable data, not to mention all the computer equipment that I
wouldn't be able to afford to replace for at least a few months. Now,
for a lot of people, especially those with a life, this might not be a
big deal (relatively speaking), but for me, it was like seeing my life
end before my eyes.
Well, it would have been if I wasn't immediately mesmerized by the
fact that something humanoid seemed to have been forming out of the
electrical discharge. It soon solidified into a beautiful woman with
blond hair. (This made me think of a manga, whose title I think was
"I Love Thirty", where the female protagonist is a computer program
who obtained a corporeal existence from a lightning strike.)
"Hello, I am Verdandi, the Goddess of the Present. I am here to
grant you one wish," the woman said. Whoa, this seemed to be
something taken right out of "Ah! My Goddess!", where a goddess named
Belldandy appears!
"And the name is Verdandi, not Belldandy," the woman said with
emphasis. Obviously she was reading (or at least guessing correctly)
my thoughts. Or maybe she had been asked questions about her name so
many times that she would answer it before they were asked. (Later I
would learn that she was indeed reading my mind.)
After a moment, it finally occurred to me to ask, "This isn't a
practical joke, is it?" It probably wasn't, since the effects I'd
seen earlier seemed to be impossible to create with current
technology. She probably was a real goddess. However, I didn't rule
out the possibility that the goddess was playing a practical joke on
mortal me.
"No, it isn't. You may wish for anything, and it will be granted,"
she said.
"Uh huh," I answered. By now, I was noticing how well I seemed to
be taking the whole thing. I seemed to be thinking straight and not
panicking, and seemed to be calm. The key word here is "seemed".
Normally, when confronted with a beautiful woman, I used to start
blushing furiously due to lack of contact with the opposite sex (I
really needed to get a life back then), which wasn't happening. That
alone should have sent screaming warning bells to me, but ....
Anyways, I considered my options. I immediately considered wishing
for an unlimited supply of unrestricted wishes. I also considered
saying "I wish to get what I truly want" (I was pretty sure I didn't
know what I really wanted, and frankly, I still don't know). The
speed at which these options occurred to me reassured me that I was
still thinking straight.
However, these were things that I had considered before (when I had
nothing to do, I sometimes thought about what I would wish for if I
was granted a wish like Keiichi in AMG), so of course they speedily
came up in my mind. That I didn't think about this, and the fact that
I didn't consider what to do if the goddess (or demon, for all I knew
then) was really playing a practical joke on me were further missed
indications that I wasn't thinking straight and wasn't being as
cautious as I should have been being.
Since I wasn't sure if Verdandi would grant any of the wishes I had
thought of, I decided to make some small talk before I tried to speak
any of them aloud.
"Um, so you go around occasionally and grant wishes for people?" I
asked.
"Yes, though I don't grant wishes for really twisted people who
might wish for the end of the universe or anything like that. It's
quite interesting learning what people would wish for," she answered.
"So is wish granting part of your job?"
"No, it's just one of the things that I do to pass the time during
normal times like this where nothing happens. It would really get
boring if I didn't do anything for decades at a time."
"You aren't required to do any specific tasks during those times?" I
asked incredulously. Obviously, I seemed to be spoiled by those AMG
fanfics, where the deities always seemed to be so busy.
"That is the case. And when I do have to perform my duty, which is
to fix the time stream every once in a while with my sisters when
someone thinks that time travel is cool and wrecks havoc, it's always
a very interesting experience," she answered.
A job that that had an obscenely copious amount of free time, and
which was also very interesting to boot? It sounded like the perfect
job. "I wish I had a job like yours," I said absentmindedly.
Immediately, Verdandi began to glow brightly, and I noticed my body
was also starting to glow. 'Oh shit,' I thought (I've been overusing
that expression ever since reading an SF novel titled "Expendable"),
immediately realizing that I was becoming a deity (I haven't read the
AMG fanfics "Oh My God???" and "Oh My Brother" for nothing, you know,
though it would have been better if I had thought of them BEFORE I
made my wish). After a few seconds, Verdandi and I stopped glowing.
"Your wish has been granted," she said.
I was a little disappointed, since in AMG wish granting seemed to be
a lot more fancier. "That was sure quiet," I said. I realized that
my voice sounded different from normal. I also began to realize that
my body felt different.
I slowly approached the mirror in my room and took a look at myself.
What I saw shocked me. I then proceeded feeling around my body and
confirmed that it was indeed different from what it used to be. I
slowly turned towards Verdandi, still in shock.
"Congratulations, Yoo. You are now a goddess," she told me,
smiling.
I then proceeded to become the first goddess to ever have suffered
from the condition called "fainting". It's quite embarrassing, you
know, especially since Verdandi still makes fun of me about that.
- The End -
Author's Notes:
This fanfic gives a small new twist to fanfics like "Oh My God???".
(Some may argue that this is not a fanfic, since it's not set in an
anime universe, merely being a work of fiction by an overzealous fan
of AMG. If that's you, then *BONK*. :)
It's my first and hopefully last self-insertion fanfic. I don't
intend to continue this, so you don't have to worry about listening to
any more details about my life. (Though I could chronicle the
training I received as a goddess or how I managed to turn half the
male population on the FFML to goddesses and half the female
population to gods, I'll leave that to other authors.)
This is Copyright (C) 1997 Yoo C. Chung, and one may do anything
with it except claim that they've written it. I'm the only one to be
granted that privilege, you know. :)