Part I: Dead End Job
It starts back some time ago, in the BCE. One is born, one commits to the idea of miracles, hinting at a higher power, and before we know it, we have a sharp object in our sides and we're being given a choice by, what can only be described as an angel: "you are one of the earliest members of an elite group: true believers. It is due to your faith and love that we offer you a job in the afterlife. A chance to live again and even choose others to aid you in your task: to reap souls and ferry them to the life here after."
So here was the chance to be alive again and walk amongst human beings forever with no pain and no consequences of mortality. With it, however, I may carry the burdens of death and the emotions I have in forever. I said yes.
Reaping like most nine to fives is only a job and one that becomes less and less burdensome with time and help. My department started off as only me. I was given the job by an angel who served as death until he thought up the idea of reapers. I became what they referred to as an angel as one of the perks of the job but just because I had a pair of wings, didn't mean I was at the same power and level as the three headed, thousands of beating wings seraph who gave me the job; I was simply an angel. That is: not Seraphym, Cherubym or Ophanym, not even Arch Angel, just head of a department, plain old Dolphiel or Dolph as I would be known across the milenia.
The last name would change of course: Dolph Gastón, Dolph Siskel, Dolph Waters, Dolph DePaolo, etc. but it was always Dolph. The angels up the food chain have the power to alter reality so it really wasn't much of a thing that every hundred years or so, human beings would perceive that I had died. Death was easy, of course; the putrid stench, the release of a body to inhabit another. My reapers saw me for what I really looked like but to human beings, my visage would change every hundred years or so.
Death was the only downside to living forever but unless I wanted to be incorporeal, it was necessary. I could exist either way but to interact physically with the living, I needed a body. I really didn't need one after the first 5000 years or so, (due to a rapidly expanding department) but I really enjoy the basest of instincts like sex, sports and occasionally drugs and drinking. I could absorb knowledge about humans effortlessly as a perk of my promotion to angel but the physical destructiveness of man was reserved for those in his corporeal prison.
Watching humanity evolve, build itself up and fall down trillions of times was truly awe inspiring at first but eternity is a long time and over this time, we must find ways to occupy our time, but that's what this story is all about. Why else would you want to hear the tale of one who ends the story over and over?
