The sign over the store had read "The Magic Shop" in elegant golden letters, but as far as you could tell, the place looked more like a pocket-sized pawn shop or perhaps a yard sale crammed into a tiny dusty nook between two larger stores.
Still, despite the disappointingly musty interior, there was a truly eclectic collection of trash on display.
Inside a the glass case of the front counter, a pair of walrus tusks etched with runes and sigils were priced at eight thousand dollars. Each. Something resembling an ape skull with three eye sockets was listed at nine thousand. Far outside the price range of a twenty six year old college dropout.
But the various shelves that lined the walls were stocked with much cheaper and more mundane items. Old toys, puzzles, even board games.
You found your eyes being drawn towards the latter. You and some of your college buddies used to organize some pretty fun board game nights back in the day, though the games themselves usually took a backseat to the drinking and the jokes and the banter. Still, there could be something weird and interesting among these relics.
Most of them looked kind of dull. Who would be interested in playing "Furniture Collector" or "Advanced Augury"?
As you wiped the dust from the box of the next game, you were greeted with something that looked completely insane.
"THE GAME OF LIVES" screamed the title, in bold letters. Beneath this was a kaleidoscope of spectacularly mismatched art. A scene of two dinosaurs fighting was placed directly beside a clip-art of a business woman struggling to juggle armfuls of documents as well as her morning coffee. A knight was fighting a skeletal warrior just above a scene of a dolphin jumping through a hoop. There had to be fifty different characters here, with absolutely no cohesion of theme or art style.
"The life-hopping challenge game where you can be anyone or anything from anywhere or any time!!" it declared.
This shoddy piece of design work had certainly grabbed you by this point. You had to know what the hell this game was about.
You slapped the game down onto the counter and glanced around for a shopkeeper or clerk who might serve you. Unfortunately, you couldn't see anyone. It looked like you were all alone. As you craned your neck and tried to peer around the corner into the deeper reaches of the store, you were startled by the sudden sound of someone clearing their throat. You realized that a little old man with a massive cloud-like beard was now standing right in front of you.
"Will that be all, young man?" He rasped in a soft little voice.
You nodded and paid him the three dollars, leaving with your strange prize. You couldn't wait to show the guys this thing.
You were still incredibly curious about what the actual game might look like, so when you got home to your apartment you placed the box onto your coffee table and lifted the lid.
The first thing that greeted you was a scuffed sheet of paper, frayed around the edges. It read:
"INSTRUCTIONS FOR PLAY.
The Game of Lives is a fantastic, life-changing game for wizards and witches of all ages!
First set the difficulty slider, and then turn the Lives dial to the desired number of stages and play will begin immediately!
Each stage will place you in the life of another person or creature, from this world or another. In each stage you will be given an objective to complete. If you complete the objective, you can move onto the next stage. The goal is to beat every stage and return to your own life!
Note that some stages may have a time-based objective, where you must meet a goal within a certain time limit or be forced to repeat the stage. This time limit could be anything from minutes to years, you never know what you might get!
Successfully beating a full set of stages will grant the player a special surprise reward!"
Beneath the paper was a rectangular hunk of plastic with a big red dial that could be set from anywhere from three to nine, with three being the minimum. The dial was pointed downwards, in a sort of idle state. A vertical slider towards the side was marked EASY on the bottom and HARD on the top. It was currently set somewhere in the middle.
The whole thing looked like a toy designed for toddlers, and as you lifted it out of the box you were disappointed to find a lack of any kind of board or cards or anything that a board game might actually need.
Sighing, you inspected the plastic toy, fiddling with the slider and inspecting it for anything that you might have missed. You idly turned it over in your hands, finding nothing but a thin slot where a card might fit. As you checked the featureless underside of the thing, one of your hands touched the dial, and you decided to give it a bit of a twist out of sheer boredom. There was a satisfying crunchiness to the way it turned, and when you released, a shrill bell tolled. Then it tolled again, louder. And again. It began to speed up, sounding like some kind of bizarre contraption coming back to life after years of disuse, and your surroundings seemed to blur and melt away from you. The endless chiming continued to swell until it was almost unbearable, and then there was a flash of light.
Suddenly, you were somewhere else. And you were not yourself any more. But who - or what - were you?