I died.
Good news, I was apparently wrong to think there is no afterlife. There is.
Bad news, I went to the bad place.
Don't get me wrong; the "good place" isn't exactly heaven from the Christian mythos, nor is the "bad place" hell. They're called "Celestia" and the "Underworld," and Celestia isn't the perfectly good utopia and the Underworld isn't a hellscape of evil and torture.
If those names sound familiar, it is because some games on the Earth I lived my life on were actually pretty accurate depictions of a set of true events. Not that they were written by someone who was familiar with the actual events, or a psychic who was, subconsciously or consciously aware of extra dimensional events or something. It is just a coincidence that they match reality.
If that seems like it would be too improbable a coincidence to be believable then you haven't really understood how the multiverse works. There are an infinite number of alternate "Earths" all connected to an infinite number of "Underworlds" all connected to each other. If something is possible, and it is given infinite opportunity to occur, then it definitely will occur at some point. In fact, it will occur an infinite number of times. So, when someone made a game called "Disgaea," no matter what they put in it, it was going to reflect the reality of some universe. Similarly, if you can imagine that your life is being written as a work of fiction in another universe, then it certainly is.
I'd like to say that, upon getting hit by truck-kun I was reincarnated as a demon-lord princeling of the Underworld with some really cheaty powers to completely dominate the setting. I'd like to say that. But the truth is that I am getting a very generic and standard afterlife: I'm a prinny.
I wasn't even a particularly bad person in life. I never hurt anyone. I just also never really helped anyone. I was a drain on society, and I never contributed in any meaningful way, so I'm serving a sentence here until I can be reincarnated.
Rather, that is what I'm supposed to do.
But there are other options. If I can get strong enough, I can transmigrate myself into a better form of demon. Surprisingly, that isn't a goal many prinny hope for, though. Talking to the others in my barracks, they tell me that it is nearly impossible to achieve in any sort of reasonable time-frame. There are magic blocks on all prinny, put there by whatever power governs Celestia and the Underworld (no one is quite sure what that power is; some think it is one or more gods, some think it is just how the universe naturally works), that don't allow us to transmigrate into anything other than other prinnies. It is possible to overpower those blocks, but you have to max out your level (9999) in order to do it. Most prinny will be reincarnated long before they get anywhere near that, and, even if that wasn't the case, most prinny don't care to work that hard. The only ones who make any sort of effort are the ones who have a lot of bad karma to pay off before being reincarnated (the really bad ones; I avoid those guys).
I'm gonna give it a go, though. I played the first Disgaea game, and most of the second. Maybe it will be fun to try.
A. N. So, I've actually played through Hour of Darkness while role-playing that this was happening. I completely abandoned Laharl and the other main cast in favor of a prinny that I pretended was me. I still haven't gotten him to max level, after 200+ hours, but he is at a stage that I am sure he will get there eventually.
