Tag: Grim Reaper

#26 – Anthony Gates

Every high-powered businessman needs a good personal assistant, someone who helps them sort the chaos going on around them into neat, easy-to-manage packages. Anthony Gates has spent the last two years working as a personal assistant, although his job is a bit different than most.

Anthony’s boss is Death.
Anthony Gates died two years ago at the age of 24, the victim of a car crash that claimed his life and the life of his girlfriend, Jennifer. However, upon his death, Anthony found himself stunned to wake up, sitting at a cafe with a gaunt, impeccably dressed man sipping an espresso.

Introducing himself as Thanatos, the man calmly explained, as Anthony sat dumbfounded, that he was the incarnation of death, and had been since the beginning of existence. However, he had grown increasingly fond of walking with humans in the years since, watching them live their lives and go about their business, and had begun to delegate the business of collecting souls and sending them to their various eternal rewards, damnations, or whatever other outcome to various surrogates, but that the work sucks away at his free time. Thus he needs a personal assistant to help him catalog the dead, organize and direct his surrogates, and generally keep the organization running smoothly. He also intimated to Anthony that his afterlife might not be everything he hoped for, while he could offer eternal life on earth, albeit a unseen one.

Anthony accepted, and now lives the life of Death’s harried assistant. The job, to his dismay, is quite literally, 24/7, with no respite. Combined with Death’s own high-rolling lifestyle, and Anthony can’t remember the last time he had a entire day to himself.

Anthony was a pretty good-humored, straitlaced kid growing up, and did pretty well in college, but nothing has prepared him for this life. Now, he exists with Death in a place “between” worlds, seen but not noticed, capable of interacting with reality but unable to leave any lasting impact. He is harried, stressed, and continually sounds like he’s on the verge of quitting, but in truth, loves the job. Anthony was a sucker for the supernatural as a child, and here he is, working for Death itself, even if that means flying to Macau at the drop of a hat because “there’s a fat businessman here who’s going to kick it this weekend but not before you help me beat his ass at Texas Hold’em.”

Anthony finds Death a unpredictable, but loyal employer. In the last hundred years, Death has given himself over to enjoying all the wild spectacle humanity has to offer. He is a enormous fan of casinos, soccer and haute cuisine. Death can be petty when it comes to little things, and has absolutely no qualms about violating some basic human values, which he sees as largely irrelevant to him. For all of that however, Death is deeply serious about his role, and takes its proper purpose seriously, even if it doesn’t seem like it at times. He brings a depth of compassion to his work that frequently goes unseen under his more sarcastic veneer.