When Dauphine Deveroux was born, lady Fortuna spun her wheel upwards, signaling her life was to be blessed with plentiful fortune and longevity.

Unfortunately for Dauphine, lady Fortuna was drunk on overripe kombucha that day, promptly forgetting that she ever spun her wheel in the first place, throwing said wheel at Bacchus for catcalling her, and getting said wheel lost on some ditch in Athens after getting swept by Trashius, Roman god of cleaning and sanitation.

Bad luck, as fate would have it, is necessary for everyday life to move in a normal and comprehensive manner. People are born, live, and then die - such is the cycle of life. But when you have an excess of fortune, something as simple as death becomes a Sisyphean task. Dauphine learned that lesson at a young age.

She was the daughter of a French paper mill owner, and some said she was personally involved in the invention of the first paper plane. Such wealth did her for life, never having to worry about a penny in her bank account. Surrounded by luxuries, pretenders, and all the love she could have, Dauphine decided to travel the world and see its wonders.

She was fifteen years old when a car ran over her in the streets of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Instead of bleeding out on the cold ground as any God-fearing human would, she only got into a mild 7 months coma.

When she woke up, she became...odd. She suddenly claimed she could see the spirits of the departed, and that spirits demanded things of her. Mostly to enact furious revenge.

Nobody had come back from the dead before her, not counting that one zombie Lazarus and that Jesus guy who are apparently too cool to return our calls to get them to comment on some basic undead facts. It is thanks to her that we know that heaven, as it turns out, smells like Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Her doctors, being 1915, decided she was hysterical and hosed her down until her crazies went away.

Word got out that there was this small woman that could speak to ghosts, and the world's weirdest Riverdance of spirits began to knock at her door.

Of course, ghosts can't knock on doors, so they would rudely come into her home and interrupt her with their nonsense requests. Anywhere from Gengis Khan wanting one last round of pillaging and destruction, to Archduke Franz Ferdinand demanding she punched Gavrilo Princip in the throat. They came every day, all day, without stopping.

No matter how much they poked, probed, swabbed, placed in an insane asylum, hosed down again, or injected with cocaine - because, again, this was 1915, and cocaine was a panacea for anything from Hangman's bunions to demons in your blood - she was still pestered by the ghosts.

In an act of desperation, she grabbed one of her father's pistols and placed it against her forehead. But when she pulled the trigger, she could only hear the clicking of the barrel. No bullet came out. She tried again, and again, and again, with different guns, to no avail.

She tried to get hit by a car, only for said car to be hit by another car, sparing her. She took a dive into a lake with rocks in her pocket, only for the lake to dry up beneath her. Similar attempts produced similar results, from jumping out of windows to be rescued by a mattress truck, to diving into a fire that got immediately blown by a typhoon.

She tried to kill herself countless times, and every time, she was saved by an incredible stroke of luck. Lady Fortuna had forsaken her with a cursed amount of good luck.

Pestered by ghosts, and unable to die, she did the only thing that could get her to end both her problems: try to appease the ghosts, or die trying. Preferably both..

Turns out, most ghosts are dicks. They want wild, difficult, and illegal things. Kill a rival, launder some money, put some shrimp on the rims of someone's car so they won't know where the stink came from, she did it all. And as Lady Fortuna was still hungover, she never came around to change her fate. Dauphine Deveroux was an immortal, one-woman army. Nobody could stop her. And most importantly, nobody ever got to kill her.

Not even the passage of time could deter her. At a ripe age of 120 years young, as she likes to put it, she was as daring and reckless as she was a hundred years prior. Her age made her blind and with a heavy case of Alzheimer's, which made her forget she was blind in the first place, thus, making her see, since she had forgotten she was blind. It all worked out for her.

She got to be known in New Orleans' paranormal scene for her age and wisdom, and for taking cases that were deemed too crazy or dangerous for any other medium - mostly because she hoped she could find death if she was around dead people long enough. But death wasn't that much into her.

Out of respect, people would call her Marraine D, meaning Godmother D, for her caring for lost souls. This made her start most conversations with an innocuous, if risque phrase.

"So, mon cher. You want the D, don't cha?" she would say with a glint of her eyes that might or might not be cataracts.

"I'm sorry, but what?" asked Chuck. "I mean, I haven't decided if I like the D or not. I think I like it, but haven't decided to try it or not. I'm not even sure I decided whether to decide on getting the D."

The woman tried to strike Chuck with the cane, which, sans physical contact, caused him emotional damage. "Not that D, you andouille. Moi, Marraine D. Your new fairy Godmother, oui? Now, what's your name?"

Chuck regarded her for a moment, basking in her short existence. The first thing Chuck noticed was that she smelled of mildew and bad decisions. The second was her height, or lack thereof. If Chuck had to describe her in one word, it would be "Depressed Puddle," which is two words. She was that weird. If it weren't for her cane giving her support, which had a weird, opaque red diamond as a pummel, Chuck was sure she would melt into the ground.

As far as mentors went, she was underwhelming. He wished he would've stayed with Smokey instead.

She was, simply put, a ground wart, and one that didn't jive too much with Chuck. Ghosts, as it turns out, are highly judgemental beings when it comes to appearances, simply because they don't have an appearance to begin with. They're not unlike Gymnastics judges, who couldn't do a flip to save their lives, yet give participants a 4.3 if they don't land with two feet after making a triple macchiato frontflip 360 no-scope.

What we are trying to say is that Gymnastics judges are among the worst beings in the universe.

"Eh, I'm sorry?" said Chuck.

The woman took her cane and pressed the red diamond pummel to her lips. She then began to lick it. It was a ring pop. "That's a rather odd name, mon cher," said the woman between licks, "but who am I to judge? Enchantè, monsieur Sorry."

Chuck bobbed up and down in awkward silence. "My name is not Sorry. My name is Chuck."

Marraine D licked the pommel a few more times while scanning the ghost up and down. "Well, is it Chuck, or is it Sorry? You're making this old woman confused."

"I'm sorry," said Chuck, almost inadvertently.

"Well, Sorry," said the woman, finally putting the cane down. "I'm Marraine D. You can call me Momma D if you want."

"Nice to meet you, ma'am. And it's Chuck."

"Who's Chuck, mon cher?"

"Me. I'm Chuck."

"Oh, enchanté, monsieur Chuck," said the woman with a toothy grin. "I'm Marraine D. You can call me Momma D if you want."

That's when Chuck figured out why he couldn't tell what made her tick: she was missing a few cogs in her head and were promptly replaced by chocolate pudding. The cheap kind.

"Charmed," said Chuck. "Look, I'm sorry, but-"

"Enchante, monsieur Sorry," interrupted the woman, eliciting a groan of desperation from Chuck, followed by her laughing a lung out. "I'm just pulling your leg, monsieur Chuck. My brain is not what it used to be, but I can still play a prank or two. Come, walk with Marraine D. Momma wants a beignet."

Any resident of New Orleans worth their salt knows that the best place to get beignets is in Café du Monde, or the world's cafe, which for their boisterous claims of being a place that represents the interests of the whole human world do a pretty poor job at accommodating to intergalactic tentacled beings.

For those of you that are unaware of that a beignet is, it is a French delicacy where the flesh of ripe wheat is shredded, milled, and destroyed into a fine powder, then thrown into a pot with water and the whipped milk of an enslaved cow, along with the forcefully obtained periods of an enslaved chicken, all hit with a paddle until submission, and deep-fried.

Like all French cuisine, it is a dish based on animal abuse and grease. It is also very delicious.

Being a cafe solely focused on perfecting the arts of the beignet, it is the go-to place grab one to eat on the go, or sit down with a chicory coffee au lait while judging on all the weird tourists that prance around with their selfie sticks while vlogging about the whole thing.

One such weird tourist was Ron Wilson, a 33-year-old father of two who was in a conference down at the New Orleans Marriott Hotel, and decided to take a break between sessions by grabbing a set of beignets. As soon as he stepped outside the cafe, he couldn't help himself and took out a beignet to eat while he walked when a rare Brown Pelican came down on him and stole the pastry right out of his hand.

Why a Brown Pelican was outside his natural habitat still baffles us. Our running theory is that, like any New Orleans resident, he just wanted a beignet but couldn't buy one on account that he was a bird, and businesses in New Orleans are famously racist towards them.

Still, the bird flew all the way to the Cafe from the lake, or at least tried to before being intercepted by a shoe that had conveniently flew out of one Rabbi Avishai ben Levi's feet as he tried to roundhouse his frenemy, Father Alejandro, in the face, and failing. The pelican was so startled that he dropped the beignet, just in time for Marraine D to step out of the building to grab it in mid-air. Such is the power of Fortuna.

"So," said the old woman as she took a bite out of the beignet. "Tell Marraine D what you want again. I forgot already"

To say that they were making progress was an understatement. The woman was walking half a mile an hour, and that's being generous.

"Well, ma'am," said Chuck, who was floating faster than she could walk, so he contented on floating circles around her, "I seem to have a bad case of the forgetsies. I woke up to my corpse hanging from my ceiling fan, and said body was not a body anymore, 'cuz I'm sure corpses can't move."

"Uh-hu," mumbled the old lady. "Do go on, cher."

"And...eh, I would want you to help me get back into my body. I would very much prefer to be alive and in my own body, thank you very much. Or fail that, at least help me remember why I was hanging there in the first place."

Marraine D dusted the powdered sugar out of her hands, making a cloud of dust that made Chuck cough. "That's all fine and good, cher. But before you get the D-"

"Please don't say anything about the D," interrupted Chuck.

"-you have to answer me something, oui?"

The woman stopped in her tracks, shining her beady, clouded eyes on Chuck. It was enough to make him panic internally.

"Tell me," said the woman, in an entirely too casual tone, "why do you want to live?"

"Why do I want to live?" repeated Chuck like a plot-convenient parrot. "Because I don't want to be dead!"

"I see," said the woman, licking her lips as she slowly shuffled down the street. "And pray tell, cher, why don't you want to be dead?"

"Because," said Chuck, "because...dying is bad?"

The woman tapped her cane twice against the pavement while giving Chuck what amounted to a callous cackle of catastrophic chaos that conditioned cats to call out in coordinated cries, coconut. "I see, and it is bad because...?"

"Because," repeated Chuck, aimlessly flying like a fart in the wind as he thought what to say. "Because we are meant to be alive?"

"Death is wasted on the living," whispered the old woman, loud enough for Chuck to hear. "Mon cher, we are meant to die, too. We are born, we live, and we die. It is the circle of life. You simply completed your circle, oui? There is nothing special about it."

"I strongly disagree!" said Chuck. "Are you familiar with the Hero's Journey? It is a narrative structure, also in a circle. You start a journey, meet a mentor, pass through adversities, defeat the great evil, and return, being a better person. My hero journey is this. I go out, meet a mentor, get my body and memory back, and I go back to my merry ways. Storytelling 101. If I ended my circle already, and this is the end, it would mean..."

"What would it mean, Monsieur Sorry?"

"It would mean...that I accomplished nothing," said Chuck. "It would mean that this is it, and there is nothing more to life, and I refuse to accept that! It would mean that I'm a failure!"

"And I'm Marraine D," said the old woman, with eyes pointing at two different directions. "Nice to meet you, Monsieur Failure."

Chuck flashed red as anger flushed down his lumps. That's why he didn't leave the house. He couldn't deal with people. They either frighted him or exasperated him.

"And life is not a narrative structure," she continued to say. "Not everything falls into a neat character act. Sometimes, people just die, and that's it. But death doesn't have to be the end, Monsieur. Sometimes, death is a beginning."

Chuck couldn't be mad at the old woman. She was his lifeline, after all. He took a deep breath and bagpiped in a low D minor to regain his composure. "I was very attached to my life."

"Aren't we all?" said the woman. "We can't live without it, can't we?"

"No, I guess not," said the man. It was a really obvious thing to say, but it rang deep to him. "But what about the zombie me?"

"What about him, monsieur Sorry?"

"If my body is moving around on its own, that means I'm not that dead yet, right? There is still hope, right? Or else you wouldn't have taken my case, right?"

"What was your case again, cher?" said the woman. She gave three licks to her cane, but she forgot which end had the candy, so she licked the bottom end. It tasted like licorice. "My brain is not what it used to be."

Chuck flew past three buildings at full speed while fuming red in frustration. His energy was so strong that every resident in said buildings came out to fight one another in a bloody, free-for-all brawl. This became a tradition of Zombie Gras for years to come, where men, women, and children would fight each other in an arena to be crowned King of Zombie Gras.

"My zombie turned into a body, you old bag of farts!" said Chuck. "I'm sorry-"

"And I'm-"

"Marraine D, yes," interrupted Chuck. "I meant to say that my body turned into a Zombie. I want to go inside my body again. Please, you're supposed to be my mentor, the one that will give me the tools to overcome my problems. Please tell me you have at least an idea of what to do."

The woman continued her walking, licking her lips in a pensive manner. "Well, life is not a narrative structure, mon cher. I've never seen such a case where a zombie and a ghost coexisted. Although I once dated a very nice zombie. Very gentle lover. He loved to nibble at my calves."

"Okay..."

"Or maybe he just wanted to eat me, but I was too tough for him to chew," said the medium. "But I still achieved le petit mort, if you catch my drift."

"Please, Marraine D," pleaded Chuck as he bobbed up and down in front of the old woman in an attempt at shaking the mental image off his head, "you have to help me."

"Monsieur Sorry, I already told you I was going to help you, oui?" said the woman as she tried to bat Chuck with her cane. "But you haven't answered my question yet. Why do you want to live?"

That, Chuck couldn't answer to Marraine D's satisfaction. Why did he want to live? There was no husband or wife waiting for him, or pet, or even one of those Tamagotchi thingamajigs his mother bought him since he was little, and that out of pure anxiety he hadn't let it die for over twenty years until the batteries ran out, forcing him to flush it down the toilet. RIP Scuffy, 1998-2018. Goodnight sweet prince.

"Let me try putting it this way," said Marraine D. "What's your raison d'etre?"

"My what in the what now?"

"Eh, comment dit-on...your reasons for being?"

Chuck stayed in place for a minute while Marraine D walked a few inches forward at the time. He has to think that through. Taking in an unusual amount of air, and speaking his mind off in one long sentence.

"Well, I obviously can't go into heaven or hell, which tells me I might have unfinished businesses on Earth, as per the trope. You know like 'Ghost' with Patrick Swayze and Whoopi Goldberg, where the ghost of Swayze can't go over to the other side because he had to thaw a few schemes and solve his death, of which it makes no sense since his partner was the one who killed him, even though he explicitly said he didn't want him dead in the first place, then why set a robbery when he knew Swayze was going to be home? Seems like poor screenwriting to me, and-"

"Hush," said Marraine D while waving her cane around. "You're making me anxious with all those words. I've never even seen that movie. Is it any good?"

"Oh yeah, a solid 5 out of 10," said Chuck. "And I'm sorry--and I know you're Marraine D. I just get a little winded when it comes to movies."

Marraine D walked the streets without even seeing the oncoming cars, but as fortune would have it, none hit her. One of the perks of being a nigh immortal being was that she didn't have to worry too much about safety. She even took the seat belt off planes when the sign was on. Such a daredevil. "Well, you missed the point entirely, Monsieur Sorry. I didn't mean the reason you're a ghost, but your reason to exist. Your purpose in life."

"To live happily?"

"Non, non, non!" yelled the woman, "you're getting it wrong! That's a feeling, not a purpose. For example, my purpose in this world is to help poor souls like you get to the other side. That's my raison d'etre. Something only I can do."

Chuck immediately shrunk to the size of a penny while blushing a deep pink. From the distance, he looked like cotton candy. We promise not to write another chapter while hungry. "Eh, about that...I don't have much money to give you, and I promised most of my valuables to a chain-smoking ghost."

"That's okay, cher," said Marraine D as he took a right at a corner just as a Pepsi truck crashed into a Cocacola truck at a speed so great that both merged subatomically to create a new, even tastier drink that combined the taste and feel of both, creating one mega bottle of Pepcoke that conveniently fell of Marraine D's hands. It tasted okay. "I'm not in this for the money. Ghosts rarely have anything of value to me. I only ask them one thing in return."

"What would it be, ma'am?"

"Whether they go to heaven, or hell, or Nirvana, or even nothingness, I ask every soul I help to find Death and put a good word for me to die," she said with the most melancholic smile Chuck had ever seen. "I'm ready to move on, but I think death is just not that into me. So that's what I want."

"I'm sorry, ma'am. I don't think I'll meet Death anytime soon," said Chuck. He was devastated when he saw the woman go from smiling to almost crying, as if a huge, unseen weight took a toll on her.

"That's okay, mon cher. I hope you don't meet the reaper, either. We have to put you back together, don't we?"

"But, what's your game? What do you want for me?"

The woman stopped dead in her tracks, her feet finally too swollen to move on. "Well, I've helped people move on all my life. Now I have the chance to bring someone back to life, and that's a once-in-a-lifetime chance, oui? Just remember: if you ever meet death, put in a good word for me."

Chuck couldn't say he trusted the old crone. She was senile, unreliable, and was slow as molasses. Tasty, tasty molasses. Still, she was all he had.

"Okay, I'm going to allow you to be the Whoopi Goldenberg to my Patrick Swayze," said Chuck. "And for all it's worth, I'll help you die after I live again. That can be my raison d'etre, at least for a while."

"That is a rather sad way to say you don't have any reason to live at the moment," said the woman with a cheeky smile.

This gave Chuck pause. In truth, he didn't have much going on besides movies and work, and he only did work to get money to eat and not die, which wasn't a problem anymore. In fact, he could watch all the movies he could want, for free! And with the added bonus of not being peer-pressured into buying a bowl of popcorn that tastes like regret and was gone before the start of the movie.

Chuck, for the first time in his death, realized he had no reasons to live.

Marraine D gave Chuck a warm smile that warmed him deep inside - which was actually a cigarette butt that someone had thrown through him. "You have to find your own raison d'etre, mon cher. Life can't be only movies and work. There is so much to see outside your own home."

"But I'm allergic to being outside!"

"Not anymore, you aren't, Monsieur Sorry," said the crone. "Speaking off, where is your home?"

"It's," Chuck began to say as he looked around to realize that, somehow, they were outside the apartment building Chuck called a home, "here?"

"I figured out as much," said Marraine D. "I always get to where I need to be, even when I don't know where that is. So, shall we go inside? We have a Zombie to catch."

As if on cue, the panicked sound of fists slamming against a door related through the streets, followed by a deep, howling growl on a voice Chuck knew well. It was his own voice, and it was shouting one word over and over again.

A name, to be precise.

"Trevor!"