The crowd screamed and surged away from me. In their haste to flee, they trampled one another underfoot. Traffic ground to a halt as the surge of people broke and ran through the streets.

"Guys," I said, amplifying my voice until it shook the buildings. "Guys, chill the fuck out."

Nobody listened. I get it--when a ten-story being of the void pops into existence in the middle of town and your primate-brain is not used to that kind of thing, appearances matter. I decided to tone things down a bit. I scanned the terrified minds before me and found a pattern I thought they might prefer.

With a loud snapping noise, I became someone the adults seemed to find comforting, a humanoid with a large, frizzy mane of hair and a disarming smile.

"What the fuck," a woman nearby screamed. "Did it just turn into Bob Ross?"

"Everybody calm down," I begged. "I'm sorry if I scared you. We all get scared sometimes, and that's okay. It was just a happy little accident on my part. And after all, aren't we all just happy little accidents? You, somehow sentient monkeys descended from ambitious amoeba--me, the animated consciousness of the screaming void? We're all just doing the best we can."

Those nearest to me cautiously stopped their scrambling and stomping. A few started to drift toward me. Fires smoldered in overturned cars, and the groans of the wounded rang out over the sudden silence.

"Theeeere," I said, waving a paintbrush. "Why don't we just take these happy little mistakes and make them beautiful? Every mistake is just an opportunity, really." Broken bones knit back together. Fires snuffed themselves out. At least a dozen dead bodies rose as if from naptime.

The primates laughed uneasily, wailing mothers hugging their suddenly-alive children to their breasts. A little boy walked up to me. "What do you want?"

"I'm here to make things a little better for everyone," I said. It was true. These sentient lifeforms were the only ones I'd ever met that had been cursed with mortality. They were intelligent enough to ask why they were alive, but fragile enough to die! I couldn't imagine a worse fate. "I'm here to kill death a little bit, just make things kinder."

With another flick of my brush, I commanded the immortal spirits cluttering the atmosphere of this bizarre world back into their vessels. "Family is important, and I want you all to know I care about yours," I trilled. I would save these poor beings from the pain of loss they had felt for so many centuries.

I split the ground and pulled the sleeping ones upward to rejoin the living. Thousands of years' worth of dead men, women and children surged up through the cracks, shrieking as they came. Being reunited with one's soul can be a shock! I understood.

For some reason, the rest of the primates did not seem to. I gasped in horror as they started clubbing and shooting their ancestors.