Manny the Magnificent and the Anomalous Routing Event

Gareth was an IT project manager from South Wales whose last thought on Earth was about an immersion heater. Then a bus introduced him to the afterlife, which promptly glitched. Now he's Manny, stranded in a medieval village called Millhaven with a floating ball of light named PIP who communicates mainly through disapproving color changes. The System has assigned him a unique class: Fabulist, an illusionist who understands that reality is just a story, and power comes from telling a better one. His signature ability is TRUE. Simple in principle: Manny casts an illusion and marks it TRUE. The ambient magic receives it, agrees with it, and files it under real. It stays. No duration, no expiry. The thing behaves exactly as a real thing behaves, because it is one. The catch? Every TRUE casting costs genuine conviction. Manny has to mean it. Not perform meaning it. Actually mean it. Armed with nothing but bureaucratic instincts, a talent for accidental truth-telling, and PIP's barely-contained judgment, Manny must navigate a world of quests, village politics, and the eternal problem of breakfast. The System may have made an error. PIP certainly thinks so. But Manny's starting to suspect that being honest in a world built on stories might be the most powerful magic of all.