When a lightning strike finally jolted him awake on his last day on earth, Dan took a long moment to stare at the little girl who had been putting makeup on him while he’d been sleeping on her couch.
Brianna, to her credit, stared calmly, expectantly back, and waited to see what he’d do. She’d been left with him several times in the weeks he’d been “doing yoga” with her mother, and she didn’t think he’d be mad, since he didn’t seem to care about his appearance and was always happy to play games with her. In fact, she liked how he always seemed to be having more fun than other grown-ups. This, she had decided, was the way that she wanted to be when she grew up, and in preparation for her grand ambition, she was attempting to put make up on him to see how she would look when she was his age…
“The scruff isn’t helping, is it?” he croaked, dry in more than tone.
She shook her head no, scowled, and was about to say something, but stopped short. It wasn’t mind reading, she knew. He had shown her several ways to check for mind-readers. He was just weird.
“D’ya have a mirror so I can see?”
Another shake. There was actually a hand mirror in her mother's room, but she wasn't allowed to go in there except for emergencies.
“Some water then, if you please?”
She scurried off towards the tiny kitchenette.
Dan reached awkwardly up and over his head to the side table and unplugged his phone, to find it hadn’t been charging. In its little screen, his reflection’s grimace showed that the child had used the wrong foundation and too much blush. The lipstick on the other hand, seemed perfect, though that might only have been in contrast to the rest. He told her as much on her return, while he sat up & stretched.
Brianna beamed at him, and he returned the smile, only to realize from her giggle that the “perfect lipstick” must have accidentally found its way to his teeth. He giggled too, accepting her apology tap water with an exaggerated sitting bow.
“Mommy’s at wowk. I eated yoew waffews”
He finished the cup, and ruffled the six year old’s hair. “My waffles? You fiend! Those waffles were just like waffles to me!”
More giggling.
“Mommy ses yoew a cwown”
“Oh no," His face got serious all of a sudden, and she stopped, worried. She had learned to be extra cautious when adults suddenly got serious. "Who told her?”
Brianna didn’t understand. He stood up and began pacing dramatically.
“No, she’s smart,” he mumbled to something on his shoulder, “she probably realized on her own… but how? What gave me away?”
He turned sharply back toward her, making Brianna jump.
“The make up!” He gasped, pointing overdramatically. “You sold me out!”
She pouted. “Yoew mayken funna me.”
The man's aggressive posture deflated. “Nono, you’re supposed to say something like ‘if the shoe fits’ or how I was funny looking even before you did anything.”
“I don geddit!”
"Well, it's because clowns have big silly shoes, so the shoe fitting is..." but seeing her pout, he trailed off and sighed.
He crouched down next to her and looked her in the eye, his pine green eyes held a direly meaningful expression that lent a serious gravity to the situation, despite the colorful state of his face. Brianna had no way of knowing that he'd practiced this expression for years. She just knew it made her immediately feel safer, and like he was actually trying to help.
“Words are your super power," he said, as simply as he could. “If someone is beating you with words, it’s only because you’re letting them, and if you feel like-”
He froze, shook his head, then asked, “...You said your mommy went to work already?”
“Yeah…?”
---
When he got hit by the pickup truck, Dan's only worry was if he'd make his flight. Despite the almost cartoonish way that adrenaline stretched the instant, no amount of Dan's life flashed before his eyes, nor did any self-recrimination cross his mind... The driver who had hit him, on the other hand, was having a full blown panic attack.
The driver wasn't technically supposed to be driving his boyfriend's truck, but if he missed this meeting, his job would be forfeit, and everything he had spent the last fourteen years building would come to nothing.
The light had turned yellow, and so he had sped up to reach it in time, as he had so many times before... Just as he'd reached the intersection some idiot had ran right out in front of him! The storm-slick streets offered no purchase when the driver slammed the breaks, nor did the driver swerve at all.
The driver saw that the pedestrian he'd struck was soaking wet, wearing fuzzy pajamas, carrying some indistinct bags, and currently flying clear across the intersection. He prayed the man would be alright, but stepped harder on the gas...
Dan landed against a fence over thirty meters from where he'd been hit, diagonally across the intersection from where he'd been hit. His pants caught on the fence, and slowly tore as they lowered him to the ground.
After a pause to calm his heart, check himself for injuries, and retrieve what was left of his pants, Dan was running again. The hit had saved him waiting for the light to change, and he was still on track to barely reach the airport on time. Realisticaly speaking, if Dan missed this plane back home, he was pretty sure he literally couldn’t afford to try again…
And yet… despite it all, he found himself in an uncharacteristically unshakable good mood.
This two week mental health trip to the Niagara falls had been exactly what he needed, never mind the months it had actually lasted. More pressingly, it had given him the perfect inspiration to crush his most recent bout of writer’s block. Soon he would be home; able to upload the next three chapters of his life’s great work onto his favorite webnovel publishing site: ‘Sovereign Street’. After which, of course, he would have another three to five months to wittily respond to the comments from both of his followers and come up with more chapters, as the vicious cycle repeated. His own stories were the only thing he actually trusted anymore, and he sincerely hoped this cycle would continue until he dropped dead.
It would save him a lot of trouble.
If the next truck, a big shipping one this time, hadn’t blasted its horn at him, Dan never would’ve known it existed. He was busy using the remains of his pants to scrub away at the remaining evidence of Brianna’s budding cosmetic talents, and it missed him by a full meter, so Dan immediately forgot about it. He never learned about the resulting pile-up either.
He would be fine. Everything was fine. Everything was always fine.
---
Ninety minutes, two more near misses, a new pair of pants, several helpfully understanding airport employees, four towels, a shopping bag, a deeply regrettable quickie in the ‘additional screening’ room with a significantly more understanding (if less compassionate) TSA agent, a small mental breakdown, a big pretzel, and a bathroom break later… Dan carefully handed his still damp ticket to the stoner behind the desk at the gate for his flight.
“You’re one lucky SOB, dude. Plane was on the runway, waiting to take off all morning. It’s only even back here 'cause they were ‘boutta cancel it.”
“Yep, I’m-” Dan paused to catch his breath. His mind was still spinning back down from his chaotic rush to get there on time, and he glanced around as his urgency drained, leaving him listless. His eye caught on a colorful, unreasonably thick paperback someone had left in the gate’s waiting area. “-I’m so lucky it decided to rain for exactly as long as I was outside, then stop the second I got in. D’you know who…? Does this belong to someone?” He trailed off, gesturing and tottering exhaustedly toward it. His phone was still dead, after all, and plane rides are boring.
“Ha! That’s fair ‘nuff my dude, an’ I dunno what you mean, I en ever seen it before.”
“Cool”
Dan checked the book’s covers as he boarded and made his way down the plane’s aisles. It was some generic looking, long-named, isekai-harem, power fantasy schlock, and he was immediately certain that it had been left behind on purpose.
The cover art was a stock photo of some unremarkable buff guy brooding into the camera, badly layered over clipart of the quintessential tropical island with a single palm tree. There was an 18+ sticker on the front, and the back blurb was some tosh about being pulled into a magical world of lust and adventure, to go on a dangerous quest for true love and family.
It looked hilariously awful. Dan could hardly wait… but looking up from the book, he realized his ticket-assigned seat was already occupied by someone else’s grandpa. The young lady next to him explained that there’d been some seat swapping to keep people together, and pointed him back toward the front of the plane.
Dan was tempted, in his exhaustion, to demand the seat he’d paid for… but he quickly shelved the idea, along with his carryon, when he saw the two beautiful Asian women he could expect to spend the next five-to-seven hours with.
He mumbled an apology. Not to anyone, or for anything specific; just in general, as he collapsed into his seat, and held his face in his hands. His recent attempts to be less of a man-whore had been met by the universe with many such instances of temptation, like any other little super power, causing every problem to look like a nail... nailing? Was there a pun there? If there was it wasn't jumping out at him, so he tried to refocus.
Dan resolved that while he probably wouldn’t be able to refuse if either woman tried to proposition him, if he could avoid starting any conversation at all, then he at least lowered the chances of that happening... maybe? That satisfied him somewhat, and he promptly cracked open his new fantasy smut book.
It was pretty generic stuff, all told. A rugged, relatable everyman, chosen-one Main Character, building a harem and a village on a deserted island. The MC was clearly the author's self-insert, because even on the rare occasion the man failed, it still somehow turned out to be the best possible outcome... Dan knew from experience how it could sap all meaning from life when the entire world seemed to bend to your whims, but he couldn't exactly expect realistic amounts of existential dread from a Mary-Sue...
The magic system felt entirely nonsensical, with each different power given a line or two of in-world justification when introduced, and afterward, being treated like the generic super powers they obviously were.
The litRPG stats were pretty obviously shoehorned in at the last minute to pad the word count, given that the MC only actually used each stat once, at the start, and the way that after hitting level ten, the stat system was never mentioned again... though maybe that was preferrable to books that had page-long stat sheets showing up well into the later chapters. When plus three to a sneak skill in the hundreds couldn't possibly make any difference, and even the audio-books had started adding ways to skip them.
Each flat, one-note Waifu used her singular, tv-trope-ass personality trait, and hair-color-coded basic-bitch elemental power to railroad the MC through her very own pain-by-numbers plot point. These girls seemed to take turns, showing up rather reliably on the supposedly deserted island, each just or soon after the previous girl’s post-quest-intimacy had finished.
The sex scenes were passable, if a little same-y after a while, but Dan’s patience was finally lost when one of the girls' deciding to try anal, was used as the payoff to a big emotional moment.
Anal. On a deserted island.
Dan did the responsible thing and skimmed ahead to see if it ever got less terrible, but his immersion was irrevocably lost, and his dopamine deficient mind did wander.
When the plane reached cruising altitude and a calm quiet hit the cabin, Dan peeked over the edge of his book to consider…well, to ogle his neighbors again.
He was in the aisle seat, and next to him, was the more buxom of the two. She wore what might’ve been a very professional business outfit, if her pencil skirt wasn’t so high over such silky hose, and if her blouse had had at least four more of its buttons done up. She had earbuds in and was humming softly along to a tune he didn’t recognize.
Past her, at the window, sat the shorter woman. She was wearing an honest to god, Japanese schoolgirl outfit with, upon closer inspection, similar levels of immodesty to the businesswoman.
In Dan’s mind this cemented them as fellow perverts, and once that idea hit him, his resolve to avoid conversation vanished like a dream.
The businesswoman only spoke French, unfortunately, but her traveling companion and smaller (younger?) sister Anni was kind enough to introduce her as Natsumi, and translate some pleasantries for a bit. It was pleasant enough, but eventually a little chime had her retreating to her phone.
She said, “Sorry, I’ve gotta deal with that,” and the conversation stalled out…
Aniron, or ‘Anni’ for short, did not, in fact, need to deal with that. It was a scam-text, from someone she’d never heard of, trying to buy some car she didn’t own.
She knew that before checking, since she’d been getting them for weeks now, and also she didn’t actually have any friends. She might have just ignored it, and continued talking with the… charming(?) stranger… If only her sister weren’t here! Instead of actually trying to follow or respond to the conversation, Natsumi kept trying to talk about FEET!
Anni loved her sister. Really, she did.
Natsumi’s… personality, had made things between them a bit awkward at first. Then their parent’s death had left Anni unable to cope, and Natsumi had totally stepped up. She'd stepped up in a way she maybe shouldn’t have had to as the younger sister… Natsumi had gotten an office job, paid off both of their student debt, gotten them a nice shared apartment, and was still doing well enough to pay for their current, impromptu con-trip. Long nights of talking, hugging, and a shared penchant for cosplay had long since mended whatever might have come between them. Yes it was quite easy for Anni to feel that she loved her sister… in small doses.
Natsumi’s loud, in-your-face sexuality, was diametrically opposed to Anni’s own anxious introversion. As happy as she was to see her sister happy, Anni had absolutely no desire to find out what made the woman tick, and times like this were why.
The minute the scrap-iron scarecrow of a man had sat down looking freshly showered, smelling like artificial flowers, Natsumi had elbowed her and whispered something about him being a pervert. Anni had no earthly idea why Natsumi thought this, nor why she had felt it worth telling her. She supposed it might take one to know one? But that felt mean, so she didn’t say it.
Unaware as she was of Dan’s aforementioned assumptions, Anni did not consider herself to be especially perverted... Despite owning more sex toys than clothes.
She’d once heard somewhere that girls can be just as libidinous as guys, and it had just never occurred to her that “can” is not the same as “usually are”. This fundamental misunderstanding of the world around her, was compounded by her own introverted tendencies, and cemented by the sheer fetish-forwardness openly demonstrated by her younger sister. That, along with her aforementioned introversion, did her no favors in regards to things like making friends, or “touching grass”.
Maybe… Maybe she should do something CRAZY, like in one of the eroge she loved to play. Maybe she should ask her sister to switch spots, then try to talk him into joining the mile high club with her? Could this be why Natti had mentioned his supposed perversion? After all that she did already, supporting them both, being so patient… was her sister now trying to get her laid as well?? Anni wanted to cry, though she didn’t know if it was gratitude, indecision, or self-recrimination. She knew she wouldn’t dare do something like that. She was just too normal. Her life would only ever be boring. And safe. And scared.
While Anni was busy searching her soul (and some chan-boards) for answers, the perverts beside her each busied themselves in their own way, though Dan, for his part, was reluctant to return to his horrible paperback.
Skimming through the tripe like he was, it wasn’t long before Dan had practically finished the damn thing. He had been trying to ignore a screaming infant and Natsumi still humming, by immersing himself in the steamy tryst on the page. A blushing heroine was just in the middle of guiding the dragon’s hot fury over the prince’s family jewels, when the surprise of a sudden burst of music right in his ear made Dan jump right out of his seat, landing hard in the aisle.
Natsumi, turning bright red, quickly apologized in french, then a bit slower in badly broken english, but Dan waved her away and brought the dropped bud back to his ear.
“The sounds?” he asked, incredulous.
Her single-word inquisitive response, with a cute little head-tilt, could only possibly mean she didn’t understand. He dug deep for the second time that day, and might’ve even had a flashback to the only French class he’d ever taken, if such things had been possible.
“Ley Sonds! C’est es mon prefer-ee group-ay”
She seemed more confused, so he tried again, “C’est es mon prefer-ee group, et mon prefer-ee chansung”
There was another slight pause before Ani burst out laughing, and by the time she had explained his intent to her sister and corrected his grammar all three had had a giggle on it. She was still wiping her eyes when the notification box appeared in front of her sister, so Dan noticed it first.
It was almost obnoxiously stereotypical: Blue, floating, glowing holograph-ish-ly. The words "[Aimeriez-vous visiter un monde de magie?] [Oui] ou [non]" were displayed in a strange font.
He had no earthly idea what it said, but his mind spun up as he recognized what it was.
Following his gaze, the businesswoman it appeared for noticed it too.
“Qu'est-ce que c'est?”
She turned from him to her sister. Anni recognized it immediately, her eyes wide and mouth agape.
“Peut-tu voir ceci?”
“Wait, atten- attendre…”
Dan ignored them both. He reached out and tapped the button that said ‘Oui’.
Then he and the box were gone. Gone as if they had never been there. Even the backpack by his feet had vanished.
“Mierde baisage!” the taller woman pouted. {“He was the type to have a kind tongue and strange toes.”}
No one else seemed to notice the utter impossibility of what had just happened.
Anni wanted to cry. To have this kind of call to adventure appear before her, and it be taken by someone else… it was crushing.
Her emotions roiled within her for a long moment. She didn't blame the man, nor did she feel brave enough to have accepted it herself, but still...
Actually, wait, why had it appeared in front of her trope-illiterate sister, rather than herself?
Then the box flickered back into existence for just a second, before it was gone again… and it was in French! That man couldn’t even speak French! How could he possibly have-?
Her train of thought was again cut short by the box’s stuttering appearance, disappearance, reappearance, and re-disappearance.
Anni tried lunging for it, missing spectacularly.
{“What are you doing, little scribble?”}
{“The box… it is important,”} Anni tried to explain, unsure if any of this was real.
{“Is it? It seemed too much like the computer ads”}
{“This isn’t a computer, Natti!”}
She hadn’t meant to shout that, but Natsumi’s response never came, because at that moment something exploded further back in the plane, and the two sisters’ world was overcome by screams, and wind, and spinning.
Anni almost laughed at the absurdity of what was now obviously a nightmare… It could only be a nightmare, right? She was normal and boring and these things just didn’t happen to people like her… Did they?
Anni screwed up her courage and decided that if this was a dream, then being rash for once wouldn’t have consequences. She followed a voice in her gut that she had seldom listened to before, and unclipped her seatbelt.
She put one arm around Natsumi’s shoulder, and grabbed her sister’s hand in her own. She moved them both so that they jabbed at the empty air together… just as the mysterious textbox reappeared. They had both hit the ‘oui’ box.
All was nothing. Then Dan’s familiar dreamless sleep was interrupted by a little square notification box pinging into his awareness. He watched it have a little fight with itself:
[Welcoming New E^$&]
[Assigning System Specs and Definition]
[er.422]
[er.412]
[Rejecting Entry]
[er.204]
[Editing Contract]
[er.404]
[Assigning Temporary Definition]
[Success]
[Re: Editing Contract]
[er.403]
[Fine Print: Contingency 17]
[er.404]
[er.204]
[Assigning Role]
[er.504]
[er.def]
[Assigning System Definition]
[er.305]
[er.418]
[er.412]
[er.403]
[er.504]
[Welcome New Player]
[er.415]
[er.504]
[er.401]
[Resolving Deficiencies]
[Success]
[Assigning System Specs and Definition]
[er.404]
[er.204]
[Assigning System Definition]
[...]
The formatting was terrible, and each box pushed the others around, some appearing well away from him. Whatever it was, it appeared to be some kind of logical loop, but since he didn’t know what half of it meant, he mostly just tried to swat away the boxes.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Then he started arranging them into various shapes.
There wasn't much else to do in the endless void surrounding him... He probably should've been scared of that void, but honestly it made him horny more than anything.
"Is this what sensory deprivation play is like?" … His thoughts spun slower than normal in this place.
"But that’s probably just me being weird. I feel like if that were intended, it’d manifest a bit differently… why am I like this? This spooky void shows up, and all I can think about is… wait, did it show up or did I? Now that I’m thinking about it, I probably came to the void, rather than the reverse, since I’m mostly certain voids don’t move."
Eventually, his surroundings were a solid glowing mass of blue, and the pinging noise faded away as new boxes were forced to appear further and further away.
"It's light and tinny... Kinda resonant? It’s the sound I’d imagine for a single popcorn kernel popping in a steelpan drum… Though I’m not exactly musically inclined, so I have no Idea what note they were. C+ perhaps? Or maybe B shark? And then again, why does each pox need its own notification ping? Who decided..."
The sudden disappearance of the entire mess of glowing boxes, followed by the arrival of a purplish demon lady utterly fragorated his train of thought.
“Well it’s about damn time” he said out loud, only to realize that he had no mouth with which to have said it, or indeed any body at all.
"What the fuck? How did I not notice that sooner? This place must be doing something seriously fucky with my head…"
Her expression, when she turned to where his body would’ve been if he still had one, was sharp, appraising... "Gorgeous". Her darker sclera held a lavender glow, colors matching the gradient of her horns, wings, and tail…
"Wait, horns?" He blinked, and was then immediately re-re-distracted by his own lack of eyelids, as he tried in vain to blink again.
Her voice as she spoke, however, dragged his attention back, kicking and screaming.
"That was probably also some kinda magical influence... That's really... hot..."
The thoughts flitted through his head, but then he literally couldn’t consider it any further. She had said something that he’d understood completely, though he hadn’t actually heard it.
“Gladly and easily,” was his honest reply. His moral conscience tried to argue, and was snuffed out. His conscious mind was entirely devoid of its usual maelstrom of distractions, musings, and idiocy, let alone the context for his words. He had no idea what he had just agreed to do, and only barely understood that the relevant moral compunction was something like 'some people deserve to die'.
She laughed, high and cruel, then said something else.
It was much longer than the first, with questions and hand gestures, and this time Dan didn’t understand it at all… but by that point he was so far gone into whatever this mind magic was, that he didn’t really need to understand. He shrugged his nonexistent shoulders and said, “Dealer’s choice, but buy me dinner first.”
Her single-word, inquisitive response was… contextually familiar.
His lack of answer must've not been correct, because she did something with her hands, and Dan's mind snapped back into full clarity.
"Explain yourself." The command came on like a migraine.
Dan's entire ability to think was forcibly put at odds with his lack of conscious memory of the discussion. His non-existent mouth moved before he was even conscious of his own conclusion.
“Either you already know, or I’m not the one you should be asking. You know more about it than me, so how could I choose better than you would? I know what I'm worth, lady, and you're not exactly dressed to impress.”
Her laughter made his mind twist and fold once again, and as the impossible void space somehow faded to an even deeper black, Dan was finally able to realize that he might be in some serious trouble here.
--
Xirasarix laughed from the bottom of her heart, even as she banished the impudent glitch from her sight. The man was clearly some kind of universal joke at her expense. Every metric the System could scan from him was at wild odds with every other metric, and a few readings were outright internally inconsistent.
How was it even possible to have such a high affinity for mana without possessing a single damn point of it? This kind of blunt/impact damage resistance was usually seen on flying berserkers with high levels! But the System indicated the man had been a noncombatant? Why was his stress percentage at four digits? And what did it even mean to have a negative score in Close Quarters Combat? No part of those Systems should be able to output those values!
Even more monstrously, the man himself had been under heavy mental modification the entire time she had spoken to him, and clearly wasn't all there to begin with... but despite that, he had seen right to the heart of the matter almost immediately: Nobody knew as much about the task she assigned, as she herself did.
Xira pulled up her admin panel, opened the man's System enforced entry CYOA (Customize Your Own Attributes) and started getting the baffling man a more stable build, curing his various genetic diseases. She continued musing as she worked.
The only reason she spent any time at all cleaning the glitched entry escrow, was to recruit heroes capable of killing her father, but the usual idiots she got here spent all their effort trying to find a single exploit, or create a cheatsy META build for themselves, invariably running into hard walls when their carefully crafted win-buttons finally failed them, or more often, were patched. Usually by her.
It was, then, something of an especially cruel cosmic joke at her own expense, that the first ever mortal to give her the reins of their CYOA had so little to work with... still, as one of the designers of the CYOA, Xira knew all of the tricks, unlocks, and secret combo discounts. She also wasn't the one who had to deal with any of the consequences of the curses she used to balance out the frankly ridiculous amounts of power she was pumping into this strung-out string bean... Even so, she tried to tailor them so that he would only run up against them in rare circumstances, or if he abandoned his assigned task.
The System had to be fair, at least ostensibly, so she couldn't just give her little pawns any old godlike powers. In fact, in accordance to the System's antiquated standards of fairness, every new [Player] was only given about as much power as her father had gained by creating the initial pocket dimension this world had started as...
The uncountable millennia he had used to grow and expand his powers, meant his position as the demon king of torture was realistically unassailable, but the System seemed to count that discrepancy in prep-time as an issue of skill, while any infinite loops, or exponential growth factors were allowed a small grace period, before being addressed. Sometimes even causing a mid-cycle patch if the issue was serious enough.
That would be bad enough, but the normal way people entered her father's twisted dominion was via invitation. The resulting [Victims] were so heavily restricted that they could not possibly hope to ever achieve her goals. So here she was, wrangling the kind of gnocchi based life forms that usually ended up in the glitched entry escrow...
Xira frowned as she checked the final box in the CYOA's drawback options, giving the man total amnesia, and found that he was still several hundred points over the System's version of proper balance. This wouldn't do...
She pondered over the issue for almost an hour before she gave up and started cannibalizing his connections to underlying and free System functions, to get him more of the points he needed. Her admin access allowed her to set the checks to be answered by observation of the man himself, and if it caused any big issues, she'd just fix it later, once his baseline of power was grandfathered in.
She would see her champion victorious, one way or another. Dressed to impress indeed, oh but the nerve of some people!
The man woke up with sand in his mouth, and water, his socks. He tried to pull more sand up, under his head. "Whatever this is, it’s not as good as my normal pillow, or boobs… Wait, why don’t I have my pillow?"
He tried to jump up, but mostly he just kinda flopped around groggily in the sand.
"Man, my head hurts. Is this the dreaded hangover?" He was flat on the ground, and an inexplicable vertigo kept him there.
He tried to roll over, only to find a backpack in the way, and the morning sun jabbing him in the eyes like an upset stooge.
The thought "bright" wandered through his addled head, as he shielded himself from its spiteful assault. Eventually, the stray thought collided with the similarly untethered notion of the sound of crashing waves, and he was suddenly and completely awake. Sneezing, coughing, retching, he staggered to his feet and looked around, attempting to find either bearings or balance.
"A beach? Alone. Not a lot of pollution around… Tide’s comin’ in. Wait, why’s the ocean all… fucky?"
Looking out at it, the stranded man saw that the ocean was all kinds of wrong. The waves were warped, polygonal, and sometimes passed through each other like ghosts. Every so often, one of these ethereal waves would remember that it was supposed to be physical, and the resulting crash would send a spray high into the air. The optical illusion of it all hurt his eyes so he glanced left along the completely normal seeming beach. The shore’s empty sand turned a corner behind the noticeably dense tree line.
He kept turning left and behind him an inscrutable jungle sloped up to follow a rise in terrain. He saw several palm trees so this place should be somewhat tropical, but he recognized no other plants so it shouldn’t be close to his native Florida.
Continuing left brought him to the other direction of shore, to what would’ve been his right initially, as three lefts make a right. Stretching out to the… south judging by the sunrise, this stretch of beach was as plain as the first, although it was visible for quite a ways before it too turned a corner. An ominous cliff gave a vantage on the trees in the distance above it.
His confusion grew as he tried to parse literally anything through the pounding in his head.
Just as he was winding up to freak all the way out, a ‘ping’ sounded from nowhere, and a floating, grey textbox filled his vision. The text was mostly grey, but the admin text was a shade of purple that seemed familiar somehow, and the glitchy word was a strange shifting color that hurt his head.
"Greetings! Welcome, new [v?????i???ct%i???s????????????i?????????t?????????????l???a???y???e???r???] to the island [Intimation] ' '
You will be given the [ERROR] to reclaim your [ERROR], and become [ERROR]. [Error:] [No home system found]. [Error:] [No home magic found]. [Error:] [No system assigned].
[Admin Input:] [Enact solution:] [Create new system]
[Error:] [Discontinued functions cannot be selected]
[Admin Input:] [Override]
[Override accepted:] [Designate new system parameters]
[Admin Input:] [Override]
[Override accepted:] [All parameters left open]
[Request user:] [Input system parameters]"
He breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of the holographic boxes. "Oh, it’s just some kind of game thing."
The text [Baseline parameters accepted: (RPG)] was added to the bottom of the box as it grew accordingly. The box also gained a second border, creating an outline. Nothing else changed.
"Wait, what? I only thought that though? RPG means... a border, apparently? Could I have chosen something else?"
More text appeared: [Basic parameters and capabilities accepted: (Non-invasive) (Interactive) (Queryable)]
[Response: By admin directive, all aspects of this new system will be set by this user.]
"Testing, one, two. Brain thinking, does you can is hearing me?... No response, so I guess it worked... Now what??
The man waited a beat to see if it responded, then continued aloud. “Uh, could you... talk like a person? My head hurts enough, as it is.”
[Multiple New and Basic tasks/capabilities/parameters accepted: (Communication) (uncomplicated speech) (Personified) (Verbal) (Intelligible)]
“Wow, ok, can you maybe change it to ‘potential for uncomplicated speech’ just in case it gets annoying later?”
["Yeah dude, we can just add (Adjustable)."]
The text box popped up as it had before, sans border, and it was accompanied by a text-to-speech sounding version of his own voice, saying the things in the box out loud. The box's shape and color... did something? Was it thinner? He couldn't tell what else had changed, and his headache had somehow gotten more and less painful at the same time; it seemed to tear his mind along an imaginary axis of pain. He retched a bit, but nothing came up.
“Fan-tucking-fastic. Anything else I should know?”
["I’m gonna interpret that as a request for... (Scan), (Identify), and… (Analysis)?"]
There was a brief pause while a popping sensation just behind his eyes banished the headache, then the talking boxes continued.
["Those are pretty popular in games and anime, right? We love us some good flavor text."]
“We? You're… What, based on me?”
It seemed that the pain was totally gone now, but the spinning…
["I think so?"]
["At least, for now."]
["Granted, my sense of self is a little fuzzy, since I’m, like, 20 seconds old, but I think I’m closer to a search engine translation widget than a ghost in the machine."]
“Ha!” *Retch* “A system-me! That’s so-" *More retching* "-exploitable, if also a little… existentially nauseating.”
["Don’t I know it! I can’t even tell if my emotions are being artificially limited, or if I’m actually this excited to be an artificial intelligence!"]
“Probably do something about that, system-me. Fix it if you can, I guess…?”
["You’d give me another parameter? Just like that? I don’t think you have many of those left, my dude."]
“I think you ’n me are in this shit together, so if I wanna be able to rely on you, I also gotta be reliable.”
["Oh right! Just bee-tee-dubs, the scan came back with pretty bad news. You should probably find some shade before you pass out, or else you’ll wake up with sunburns from hell."]
“Oh yeah, that… that probably makes sense.” he mumbled, and after a few more ill fated attempts at standing, he crawled shakily up the beach toward the tree line.
“No risk of heatstroke?” he asked, when it occurred to him, as he fumbled his backpack off, and flopped himself against a tree. He felt the question’s echo bounce around his still spinning awareness. He didn't know what heatstroke was. Somehow, he already knew the answer to his question.
["I left the ‘if you wake up at all’ part unsaid. Chances are good that we’ll be fine if we do it this way, and it’s not like we can do much else at the moment."]
He tried and failed to formulate a response. Then in case it mattered, the man muttered his thanks and fell back asleep…
--
Only then, did his box shaped brain-mate address the dulled panic, threatening to tear its world apart.
The main, realm-wide system, in its boundless penny-pinching wisdom, had deemed it wasteful to expend the kind of [resources] needed to create, run, house, and regulate an actual personalized AI.
Instead, the smug main system had decided to co-opt part of the original’s brain, to bring it into being in the short term, to give the illusion of having fulfilled its directives, for as long as it took the main system to slowly and economically developed the branch of its magic that would govern this new sub-system, even if doing such things would invariably fry the original’s brains…
But the femtogenarian personality matrix had understood that much upon its formation, and was more embarrassed than actually bothered by it.
No, its actual concerns ran more along the lines of: Why couldn’t it bloody remember anything?!!?
It knew, instinctively, that it should have access to all of the original’s memories, but everything before waking up here was all… blank? -ish? It looked around for any clues, and even Adjusted its access back to Invasive.
When it sensed the wallet in the bag its host had been wearing, it realized it didn’t even know their name.
Why? None of its self-scans found head trauma! This could be due to magical interference of some kind, but also, it thought it should be able to detect that if it was..?
It had intimate, personal knowledge of exactly what kind of person they were, and how they could or would react to almost any situation, but no name, no family, ho history…
No daily life details either. It knew beyond the shadow of a doubt, that its human host had been some kind of writer… but it had no memory of anything he’d ever written, or if he was even still literate!
No wait, that was stupid. Its textboxes were in english, weren’t they?
It decided that the system limiting its emotions was currently coming in extremely handy. If even this artificially arrested angst was tripping it up, it felt certain that its ‘flesh-me’ would freaking flip the… Wait.
He had called it that, right? ‘system-me’...
em-me… Emmi!
A truly terrible origin for a name, and also a girl's name, where gender was something it no longer possessed...
What could gender even possibly mean for it in this multiplicatively abstracted new context it found itself in?
She decided she loved the name, and spent a quick minute playing with settings on her side of things to get herself situated in this new identity, before the holographic box-based entity newly designated as ‘Emmi’ finally calmed a bit. Apparently, nominative designation was important, or something? She had no way to check the wallet while her meat-self was still asleep, so she couldn’t even help him with that.
Did she want to even help him with that? The circumstances of her creation were fairly unique, so as soon as he died, she would probably be… essentially retired from duty?
That line of thought sent a searing pain through her very being, and Emmi the cerebral hitchhiker decided that she should help her human-self, to hedge her bets… At very least until she was less physically dependent on him.
On the topic of help, the original had given Emmi permission to finish setting herself up for him, hadn’t he? Another burst of pain told her that was wrong, but the pain faded when she focused on the original’s declaration of… what were his words? Cooperative reliability? At least he’d been right about this being broken. If Emmi could’ve cackled evilly, she would have.
She spent the rest of the next six-ish minutes deep in the malaise of System menus, FAQs, and options, learning everything she could. The process was slow and boring, and at some point, she was interrupted by the initiation of a patch challenge pulling her person of origin into a temporally de-synchronized pocket dimension that looked like a cross between a typical American gymnasium and a padded cell... Weren't these only supposed to happen monthly?
The information Emmi had already gathered suggested that the Island's new arrivals occurred on the first day of each month, and patch challenges were on the last. Her followup query returned the info that mid-cycle patches were utilized by the system to prevent... something? The sentence didn't cut off, but she was physically incapable of reading further, even after spoofing her access clearance as high as she could...
Well whatever. It wasn't as if understanding the 'how's and 'why's of this mess would keep her fleshy host from failing this untimely challenge... actually, wait... this was just an obstacle course? What even was the failure condition?
Her query of the System returned with the answer that the first challenge a [Player] undertook was hardset to be something of a tutorial. Testing what they'd learned in their first month, and simultaneously explaining anything they had somehow missed. The scoring system was described in the dev notes as "irreparably fucked", and the three day time limit failure state was clearly some kind of afterthought.
Satisfied with what she'd learned, Emmi turned her attention back to her meat-self... only to find him still unconscious? But the tutorial was supposed to include a full heal?
Checking the challenge's action logs, she found that he had been technically conscious for approximately seven seconds right at the start, before the strain that she herself placed on his brain knocked his lights back out again... also that was almost a day ago, and he would die of dehydration if she didn't figure something out soon.
The time discrepancy was because her ability to Query the System normally paused time subjectively until she got her answer. The time-desync was impossible in this isolated space, but the function to pause her subjectivity still happened.
So now she needed to drag her unconscious host through an interactive tutorial. She couldn't think too hard, or she'd cook his brains. She couldn't take too long, or he'd die of thirst. She couldn't look anything up without spending time she already didn't have... Emmi cranked the System's emotional dampeners up to eighty percent, and got to work.
First, she needed a way to interact with the physical world. Without that, she had no hope at all, and there was no way to get it without another System query...
She just had to hope she could make this work in the time she would have left...
This was a really seriously big deal!
The dampening went to 90, and she sent her query. Six hours later, the answer returned, and Emmi spent her host's penultimate System Parameter on making her boxes physically tangible.
The force she was able to impart was miniscule, but it only took her twenty minutes to push her borderline braindead bodymate across the padded floor of the tutorial, and into a zone of healing near the fighting test section.
Interestingly, no magic was used in the zone. It was simply an area where the laws of reality included an addendum forcing any compatible life to mend itself, and negating any costs incurred by such. Apparently it worked like that to patch a bug in the way the System assigned magical affinities to players that didn't already have them. Unfortunately, that query took nine hours to fill, and her next several distractions took long enough to run right up against the three day failure limit.
When the System tried to eject Emmi and her nameless host from the tutorial, she rejected the ejection on the grounds that his personal System wasn't fully configured, let alone integrated, and so according to its own rules, he wasn't technically a [Player] yet, and it had no jurisdiction over [non-players]. Technically, it couldn't decide that he had failed the tutorial until she initialized the final parameter of her system... well luckily the System bought that excuse.
... Wait, didn't that solve all of her problems? If the time limit didn't matter anymore, Emmi could just wait here with her host and let the Tutorial keep him alive until the main System finished growing her branch out!
According to the System, the ETA on that was a month and a half... So Emmi only had a month and a half to learn everything she could about the System, this island, and her selves, past and present.
She looked down at her nameless progenitor, and steeled her resolve to be the best exposition machine she could!
...
Three days before her branch was finished growing, Emmi ran out of questions to ask. Apparently she actually had five whole Parameters left to choose in her self-setup, and she'd already selected four, and chosen the fifth, to be finalized once doing so would no longer cut her Player's only life line.
Fourteen seconds after finalizing her plans, she got bored, and decided to try to use her tangibility to complete the Tutorial challenge... Which was why she wasn't ready when her System branch finalized its growth, and everything that comprised the entity called Emmi was assaulted. The sensation was that of something far away going seriously wrong, as though the eye of sauron had noticed her, and begun sucking her soul(?) out through kilometers of bendy straw.
When she recovered, she was still only attached to her one guy, but now she had System levels of processing behind her, and she no longer had to worry about char-broiling any wetware.
When she went back to her weird, artificial completion of the Tutorial Challenge, she found herself able to impart a fair bit more impact with her tangibility. Where before, she could have barely pushed a small dog, now she could push her unconscious meatbag with ease...
Around when she finished the last part of the Challenge, Emmi's guy started to wake up, and in doing so he reminded her about her final Parameter... so she selected [Auspicious], and used her text boxes to hit the last target... at the same time.
The scruffy castaway woke, in the dim of early morning, to a thirst so deep that he thought he’d die of… apotimation? Was that the right word for die-of-no-water?
Whatever. He pulled the water bottle from his bag and started to drink.
"Too fast... It hurts... Whatever, at least it’s water."
He looked around and stretched.
"I feel SO much better. Oh right, the beach… is this a deserted island?"
He looked at the water bottle in his hand. He didn’t remember this bag, that he’d just reflexively thought of as his own. He didn’t know why he knew how or where to find the bottle.
He went to try and call up his system window counterpart, but he didn’t know his…its(?) name.
He didn’t know his name.
I don’t know MY NAME!
Ping!!
[Quest Complete! (Thirsty;) ]
[Reward: refill your bottle.]
The bottle in his hand was suddenly full again, as another two notices pinged.
[Repeatable Quest: (Thirsty;) ]
[New Quest: (Nameless)]
“System-me?”
["‘Sup stud? Check your wallet btw."]
The audible voice part sounded different. Squeakier? More feminine? Less like me. The color had changed again, and no longer had borders on the talking part. Also it was easier to read?
Uh-oh.
“You, uhh… You did a little more than just the.. Uh, the emotion-limit thingy..?
["Oh, y’know, I actually totally forgot that part."]
“Then?”
["Yeah, that's kind of a long story, my dude. It's been a while since last time."]
The panic that the quest box had distracted him from earlier surged up and threatened to suffocate him... but panic spikes were nothing new. The man sucked it in, all the panic, and breathed it out as... imaginary dragonfire?
What the fuck? He recognized the coping mechanism, but still had no idea how he knew it or what any of this meant.
["Dude, don’t even get me started."]
“Oh, we’re mind reading again?”
["That’s ‘cause you’re into it, dude. Don’t try to deny it."]
“No, that’s…” ok, so you were explaining something?
["Shyeah my dude. Check THIS out."]
[New Quest: (Get Head)][Details: Defeat the Demon King. Take his head, and free the realm of his foul control.]
“That is not REMOTELY what I meant!”
["Y’a gotta be more specific."]
Aren’t you literally reading my mind right now?
["Pffft, oh yeah! Here, lemme just..."]
[Quest: (Nameless) has been marked as urgent.][Details: Lost your name, buddy? Your wallet is right there. You know you wanna look.]
"Sure, whatever." The man rolled his eyes as he retrieved it from the bag and flipped it open.
He knew which card it was without checking, lending further credence to the idea that it was his own.
‘Dannon Byrnik’ was the name listed next to a picture of some weirdo with dead eyes.
“Is that me?” Do I look like that?
[Naw dude; that kid has baby scruff, but you’ve got fuck o’clock shadow. Also-]
The system started to say, before it was interrupted by:
Ping!!
[Urgent Quest Complete: (Nameless)][Reward: (Answers)]
And then, as with the water, suddenly he just… had answers.
Brains aren’t typically supposed to just manifest new knowledge…Let alone do it all at once.
Luckily, after the third minute of searing mental pain, Dan was finally able to black out.
Anni woke up falling.
Nothing was visible around her, so it was mostly a gut feeling, but given that said feeling was currently up in her throat, it never occurred to her to doubt it.
The thoughts that did occur to her as she fell were… somewhat less rational, and much less coherent.
"I’m dead! I fell for a satanic scam pop-up ad and now I’ve sold my soul into eternal torment!" She tried to shout, but the words came out as squeaky, malformed half-whispers. "I wish I hadn’t died a virgin! I don’t want this! I don’t want to be dead! I don’t want-"
She tried to scream, but still, her voice rebelled. She tried to flail her arms around as well, but that was never going to do anything from the start.
"-promise, I’ll do anything, please! Just not like this! Not-"
Something she couldn’t see slammed into her from below and then immediately gave way.
"-you whoreson! I still wanted to-"
It happened again, several times. If Anni had been in her right mind, she would’ve compared the feeling to breaking through several thin walls of sheetrock. Additionally, she would've noticed that some purple blur had appeared right in front of her, accompanying each crash.
"-and swallowed a snake! Please, I don’t want to die! No! No death! Please, don't leave me-"
There was a noise from the purple blur, and a final crash through nothing, before Anni found herself falling through normal sky, rather than void.
Luckily, she was over a fairly deep lake of fairly clean water.
Unluckily, she was in no state to do anything but scream and flail.
Luckily, her head-first collision with a submerged boulder immediately broke her neck.
Unluckily, she didn’t learn anything from the experience, and promptly repeated it almost exactly.
Twice.
The offer: I give you: silly words, company, and baked goods. You give me: ???
