I fell for what seemed like forever, bracing for an impact that never came. At some point, my body began to spin through the air. It was almost imperceptible at first, but I whirled around faster and faster the longer I fell, until eventually I felt like I was inside a goddamned washing machine set to the spin cycle. My heart was racing as I started to panic. There’s no way the sewer was this deep. What the actual fuck was happening? I screamed. Then I vomited. Then I screamed for a while longer. The rotations kept speeding up until I was literally pinwheeling through the air. Falling and spinning and screaming for so long I lost my voice. I fell and fell and fell until I just stopped.
There was no sense of slowing down, no sudden slamming to a halt. I just ceased to fall. In fact, I realized, I was standing. Jesus, I thought, reeling with dizziness and disorientation from the sudden change. Before I could continue the thought, however, I fell to my hands and knees and with my eyes clenched shut, vomited again. Vaguely, between retches, I could hear people talking in hushed tones not far from me.
“You sure this is the guy? Tell you the truth, he don’t look like much.”
“He is the one.”
The first voice sounded familiar to me, but the second was so ethereal and enthralling that my pulse immediately slowed and every ounce of nausea I’d been feeling simply slid away from me. I stood up and tried to open my eyes – but the darkness had been replaced with a blinding white void. Holding a hand up in front of me to shield my eyes from the light proved ineffectual, but I did it anyway. I squinted at the two beings in front of me who seemed to float in albicant nothingness.
“Yeah, yeah,” the first voice said, “the chosen one. The champion. We get it. Can we move this along? I have 16 more resurrections to get through today.”
Suddenly, I was struck lightly but firmly on the forehead by what seemed to be a pamphlet of sorts. I dropped my hand slightly to take hold of it and realized that I could now see perfectly well, without discomfort. I looked up at the two people before me. One was…the construction worker who I’d been yelling at earlier. The other was an inscrutable being made of pure energy. Just looking at that one made me want to look away in horror and stare lovingly at them forever. Simultaneously. I could scarcely make out the shape of the light-being. It was about the same height as the construction worker, but at the same time seemed to tower over him like a mountain standing next to a tree. It took everything in me to pull my eyes from that one and look at Mr. Manhole again.
“You…you’re the construction guy from before. Did you kill me?”
“Kill you?” he laughed. “Buddy, you walked straight into an open manhole. Nobody killed you but you.”
“But…I am dead?” My mind reeled. What in the ever-loving fuck was happening right now? I couldn’t make sense of any of it. I looked at the pamphlet in my hands. The front said New User Integration Manual in what I highly suspected to be comic sans font.
“Do you feel dead?”
“I–” I had to think about that for a second. I patted various places on my body. “N-no? I guess not really. But if I’m not dead, what is all this? Am I in a coma? Did I hit my head and now I’m in some kind of psychotic episode?”
Construction guy looked over his shoulder at the light-being while jabbing a thumb in my direction.
“You’re absolutely sure?”
The light-being simply nodded, eliciting a sigh from construction guy.
“Alright,” he said with a noncommittal shrug. “I’ll give him the usual rundown. Show him the ropes. Look, I know you usually hang around for these things but…you wanna take off and give us some space? By the look on this jamook’s face, I doubt we’re gonna get anywhere with you here.”
I blinked. I hadn’t realized I was staring at the light-being again with slack-jawed reverence.
“Very well,” the being said in a voice that was like hot fudge sliding down the ice cream of my soul, “Alert me when you have finished and I shall return. He and I must…talk.”
And with that, the being was gone. He didn’t leave insomuch as he just ceased to exist in the space he had previously occupied. He, I realized, I’m thinking of it as a he. I severely hoped I wasn’t misgendering the being because I had a sneaking suspicion that it knew everything I was thinking. Or maybe even every single potential thought I could possibly think at any given moment. I shook my head. This was too much. My mind was spiraling again. My heart began to race once more. A loud series of popping sounds snapped me out of my reverie. It was construction guy cracking his knuckles.
“A’right. Let’s get down to business. Where were we?” He tapped his lower lip with a finger for a moment, before seemingly remembering the conversational arc we were on. “Oh, yeah! You asked if you were dead. But, it’s a stupid question, and I’m not going to answer it because it doesn’t matter. It is what it is. What does matter is that you can’t go back to New York. You’ll be starting a new life on a new world, and I’m here as your official consigliere to get you acquainted with how things work over here.”
“And where is here, exactly?” I asked, looking around and feeling like a period placed in the middle of a blank word document.
“Not HERE, here, ya moron,” he said. Then he gave a small wave of his hand and an entire world popped up around me. You know how, in those older video games, the landscape was all fuzzy polygons until you got close enough for the game to generate the details? It was kind of like that.
“Nah, nah. You got it reversed. You were the fuzzy polygon that I loaded into this world. Welcome to the fuckin’ universe, kid.”
I furrowed my brows, about to ask what that meant, but I thought better of it. The landscape had me distracted, anyway. We were standing in the middle of a beautiful prairie, complete with tall fields of wildflowers and grasses, rolling hills with mountains in the distance and a calm river flowing through the valleys. It was objectively gorgeous and instantly reminded me of Montana in the spring. My grandparents had a summer home out there and we’d visit every other year or so. As you can imagine, that sort of scenery made an impression on a kid who otherwise never saw anything outside of the boroughs. I squinted a little, and a sneaking suspicion crept into my mind.
Everywhere I looked, the landscape was perfectly composed. I turned in every direction and no matter how I looked at it, every angle was perfectly set up to follow the rule of thirds. The horizon and sunset rested at exactly the bottom 1/3 of my field of view. If I turned in the opposite direction, the horizon still sat at exactly the same spot, wispy clouds filled the middle third of my view and the night sky emerged above it with sparkling stars and an oversized moon filling up the top third. I glanced back at construction guy, who was rubbing the back of his neck and looking a bit embarrassed.
“This is really good work,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said before clearing his throat, “let’s not make a thing out of it, alright? You artsy types always make things weird. Anyway, you can stop thinking of me as “construction guy” although…as you’ve already figured out, that’s not totally inaccurate. Most of you call me The System. For the sake of continuity, let’s stick to that. Capisce?”
I smirked.
“Is that like a first name, last name situation? If we get to be on a first name basis do I just call you The?”
The System just huffed at me. “Wiseguy. Fuckin’ George Carlin over here. Look, mamaluke, can we get on with the tutorial here? I got places to be. Or would you prefer to continue regaling us with your particular brand of observational humor detailing the quirks of human linguistic conventions?”
I held my hands up in silent surrender.
“Thank you. So. I’m The System. You won’t see a lot of me, but I’ll be around. This,” he said, gesturing to the world around us, “is your new home. This particular plot of land is specifically yours. It’ll be your safe zone and base of operations once you build it up.”
He held a hand up and shook his head before I could open my mouth.
“We’ll get there. Just follow along, for now. I say this is a safe zone, because the rest of the world is very much not safe. When you thought of video games earlier, you weren’t all that far from the truth. You got all kinds of dangers you’ll have to navigate here. Monsters. Aliens. Gods. Etcetera. You get the picture.”
“Wait,” I said, “are you being serious, right now? This is ridiculous. I’m in a goddamn isekai??” I buried my face in my hands and shook my head in exasperation. “Of course I am. Son of a bitch. Even my death is cliché.”
“Oh, well, excuse me, your royal highness,” The System said, “if you prefer, we can just let you be dead. I didn’t realize we were imposing on your amazing life as a…” he paused and pulled out an actual clipboard with actual notes, “cardboard box dealer.”
He flipped the clipboard around and showed it to me. In the center of the page, it did indeed say “cardboard box dealer” in scrawled handwriting. All around it were various drawings of mocking smiley faces and those crying-laughing emojis. He bonked me over the head with it.
“Now, do you want to let me continue or do you want to go be dead?”
I sighed, dejectedly rubbing the top of my head where he bonked me, and replied, “Continue, please.”
“Alright, then. The first thing we gotta do is get you a class. Everybody gets a class. Can’t do much around here without it.”
A list of available classes filled my vision like a modal overlay. I instinctively moved my hand up to scroll down the list and nothing happened. My hand just slipped through the visual with no effect. But when I imagined it scrolling, the list started to move on its own. That’s gonna come in handy, I thought. I scrolled through the list, continued scrolling, then scrolled some more.
“Jesus. How many are there?”
“Infinitely many.”
“Well then, how the hell am I supposed to pick one? You can’t expect me to just sit here and scroll forever.”
“Think about what skills you had in your past life. What comes to mind?”
I thought about that for a second. Honestly, not much of use really sprang to mind immediately, so I just started rambling about whatever I could think of in that moment.
“Well,” I said, “I wasn’t actually a cardboard box dealer. I wasn’t a salesman, exactly. I was the social media manager for the company that manufactured and sold the boxes.”
“Cardboard boxes,” The System heckled, snickering.
“Fancy ones,” I said.
“Well, were you any good at it?”
“I guess so? Sales went up 15% when I took over the position. I had to interact with customers online, engage with them, figure out what would trigger their buy-condition. Things like that. None of that is going to keep me alive here, though.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” The System said. “Sounds to me like you’re a natural Infiltrator.”
“Infiltrator?” I asked, immediately finding the search function in the class selection modal and pulling up the class.
“It’s kind of like a bard, except you don’t have to follow heroes around and sing for them. Fuggedaboutit. Unless you’re a secret karaoke enthusiast. Some people are into that kind of thing.”
I read The System’s actual on-screen description of the class:
That actually sounded pretty decent. Less fighting, more sneaky sneaky. I could live with that kind of class. But, when I looked at some of the other classes like Celestial Archmage and Warblade, Infiltrator’s stats were…a bit lackluster in comparison.
“You definitely will be on the weaker side, compared to the more powerhouse aligned classes,” The System said, nodding. “But, unless you’re comfortable jumping in and fighting hordes of enemies on day one to level up, you’re probably better off not picking a purely combative class. And I gotta be honest, you got moxie, but you don’t strike me as a guy who’s built for full frontal assault, ya know what I mean?”
“I don’t know. Grandchampion Brutalizer sounds pretty badass.”
“Look at your hands.”
“What about them?”
“They’re soft. They’re typing hands, not smashing hands. Is that…did you get a fuckin’ manicure?” he asked, incredulously.
“I get hangnails.”
“Kid, do yourself a favor. Don’t pick a punching class. I’m begging ya. Be a baker, I don’t give a shit. Look. Right there: Maître Pâtissier. Just…for the love of the gods, pick something that isn’t going to get you killed on day one. I got a reputation to maintain over here.”
I pulled a sour face at him and clicked on Infiltrator without breaking eye contact. I hesitated for a second before hitting the confirm button, but ultimately, I figured The System knew the world better than I did. If he thought this gave me the best chance at survival, I’d probably be an idiot not to pick it. So, I pressed the button. A new popup appeared.
“I have one point in Charisma? Come on. And what the hell are the last two? Moxie and Influence?”
“Everyone gets 10 points to start. It’s distributed partially based on your class, but also on an actual assessment of your personality. Those last two stats are specific to you and your class. They aren’t all that important now, but they will be very important later as you level up. But forget all that, for now. Right now, we can finally move on to the fun stuff. Weapons.”
“I thought you said I’m not a fighting class?”
“Oh, you ain’t. But that don’t mean that you won’t be fighting. Now, let’s see…you need something ranged, I think, since we already established you’re not a hand to hand kinda guy. You know what? Let’s not overthink it. You’re American – you get guns.”
He snapped his fingers and a plastic folding table appeared with three guns on top of it. He stood behind it looking like the worst vendor at the county gun show.
“Alright! So, here’s your options: you got a rifle – good for longer range precision, but not so great for close quarters. You got a shotgun, which is basically the opposite. And finally, there’s the pistol which is kind of like a happy medium. It doesn’t do either long range or close up particularly well but it also don’t do too badly at either one.”
After a close inspection of each weapon, I decided to go with the pistol. I figured I wanted something that would do everything moderately well, rather than a highly specialized tool that I could only use at a certain distance. I picked it up and inspected it, and a new screen popped up:
“Ok! I think we’re all done, here. Bada boom, bada bing. And with just enough time to get to my next appointment.”
“Wait, that’s it?”
“I gave you the whole spiel, you got your pamphlet, you got your class, your weapon, and I even built you a whole safezone from scratch. Whaddaya want from me? Oh! You do get one more thing though, now that you bring it up. Once I set you loose into the world, you’ll receive a starter kit with some stuff that’ll help you strike out on your own. But for now, yeah, that’s it. Any last questions before I take off?”
“I guess…just…how do I reach you if I need you again?”
He laughed in my face and put a hand on my shoulder as he started to fade from view.
“You don’t. But don’t worry. I’ll be watching.”
And then he was gone. I didn’t know if that made me feel better or worse.