“I feel so dull in comparison to you,” I said. I was wearing my standard baggy, dark hoodie while walking next to my friend dressed in her bright, cute outfit. Though her current outfit was for cosplay, we were both wearing comfort clothes.

“Well, that’s fine, isn’t it? Not everyone has to cosplay something,” Izzy replied, the bells in her hair jingling slightly. She had chosen to cosplay a character that shared her name, Isabelle, from Animal Crossing. She looked brain-meltingly adorable.

“I guess… I just wish I could get into it the way you do.”

“You like all the stuff at this convention just as much as I do, and you even helped me make this costume!”

“Yeah, okay. Know where Kyle is?” I asked, changing the subject. Now was not the time for one of my depressive spirals.

Izzy gave me the side-eye, aware of my avoiding the subject, but decided to go along with it for now. “Hold on a sec.”

For her cosplay, she had gotten one of those clipboards that could store things inside of it, and she opened it to check her phone. She had a little backpack shaped like a bell bag from the game as well, but the clipboard was more convenient for smaller stuff.

“Still playing Yu-Gi-Oh, looks like. The nerd.”

“You’re dressed like a dog,” I retorted.

“A cute dog.”

“That’s true.”

“It’s amazing that that’s still a thing.”

“Yu-Gi-Oh?”

“Yeah, that started in the 90s, didn’t it? That was like 60 years ago!”

“That dog you’re dressed as is also from around then.”

“Isabelle was introduced to the franchise in 2012.”

I rolled my eyes. “Who’s the nerd in our friend group again?”

“You?”

I nodded. “Mm, you’re right. But if I’m a nerd, then you’re a mega nerd.”

We still had half an hour or so before Kyle finished up, so we wandered around, checking out several booths in the meantime. When her clipboard vibrated and dinged—with the exclamation noise from Animal Crossing—we knew he was done.

The three of us met up near the tall Saitama cosplayer, who served as a good landmark. He was apparently used to this treatment, as he had a slight smirk on his face when he glanced at us.

A few minutes later, we spotted our nerd friend weaving his way through the crowd. He had a DBZ sweatshirt on and commented, “We’re like a spectrum of cosplay. Regular sweatshirt, cosplay sweatshirt, full cosplay.”

“Nah, full cosplay would be a fursuit, I think,” I replied.

“That would be too hot, anyway. I don’t know how furries do it,” Izzy added.

“Well anyway, lunch? If we go now, we’ll probably have at least a little bit shorter of a wait time.”

“Ye, sounds good.”

The three of us spent the next thirty minutes just chatting as we waited for food. This year’s convention had prepared several more options for food than previous years had, otherwise we probably would’ve had to wait a lot longer for a meal.

We had all met online through similar interests and social circles, and we had an additional two more in our friend group that we would be meeting up with later. Izzy and I lived in the area and hung out quite a bit, but Kyle was from out of state. The absent pair had come from two and three states away.

The five of us had all been friends for a few years now, with the friendship between myself and Izzy going back the farthest, which was five years. Because of the amount of time we spent together, people frequently joked that we were a couple, but neither of us really felt it.

Izzy is a lesbian, and I’m aroace. I’m still attracted to women, but the thought of actually doing anything with anyone at all just makes me feel like something’s wrong, like I’m lacking something. We do snuggle a lot, though, which is great. Friends should snuggle more.

With our stomachs filled, the three of us headed toward the magical girl TTRPG panel and would meet up with the remaining two afterward.

We were halfway there when everyone abruptly began feeling nauseous. The floor was vibrating, our bodies were vibrating, even the air was vibrating. A humming noise grew louder and louder as everything around us began to crumble away like it was being dissolved.

People were trying to get away, and I could hear screaming, but everyone had collapsed and could no longer move. I glanced up and saw that whatever was happening right now was in a contained area. Several people had remained at the edge of the area and were just standing there with eyes and mouths open wide, recording us.

Izzy, Kyle and I managed to grab onto each other’s hands before there was an intense screech. Our ears popped like we were on a plane, we couldn’t breathe, I could feel blood coming out of my nose and I was on the verge of vomiting. Reality distorted and looked like it was being squeezed through a kaleidoscope. The feeling of my friends’ hands in my own managed to calm me down ever so slightly. Whatever the fuck was happening, at least I had them.

I felt like I had become weightless and that some invisible force was pulling me somewhere with no regard for the way my body was supposed to bend. Like if I was underwater and a rope had been tied to myself and a boat.

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With a violent slam, I was suddenly lying in a crumpled heap upon a cold, stone floor. I could barely move and was struggling to breathe. Several hands rolled me onto my back and straightened out my limbs. I was then filled with a pleasant warmth, and all the pain faded.

I could see again, hear again, breathe again and the sense of vertigo had faded.

Carefully sitting up, I found my friends also sitting up and looking around warily. They were both bleeding from their noses like I was, but I was the only one of us who was lucky enough to not vomit, possibly because I had nanites in my blood that always kept me healthy.

I took off my sweatshirt and handed it to Izzy to clean herself up. My comfort hoodie was just a boring, dark-colored hoodie with nothing special about it, unlike Kyle’s, and I didn’t want them to have to ruin their outfits, so I didn’t mind doing this.

She used the front to clean herself up, kyle used the back, then I washed my face with a sleeve after a quiet “thanks” from both of them. I carefully turned the sweatshirt inside out and bundled it up. Izzy took out the bottle of water she had and poured some into her mouth to rinse it out before handing it over to Kyle to do the same. They both just spit it out on the floor, which was already a mess, anyway.

With each of us as taken care of as we could be for the moment, we finally got to looking around. The horrible sensations we’d just been put through combined with the numerous brightly-dressed cosplayers had made it a bit easy to ignore reality for a bit, but actually taking in our surroundings made us seriously concerned.

It looked like we were in a massive cathedral of sorts, but it wasn’t decorated at all and was incredibly dreary. But more important than that were all the… creatures? Aliens? What…?

On the floor were a hundred or so wrung-out weebs, and walking among and around them were beings of all kinds of descriptions. No two were the same.

One was short and had dozens of tiny tentacles for arms. Another was eight feet of scaly muscle. The one next to that one was a very thin and shrewd-looking mouse-shaped person with gills and glowing eyes. I’m assuming they’re all actually people and not mindless creatures because they’re all wearing clothes and are observing us with what is clearly intelligence.

Another thing I took note of was that they were healing every person they touched. Noses stopped bleeding, clarity returned to peoples’ eyes and even some broken limbs were mended in only a moment.

“No fucking way… Did we just get isekaied?” someone nearby muttered.

I glanced around the room worriedly. We all just disappeared from one place and reappeared in another. There are numerous nonhuman people here. Something akin to magic exists, judging by the healing.

“Fuck, this is an isekai,” I whispered in fear.

“This kind of thing actually happens…?” Izzy asked incredulously.

“I so hope I’m hallucinating right now. Who would actually want to get embroiled in this kind of shit?”

“Damn it!” Kyle angrily said, clearly doing his best to keep his volume under control. “And I had just gotten a boyfriend, too!”

Izzy and I stared at him in bewilderment, looked at each other then back to him.

“You always said you were straight, though?” Izzy questioned.

“Well… I thought I’d try dating a guy for once? I kinda realized recently that I was really emphasizing my straightness to myself. I still like women, but maybe I’m a bit bi or something. Had a boyfriend for only two hours, this is such horseshit.”

“Ouch,” Me and Izzy said in unison, then shared a brief chuckle with each other.

Around us, people were muttering among themselves and glancing warily at the strange beings. I definitely heard the words “isekai” and “status” muttered numerous times. Everyone checked their phones, but as expected, not a single person had any service.

More than a few people were crying. I only saw one person who actually looked excited to be here, though he was trying to downplay it.

“Why’d it have to be an isekai of all things?” Izzy asked. “The garbage genre that refuses to stay completely in the garbage.”

“At least it’s not a classroom full of edgy 15-year-olds, though I don’t know if a bunch of anime-lovers is much better. And I don’t see any obvious royalty or religious figures here, though we do seem to be in a church or something.”

“Yeah, no humans at all, even. And none of them are the same, either. This is all worrying in a million different ways. Whatever it is, it had better fucking be temporary.”

I nodded, but wasn’t counting on it.

Once everyone was healed, our abductors didn’t give us any time to begin panicking or making a scene and began leading us down a hall and into another large room. Two bored-looking beings with mops and buckets were waiting for us to leave so they could clean up all the messes people had made. We noted with fear that there were six completely unmoving people left lying on the floor.

Many of us tried to talk to them in various languages, but whatever language they responded back with wasn’t anything we knew.

The massive hall-like room we were led into had several rows of tables, and rooms off to the sides were pointed out to be bathrooms. They actually had several types of alien toilets in each, which made sense, considering the wide variety of species we had seen so far. There were also plates of food on tables off to the side that was away from the bathrooms.

The food was relatively safe-looking. Most of it was identifiable as actual food, and not just piles of weird purple goop or something.

At the far end of the room was a towering panel that appeared to be made of bronze, and had hundreds of gems embedded in it in neat rows.

Over the next hour, people went into the bathrooms to clean themselves up, and eight people went back to the first room to mourn but were brought back to the hall eventually. Some people were brave enough to try the food, and they described the flavors as unfamiliar, but not bad.

I was glad that the three of us had each eaten before coming here, and was then glad I didn’t voice that thought when I remembered that I’m the only one in our group who hadn't thrown up.

After a bit more time, everyone was given something like a notebook and a pen. It had hard covers, and the paper was completely blank. Its pages had a bluish tinge and a slightly rough texture.

A massive board appeared from… somewhere, and a being at the front began writing on it. Whatever the medium used to do the writing was, it was glowing slightly.

Aware that we were all suddenly taking a class, we dutifully took notes. Our lives might depend on it, after all.

———

That very first class we took was several hours long, but we learned some important words, both spoken and written, as well as basic geography and some demonstrations of what I am very hesitant to call “magic”. It seems to be literally exactly that, though, and it pisses me off.

They then showed us pictures of many of the species of people we might encounter, as well as a few basic etiquette rules.

Following those pictures were drawings of similar beings, but they were all solid white in color and had claws, horns, wings, fangs and a tail. There were a few photos thrown in as well, but they were from a distance and were blurry, unlike the initial ones.

The photos were apparently created with some kind of magic camera, and my reasoning for that was that they could focus in and out of various parts of the image, and in a way that wasn’t just some blur or sharpen filter.

Following that class, random people were selected to go to the panel at the front of the room. Those people placed their hands on the panel while one of the beings channeled energy through them, or at least that’s what was going on based on their descriptions and what we were able to understand of what the beings said to us.

After the second person went up and nothing happened, the beings began to get nervous. After the third and fourth, they seemed to be cussing. After the sixth non-reaction, they gave up. They were clearly frustrated, though it seemed that they were more angry at the situation than at us.

I guess we weren’t what they were hoping for? That doesn’t bode well. And I guess all the white beings are some kind of threat? Just what in the fuck.