He had come just as the school bell had sounded, signalling the start of the school day, which had always begun with ‘form time’ for as long as he had remembered. However, on this occasion, it had been an assembly instead. He, along with all rest of the school, were ushered into the great hall. It did not occur to Rod that it was in fact the first day of secondary school because to him he had already spent the torturous five years locked in within the stoney old walls, and thus his attention wandered infinitively on other, more pressing matters. Not once did he bother to inspect the children around him. Instead, his mind pondered on what the strange voice had said. He had dismissed the class sheet that came up whilst he was in the car as just an intense intrusive thought. “It must be some weird glitch with the simulation,” he thought. But he frowned because he wasn’t convinced at all by this rational.

The headteacher paced up and down the stage situated at the front of the auditorium, a bright spotlight illuminating him. All the while, Rod tried his best to avoid looking at the little black text crawling up his vision like street cat. “I’m not playing your stupid little game, Aleku… Aleku! I completely forgot about him.” Rod started to look around him, standing on his tiptoes to gander at the rest of the Year 7 class behind him. His eyes met one of the Year 11’s sat slightly above them in the dining area which was cojoined with the hall, separated only be a retractable wall, and he held it longer than he should have. Then, deeply perturbed, he tore his eyes away and crinkled his face, horrified at these hormonal feelings surging inside of him.

“What the hell,” he said to himself exasperatedly. “Keep it together. You came here to learn how to have a good personality. You need to get a grip.”

[Gain Magical Points is advised in order to use {ADULT} skills. Otherwise, you will undergo a regressing process…]

“Oh, fuck off,” he muttered. “Not this shit again.”

“What?” a voice next to him whispered in surprise.

Rod looked at the little chubby boy next to him, his face remaining calm and neutral like stone.

“Did you just swear?” the boy asked, his squeaky voice grating on Rod’s ears like chalk.

“No,” Rod said flatly.

“Uh, I think that you did.”

“No, I think that you are hearing things.”

“No, I wasn’t! I’m going to tell the teacher.”

“Go ahead, I don’t care,” Rod said icily.

The fat boy stared at him with wide eyes in disbelief. Rod watched with glee the boy as he glanced at the side where the teachers stood and then quickly around him before settling his eyes back on the stage where the head teacher was still introducing himself. Rod felt someone watching him. He looked back at the Year 11’s and locked eyes with the older brunette girl again. She was the one to look away first this time, however.

[Well done! You gained 1 Cool Point. Keep acting ‘Cool’ by developing your relationships with your peers]

“Good, you little bitch. I’m going to rule this fucking school,” Rod chuckled to himself. “Dominating socially will be no problem. No one’s gonna have a chance to bully me because I know how to humiliate children – having been humiliated as one myself. Haha, what would you call me… a professional ‘humiliator’… Yes, I am the ‘humiliator!’”

[Thanks for choosing a class. You have chosen the ‘Humiliator’ class. This class is also known colloquially as the ‘Bully’ class. Now that you have chosen this class, you will be awarded with Cool Points whenever you act in line with the ‘Humiliator’ Archetype. Failure to do so, however, will result in deductions of Cool Points. You can spend Cool Points to level up your INTERPERSONAL skills. As a reminder, you can spend your Magical Points to level up your ADULT skills]

[Status:

Cool Points: 1

Magical Points: 0

End]

[Warning: You have used {ADULT} skills without possessing the requisite Magical Points. Therefore, debuff, EMOTIONAL DYSREGULATION, is applied]

“What the-” whined Rod.

“Ssh!” an old fat woman screeched from the side.

Everyone in his vicinity looked at him. As he felt their little eyeballs penetrating his flesh and their whispers his bones, he was all at once overwhelmed with anxiety and turned white as the bones beneath his flushed cheeks. Again, those awful sensations from this morning had taken over him, and he began to shake nervously. “What the hell is going on,” he wondered. “It’s as if I am as nervous as they are but for a totally different reason. Demons? Cool Points? What the hell is going on?”

[Warning: Stress levels rising… Protective measures activated. Regressing…]

“Does no one else hear this? Am I the only one who has this?” Rod thought in a panic, gazing across the sea of children squashed together in the hall.

[{LOW SELF-ESTEEM} {MIND READING} {SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS} {RUMINATION}]

“Oh, they are thinking how weird I am now, aren’t they?” he gritted his teeth and stared straight forward at the stage, sweat dripping down from his forehead. He felt the old woman’s eyes burning into him like the freshly lit stub of a cigarette. “I’ve fucked it now, haven’t I?”

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

He looked down at the corner of his vision and read silently the description of the ‘Humiliator’ class, simply out of curiosity and also to distract his ruminating mind from spiralling even further into a panic. “Wait, stats? Classes? Is this some kind of RPG?” he grew pale all of a sudden, “Oh, no… Does this mean that there’s actually going to be bloody monsters in this world? They actually exist? How do I fight them?”

Rod shook his head, distressed by the numerous questions that popped up in his head. “But what good is all this for?” he thought exasperatedly, thinking about his ex-girlfriend. “I can’t be a bully. She… would she want that?”

Suddenly, more black text popped up in the centre of his vision. The information overload had already exhausted his brain, but he’d rather focus on it than the headteacher’s ramblings about grades and rules.

“Yeah, yeah, heard it all before grandpa,” he muttered under his breath. Playing the good guy hadn’t worked out for him. “Wouldn’t be here now would I if following rules got you anywhere in life.”

When he focused on the bottom right corner of his peripheral vision, menu tabs became visible. One tab in particular caught his eye: ‘ADULT’ skills. He waited for it to open, but it never did. “It’s locked? Damn it. What the hell am I supposed to do?” His eyes crawled to the one next to it, “INTERPERSONAL’ skills. He opened it.

[INTERPERSONAL SKILLS:

Bullshit Detector: 0

Flattery: 0

Flirting: 0

Gossip: 0

Grownup Face: 0

Impersonate: 0

Intimidation: 0

Negotiation: 0

Performance: 0

Reassurance: 0

Taunt: 0

]

“So, what am I supposed to do with this information?” he wondered with annoyance.

[Spend ‘Cool Points’ to level up these INTERPERSONAL skills. You have 1 Cool Point]

“Wait, I can speak to you? Why didn’t you just say that in the first place instead of just ramming a bunch of nonsensical information down my throat and scaring me to pieces? I could write a better game… what are these interpersonal skills for?”

[These type of skills are used to develop and maintain important relationships within the Social Strata. Your position within the Social Strata affects your Psychological Health, and, to a large extent, your Physiological health]

“I don’t get it,” he said, careful to keep his inside voice on, “what do you mean, my Psychological and Physiological Health?”

[You’re Psychological Health encompasses the following four domains:

* Emotional Health (Feelings)

* Spiritual Health (Being)

* Mental Health (Thinking)

* Social Health (Relating)

]

Rod pondered for a moment, and then strained his brain to conjure up words to communicate with the System inside his head, “What…what do these four domains mean?”

[Think of these four domains as the four walls of a citadel. Although the destruction of one would expose the inside to outside forces, it is easier to counter an invading force coming through one point as opposed to several]

“That… that makes sense. It’s a pretty cool analogy, actually.”

[These domains have a direct impact on your psychology, whether it is how you feel, act, think or believe. As you level up, these domains will naturally increase as they naturally would. However, you can level them up even further to help you navigate life’s challenges. It is one of the purposes of this game to give you, the player, more control over your own development. You choose the kind of person you become.]

“What is Emotional Health?” he asked, his temple throbbing with excruciating pain. He placed a hand on it and rubbed it soothingly, wincing all the while.

“Hey! You, concentrate,” hissed the old woman from the side.

Rod looked up and saw her scowling at him. “Fuck that bitch,” he said. The old woman must not have heard him, for she only leaned back against the wall, staring at him scoldingly with her arms crossed against her large bosom. The boy next to him, however, stared at him in horror. Rod glanced at him and the fat boy turned quickly away, the wobble in his double chin lagging behind like the tail of a jumpy cat. At last he concentrated back on the System, straining with extreme difficulty on the blob of text hovering in front of him, imperceptible to the swarms of white children around him.

[Emotional Health determines how you will respond to particular events: poor Emotional Health will tend to lead to intensified feelings disproportionate to the triggering stimuli. Good Emotional Health, on the other hand, will result in increased relationship satisfaction, amongst other positive effects.

Furthermore, poor Emotional Health will affect not only your ability to combat demonic entities but to perceive them as well. Gain Magical Points is advised.]

“I’m so lost…” muttered Rod absentmindedly.

[The lower your Emotional Health, the more overwhelmed you will be by your feelings; the more {Emotional Dysregulation} debuffs you will experience. Controlling your emotions is paramount to defeating the demonic entities.]

Rod was about to ask who these ‘demonic entities’ were but his head felt like an eggshell cracked on a marble kitchen top. He placed two fingers on his temple and pressed down hard. The searing pain did not stop at all.

“That’s it, boys and girls: you are no longer in primary school now. A new start, a fresh chance awaits you. These are the best years of your life. Make them count,” the headteacher shouted as though they were all deaf. Then he smiled nostalgically, placing his hands on hips. He was a barrel-chested man with skin like cardboard. His glasses were big and round. “Ah,” he went on boringly, a self-indulgence that permeated the hall made Rod sick in the gut, “If I could go back and relive secondary school…”

Rod swore that he saw the man look at him strangely. Before he could react, the headteacher whipped his eyes back to the centre of the audience. “And you, older years, show some compassion and be nice to the Year 7s. Remember, you’re all being watched and evaluated. What you do here will influence the rest of your life.”

When the headteacher had finished his rant, Rod pondered over what the System had said, which had more and more of an effect on him as time wore on. His thoughts went back to the class that he had accidentally chosen. He asked himself if being a bully would be such a bad thing in the grand scheme of things. “I just want to change my personality to get my ex-girlfriend back,” he told himself. “Everything else is meaningless. What I must do to get there is not important.”

As the entire hall erupted into laughter and loud chatter, Rod turned increasingly inward and contemplative. He felt no desire to make introductions yet. Truth be told, he was scared of more warnings by the system. There was a lot that he did not know. For example, what exactly were ‘Adult’ skills? How were they different to ‘Regression’ skills? Could he use them consciously? Or were they like passive skills, automatically triggering in certain situations? All these questions he must figure out, he told himself, for they held the key to truly changing his personality once and for all.

He walked with a dull apathy, following the throngs of children into his first lesson. He hadn’t even looked at his timetable yet, which had his biweekly scheduled classes for the full academic year laid out.

“Well,” he thought with a quiet smirk, “this isn’t real so playing an evil character shouldn’t be all that bad. And besides, the bullies are the ones who gets all the friends and girlfriends, right? It’s a dog-eat-dog world. And up to now, I’ve only ever been the food.”