In the space between moments, my world changed. In a second, the world of steel and glass that had been my home forever vanished. The comforting dullness of life was replaced by a smooth expanse of white. Above, a brilliant blue summer sky reflected off the mirror-like finish of the ground. Heat waves radiated up, distorting the air and leaving a sheen of glistening sweat across my brow.
Where’s the sun?
That was the first thought that popped into my head. There was light but no sun. No clouds cast long shadows across the ground, nor did my diminutive frame leave its mark on the ivory earth. Somehow, of all the things wrong with my situation, it was this that I fixated on. The featureless white expanse was frightening in its stillness, but it didn’t capture my attention like the featureless sky did.
I looked down.
I was clothed. Thankfully. In comfortable jeans and a sleeveless top with a dark ring of sweat steadily growing around my neck. I supposed the sports bra and track sneakers were a nice touch, but they only served to accentuate the growing sense of wrongness I felt.
These clothes weren’t mine. The sneakers were too white. The jeans were too tight, and no tank top had found a home in my dressers since I’d discovered that my body sucked at regulating glucose. Speaking of...my monitor was gone. There wasn’t even that annoying ring of glue I had to use nail polish remover to get rid of.
Suspicious...
A stray strand of hair tickled my cheeks. I flicked it away, then frowned. I kept my auburn hair short. Or shortish. I could put it up in a ponytail, but inevitably, the edges would fray, leaving me looking frazzled or worse. Now, though, my hair was long and heavy. The gentle tug of weight pulled at my neck in a vaguely familiar feeling. I hadn’t worn my hair this long since middle school, and the constant pull on my scalp reminded me swiftly why I had made that decision. Even when I did rock long hair, I never had it be this...thick.
The bangs came back, curling into my eye and tickling my lashes. I blinked in annoyance, holding it before me as I felt up my now long hair. I had no mirror, but it felt like my cat’s thick and indescribably soft without a single snarl or knot in the perfect strands.
Disconcerted, I grabbed at my scalp and pulled. I winced, but the wig refused to come off. A careful probe around my hairline proved there was no cap glued in place.
“Huh,” I said, letting my hands fall to my side. The heat was getting seriously oppressive by now, but it didn’t register. Instead, I squinted at the empty blue sky, triple-checking the lack of any celestial elements. I found nothing, just perfect blue as far as the eye could see, and so turned my gaze back down to the horizon.
The ground was perfectly white and smooth to the point of being slippery. It extended out for a way before abruptly ending. I walked out to the edge, freezing suddenly as my stomach rebelled at the sight of the drop. For some inexplicable reason, the ground just...ended. The horizon blended into a dark, hungry void staring up at me over the edge of the ground. It reminded me of a skybox with a faux sky to give the illusion of realism.
I gulped, carefully crouching down and making doubly sure I wouldn’t randomly slip off of the smooth ground.
This is surreal, I thought. The ground was floating at complete odds with gravity and paper thin. It was thin to the point that I was worried it would cut me if I touched it. I did so anyway, with the hem of my shirt rather than a finger, and it sliced through the fabric frighteningly easily.
I rolled over, making some distance from the edge as sweat dripped freely from my brow. It was getting truly uncomfortable now. At least the ground was cool. In a weird way, almost like ceramic. It was thin, though, and within seconds, I had to scooch to the side as the ground warmed.
With my cheek touching the ground, I noticed that the ground wasn’t as perfectly white and seamless as I initially observed. I could see a flickering distortion from my low angle every couple of meters. Dozens, if not hundreds, of black lines separated the ground into a grid of tiles. The lines didn’t have color and were even hard to discern unless my face was literally inches away.
I sat up, not sure what to do. There was nothing on the horizon, and a quick check of my pockets revealed only the small strip of fabric the edge of the world had liberated from my tank top. I had no guidance or instruction, and the temperature was slowly rising.
On a whim, I decided to count the tiles. I could step across each one in around two to three short stride lengths, which I supposed made the tiles two meters on the side. Maybe a little less. I couldn’t be precise without a measuring tape, but in my experimentation, I discovered that the tiles were about as wide as I was tall. So 175 cm unless that — like my hair — had changed too.
The distorted tile boundaries ran perpendicularly to each other and extended all the way to the edge of the world. I followed them, keeping a mental tally until I reached the edge once again. In this way, I discovered the ground was a perfect square that ran 128 tiles by 128 tiles, or roughly the same size as a football field.
That seemed awfully convenient and no mere random fact of nature. Someone had built this place. Or at least set up the dimensions.
I lay down, trying to find the coolness of the earth again, but the heat had soaked into the hard material. The roof of my mouth ached as the invisible sun baked me. I pulled up my tank top, trying to cover my head from the grueling heat, but the light was sourceless. Holding the top overhead didn’t shade me and only seemed to increase the heat as my humid breath gathered beneath it.
Time passed. Maybe an hour. Maybe ten. I didn’t know, as I had no way to check. The noonday light didn’t change. There was no sun to pass over the horizon to make it so. The heat was relentless and constant.
At times, I raged. At times, I rested. It seemed like there was nothing to do. Somehow, that scared me more than any other thought of my predicament. I approached the world's edge countless times, sure that the secret to my entrapment was hidden there, but I never had the guts to do anything specific. The void was too dark for me.
The heat rose, and my mind grew fuzzy.
Eventually, I slept.
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I blinked. The white expanse taunted me. In the moments between my awareness congealing, the land had changed. It was still white. Still brilliant. But instead of being perfectly flat, it had acquired the gentle curves of a rolling plain. The ground dipped or rose in places, giving the it an organic shape entirely at odds with the perfect white material it was composed of.
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I slipped a little as my sneakers struggled to grip the sloped ground. It spread out around me, reflecting the light of the sun that now hovered silently in the sky, yet somehow, my budding fear of it was muted. It took me a second to realize why. I was back to perfect health, and the heat was gone. It was cool, like an autumn evening. At that time of day when the sun was bashfully descending beneath the treeline yet still illuminating the world in a warm glow. I could almost taste the scent of cut grass from lawnmowers on my tongue, but alas. This was not a place for life.
It wasn’t so much a message as an intrusive thought. It pounded into my skull, sourceless yet insistent, as if it wouldn’t — no, couldn’t — take no for an answer, no matter how much I tried to ignore it. I didn’t know what a chunk objective was, nor what I had to do to complete said objectives.
I winced, crouching down and holding my head. The white square of land with 128 tiles on the side was probably a chunk; presumably, there were objectives. I didn’t let myself think too hard about why the message was blaring in my mind. Whatever had happened to me, foreign intrusive thoughts were definitely not a good sign.
Suddenly, the message expanded. New information flooded across my synapses, and I gasped as I distantly felt my physical body fall over. I barely noticed as I was suddenly made aware of myself in a way I had never been before. It was like meditation but more...cold. Calculating. An indifferent tabulation of who and what I was.
Combat level: 3 Health: 10/10 Attack: 1/1 Defense: 1/1
I looked at the stats, feeling vaguely insulted that this mind-shattering epiphany thought so little of me. I wasn’t so simple as to be reduced to four insignificant numbers. I was me. Cat lover. Rock climber. Budding neuroscientist. Any of these things I would be satisfied to be described as. They weren’t sufficient. Of course, they weren’t, but at least they captured some small aspect of who I was. Four numbers focused on combat like in a video game was...insultingly limited.
The message blared one last time, and I got the distinct impression of a motionless rat. It was a still image that faded rapidly from my mind as if someone had drawn it in sand. I blinked, still not comprehending, when a skittering sound of claws sounded from behind me.
I spun, but not before a furry, writhing ball of rage slammed into me. I yelped, falling backward on the sloped, slippery ground in a mess of limbs as tiny teeth and claws tore into my arms.
Health 9.6947332817/10
The thought blurred my vision as I struggled to fight off the aggressive rodent. The dark-furred thing jumped off me, and I lost sight of it as I struggled to fight off the intrusive mental message.
A sharp sting of teeth on my ass made me scream as I arched my back to escape my tormentor. Once again, the system informed me of my reduced health with far too many decimals of precision. I pushed the unhelpful thought to the back of my mind as I leaped to my feet. Three rapid strides put distance between me and the rat.
I spun, kicking at it the second it bounded after me. My shoe connected with a sickening crunch as the small rodent went flying. I gasped, staring after it as it bounced on the white ground.
It rolled, righting itself with a shake of its shoulders. From a distance, I could get a better look at it. It wasn’t anything particularly remarkable. Small, but with a long bald tail that made it look deceptively long. Its short, coarse fur was fuzzy and clean, not at all what I expected of a rat, but its yellowed teeth and grimy, bloodstained claws still made me wish the thing hadn’t just been crawling all over me.
It hissed at me, raising gooseflesh all over my arms, then started scurrying back at me. I backpedaled, doing anything to give my shocked mind a chance to process what was going on. Before I could, it lunged, and I was forced to kick at it again. I missed, and the bloody thing landed on my leg. Sharp spikes of pain lanced up my leg as its tiny claws dug in.
I screamed and punched its hunched back as it clung on for dear life. I fell, not at all used to fighting a tiny creature, nor the pain associated with it. The rat clawed up my leg, reaching my thigh before I renewed my brutal assault on it with my fists.
The intrusive system messages barraged me with updates. My health was dropping with each tiny cut inflicted on me, but I was dealing far more than I was taking. Suddenly, I felt something snap in the rat, and it froze. A shudder ran up its small body as its dark fur drained of color and began shrinking. It sank into itself, melting and losing cohesion as its body turned transparent. A perfectly cut marbled steak appeared floating inside the goopy gel. Before I could get a good look, I gasped as the cold liquid soaked my jeans.
I sat there stupified as I reviewed the changes of the fight. Looking inside, I could pull up my stat sheet — for lack of a better word — and could see that my attack stat had increased by one. I tried focusing deeper to get a sense of what each of the skills did, but before I got anything, I once again heard the scrabbling of small claws on the ivory ground.
Before my eyes, another identical rat materialized out of thin air and plopped onto the ground. It shook itself briefly before turning on me in a blur of rage-induced mania. I didn’t have a chance to run, so I tackled the thing head-on. I instantly noticed a difference in my elevated stats. My punches and kicks hit harder. Much harder, though the small creature still managed to sink its tiny weapons into me several times.
The battle was over in moments, and now my other pant leg was getting soaked by the clear gel. This rat had dropped another steak, and I quickly grabbed the pair and ran away from the rat spawn point in the center of the platform.
Another rat popped into existence, but apparently, I had made sufficient distance. Instead of instantly zerging on me, it began sniffing at its environment in tight little circles. I made some more distance, just in case.
“Is this...rat meat?” I muttered, holding up the two steaks in consternation.
A small golden genie lamp popped into existence right in front of my face. I yelped, dropping the meat but still failing to catch the lamp. My outcry, coupled with the metallic clang of the lamp hitting the ground, caught the attention of the rat circling in the distance.
Dammit.
I jogged all the way to the edge of the platform, now with three slabs of raw marbled steak and a golden genie lamp. I had mostly managed to avoid the rat's attacks this time, though I hadn't been able to avoid them completely. Despite getting hurt, my defense skill hadn't budged. It felt like it should, but I supposed I wasn't blocking any attacks at the moment.
Touching the genie lamp forced an intrusive dialogue into the forefront of my mind. It wanted me to choose a skill, any skill, and it wouldn’t shut up as long as I was holding the lamp. With a wince, I selected defense to see what would happen. To my surprise, the lamp melted into clear gel in my hands, and a notification buzzed across my perception.
“Huh,” I murmured, wiping off the clear gel as I idly noted the rat respawn in the distance. I felt the skill improve, but no level-up notification popped up. Clearly, one lamp -- or ten experience -- wasn’t enough to level the skill.
It looked like I was able to name things in this world, and by doing so, the world rewarded me with the lamps. I wasn’t entirely sure why any of this was happening, but I was down to play along for now, considering I had nothing better to do.
“Ok, first. The rodent all the way over there is a Rat, and my name is Skylar. The lamp I just used is an...Experience Lamp, I guess,” I said, feeling slightly silly, speaking out loud to nothing. The system, however, didn’t seem to care about my embarrassing form of address and simply sent three compact thoughts directly to my prefrontal cortex.