CHAPTER TWO
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+—|-CONGRATULATIONS-|—+
People of [Planetary Designation: PL-0017-D38]! Rejoice! For it is your turn to be assimilated into the multiversal fold!
Now, we, the friendly folks over at Ra’ak Neer consortium, understand that this can be a very delicate and tumultuous time for you lesser race- ahem! That is to say, for un-initiated species such as yourselves. What with the whole, end of the world as we know it, thing you’ve got going on.
Rest assured, however, that the people shouting doom and gloom, the end of days, and all out armageddon… are entirely correct.
I mean, good for them right? About time they got one.
“But wait!” You must be wondering. “How can one announcer sound so incredibly handsome and well built at the same time? Surely the gods would not be so generous as to rain all their blessings down upon one unsuspecting Ra’ak Neerian while leaving naught for the rest of us? Also what was that about the world ending? Surely that can’t be right!”
Alas… little do you know how very stupid you sound right now. This humble announcer will have you know he was born under the syzygy of seven celestial bodies, and keeps to a rigorous gym and scale cleansing routine—at least three days a week!
Ahem-! Anyway, where was I…? Ah! Yes.
It is not an exaggeration to say each and every one of you can look forward to some particularly rough times ahead.
Those of you that survive, that is.
I mean, some real bleak stuff all ‘round. Harrowing days sure to prove chock full of civil unrest, mass casualties, and a general breakdown of the natural order.
And that’s just the appetizer. We haven’t even gotten to the bad stuff yet.
To make sure that this fundamental shift in your mundane and meaningless realities does not result in your fledgling species cannibalizing itself from the inside out, your pals over at consortium h.q.—in strict accordance with intergalactic law, and in compliance with the anti-discriminatory practices established under Article 12 of the multiversal equity convention—have come up with the perfect solution.
You will each be placed into a tutorial in accordance with your karmic profile. Naturally, this is to help ensure that the baby eaters and pregnant mothers out there don’t get mixed up and placed in the same tutorial, except for in the most exceptional of circumstances.
That said, we wish you the best of luck! And just know that we will be watching everything you do intently.
~CALCULATING KARMIC PROFILE~
*DING!*
~KARMIC PROFILE CALCULATED~
Tutorial Designation: Super Easy Mode
Prepare yourself for complete integration. You may feel a slight pinch.
Before he could even begin to protest his fate, a figurative shock prod was jammed into his central nervous system, and his world faded once more into the colors of oblivion.
+++
When Richard awoke, it was lying atop a spongy lawn of perfectly manicured grass. The close trimmed turf such a vibrant, verdant green, that his eyes honestly had a hard time adjusting to it at first. It looked… artificial? Photoshopped, almost. And not by a particularly talented magic wand enthusiast either. The saturation somehow cranked up all the way to eleven. It was almost painful to look at.
Almost, but not quite.
Thankfully, it managed to tow the line between cartoonishly unbelievable, and dunked in deep fried battery acid.
Please tell me it isn’t always like this.
Head still lying on its side, and unlikely to be moved from that position any time soon, he was able to make out that a great deal of his surroundings looked equally uncanny. As if the illustrations of a children’s picture book had leapt straight off the page to splatter across the landscape, and otherwise conspire to strain his developing corneas.
He was lying in a perfectly circular clearing, about fifty or so paces in diameter, about which a sparse forest with negligible undergrowth surrounded them on all sides. Of course, he couldn’t actually turn around to confirm any of his assumptions, though he thought he knew by now how these things typically went. More likely than not, he was entirely correct.
All around him, at least in so far as he could see, were sprawled several small children from a range of ages, though the eldest, he noted, could’ve been no older than six. Just like him, many were only now beginning to come around. To rub at bleary eyes, gingerly rise to sitting positions, and look around at their environment with obvious confusion—the reality of their situation having yet to fully dawn on them. And for a moment, one blessed, glorious moment, it remain that way.
As if a breath held in anticipation, perfect stillness blanketed the glade.
This silence was first shattered by a hesitant sniffle. A sniffle which somehow multiplied into three hitching sobs. Those sobs cascading into half a dozen practiced whimpers, like the flash of lightning heralds the vicious crack of thunder. His hope for a moment of peaceful tranquility crashing down around him with the inevitability of a landslide.
And then the world was inundated with a raucous, wailing cacophony. A symphony of suffering. His suffering, to be exact.
Move, curse you, move! I am the master of my own body! A high ranker! An A grade champion! One who’s stood at the very pinnacle of humanity since the earliest days of the tutorial! I simply refuse to be defeated by the likes of you!
Feeling like Hercules grappling with the Lion of Nemea, Richard strained. He struggled. Wrestling with himself until he saw double. Pushing his body to its limits and then well beyond, until, at long last, with no small amount of effort expended on his part, he was able to clap one of his teeny tiny hands over an equally miniature ear.
Hah! That aught to teach you the worth of a ranker’s conviction, my foul meat prison! I am not to be underestimated!
From somewhere behind him, a woman’s calming voice began to shush the crying children.
“Shh shh shh. Yes I know. It’s alright now. Come here you sweet thing.”
And, as the saint of a woman apparently made the rounds, gathering up the squealing infants and quieting their incessant cries of “Mommy!” “Daddy!” and, “I wanna go home!” other… less helpful voices began to make themselves known.
“W-where are we?! What is this?! You there! Girl! What in the world is going on here?!”
From where he was positioned, a teenaged girl in a private school uniform backpedaled into view, an irate woman, with her tight jeans, blonde hair, and designer hand bag, nearly stalking the poor girl into the tree line.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Well? Are you mute?! Deaf or something?! Huh?!”
“I- I don’t- I’m not-” the girl stammered, eyes darting this way and that.
The kid looked just about ready to cry.
“Leave the poor girl alone,” came that same dependable voice from just behind him.
The woman snapped her head around, mouth already primed to loose another caustic comment, when she paused. And though her designer sunglasses somewhat hid her expression, hesitation was clearly written in her body language. She pursed her lips in distaste. Snorting like all this was beneath her, she promptly turned and stomped off in another direction.
“Whatever. You’re useless anyway.”
The teenager, for her part, promptly fell flat on her rear, all the strength in her legs having, apparently, left her.
“That’s it, I’m calling my husband!” the obnoxious woman pronounced, shouting up into the too blue sky as if someone up there were listening. “He’s a senator, I’ll have you know! A very important man in congress. Some of his drinking buddies are even in the secret service, so if this is some asinine plot to kidnap me and sell me for ransom, you all have another thing-! Hold on. Wait where-? Where’s my phone?!”
She immediately spun on her heels. Literally. Six inch pumps digging shallow furrows in the soft turf. Turning on the first woman, she glared.
“Did you-!?”
“Would you please lower your tone?” the first woman cut in, finally stepping into view. “You’re upsetting the children.”
From what Richard could see, which wasn’t much given his vantage, she was a rather tall looking African American woman in her mid to early twenties, dressed professionally in a navy blue business suit, a baby cradled in each arm.
“And as for your phone, I have no idea where it went. Neither do I know where my own phone ran off to. Or, I now suspect, where any of our devices have gone.”
She directed a meaningful glance behind her, to which a voice he had not heard before piped in.
“Mine’s gone too.”
She shifted her gaze.
“And mine, yeah. I coulda sworn it was in my pocket.”
Really. Just how many people are back there? Are they breeding or something? What next? Are you going to tell me the florking bug eyed clown thing is back there too? Wait, florking- flork-! Why can’t I say flork?!
*DING!*
+-|—OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE DETECTED—|-+
Uh oh! Looks like you were trying to use some naughty no no words :(
Well we, your all mighty benefactors over at Ra’ak Neer consortium h.q. would ask that you please refrain from using profanity whilst inside the Super Easy Mode Tutorial.
Given the typical age range of Super Easy Mode participants, without naming names, certain conservative parties have since taken issue with particularly potty mouthed individuals: “corrupting the sanctity of youth.”
As if we’re not all gleefully tossing them in the meat grinder…
Uh-! Err…. Yes- To appease our majority shareholders- ahem! That is to say, to uphold our proper family values, any and all offensive language will, henceforth, and in perpetuity, be automatically censored.
Remember! Good boys and girls don’t need smelly swear words to be happy!
Is this supposed to be a joke? What the forking shirt is this? Shirt? Bullshirt- shirt-! Argh! Flork this. Censors! In the bleeding tutorial? What next? Swear jars in an active war zone? Shear blindfolds at a gladiatorial arena? Tell me, for I cannot seem to wrap my enormous forking head around it. What the swell is the point?
Finally, the first woman’s gaze landed on the terrified private school girl. Jerking in surprise when she realized everyone’s attention was suddenly on her, she was quick to respond.
“I-I don’t have one. Mama says it’s the work of the devil tryna control our minds through the cell waves.”
Maybe a little too quick, if the flush of embarrassment that swiftly reddened her cheeks was anything to go by. There followed a rather awkward pause. A serenity that was broken, of course, by the most pleasant of the bunch.
“Hah! That’s- Oh… my god, she’s serious. Hahaha! That’s some straight up hick town, rifle toting, reptiles in the white house levels of deranged. Oh, you have no idea how lucky you are that I don’t have my phone on me, because you would be so TikTok famous right now. Cell waves?! I’m literally dead!”
“It doesn’t matter,” the first woman cut in, even as the second continued to chortle in the background, the girl growing more downcast by the second.
“What matters is we now know some one doesn’t want us to have access to the authorities. The same someone who likely left us all out here to begin with, most likely.”
One of the younger voices behind him piped up.
“Did- did a, uh, a sort of, like, notification? Like, talking about aliens and stuff, show up for you guys too? Assimilation, I think they called it.”
There was a moment of silence, before the first woman responded.
“I did… Though I chocked it up to a hallucination at the time.”
What followed was something Richard had already experienced once before, as they all went around in a circle and slowly came to terms with the reality of their situation. Even the disagreeable one couldn’t help but come around eventually, if begrudgingly.
And in that way, everything was more or less chugging along exactly as he remembered it from his own Hard Mode Tutorial. Next they would dredge up the courage to head out into the forest, driven either by thirst or hunger. At which point they would receive the first of many quest notifications, and only then would the true danger rear its ugly-
“Oh ho ho! What’s this I see? A bushel of playmates just for me? And just how many new friends do I see? Three plus three plus three plus-”
Richards blood ran cold.
He- he was in no way ready for this! Wasn’t this supposed to be a super easy tutorial?! How in the flork was this shirt rated easy, when the very first enemy they were up against was something like… that?! And although he was completely blind to the creature, foiled again by the immovable object that was his bulbous bare head, that voice…! That cadence….! It was unmistakable.
A nightmarish creature he’d vowed on his master formation to never cross again, in this life or the next.
The last time he’d been unfortunate enough to hear that bone chilling singsong, during one of the last major portal raids he’d taken part in. It was because of a creature just like this one that he’d decided joint raids simply weren’t in the cards for him. One hundred B grade rankers—each and every one of them in the 600 ~ 700 lvl range, at least—entered into that accursed rift, practically brimming over with confidence. Only he and two others managed to escape with their lives.
It didn’t matter that his bald head weighed as much as a u-haul truck on moving day.
He needed to flee!
+++
Robin listened warily as the person in the strange costume rambled on about numbers, and playmates, and friends. Studying the bobble headed mascot in closer detail—a large eyed tabby with round, golden irises, purple on white fur, and a red collar which sported an oversized bell—Robin made sure to keep herself between the clearly deranged figure and the children at all times.
Maybe the guy’s just really method…? Hmm. Yeah, better to be safe than sorry.
Especially since those claws seemed oddly sharp for a costume.
And the puppeteering’s better than anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s like one of those freaky kids movies. With the talking animals? It’s almost like it’s actually speaking, and not just some clever ventriloquist dummy.
Her attention beginning to wane—as she tried, unsuccessfully, to make sense of the rambling nonsense—something else grabbed her attention.
“Well I’ll be. What are you doing down there sweetheart?” she cooed. “You’re gonna hurt yourself flopping around like that.”
Plopping down onto her butt, to better hold onto all three of the precious bundles at once, Robin plucked up the spunky little fella, eliciting a sharp cry of protest in response.
“Can’t be more than a month old, poor thing. Bet your mama’s sick with worry.”
Setting one of the older kids down so that she could support his head properly, she cradled the little guy to her chest with the practiced ease of an eldest sister of five. Briefly, she questioned how weirdly transfixed the boy seemed to be with the, admittedly, strange looking mascot, before brushing it off as an infants innate curiosity. Tuning back into the conversation, Robin immediately perked up. It would appear things had gotten interesting in her absence.
“What do you mean we can’t leave?” snapped Denise, still as irate as ever.
“Blinky says what Blinky means! Did you not read the system screens?”
“Of course I read them, but they don’t actually say anything! It’s just some guy talking about how hot he is. Which doesn’t even make sense, by the way. Like, it’s just text? But whatever. Point is, it literally does not explain anything about anything!”
There was a brief pause, in which the mascots animated gestures froze mid wave.
“Hmm… hmm… is that so…? Blinky may have questions for the runners of this show.”
Robin blinked. In fact they all seemed to be a bit taken aback by the fact that it had actually worked.
Well. Go team. Leave it to the Karen to shoot our complaints straight up to management.
And then the mascot was back to its strange antics. Waving its paws in the air. Hopping this way and that. Contorting its body in weird ways as it chanted in that singsong voice. A few children even seemed responsive to the over the top display.
“Ha ha ha! Ho ho ho! He he he! Yessiree! We shan’t waste a second more! For that is what sir Blinky is for!”
And with that, he waved his paw magnanimously, and, in the next second, one semitransparent screen—like paper-thin rectangular holograms—appeared before each and everyone of them. Even the kids too young to know what they were looking at got one. Two of the eldest children, Alice and Donald, began tugging on her sleeves, asking that she read it to them.
A bit bewildered by the casual flaunting of, what she would’ve previously labeled, sci-fi technology, Robin was more than happy to oblige. Although, skimming down the page, the contents themselves were more than a little off putting.
In essence? For the next four years, they were trapped—a nifty little counter springing up in the top left corner of her vision.
Time Remaining: 1460 days, 22 hours, 9 minutes.
No one would be coming to rescue them, because any and all law enforcement, army personnel, and even their loved ones, were stuck in their own versions of this trial. And what was worse? They would be forced to fight to survive.
To kill.
Looking down at the little bundle of joy in her arms, barely a month old, she couldn’t help but wonder how in the world they were supposed to manage that. Oh, what she wouldn’t give to get her hands on whatever twisted son of a birch came up with that idea.
Wait a minute-? Birch? Son of a birch- birch! Son of a-!
*DING!*
+-|—OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE DETECTED—|-+
Uh oh! Looks like you were trying to use some naughty no no words :(
Oh, you’ve got to be florking kidding me!