There was an unfamiliar ceiling staring back at me when I opened my eyes. I looked around and realized that I was lying in a hospital bed. Mom and Sofia were sitting on the other side of the room and got up when they saw me moving.
Mom wrapped me in a tight hug. “Are you feeling alright? You had me worried to death.”
“Yeah, I feel fine. What’s going on?” I said.
Sofia hung her head. “The doctors are saying it’s cancer. They’re giving you one month to live unless they operate immediately.
I sprung up in the bed. “What?!”
Mom whacked her on the back of the head. “What’s the matter with you? We’re all dealing with enough already without you messing with your brother.”
“Sorry, I just couldn’t resist,” Sofia said. She rubbed her injured head as she turned back to me. “You passed out from shock after you saw Nonno pass away a couple of hours ago. The doctor said that you seem fine other than that.”
My heart dropped. So it was true. He was really dead. I cursed myself for not spending more time with him while I still could. I’d made excuses like needing to study or spend time with my friends, but I could’ve at least called or FaceTimed him regularly. Now it was too late.
I shook my head. “I can’t believe he’s gone.”
Sofia put her hand on my shoulder. “Yeah. I’m gonna miss him too.” She wiped away some tears.
I was surprised. It was rare for Sofia to be sincere and open with her emotions like that. But it seemed like Nonno’s death was big enough to even melt her cold, decaying heart. I passed her the box of tissues from the nightstand next to my bed. She accepted them wordlessly. Mom left us alone for a couple of minutes to find my doctor.
“So what did you talk about with him before he passed away? You were the last one to see him alive,” Sofia said.
I glanced down at the ring on my hand. I’d almost forgotten all about that weird conversation in all the commotion since I’d woken up.
“Nothing much. He just wanted to know about my plans for the future and give me some advice. Typical old man stuff,” I said.
“Um, and what are your plans?” She said. “I know I give you shit all the time but I’m really worried about you, Nico.”
“As soon as I figure that out, you’ll be the first person to know,” I sighed.
What WAS I going to do? I’d heard that it was tough to find a job with just a bachelor’s degree and I didn’t even have that. I have nothing against fast food workers or people in retail, but I wanted more for myself than that. The military was one option, but I didn’t love the idea of probably getting myself killed just so Uncle Sam could get cheaper oil or whatever.
I’d started warming up to the idea of entrepreneurship during that final conversation with Nonno earlier. It was ironic that running a business had gotten me into this mess, but maybe it could get me out. I didn’t have any clear idea of what type of business I could run though.
My thoughts drifted back to that conversation with Nonno again. What had he said? Something about his ring having special powers or whatever? I couldn't help but laugh a little on the inside. It would be great if some mysterious power could solve all my problems.
SYSTEM ONLINE
What the hell? I thought. A vague memory popped into my head of something similar happening to me right before I passed out.
I waved a hand in front of my face but the words didn’t disappear.
Sofia gave me a weird look. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing. I must be a little loopy from all the drugs the doctor gave me,” I said.
“They didn’t give you any drugs…”
I yawned and pretended that I didn’t hear her. After a couple of seconds, the words finally disappeared, but some new ones took their place. At the bottom of my field of vision were four blue boxes: Stats, Skills, Assets, and Quests. No matter where I turned my head, the boxes seemed to follow.
Seriously, what the hell is going on? I thought. It doesn’t seem like Sofia is seeing the words.
The doctor walked into the room before I could think about it further. Sofia left so he could talk to me in private. The doctor was a tall middle-aged man with long black hair that was tied back into a ponytail. He introduced himself, but I forgot his name almost immediately because I couldn’t stop thinking about the blue boxes. After he went over all the tests they performed on me after I passed out, he let me know that there didn’t seem to be any issues with me and I was free to go home.
“Do you have any questions or lingering concerns that you want to ask about?” The doctor said.
The boxes floated below him. This was insane. It shouldn’t be possible. There was something wrong with me. Normal people didn’t imagine words and boxes floating around. I was having some sort of mental breakdown.
“No, nothing is coming to mind. Thanks, doc,” I said.
I shook his hand and he left the room again so I could change out of the hospital gown and back into my regular clothes. There was no way I was going to ask him about why I was seeing things that weren’t actually there. That would’ve gotten me a first-class ticket straight to the looney bin. Whatever this was, I was sure that it would pass soon enough. It was probably just because I’d been under so much stress recently. Yeah, stress. That must be it.
It was humid and raining outside when we left the hospital, which was typical for Miami. There was only one umbrella between the three of us, so we huddled together tightly and made our way back to the car. Part of me wanted to be alone at that moment and I wished that I’d driven to the hospital in my car instead of coming along in my mom’s car. But I couldn’t have known beforehand that this visit would end up taking as long as it did.
The ride home was mostly quiet, which suited me just fine. Mom was focused on the road and Sofia was looking at videos on TikTok. No matter how much I tried to ignore it, I couldn’t get rid of the weird boxes at the bottom of my vision.
STATS/ SKILLS/ ASSETS/ QUESTS
Stats? Stats on what? I wondered.
Immediately, the Stats box disappeared from the bottom of my vision and three new transparent boxes appeared in front of me.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
User
Domenico Moretti
Age
21
Current Class
None
Current XP
0
Charisma
4
Intelligence
6
Wisdom
3
Strength
3
Constitution
5
Dexterity
5
What’s the difference between Intelligence and Wisdom? I thought. And what do constitution and dexterity even mean here? What’s the range for all these numbers? Is it out of ten? One hundred?
The more I looked at these stats the more questions I had. I wished they would just disappear. The stats disappeared just as soon as I thought about it and returned to the box at the bottom of the screen. Everything about this felt freaky.
It was strange to me that all of the sections on the Stats table had information except for the part that said “Current Class”. Between this class thing, the line for XP, and the blue box near the bottom that mentioned quests, I couldn’t help thinking about the video games I used to play when I was a kid. I hadn’t had much time recently to play games, but this all reminded me of RPGs where you level up and make your character stronger. The more I thought about this, the more concerned I got about the possibility that I was having some sort of mental breakdown.
“Hey, when did you get that ring?” Sofia asked, snapping me out of my thoughts.
“What? Oh, I bought it on Etsy a couple of months ago,” I lied. “Looks real, doesn’t it?”
Sofia scrunched up her nose. “It looks kind of tacky to me.”
“Pft, what do you you know about fashion?” I scoffed as I stared at the golden ring. The crimson gem in its center seemed to give off a glow that I hadn’t noticed earlier.
Nonno’s words about the ring echoed in my head. He said that the ring had special abilities and that it could somehow change a person. And as soon as I put it on, I started seeing things. I felt like an idiot for not realizing it sooner.
These things that I’ve been seeing have got to be connected to the ring, I thought. I guess Nonno wasn’t going crazy after all. …Or maybe this is a coma fever dream?
The first thing I did when we got home was sprint up the stairs to my room and open my laptop. I felt like a moron for typing “stat box appears in front of face” in Google, but I couldn’t think of any better ideas. I needed to see if there were clues out there about what was happening to me. Using an incognito window made me feel a little better about searching for this because at least I wouldn’t be leaving a trace of what I was looking for.
To my surprise, it only took about five minutes before I found some Reddit posts that were related to what I was going through. There were a bunch of posts about people discussing a genre of fiction called “LitRPGs”. Apparently, nerds had started writing stories where they could make themselves the main characters and live out their fantasies of leveling up like they were in video games. It didn’t seem like my cup of tea but to each their own.
What did interest me about these litRPGs was how closely the setup of the stories mirrored what I was currently going through. All of them seemed to have the same idea of characters who saw boxes appear in front of them with information about their characteristics and abilities. The more monsters they fought or trials they overcame, the stronger the characters became and the more abilities they could unlock.
I knew that my Nonno had mentioned that the ring had helped out people in our family for generations and he said that it had changed his life. All that stuff he’d mentioned about powers didn’t sound so far off from what went down in litRPGs. The more that I learned about litRPGs, the more it seemed to fit in with the story he’d told me.
I’d already looked at the Stats section earlier in the car, but I realized that I still hadn’t checked out the other boxes. I mentally commanded the Skills box to open.
Skills
None
That makes sense since I haven’t started “leveling up”. Okay, what about assets?
NET WORTH: $29,473.05
INVENTORY/ UNDERLINGS/ PROPERTIES
Assets having more subsections inside of it was unexpected. But I was more surprised by the net worth information that was listed above them. That was the exact amount of money that I had saved in my bank account from my test papers business. I quickly logged into the banking app on my phone and the dollar amount matched down to the pennies. It was mind-boggling to me that the system somehow had access to this information.
A random idea came to me and I decided to test it out and see what happened. I placed an order on Uber Eats for a delivery of Chinese food from Good Fortune, a restaurant that I ate at all the time. Their Chicken Lo Mein was like crack. While I was feeling a bit hungry, that wasn’t the main reason why I ordered the food. I decided to see what was in each of the subsections of Assets while I waited.
Inventory
None
Properties
None
Underlings
None
It wasn’t surprising to see that there was nothing listed in Properties. I’d expected Inventory to have some of my belongings listed in it like my phone or something. It made me wonder what exactly counted as “inventory”. The fact that this system didn’t come with an instruction manual was beginning to annoy me.
But the Underlings section bothered me even more. The word had a very negative connotation to it. Based on that word, I was starting to get an idea of what this system thing wanted from me and I didn’t like where this was going. Instead of dwelling on that, I checked my banking app again. The money for the Uber Eats delivery had been deducted from my account and I now had $29,453.05.
Why does Uber Eats always have so many fees in it? Oh well, it’s not a big deal.
I looked at my net worth again.
NET WORTH: $29,453.05
Just like I’d expected, the system was able to update its information instantly. I didn’t understand how it was able to do that. Hell, I didn’t understand how any of this worked. Where did the ring and the system originally come from?
I couldn’t rule out the possibility that there was somebody or some group that was monitoring my actions and setting this entire thing up. If that was the case, there was no telling what they gained from giving people access to the system. Maybe I would be better off trying to ignore all of this. The ring seemed to be the cause of everything, so I could just chuck it in some corner of my room and forget about it.
I put two fingers around the ring so I could slide it off. But it didn’t budge at all. I frowned and pulled a little harder on the ring. It remained firmly in place as if it was super glued to my finger. No matter how hard I tugged on the ring it stayed exactly where it was.
Eventually, I had to face the facts. I was stuck with the ring. Worse than that, I was stuck with the system. I remembered that Nonno told me not to accept the ring unless I was sure. That must’ve been his way of warning me that it was a decision I couldn’t take back. I just wished that he’d been more direct about what would happen after I said yes.
After all the weird things that had happened that day, I felt too drained to even go down the rabbit hole of theorizing about how the hell this ring fused itself to my finger.
I decided to close out the Assets tab and finally open up the last tab; Quests.
ACTIVE QUESTS/ COMPLETED QUESTS
I knew that I hadn’t completed any quests so there was no point in looking at that. When I opened up the Active Quests section there was only one thing listed there. My heart started racing when I saw it.
“Get the fuck out of here,” I said, clenching my fists.
QUEST: ONE OF US
OBJECTIVE: JOIN A CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION
TIME LIMIT: INDEFINITE