It was in the dawning of consciousness that pain flooded back into the body, a flood of needles spreading through the veins to radiate towards sinew and skin.
Aurelio had suffered from alcohol induced benders and an accidental stint with way too many edibles, but the ache in his head and the pain across his body was of a greater caliber. It threatened to end his life then and there.
He was nauseous and his body wretched and heaved bile from the pit of his stomach. The acrid stench of copper and smoke and stagnant water overwhelmed his nostrils. The vile taste of pure stomach acid gurgled just below the base of his throat, threatening to explode out of him without warning.
Even opening his eyes required a greater force of will than he was used to. Through slits, his eyes stung and watered as the black smoke and heat irritated them. Aurelio could make out the faint silhouette of a massive metallic structure highlighted by a raging bonfire and the distant stars above.
"Someone get the payload!" A feminine voice shouted.
His senses were coming one after another with his sense of mind beginning to pour in. The voice calling out was unfamiliar to him. He certainly hadn't planned a night out, especially not on a school night.
"Get moving, soldier!" The woman growled.
Had he fallen asleep watching a movie again? The disorientation in his mind was slow to clear but the sensation of a mucky earth on the side of his cheek and the rush of alien sounds around him told Aurelio that either he'd found himself in a realistically vivid lucid dream or a situation far, far worse.
"C'mon!" Called another voice from above him. Their metallic hand stretched out to pull him up but Aurelio's body was unresponsive to the demands of getting up.
An explosion from the metal structure ripped through the night in a brilliant pillar of light and the world around him responded with the impossibly low thrum of giants. It was the closest thing he could rationalize where not even the deep tones of a whale could match the weight of their cries.
"For fucks sake!" The voice cried out in exasperation and at once, Aurelio was lifted off the ground. The sudden movement caused what little food and acid there was in his stomach to rapidly exit out of him in a gurgle of viscous spit up.
"S-sorry." He muttered. His voice was hoarse. The vomiting hadn't done him any favors but the ache in his throat was near unnatural.
What the fuck was going on?
"Is he alive?" The first voice asked.
The jerky, frantic movements had slowed down to an even pace, "Think so. Might have said something but the fire's drowning out a lot of sound."
"Good. Phineas's trying to scout ahead. Cantwell is already scrounging for the bits of the ship that aren't on fire."
Ship? And their names...
"Wait," steps approached his savior and he felt the gentle grip of a hand lift his head up, "I think he's coming 'round."
Aurelio placed all of his will into moving his eyelids and successfully blinked his eyes wide open. Staring back at him was a robust woman slightly less dark than the sky with bursting orange embers for eyes. Grooves of a fainter orange hue traced from the edges of her eyes down her cheeks and further into her neck, disappearing beneath the rusted metal of her armor. The hardiness in her gaze and tone was offset by the care she displayed for his head as she inspected it for wounds.
The woman gave him a wide smile, "Well look at that! The man of the hour has come 'round to enjoy his welcome."
The world gave way again as the support around his midsection dropped and his body collided with the earth. A dull thud and an ill-placed stone sent his vision spiraling once again.
"-heavy...walk!" the second voice shouted as he felt hands reach underneath him again.
Despite the spiraled vision, he was beginning to panic with the rising number of oddities to his situation.
He'd never been much of a LARPer but this felt like a situation far removed from that community, and the pain that flooded his insides and outsides would have woken him up by now if this were a dream.
Short of a bizarre situation like that movie about games and bored rich folk, there was only one other idea he could think of to explain his predicament and he didn't like it at all.
"Captain," a hurried masculine voice called out, "I-I think I've found a place!"
"AH!" Aurelio seized and cried out. His mouth grew dry as a scorching, searing pain pierced him through the chest and exploded with an unbearable heat. Every inch of his body felt like it’d been dipped in molten lava.
He attempted to cling to consciousness, but the task proved insurmountable in moments.
---
Aurelio gasped and lunged forward. Whatever pain had taken him had subsided, but it lingered in his bones and sinews like an unwelcome guest.
He took a moment to assess his surroundings.
The area was faintly lit by electric sconces embedded in the walls. The room was fairly large with bunk beds lining either side of the building. At the back of the building were metallic beams and frames that jutted out with cables and hooks. The front of the building held the sole exit to the place, the outdoors unlit save for what illumination could be found under the stars above.
Although pleasurable waking up on a cushioned bed than the moist earth, this all but confirmed his suspicions that he was not in his home anymore.
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He looked down at his hands and saw similar grooves to the woman who'd smiled at him earlier now tracing through his body with an aberrant cerulean hue.
No number of drugs or kidnapping plots could steer him away from the realization that he had woken up in another world. It was the only judgment he could make short of assuming that he’d finally lost his mind.
And the sinking feeling in his stomach matched his growing familiarity with the few elements this world had offered him.
Aurelio pulled his shirt over his head and traced the grooves in his hands to a cratered blue flame lodged into his heart.
"Fuck!" Aurelio shouted. "Fuck! This can't be happening!"
It was useless. Pointless.
Unless there was another world set with scrapped together mechanized suits and humans with ember cores in their chest, this setting was a near one to one with the setting of the tabletop role playing game "Dying Ignition".
A game well renowned for the ways it churned player characters through a meat grinder of monsters and events. A pleasure he'd experienced firsthand alongside his younger brother-
All thoughts ceased at that moment. His younger brother and his brother's fiancé. His mother and father. His students. His cat.
Aurelio felt the sudden pang of loss weigh him down further, the gravity of the situation halting all progress towards productive thought.
He sat there in relative stillness, hearing the distant hurried chatter of his saviors outside, attempting to reconcile a world's worth of loss in but a few short moments.
Aurelio couldn't do that.
No human could.
And so, he took control of what little he had power over, mainly his breathing and his movements, and steadied himself.
If there was a mechanism that brought him into this world, then he reasoned that there was a mechanism to bring him out of it. That thought alone lifted a lot of the weight on his shoulders, turning a permanent loss into a tragic setback.
He pulled himself back to the thoughts of Dying Ignition and considered his familiarity with the game. His brother had asked him for help with play-testing the expansion of the game and begged him to sit down and listen to the intricacies of the broad world and the fine mechanical details.
Unlike his younger brother, he didn't have the patience to sit down and design games, let alone pay attention to the lengthy presentation, but it was important enough for his brother that Aurelio committed as much of it to memory as he could.
Dying Ignition was a game set in the far reaches of space where a group of scavengers crash land onto the Scrap Planet and attempt to rebuild their ship from parts across the land before the land is subsumed by a sentient void.
Of note was the tutorial section of the game that went through the basics of how to run combat and events before having the ship crash land onto the planet.
Which meant the first mystery he'd needed to solve was getting answers on what happened before the ship crashed onto the planet. The Commander had spoken to him with some level of familiarity and that alone was a cause for concern because aside from knowing her general backstory within the supplement for the expansion, he'd never met her in his life.
She’d referred to him as a “payload” if his memory served him correctly.
He pushed those thoughts aside and went back to inspecting his new body.
Aurelio gingerly pressed the crater in his chest and felt the calcified cracks where soft skin used to be.
A thin trail of blue fire jumped out of his chest and exploded into a bizarre diagnostics sheet that looked similar to the character sheets his younger brother employed for their Dying Ignition campaign.
[Name] - Aurelio Cancio
[Status] - Healthy
[Second Wind] - {X} {X} {X}
[Species] - error
[Heart] - 1
[Ignition Regen] - 1
[Ignition Cap] - 10
[Role 1] - None
[Role 2] - None
[Mov: +0 | Acc: +0 | Str: +0 | Eva: +0 | Spd: +0 | Lck: +0] (+3!) [::]
[Weapon Class Specialization] - None
[Spark Level] - 0
He looked at the sheet and found the pile of questions in the back of his head to be growing every moment.
For one, the sheet didn't consider his species to be human, which was a worrying development because he very much felt that he was human and a cursory glance at all of his bits, aside from the flaming leylines, pointed to that fact. He had a vague memory of the other races in the game, and he didn’t match their descriptions either.
A more promising development was the presence of the point allocation blinking to the side of his stat array. That was a welcomed difference between the base game and his current predicament.
There was a singular die symbol next to the flashing icon, which meant that he wouldn't be able to hand pick his points, but some starting stats were better than the nil offered to players in the base campaign.
There was room to worry in this moment of grace. Changes on this front meant there were changes elsewhere in the world, and with what cursory knowledge he could recollect of the game, keeping things as close to familiar would allow him to maintain the advantage.
Aurelio laughed.
Advantage against what, exactly? He was a high school teacher, not a scavenger like the rest of the people outside. He had a limited omnipotence to the world and the mechanical elements underlying it but acting on his knowledge felt far beyond his skill set.
No.
This wasn't the time for hesitation. Decisiveness would be required. Planning was a necessity. He was assured of his lackluster skills as a combatant so he would lean on his skills as an educator and plan the road ahead to the best of his abilities. Familiarizing oneself with the interconnected efficiencies of the game was more within his younger brother's wheelhouse than his own but Aurelio was quick to adapt plans when their resources hit snags on his brother's roadmap.
This would be no different.
The first thing to do was gather information on the differences between what he knew and what was. The rest of the crew was likely waiting for him to wake up from his stupor. The emergency lights faintly dispelling the dark suggested to him that they'd failed to locate the Monolith in the outpost or were currently failing to communicate with the devilish stone.