The arena stands began to empty, but slowly. People seemed dazed. Hell, I was dazed. This was a lot of information to absorb all at once. Abducted from Earth, normal bodies placed in some sort of tank, and minds packed into superhuman bodies on another planet countless light years away. For a game.

You’d be a bit dazed too.

I joined the throng spilling outside and tried to distract myself from a growing sense of doom by pondering what kind of games this would involve when I left the arena and almost fell over backwards with surprise.

If I wasn’t dazed before, I certainly was when I emerged from the arena into a scene straight out of a fantasy movie. The arena sat along the edge of a vast cobblestone courtyard that seemed to function like a town square, only it was hexagonal. A dozen evenly spaced fountains encircled a large central gazebo crafted from smooth, white marble.

Various buildings that appeared to be mostly shops lined the edge of the courtyard and six evenly space streets spread out like the spokes of a wheel. The buildings along these streets were, from what I could see from my vantage, more shops and perhaps some houses. The layout was quite structured, but the architecture was all over the place. A cozy log chalet nestled between a domed yurt and a thatched roof cottage. It was like someone had taken all the fantasy settings in human stories, chewed them up, and vomited out this absurd town.

The place was hopping, too. There were many more people around than the ones who’d been with me in the arena. They stood out because they were dressed in clothing that matched the fantasy setting whereas we wore whatever we had on when we’d been abducted. I myself was in my Isekai World GameCon t-shirt and jeans. I had a loose hoodie on over it, and I zipped it up to cover the big pixellated Games Are Everything on my chest; it was like the uncoolness of wearing that t-shirt right then came crashing down on top of me and all I could think to do was hide.

But I didn’t know what to do.

That’s when I realized that none of us knew what to do. I wondered how long it would take people to adjust to everything. Given that they were all gamers, probably not very long.

Another difference between Players and the people who were here before us is that the locals weren’t milling about lost and directionless like we were. They all seemed to be moving with purpose, comfortable in the baffling surroundings. Most people were on foot, but some had mounts or rode in wagons or carriages. The mounts were not horses, though, nor were the beasts pulling those wagons and carriages. I could see two different kinds of creatures that people used to ride or drive, one was a sort of bird, like a giant puffin with long, powerful ostrich legs, while the other looked like a sort of dinosaur. A friendly velociraptor, if you can picture such a thing.

Who were these people? Were there already other Players there before us?

I used All Shall Be Revealed on a few of them.

Diligent Shopkeeper

Carefree Citizen

Wolf Clan Fighter

Mischievous Boy

Dragon Clan Fighter

Nope, not Players. They all seemed like generic non-player characters. Figures there’d be NPCs.

I was starting to believe this really was a different planet. Stratos said it was, but even though they did promise they’d always tell the truth, how could I know that itself wasn’t a lie?

I took a deep breath. It felt the same as usual, my chest rising as my lungs filled with air. I figured the atmosphere must be the same as Earth’s, unless Player bodies were designed to work in whatever atmosphere this was. Either way, breathing seemed fine and the body seemed healthy enough.

When I thought about it, I’d woken up with sore legs from walking around the convention so much, but now I didn’t feel any pain at all. This really could be a new body.

I did a little hop.

Gravity seemed to be the same, but again it could just be these bodies were stronger or weaker to compensate for the difference. Either way it felt the same.

Everything seemed pretty normal. The colors all seemed the same and there was only one sun in the bright blue nearly cloudless sky, although it looked a little larger than normal. The temperature was comfortable, not too hot, not too humid, just right. Anyone would have to agree, it was a beautiful day.

Nobody knew what to do.

Almost everyone who’d appeared here with me looked lost and confused. It’s one thing to take action when you’re playing a game, it’s another thing entirely to know where to begin in a situation like this, set loose in a strange place not knowing where to begin, not even knowing the rules of the game you’re playing.

I headed over to the nearest fountain intending to sit on the ledge surrounding it. As I got close I noticed words engraved on it.

Feu Fuoco Огонь Feuer 火 Fire Φωτιά

That’s the word Fire in different languages. Fire is an affinity.

I went to the next fountain: Earth. Next to that, Nature. Then Light. Then Life, Air, Ice, and Water. Twelve fountains in total.

That must mean there are twelve affinities too. Good to know.

I went around to all the fountains making note of what all the affinities were. I noticed that each one had an opposite — Light and Darkness, Life and Death, Fire and Ice — and sure enough, I found that the placement of the fountains formed a patterned ring of opposites and similarities. Opposite affinities lay across from each other in the ring, while similar affinities were adjacent. If it was a clock, Life was at 12:00 with Death opposite it at 6:00, like this:

image [https://i.imgur.com/m6GBHgq.png]

Seeing it laid out in this way led to another realization: the further you got away from the two poles, the more common the affinity. Life and Death were rarest, Earth and Water most common. I perched myself on the ledge of the Air fountain and had a deep think.

So everybody had a simple quest: settle in and get experience. Everybody except me. I needed to assemble a team. I was pretty blase about my powers, but at least All Shall Be Revealed would be handy for choosing team members. I’d evaluated a lot of people and it was clear that some people had more powers than others, and some powers were better than others too. I needed to find nine kick-ass Players with great powers to make a team of ten, including me. There was affinity to consider too. Some affinities were more common than others, so I wondered if there was an advantage to having a less common affinity. I decided to try for a balance on my team. Cover all the bases, because I still had no idea what this game was really all about.

I was roused from my reverie by the sound of clapping. There were a lot fewer people in the town square, most having dribbled away to explore. A small crowd had congregated not far away from me, centered around two men. A jet of flame sprouted from one of the men, rising up a few feet into the air from his outstretched hand. The crowd clapped again. The other man showed off by creating a small tower of ice in front of him. More applause. It’s pretty funny to think back about how impressive it seemed at the time, actually.

I recognized the men in the center from the GameCon, of course. They’d been playing together at a collectible card game table. I didn’t like them.

Look, here’s the thing: I’m a gamer. I love games. Like, I really really love them. I’ve played every kind you can think of, and I’ve even designed a bunch myself. I don’t have a favorite, there’s no one game I keep coming back to. Not even a type of game I prefer, I love them all. I’ll find a new game, obsess over it for a while, figure out how to beat it, then get bored and move on to another one. Happens every time.

The thing I don’t really like very much are other gamers.

When the ads started appearing for the Isekai World GameCon I wasn’t really interested. I had a passing interest in going around the vendors looking for my next obsession, but I had no interest at all in joining any of the tables as a player. Partly because having to choose just one or two to play would be way too hard. Mostly because of other reasons I am choosing to redact. Maybe you can figure it out for yourself, but I’m not about to draw extra attention to my many failings.

Then I heard about the meta-game.

It was something new to this convention, only possible at this convention. A special game that pretty much epitomized the whole games are everything, everything is a game ideal. They called it the God Game, and used the convention itself as the game board. The rules were simple: Players of the God Game were challenged to pick the winners of all the other games. It was like it was made for me. There was no way I could not play it.

The GameCon had a mobile app that showed what was happening at every table at all times. God Game players had access to a special feature of the app where we could also see who was playing at each table and enter our selection of the player we thought would win. It felt very much like betting on horse races. And while I might not know much about horses, I do know gamers.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I spent most of the first day scoping things out. I systematically worked my way through every table and made my guesses about who would win. There were a crap ton of tables, but in the end I didn’t need to spend very long observing any of them to make my picks. I didn’t even show up for the second day. The God Game had been fun, but I’d seen it all. Not to mention that one day of those crowds was one day too many for me.

I was planning to skip the third day too but then I received a direct message through the GameCon app on the second night that changed my mind. It was from someone who identified themself as the organizer of the God Game, and they wanted to meet me first thing on the third day. Said they had a business proposition and that I would be compensated to make it worth my while. I assumed by compensation they meant something monetary, and I could definitely have used some extra cash. Now that my ex-girlfriend was out of the picture I lived alone and no longer hemorrhaged money like I had when I was supporting the parasitic harpy, but even though I had no dependents and at least some income, between student loans and a credit card ratcheted up to maximum my debt load was unsustainable unless something changed.

So sure, I could’ve used some extra money, but that wasn’t what intrigued me the most. It was meeting the person who’d made the God Game. And, of course, when I showed up the next day the person I met was Stratos. I had no idea if they were a man or a woman or both or neither, not that it mattered. I didn’t know if Stratos was a first name or a last name, they were just Stratos. Seriously, they handed me their business card and that’s all it said.

Stratos

Gamester

Lame and pretentious, I know. I had to give them props for the cool job title, though.

Anywho, it turned out they wanted to follow me around the conference all day and have me explain my God Game choices. Apparently, my picks had been over 90% correct, more than twice the score of the next highest God Game player, and they wanted to know my secret. So I spent the final day of the conference with Stratos attached to my hip.

We hopped from table to table and I pointed out who the strong players were and explained why. I can’t remember talking so much in my life. Honestly, in the half a year since my break up, I hadn’t really spoken more than a few sentences to anybody one-on-one in a non-professional way. Not that I’d talked all that much to my ex even when we were together, but that’s an entirely different issue. Or maybe it isn’t. But after we split I didn’t know anyone in the city. I had been meaning to get out more and try to make some friends, but you know how it is. So having someone who was that interested in what I had to say was pretty novel and not just a little bit flattering, and I held nothing back.

I’d played all these games before, and if there was one I hadn’t played before, I’d played ones like it, and I knew how to win. Watching people play, I could quickly pick out each person’s strategy, — a shocking number of people just play these things for fun without knowing what they’re doing, I really don’t get it — and what they needed to do to win. I could also see very quickly who would come out on top. So many times there was this frustrating moment when I could see someone’s path to victory laid out there, clear as day. But they didn’t.

I kept thinking if only I had some way to give them a hint and coax them in the right direction, I could’ve helped so many people win. My ex used to joke that being an annoying know-it-all might be why I didn’t have any friends. At least I think she was joking. Either way I’m pretty sure that’s not the reason. I don’t like conflict. I don’t like to argue. I don’t even like offering an opinion. I’m not the sort of person to correct someone else. And I’d never, ever tell someone what to do.

If I am a know-it-all, I go to great lengths to hide it.

That’s why the situation at the convention was so unusual. Stratos went out of their way to ask me, over and over, what I knew. I guess it’s really not normal to be able to correctly pick out who would win nine times out of ten. That was my takeaway from how Stratos was so fascinated with my ability to pick winners. And they didn’t just want to know who the winners would be, they often asked me about more subtle things, such as who I thought would be good to play with, win or lose. And I told them.

That’s why I’d recognized so many of the other Players here. They were those people. Not everyone was a winner, some were just fun to play with.

Stratos was also curious about the opposite, the ones I would not want to sit down at a table with. The players who were greedy, selfish, and annoying. The ones who whined when things didn’t go their way. The sore losers. The show-offs. The ones who argued about the rules. The ones who didn’t pay attention and wasted the others’ time. Basically, the ones who weren’t there for fun, or at least didn’t care about or outright ruined the fun of others. I hate people like that, and while Stratos wanted to know all about the good players — the ones I did like — they were also interested in hearing about the crap players too.

Once you know what to look for, it’s pretty easy to separate the wheat from the chaff. When in doubt, just follow this one simple rule: if the person chafes, they’re chaff. It doesn’t matter how good someone is at game mechanics, if they’re not fun to play with then they’re a bad player, period. I kind of wished I hadn’t pointed them out because there were a lot of those crap players amongst the Players who’d been summoned to this other world, too. Including the two guys showing off their fire and ice powers.

These two guys had been playing at a collectible card game table and were the sort who didn’t have much skill, but they compensated with terrific cards. That’s the problem with CCGs, anybody can be awesome if they spend enough money.

These jokers loved making a big production every time they brought out a kickass card. You know, the slow draw from their hand then the slam of the card onto the table with some kind of sound effect like Boom! or Wham! or even worse, a loud, fake laugh like a supervillain in a poorly funded film. Ha! Ha! Haaa! Hell, just remembering it now makes my skin crawl. But they were one-trick ponies, these guys. A good player with a sound strategy who can adapt to the unpredictable shifts in a game will always beat them in the end. These guys based their whole game around the power of a couple of cards, and while it might work with the gang back home if you bring that to a convention table where you faced real players, expect to go down in flames big time. Which, of course, is exactly what happened to them. Every. Single. Match.

The more it happened, the more times their amazing rare cards fizzled because another player used more common cards well, the sulkier they got. Then the angrier they got. And because they acted like babies, they became more and more unwelcome at the table. What was amazing — the redeeming thing that made me truly love the good players — is that no matter how many times these bozos switched tables to try again with other players, the same thing always happened. The other players would get pissed off and go out of their way to eliminate them first. You’re not really supposed to team up on other players, but there’s no rule against it. In fact, it’s an unwritten gamer code to unite against the whiny babies.

The thing about gamers is that we look for ways to turn things into games. Seriously, there’s a reason why that damned "games are everything, everything is a game" slogan resonated so strongly. It’s because to a true gamer it is 100% true. So once these crybabies’ antics reached critical mass it became a game for the other players to see who could find the fastest and most humiliating way to eliminate them, and keep it up right until the point when the losers packed up their expensive cards and said screw you guys, I’m going home. This was, of course, much to the delight of the other players who no longer had to deal with their crap and could get on having fun playing the game they loved enough to come play it for three days at a convention. You do not mess with proper players, not when it comes to messing up a good game.

So yeah. Those crybaby losers? That was these guys. It sucked that they were here, but there was nothing to be done except stay the hell away from them.

Those cretins would never be on my team. Ha! Ha! Haaa!

Out of curiosity, I used All Shall Be Revealed on them. I wanted to know how they were managing to produce the fire and ice.

Greg Tremblay Affinity: Fire - Novice Gifts: Tough Guy - Improved toughness Powers:

I Spent The Last Few Years Building Up An Immunity To Iocane Powder - Novice: Resistant to poisons, venoms, and toxins

All Or Nothing – Novice: Damage done scales with amount of mana put into attack

Skills:

Affinity Control - Novice

Pyrotechnics - Novice

Sword - Novice

Chuck Green Affinity: Ice - Novice Gifts: Bright Eyed - Novice: Enhanced recovery Powers:

Fleet Footed - Novice: Improved movement speed

Bushy Tailed - Novice: Werewolf transformation

Skills:

Affinity Control - Novice

Construction - Novice

Sword - Novice

The affinities matched and the powers were decent, but it didn’t explain how they were producing the fire and ice.

Then I noticed the skill they both had and it all made sense.

Affinity Control - Novice: Player can manipulate their affinity element

Now that was a skill worth learning.

The show went on as more fire and ice continued to erupt. The crowd around them appeared to have split their allegiances, some supporting Greg while the others cheered on Chuck. The competition grew heated as they argued about which one was better and tried to outdo one another. I kept watching, not caring who won the competition but very curious about the skill they were using.

Then the fireworks stopped. They seemed to be trying to make more, but nothing happened. And they looked worn out as hell, like they ran out of gas. In any game with abilities like these, they’re fueled by some sort of limited resource, such as mana, or energy, or something like that. Use the power too much and you’ll use it all up. That must’ve been what happened.

System: You know Affinity Control

I had to blink a few times to make sure of what I was seeing. I couldn’t believe I got the skill already, it was too quick. I thought Jack Of All Trades wasn’t worth jack all, but that’s when I started thinking I might have been wrong.

System: You are the first to learn a new Skill - Reward Tokens: +1 (2)

And another Reward Token? Sweet.

I was sorely tempted to try out my new skill, and I particularly wanted to see how my Good At Everything gift would work with it, but I didn’t want to do it in public like these jerks. It could wait. I went back to pondering the situation and figuring out my next steps.

Having no idea how long I was going to be stuck there, I decided to err on the safe side and assume it would be a while before I got home. I needed to prepare for a long haul.

But what to do first?