Everyone says it all started with the abductions. And for everyone else, that’s true. One minute they were going about their normal lives — cooking food, playing a board game, checking socials, playing a card game, going to school, playing a video game — and the next thing they knew they were on another world. That’s true for other Players, but not for me. Sure, I was abducted too, but my story began the day before, at the Isekai World GameCon.

From the first time I heard about it, I thought isekai was a fun name for a gaming convention. After all, getting immersed in a good game is a lot like being transported to another world. Of course, we know now it wasn’t a cute metaphor so much as an insidious joke.

We all arrived at the same time, hundreds of us, snapping into place in the new world with a sensation a lot like waking from a dream, although it was more like we’d fallen into one. This arrival came with an abrupt jolt to the body and mind, which I think is to be expected after being ripped from living a normal life one moment, then boom, finding ourselves plunked down with a horde of strangers in the stands of some kind of arena. Yeah, it’s not surprising we were all dazed and disoriented and groggy. Everything about it was strange and slightly surreal. Even the arena itself was a huge departure from normal; it wasn’t like any arena I’d seen before, except maybe in some Asian action flick.

My first thought: this is absurd.

My second thought: I must be dreaming.

A low murmur built among the crowd and I saw more than a few sets of eyes darting around as their owners pinched themselves. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one to think that, but at least I had the decency to hide my hand in the pocket of my hoodie when I pinched myself.

The murmur grew steadily into a loud buzz as people began to discover, as I did, that those pinches actually hurt.

Not dreaming, then. Even more absurd.

I didn’t remember getting hit by a truck.

When confronted by something like this, you’d expect the buzz that it generated among the crowd to be an angry one, or at the very least a confused one. Sure, some people were very angry and others were very confused, a few were likely both, but if I had to pick one word to describe the vibe that surrounded me it would have to be this: excitement. I felt it too, that quivering anticipation. It even threatened to overpower the crippling anxiety I’d initially felt after finding myself suddenly surrounded by so many strange people in an even stranger place.

Of course we were excited, this whole scenario was straight out of some kind of immersive game. It was like throwing fish into water.

See, when I finally took a good look at the people around me, I discovered that I recognized every person there. That’s when I realized I knew something maybe nobody else did yet: we weren’t strangers, not completely. We all had something in common. The day before, everybody there had been in the same convention hall in Toronto attending the Isekai World GameCon, myself included. They had been scattered all over the place, playing different games at different tables in different rooms, so they didn’t recognize each other. But I recognized them. I could even tell you what game they preferred, and if they were any good at it. Heck, I could even tell you why.

The freckle-faced teenaged boy in jeans and a Minecraft t-shirt on my right had probably spent most of his young life with a gaming console controller in his hands, and had honed his reflexes to the point that multiplayer online battle arena games were as natural to him as pushing his glasses up his nose.

That pale-skinned young woman over there, whose dense curly hair, thick eyeliner, glossy lipstick, and long lacy dress all competed over which one had the darkest shade of black, nurtured a hidden talent for solving puzzle games. My guess is that she had spent most of her childhood alone, those people tend to enjoy puzzles.

Beside her, the surly teen in a red-checked lumberjack coat hiding behind a curtain of lank hair could roleplay most people under the table. I’d known more than a few people like him before, people so uncomfortable in their own skins that the only way they could truly express themselves was by pretending to be someone else, in real life and in games.

The swarthy man in a dark gray suit one row down, whose round face swelled like an over-inflated balloon over the noose of his necktie, was surprisingly good at collectible card games. OCD if I’ve ever seen it.

Over there, the dark-skinned woman with cornrow hair wearing a prim blazer and matching knee-length pencil skirt, was always several moves ahead of everyone else when she played board games. Toronto was a pretty multicultural city, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t prejudice there. She’d probably had to constantly strive to be better than everyone just to find herself on equal footing, and it showed in how she approached her gaming.

That young Korean man wearing clothes at least two sizes too big with deep bags under his eyes was a first person shooter savant. Addictive personality.

The spotty-faced boy gawking around with the darting head movements of an anxious bird transformed into a zen monk when playing sports video games. That one I didn’t have a quick answer for, some people just like what they like, and that’s okay.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Each of these people were top tier players in their chosen games. I’d seen that for myself.

I don’t believe in coincidence, so as I surveyed the crowd around me my initial excitement melted away, leaving me with nothing but my quivering anxiety and a sinking feeling that it was no accident these people were there with me.

They were all there because of me.

A lot of them were the people who'd won at their games, that's what you'd expect. But a significant number of the people around me were there because for other reasons, reasons I'd chosen. Because for one reason or another, everyone there had caught my interest at the convention and I had personally singled them as special in some way. All of them.

I want to make it clear I had no idea at the time that in doing so I would be choosing them to be abducted and plonked onto butt-numbingly hard arena benches en masse. Look up unwitting in the dictionary, you'll see me. I swear, I hadn’t known at the time that anything like this would happen. How could I? I was just picking out the most interesting players. It wasn’t my fault. Honestly.

We’d barely had enough time to wrap our heads around the absurd situation when a jaunty fanfare began to play, the kind of tinny digital-sounding tune you’d expect to hear in an old-school Nintendo game after rescuing some captured 8-bit princess. I couldn’t tell where it came from, it seemed to be all around me. No, that’s not quite right. It was more like it was inside me, filling my head as though I was listening to it through headphones, only I wasn’t wearing any.

Then I noticed some people pointing towards the arena floor.

The arena was hexagonal and made entirely of polished wood. Straight vertical walls about twenty feet tall rose up from the packed dirt of the arena floor on all six sides. Ten tiers of bleachers followed, each with just a few rows of those hard benches. A shallow dome covering the entire space, making it look like a huge curved mirror was above us, but at the same time the dome also seemed to cast a uniform light over the entire area. The bottom third or so of the stands were full of people, me and my fellow Players.

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Down on the floor, where people were pointing, a dense fog was accumulating. It billowed around, impenetrably thick, then as quickly as it appeared it began to dissipate, revealing the outline of a solitary figure standing within it. A circle of bright light beamed down from the dome to illuminate the figure.

When enough of the fog had melted away, the light revealed a tall, slender person, attractive in an androgynous way, with short, dark, slicked back hair, wearing a flashy outfit with a long coat festooned with ruffles and bright gold buttons that would have looked right in place if the Joker had appeared on the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. Gems glittered from rings on the fingers of both hands and a gaudy brooch had been pinned on its chest like a war medal. The rest of us were all dressed in regular clothes, but this person looked like a Medici Duke trying a bit too hard to express their individuality, or maybe like Antonio in a pretentious contemporary take on The Merchant of Venice.

That sinking feeling sank deeper. I groaned.

No way was this a coincidence.

I recognized this person too, of course. I’d spent the entire previous day — the third and final day of the GameCon — walking the convention floor with them, observing the various tables together. When I’d pointed out the players I thought would win or perform best in whatever game they’d been playing, this person was the one I’d pointed them out to.

My anxiety’s BFF, an all-too-familiar sense of panic, swelled in my chest and I started to have a hard time breathing.

The fanfare reached a rousing crescendo before stopping and the person began to speak, their words somehow amplified in the same head-filling way as the music. The crowd’s hubbub silenced.

“Welcome Players,” the person said. The way they said it I could hear the capital P. “My true name is challenging for your mouths to pronounce, so you may simply call me Stratos. I must congratulate you all on the singular honor of being chosen to play the game.” The figure who called themself Stratos flashed a brilliant smile.

Indistinct murmurs began floating through the crowd, punctuated by a few recognizable exclamations like “what game?” and “chosen by whom?” and whatnot, but Stratos’s booming voice drowned them all out.

“I know you have questions,” Stratos said. “I shall endeavor to explain. You have been chosen—”

“Where are we?” roared someone in the crowd, triggering an avalanche of vocal hostility.

Stratos raised and lowered both hands, palms down, a futile placating gesture. “We will get to that. If you will just have patience—”

“Chosen for what?”

“Just tell us where we are!”

“How’d we get here?”

“What game?”

“Who are you?”

A reddish tinge swept over Stratos, as though someone slid a scarlet gel filter over a spotlight.

They clicked their tongue, their smile vanishing into a scowl. “Tch. Humans,” they muttered. Then they flicked their wrist and a barely perceptible orange light flared from their hand. “AHEM!”

Instant silence.

“You will have patience,” Stratos growled. “You will let me speak.”

Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. Nobody so much as blinked. We couldn’t, we were literally paralyzed.

“You want to know where you are. That is fair. I will tell you. But let me warn you, as unbelievable as the answer may sound I promise you one thing: you can believe it. I will never lie to you. You might think this is a dream, or perhaps a virtual reality simulation. I assure you it is not. This is all very real.”

“Right now, your bodies are in stasis tanks on a spaceship orbiting Earth. At least, that is where your old bodies are. Your minds, on the other hand, are here. On a different planet, many thousands of light years away. In new bodies. Better bodies. Player bodies.”

I knew what this was.

Stratos made broad, sweeping gestures with both arms. “Everything on this world, from the flesh you now inhabit to the air you now breathe to the bench upon which you now sit, all of it has been created for you. For the game.”

Stratos kept their arms spread wide, eyes closed, mouth open, and head tilted back as though flooded with divine ecstasy. “You are in a place where games are everything, and everything is a game. This is your stage, and you are not merely Players.”

Games are everything. Everything is a game. That had been the slogan for the Isekai World GameCon. It was on all the posters and in all the ads. It was even on the event t-shirts. Hell, I was wearing one of those shirts when I’d been abducted, and I was still wearing it at that moment. A big ‘Games are everything’ on the front, and ‘Everything is a game’ on the back in an olde-timey font. I couldn’t tell you what font it is, you’d have to ask my UX designer sister what it’s called (she’s just as nerdy as I am, only she geeks out over a whole different set of things), but it’s one of those where the letters are all chunky and pixellated, like you’d see in an old Atari videogame or something.

“Now then, that should have piqued your interest enough that we can continue without further vexation.”

Stratos brought their hands together as though bestowing a blessing upon us. Another orange flash from their hand and the disconcerting red light faded to a soft white again as the paralyzing stiffness loosened. A collective sigh of relief swam across the crowd and we all took a few deep breaths — the paralyzation was thorough and we hadn’t even been able to breathe while frozen. But that only make it more effective. Even after catching our collective breaths we remained obediently quiet. Mostly. Nobody wanted to get paralyzed again. It had been...unpleasant. But there’s always one in every crowd who just doesn’t know when to shut up.

“What is this, really?” someone shouted. It was a man, a bit older than me, whose entire look and demeanor just oozed privilege. He was a good looking guy, impeccably groomed, and clearly arrogant. At the convention, he’d demonstrated himself to be a ferocious video gamer who took pleasure in humiliating his opponents’ avatars after defeating them. “I demand that you stop this at once.”

Stratos didn’t even look at him. “You wish for this to be over?”

“I do,” the man shouted.

Stratos sighed and a red light flashed from their hand. The complaining man stood there for a moment, mouth open as though to say something, then he vanished. Poof. Just...gone.

“Is there anyone else who wishes for the end?” Stratos said in a low voice. Not a peep.

“Good, then. Let us talk a little more about your new bodies. While these bodies may look the same as what you had, and even feel the same, they are not the same. They contain remarkable potential. The strength of Hercules, the skills of Batman...”

As Stratos droned on, I peered down at my hand, turned it over. Looked the same.

I flexed my fingers, made a fist. Felt the same.

Then I got an idea.

“Status,” I said in the quietest hush, less than a whisper. More of a sub-vocal mumble, really, like the breath of a nearly professional ventriloquist.

As I suspected would happen, something appeared in the middle of my field of vision. I already knew what it was going to be. After all, how could I not? I knew perfectly well what was going on, this only confirmed it.

At that exact moment, Stratos paused for just a tiny bit, and I am pretty sure their eyes darted to look directly at me when they did, then they looked away and kept talking. I forced myself to listen, but it was hard. That thing that had appeared in my vision screamed for attention.

“...the magic of Merlin,” Stratos continued. “In this place, with these bodies, anything is possible. To put it in terms that should resonate with this crowd in particular: you are now superheroes. And this,” Stratos gestured grandly around the arena again, “is your origin story.”

I felt the teenaged boy beside me tremble. I glanced over and saw the hairs on his arm standing on end.

I knew how he felt.

“The only thing these new bodies cannot change is who you are inside. Your mind. Your consciousness. Your soul. You are still the same people you were back on Earth, just with a few significant physical upgrades. You are Players, and you have now entered the game.”