She awoke staring at the roof of her car.
[WELCOME TO THE ATARAXIAN SYSTEM!] Whimsical chimes echoed in her ear with no discernible source, and a strange, cartoonish text bubble floated into her vision. [YOU HAVE GROWN SMART ENOUGH TO UNDERSTAND THESE WORDS! MUMMY AND DADDY WILL BE SO HAPPY!]
“. . what the hell is this?” she spluttered as the bubble faded out.
[TO BEGIN BASIC COUNTING LESSONS, BLINK!]
Mikayla blinked reflexively at the new speech bubble that had appeared in her vision. Though calling it a speech bubble wasn’t entirely accurate; it was making itself heard in her mind as well as her vision. It was like nothing she’d ever experienced before, like information being streamed directly into her brain. Was she hallucinating? The words felt distinctly other.
[1. THIS IS THE NUMBER ONE. IT MEANS THAT THERE IS ONLY ONE OF A THING. FIND SOMETHING NEARBY THAT THERE IS ONLY ONE OF!]
Mikayla waved at the floating text, and it vanished. “Am I seeing things? Do I have a concussion?”
The car shook around her, as though there was an earthquake that only lasted for two seconds. Startled, Mikayla looked around, peering through the windows. What could have caused a shake like that? Actually, where was she? There were trees all around, and not much daylight . . but the trees looked wrong. She didn't know much about trees, but these ones were all white with black stripes. Birch, right? There weren't any birch tree forests where she lived. What had happened? The last thing she remembered was trying to avoid a sinkhole. Had she fallen into the sinkhole? She thought she had avoided it, but couldn’t remember anything after that. She must have gotten a concussion. Short-term memory loss. Greeeeeat.
The car shook again, and the source of the quake felt closer this time. Mikayla turned back around and squinted. Had that tree been there a moment ago? Its colour and texture was strange. It was brown rather than white and covered in what looked like hair, as though it was the leg of . . a giant insect . .
Swallowing nervously, Mikayla looked up through the skylight of her car.
It was the most awful thing she’d ever seen. A segmented brown carapace with crooked legs like spears, growing out of a body that was all gnashing mandibles and milky white eyes. It was a spider. Sort of. If a spider was large enough to eat her car with her inside it.
The speech bubble popped up again, and it was almost a blessing that it did, if only for distracting her from an impending panic attack. [WELL DONE! THAT IS ONE (1) CAVEMAW SPIDER!]
“. . oh,” Mikayla managed to whimper.
[2. THIS IS THE NUMBER TWO. IT MEANS THAT THERE IS ONE AND ONE OF A THING. FIND SOMETHING NEARBY THAT THERE ARE TWO OF!]
Mikayla buried her head in her hands and whimpered. “I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die,”
[WELL DONE! YOU HAVE TWO (2) HANDS!]
The car shook again, and Mikayla couldn’t even breathe as the main body of the spider drew closer to her car. Through the cracks in her fingers, she watched as pedipalps the size of her arms unfolded from its mouth and pressed against the roof of her car, separated from her only by a thin pane of glass. Paralysed by fear, she couldn’t move.
But after a moment that felt like an eternity, the spider pulled away, leaving only a smear of drool on the glass skylight above her.
“It’s . . it’s not gonna eat me? Why?” Mikayla slowly breathed. It had touched the roof of the car . . wait, the car? Had it been feeling out her car? Had it realised that cars weren’t edible?
That . . that meant she was safe. That it wouldn’t eat her. So long as she stayed in the car. Right?
Taking long, slow breaths, she looked down, gripping her seat cushion. Before she could think any further, though, the speech bubble appeared again, with its words that seemed to be beamed directly into her mind.
[3. THIS IS THE NUMBER THREE. IT MEANS THAT THERE IS TWO AND ONE OF A THING. FIND SOMETHING NEARBY THAT THERE ARE THREE OF!]
Well, Mikayla decided, if she wasn’t about to die, she could at least work out what this was all about. “I don’t know who or what you are, but knock it off with the pre-school crap!” she insisted.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
[CHECKING. BIOLOGICAL AGE DOES NOT MATCH CHRONOLOGICAL AGE AS OBSERVED BY THE SYSTEM. WOULD YOU LIKE TO UPDATE YOUR REGISTERED AGE TO MATCH YOUR BIOLOGY?]
“. . has this thing been treating me this way because it thinks I was born ten minutes ago? Fine. Whatever. Yes. Update age,”
The speech bubble vanished, replaced by a pair of swirling arrows. Mikayla squinted at them for a moment in disbelief, but only a few seconds later they were replaced with a banner. Unlike the previous cartoonish speech bubbles, the words were now rendered on what looked like a translucent blue pane of glass with white letters. [CONGRATULATIONS ON REACHING THE AGE OF MATURITY FOR YOUR RACE! WELCOME TO THE ATARAXIAN SYSTEM!]
“Does this mean I’m getting somewhere now?”
[WARNING: YOU ARE IN A LOW SIGNAL AREA. FUNCTIONALITY WILL BE LIMITED UNTIL YOU RETURN TO A REGION WITH AN ACTIVE ATARAXIA NODE.]
“I’ll take that as a no. Can the Ataraxian System do anything to help me get out of a giant spider’s den?”
[SCAN FUNCTION IS AVAILABLE. (IDENTIFY FUNCTION IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE.) LOCAL MAP FUNCTION IS AVAILABLE. (GLOBAL MAP FUNCTION IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE.) MANA ASSISTANCE IS AVAILABLE.]
“Uh . . okay. Scan,” Mikayla tried.
Her field of view suddenly dimmed, as though the sun and the lights in her car had suddenly gotten dimmer. Squinting, Mikayla turned her head, catching sight of the Cavemaw Spider again - only now it was faintly glowing, like it had a radiant outline around it. “If this thing is literally just telling me that the giant man-eating spider is worth paying attention to, I’m going to be so disappointed,” she muttered numbly.
No further answers were forthcoming, so she looked around the rest of the den in the trees. It only took a few seconds for another glow to catch her eye. It was a bundle of some sort, about the size of a duffel bag.
The bundle, whatever it was, was only about a hundred metres away. At a sprint, she could reach it in less than a minute. But Mikayla doubted that she could get to it before the Cavemaw Spider got to her. And she had no reason to believe that whatever was in there would somehow save her from being eaten by a giant spider.
No, no, she’d been asking for things that would help her escape with her life. The bundle would be something good. Surely. Because if it wasn’t then she was going to die.
“Um. Okay, that was Scan. What were the other two things? Local map and Mana Assistance?” Mikayla tilted her head. Mana? That was synonymous with magic.
There was no way. Right?
“Okay then. Engage Mana Assistance?” she squeaked, uncertain.
Nothing seemed to happen for a moment. She was about to give up when a new blue text box appeared. [YOU DO NOT HAVE ANY TECHNIQUES SAVED. YOU DO NOT POSSESS ANY CORES. LEARN A TECHNIQUE OR ACQUIRE A CORE TO INITIATE MANA ASSISTANCE.]
Mikayla let out a groan. “Oh, of course not,” She glanced back in the direction of the bundle that the Scan had highlighted. Whatever a ‘core’ was, maybe there was one in there?
Her eyes drifted back to the giant spider. It was staying perfectly still, so much so that if she didn’t know what to look for she actually could almost mistake it for a tree. Did that mean it was an ambush predator? Then it probably wasn’t very fast . . but it still had massive legs so she doubted she could outrun it.
Peering through the other windows, careful not to move too much or do anything that would draw the spider’s attention, she looked around. The ground sloped upwards in every direction. She was at the bottom of a hole, wasn’t she? Some kind of pit that the spider hid itself in and prey on anything that got too close on the surface. The walls of loose earth that she could see through the trees looked dusty and caked with gravel. It’d take a miracle to climb out through there.
Mikayla breathed heavily to centre herself. If that was the spider’s method of hunting, then it would have to leave the nest to attack its food eventually. Even if it was only gone for a minute or two, that would be enough. Spiders liked to cocoon their food to eat over time, right? She couldn’t see any cocoons or anything that looked like spider food, unless it was hidden. Then again, spiders were supposed to build webs too and she couldn’t see any webs. Unless they were all outside the den? And who knew if her passing knowledge of spiders applied to this monstrosity.
She couldn’t stay here forever. She’d starve. And if she doubted her ability to climb out of this pit, there was no possible way her car could get out.
For some reason, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The tears burst forth, and it was all she could do to press her face into her knees to stifle her sobs. It was such a mundane thing to think about, but she’d saved for more than a year to buy this car and had barely had it for a month. And she’d ended up who knew where, in some strange place with magic yellow text boxes and giant spiders, and even if she could get out of this hole, she’d have to leave her car behind and look for civilisation on foot, and - and what if she was somewhere in the Amazon, or . . or whatever other forests were as big as the Amazon? She’d seen the memes about Australian spiders but there weren’t any like this one near Melbourne! Not in Australia, not anywhere! She probably wasn’t even on Earth anymore!
“This - this sort of thing doesn’t happen! Why did this happen? I never wanted to be isekai’ed! Not like my nerdy little brother, he’d be all over this, probably. He’d know how to drop a boulder or something on that giant monster. That’s not me! Why couldn’t I have just, like, gotten superpowers or something? I could handle being a superhero. Not this! This is . . this is . .” She trailed off into half-choked sobs.
For a few long moments, she lay there, her mind racing in circles of despair and self-pity. It was like her limbs had turned to lead. She couldn’t even muster the energy to look up.
She was going to die.