“Ronald! You better be ready in five minutes!” my mother yelled from down in the kitchen. I was up in my room, sitting in front of my computer with a cup of lukewarm coffee and playing the latest and most hyped up MMO game of the year, Running with Devils, It was bringing a whole new meaning to P2W, and the ads were plentiful all over the game world. Not that they were first with ads in-game, but they had taken it to a whole different level. All in all quite a terrible game but with a really good PR department. Normally, I’d never play something like this. But since my mother and I moved across the country, she had landed a new and better paying job and all my old friends had started to play RwD, you could say that they had fallen for the hype. “Ronald, are you hearing me?”

I sighed and took the last swig of the now almost cold coffee, logged off, and, beginning to rise, I shouted down to my mother! “Yes, I’m coming!”

The new apartment was nothing like our old decrepit house we had to move to after my father's death, this was brand new and belonged to my mother's new employer.

Today was the first day of my mother's new work, and she wanted to make a good impression and be on time. She was going to drop me off at my new school. Oh the joy, I thought, starting to move my body down the stairs.

The apartment was on two floors with the bedrooms on the second floor while the kitchen and living room were on the first. When I almost reached the kitchen, I was, not for the first time, thinking that maybe this was going to be the year I started working out again. A couple of years back, me and my mates went to the gym every day after school. That all stopped when my father died in a car accident and my mother's depression and sorrow made her lose her job and me the sole breadwinner. I turned all the gym time into more and more shifts at the local factory looking at a computer screen for 8-16 hours a day. That and an unhealthy diet did not help my weight, I gained the nickname Fatso along with 50 kilos of fat. I’d do it all over again. My mother had been nothing but supportive during my upbringing, and this was my chance to help her. I got her the best therapist I could afford with my money. Thanks to Miss Lisa, her therapist and me, my mother got better and now all my hard work was bearing fruit.

“Okay, I’m ready” I called out from the stairs. I gave my mother a hug when I reached her in the kitchen.

“Sorry for yelling, sweetie, but you know I can’t be late for the first day of work, and you have your first day at your new school.”

“I know mother. Don’t worry, your new boss and workmates will love you. Don’t think about me. I just know I’ll fit right in at the new school.” That was a lie, of course, but I was so happy that she finally was back on track after everything that had happened. And I’d do anything to keep it that way. We’d visited the new school once a couple of months back and I got really bad vibes straight away since everyone there looked at me with disgust and pity.

During the drive to my school, we were both silent, both of us were probably thinking about our new start and new life in the city. We turned into the parking lot just when the bell for classes rang out. I kissed my mother on the cheek and closed the door to the car and started running for the entrance.

I reached the door just as the bell stopped ringing. Classroom E2468 was where I was supposed to be in 30 seconds. After going down a long corridor, I found it. The door was still open, so I stepped in. Inside the classroom there was pandemonium, paper planes were zipping about, kids were sitting on the tables, talking, two guys were having a small fight or if they were training. It was hard to tell. A couple of other kids cheered them on.

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Welcome to my new school, I thought as I looked around the room. There were a few empty spots in the front row, but that’s not where I wanted to sit. Instead, I found one free seat next to one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen. “Hey, my name is Ronald, is this seat taken? It’s my first day here at Ohno High.” Just as the girl was about to reply the teacher came walking in.

“Settle down kids, settle down. Everyone takes their places and opens up page 110 of ``A new way of looking at chemistry A”. The fighting kids were still at it, but the onlookers had started to sit down. “Robert, Andrew! Sit the fuck down I said.” The two fighting students stood and one of them sat down on a free chair.

“That’s my seat. Move or I smack you down. Are you deaf? I said move!” The second kid said, and I realized that he was talking to me.

I was about to move when the teacher said, “Andrew, you snooze you lose, up here in the front is a free seat.” Glaring daggers at me the kid turned and moved up to the free seat. “Everyone please welcome Ronald to the class, he has just moved to the city.” I heard a couple of murmurs “Hi, hey and welcome” from some of my new classmates. “As I was saying, open up page 110,” the teacher said and started the class.

While the teacher droned on about chemistry, I started thinking about how I ended up here. Dad's freak car accident. He was driving home from the store where he had been grocery shopping one day when a tire came off a pick-up truck, went airborne and smashed into his windshield. They had to cut off the roof to get him free. He died on the way to the hospital. Mother's depression after, since she told him to swing by the store because she needed some stuff. He had suggested that they could do it the day after. But she was firm in her decision to have him do it. She blamed herself. Me having to get extra work, and everything else, but I was glad that during all that hard time I had the support from my friends Malcolm and Peter. It was also because of them that I started to play Running with Devils even if it wasn’t my regular type of game, it was a fun way of staying connected to them.

The bell for the end of class rang out. Everyone shuffled out, and I got out of the classroom and into the corridor while checking the school schedule app for my next class. I wasn’t paying attention to things happening around me. That was something I’d come to regret big time, although the thing that happened was probably inevitable.

I felt more than heard someone grabbing me and pushing me into the lockers. “Hey! What are you doing?!” I more or less shouted.

“Who do you think you are, new kid? You took my seat next to my girl!” The guy Andrew told me. “You will pay for that! Boys, let’s put him in old man Jake's cleaning closet, and he can think over his sins until Jake is back in the morning.”

“Uh, wait what are you doing? Let's talk about it, guys,” I said. No matter my protests, I was strong-armed, duck walked to the cleaning closet, and thrown inside. And I heard how they barricaded the door from the outside. I tried to break it open by slamming my right shoulder against the door, a couple of times, to no avail.

After looking around and seeing nothing, it was darker in here than a devil's heart. I started to shuffle with my arms and hands outstretched to get a feeling of how big the closet was. It was roughly rectangular with some buckets and a table of some sort maybe 1-meter times 2.5 meters. There was lots of other stuff I couldn’t figure out what it was, so I turned one of the buckets upside down and sat down on it. I needed to think. A short while later, I figured that if everything in the middle of the room was moved to the side, I’d get enough room to run into the door.

So after moving everything, I said to myself “fuck it”. Stood up and moved to the wall opposite the door. I ran with all my might into it.

Things didn't go as expected. The door didn’t fly open. It didn’t even budge. To be fair, I don’t know what happened with the door because everything went black once again, and this time it was as if someone turned off my brain.

*Control of the body is temporarily taken over to avoid accidental injury.*

*Stasis induced*

*Teleportation to PAERD, location USERUS commencing…*

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*Teleportation to USERUS concluded…*

*Removal stasis of the body*

*Waking up indenture 6012349873*