Kitchens are hell. Not the poetic kind, where suffering brings revelation—but the sweaty, stinking kind, where every moment grinds you into a worse version of yourself.
These types of jobs were the same anywhere. Service industry—kitchen. Working under another person who took their petty position of authority and decided that it made them King? Something about these places attracted people to them. This Hell, this kitchen, was indeed made a hell by the boss. Him. The devil that everyone called Chef.
As Colt sliced into the fiftieth piece of chicken, his finger cramped against the blade.
Today was like every day. Except, in some ways, it wasn’t. Colt couldn’t shake the feeling since he awoke this morning—had the air felt different? It was heavier, maybe, as if a light weight were pressing down. That and he kept feeling like someone was staring at him. Even when he got up in his bedroom alone.
Paranoia, maybe.
Colt leaned over his cutting board and glared at the door outside. Chef had left through it fifteen minutes ago. He was just another cook, and his job today was to take the knife and cleave through an endless supply of chicken. Dice, dice, dice—mindlessly repetitive. The sheer quantity of slimy chicken meat was enough to make anyone’s stomach churn. But Colt especially hated it. That’s why Chef kept it for when he was on shift.
Chef thrived on making people miserable. He didn’t just run a kitchen; he ran a fiefdom, ruling with insults and spite.
That's why he added insult to injury and stuck Colt’s chef prep right next to the oven—just so he could bake in the heat while working with his slimy chicken.
All this for eight dollars an hour.
It was an endless, necessary task. He’d quit, but Colt had bills to pay, and food didn’t come free. Not many other places were hiring, especially him, given his spotty work history and an unfinished college degree. So he stayed. It was a risk to find something better, better than desperately looking for jobs that weren’t hiring and hoping his roommates didn’t kick him to the curb.
Yeah, they wouldn’t put up with that for long.
Colt set his knife down, peeling off his gloves while he looked around.
The tyrant Chef wasn’t watching over his shoulder. Jimmy, the dishwasher, was hands-deep in suds, his eyes red and zoned out, and the other line cooks were busied away, toiling hard in the kitchen while the chef went outside for his smoke. His other favorite one in the kitchen to harass—even right now, wearing the hat with ‘dumbass’ scribbled on the back of it that Chef made him wear.
It was a petty thing to do that when you were in leadership. To take out all of your frustrations on the people around you just because you could. Sad, too. Colt ran into this at almost every job, but nobody had been as blatant about it as Chef—it was the way of the world. The people who got to those positions got to them because they craved power and didn’t care what it took to get there. The last kitchen he’d been in, the Chef had been messing around with the owner, then stealing money underneath their noses.
Everyone wanted power. So did he, if he had his own kitchen? He wouldn’t force someone to do what they hated most out of spite. That, at least, Colt knew. What you put out into the world is what you end up getting, eventually.
The rest of the kitchen was clean, the smell of onions and oil filling the air. Stainless steel appliances with burning pots, another Saturday night service. Like every other Saturday, just like how would every Saturday be, up until Colt got fed up enough of Chef’s targeting and got himself in trouble.
Kitchens were like kingdoms. The oven, the pantry, and the kitchen grounds belonged to the King. He who led the kitchen ruled his subjects. You could have a benevolent king, usually someone high on drugs and in that position by luck. Or, sometimes, you could have people like Chef.
“Donny.” Colt corrected himself out loud. The man was a chef, not a king. Saying that in front of Donny was liable to get him cleaning out the freezer and accidentally ‘locked in’ again. “I need a smoke.”
You didn’t get breaks in the kitchen. Not unless it was a smoke break. So, he learned early on when he started taking these jobs that you should smoke. Often. Even King Donny didn’t get too pissed when his subjects went and smoked, the one saving grace the tyrant allowed his subjects.
Colt nodded to the other cooks as he pulled a cigarette out and put it in his mouth. Soon after, he was out the door near the trash cans.
“I don’t care,” Donny screamed; Colt rounded the corner and got a look at the red-faced pudgy man, his eyes blaring out, “You’re gonna get your ass out of the apartment—go live with your dad, or I’ll toss all your shit in the gutter. You rat-faced bitch. I told you, Mandy, don’t mean anything to me, and if you’re gonna throw a fit, get out.”
Ah. The weekly gossip.
Colt lit his cigarette and watched his boss scream at his poor, long-suffering girlfriend.
If justice existed, she would have dumped his cheating ass months ago, but she didn’t. So he kept cheating. She kept forgiving him. Again and again. Life could be like that, a circle of stupid things that kept being stupid.
At first, Colt felt angry about it. He wished he could talk some sense into the poor girl, help her, and escape the guy. Now, he’d stopped caring. He couldn’t even help himself.
Donny screamed into the phone for another minute while he watched.
Then the guy threw his phone at the wall, breaking it.
Screaming and throwing things was also his M.O. Sometimes, it was a pot or a pan; other times, it was food. This was the first time he’d thrown a phone, and it didn’t warrant more than a normal flinch with everything else Chef had thrown.
Now, Danny noticed him standing by the door watching the show. “Get your ass back in the kitchen.”
“Smoke break, Chef.” Colt held up his lit cigarette and stared at his boss's furrowed nose and fuming face.
Silently, he brought out his pack and pushed another cig out, a peace offering. Well, more like a bribe. For a blessed five minutes of freedom from cutting slimy raw chicken after an hour of it.
“I said: Get. Your. Ass. In. The. Kitchen.” Donny slapped his pack of cigarettes to the ground and stomped on it. His heel ground the tobacco into the wet concrete to make sure that his message was received loud and clear.
Colt stared down at the ruined cigarettes, his blood going cold.
Eight dollars.
Those were eight bucks.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
His last hour of cutting raw chicken—no, last hour and some change if one accounted for taxes—had just been ground into the alley by King Donny.
Colt saw red and puffed up. Some fights were worth fighting; if you wanted justice, you had to earn it. Maybe it was time to get a new job; maybe if he begged his roommates, he could float his rent by a month and find anything. This was over with.
“Listen, you trash-bag,“ Colt began, ready to empty it all out. It was a long time coming, and if he were going to lose this worthless job, he would get every bit of joy out of it that he could.
Before he could get the satisfaction, the ground bucked beneath him. Lights rattled, walls cracked, and a deep, thrumming roar swallowed the alley. This wasn’t just an earthquake—it felt… wrong, like the world itself was coming undone.
Colt went straight to the ground.
Earthquake? This part of Tennessee shouldn’t be getting them. Shoulds or shouldn’ts didn’t matter when life happened; Donny screamed in fear beside him, and the shaking continued. The bricks nearby cracked.
Are we going to die? Did a bomb go off?
The air around him snapped into several bursts of colors: green, blue, red—and then it returned to the way it was before. And a message appeared.
———
Integration Commencing...
Planetary ID: Sol
Reality String: 2220DAX932329C27
Population Rank: F-
Systems Loading...
———
The words flashed quickly in a box in front of Colt; his vision filled with like menus from a videogame, the shaking only increasing as each second brought new information until, at last. It stopped.
Fear. Immediate fear was the first thing he felt. Was he hallucinating? Did something get into the food from another chef? Has his brain finally short-circuited from heat exhaustion?
Only for a brief second, and then a more, longer-lasting message appeared.
———
Welcome to the Commonwealth of Existence!
Reality String: 2220DAX932329C27
Integration Successful.
Core systems active. Additional features such as Classes unlocking in 24 hours.
———
Colt sat on the ground. His breath came in heaves as he put a finger to his neck. There was still a pulse there; he was alive. Even though the panic in his chest right now, screaming he was about to die after seeing those hallucinations, begged to differ. It finally vanished as soon as he finished reading the message box.
Reality had reclaimed its place.
With it, though, was the last vestiges of fear. He was still alive. Wondering if this was the start of a seizure or stroke. I don’t smell toast.
“The fuck is a reality string?” Donny said from not far away—Colt looked at him. The red-faced chef had his head back to the brick wall, staring outward with a glazed expression.
It was real.
Those boxes had been real, then.
Colt got to his feet and looked around the alley. It was… Off. Darker than before, the shadows clung to the buildings like a fog; the air tasted not only of nicotine but of a gross sulfur. The oddest part was the ends of the alley cut off into what looked to be more alley. Not the open, busy streets he was used to seeing when he paced around during his smoking sessions. Looking closer, too, the buildings didn’t match. Taller than what he was used to, the outsides radically changed.
Their little Italian joint was plucked out of Nashville by the invisible hand of god and plopped somewhere else.
Colt stepped back and walked right towards the kitchen door. With a jerk, it flew open. The rest of the Kitchen staff was still there, huddled around. Knives and pots littered the floor, which was no wonder with all the shaking. The whispering made sense with the messages. They looked desperate and sounded worse. Work was forgotten entirely, as it should be.
“Everyone alright?” he called, trying to look into the rest of the restaurant through the window at the pass, where they put the food for the servers to grab. To the kitchen, it was their window to the outside world from their kingdom.
“Yeah, man, only some bruises. But the front of the house is gone.” Jimmy called, surprisingly calmer than everyone else. He was always like that—the red eyes a key insight to why he wasn’t freaking out like the other five in here.
“What do you mean?”
“The restaurant is gone, man. There’s a wall at the pass.”
Confused, Colt stepped into the kitchen to get a better look. Before he could go any further, Donny yelled from behind. “The hell is that?”
He felt a shudder run down him; something in Chef’s yell was unnatural.
Colt dipped his head back from the kitchen into the strange world and saw a shambling man walking down the alley. Initially, he thought it was a homeless person or a drunk. From a distance, and with the dark, it was hard to tell. So, he moved out to the alley right near Donny. And Donny’s question shot into his head like a bullet.
What is that?
It wasn’t wearing a fur coat; the light reflected mangy, dirty fur on something shambling on both legs. It was about half the height of a person, and its long oval eyes gleamed in the outside light of the restaurant. In its hand was a Colted pipe—not that it needed it, considering the wicked claws wrapped around it. Claws? Someone mashed together a person with a mangy dog.
Without realizing it, Colt wandered out even further to get a look.
“Shove off, then,” Chef said, getting past his bluster. “You aint wanted here.”
The thing tilted its head.
“Get.”
The creature tilted its head, then bared teeth in what might’ve been a grin. It dropped its pipe, falling to all fours. A guttural howl ripped through the alley as it lunged.
It had gone from a safe distance away to leaping right for Donny’s throat in two seconds flat.
For his part, Chef was quick on the uptake, moving backward and narrowly avoiding the sharp jaws of the thing from ripping his throat out. Unfortunately, he wasn’t fast enough to prevent it from latching on and taking him down to the ground—it bled too quickly into a scuffle filled with perfuse swearing and excited vicious barks.
Colt blinked, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
Then there was blood as it snapped its jaws and got a lock on Donny’s arm. The scream of sharp pain cut in and brought clarity. Whatever was wrong with this person—thing—it was attacking Chef.
He did what came naturally in such an unnatural position.
Colt went over and started kicking the pile of Chef and Beast Man, trying to get the thing off Donny. Sure, Donny was a dick, but he didn’t deserve his face bitten off. Well. Not by a stranger.
A good one or two connected, snapping into the beast-thing. Given the rapid shuffling of the fight, the aim was hard, but this kind of scene wasn’t unfamiliar. Fighting in school hadn’t been dissimilar, minus the weird mutant creature thing.
After cracking into the thing’s ribs with the second blow, it leaped off and turned towards Colt with a snarl, now between them and the kitchen.
Ah. Now, it’s trying to turn me into food.
Donny moaned on the ground, grabbing at his arm. Past the blood, it was hard to tell what damage this thing did. But it wasn’t done.
There wasn’t time to think. Colt’s eyes went to the only weapon he could see—the pipe not that far away this thing wandered in with, and Colt bolted. It was there in seconds, snapping at his heels, but he ran for it. Lungs burning as life and death took over. He flew to the ground, grabbing the pipe and swinging as the monster pounced from behind.
The pipe connected with a sickening crack. The creature’s head snapped sideways, its body crumpling to the ground like a broken puppet. Dead.
———
You have defeated Homeless Kobold - Level 3
You have leveled up!
You have 2 Stat points to spend!
———
Aside from the message, there wasn’t any physical change to announce his level-up. No pulse of light, vibrant bell—he did feel a little lighter, as if a weight he didn’t know existed was removed from his chest; the implications of the level-up, though…
Did I just… Get stronger?
It was a game. His mind started to whirl, and then another message popped into existence.
———
Status Unlocked!
Please think, say, or intend to view the STATUS screen to bring up your specific information; this is the hub of what makes you you. Take your time to explore. Additional systems will be expanded upon when relevant. This STATUS screen can be closed by willing it to close, saying ‘close,’ or gesturing with your hands.
———