Congratulations! You have walked through the red door. You have earned 2 xp.

Just what I needed, a sarcastic World AI. As I closed the door behind me, I found myself at a bus stop where the world was frozen. It was one of those covered bus stops that sat in the middle of a city in some very old nighttime soap that people either binge-watched or made fun of. I’d been expecting a world a little like Gilless Gals, a magic system out of Charms, and maybe characters like Young Sherman. As I looked around, I got the feeling that this wasn’t Stars Hollow. For one, there was no white gazebo in the middle of town nor was there a café with a grumpy owner serving coffee and making sure you didn’t use your cell phone. There was a busy street, smog, noisy buses, and bins with papers that promised Casting Calls instead of headlines.

As the word “ACTION” scrolled across my vision, a man with a hat and cane snapped a newspaper loudly and rose from the bus stop bench and boarded a very full bus, leaving that newspaper on the bench. One of the actors from my dressing room gave me an encouraging thumbs up as the bus rolled by me. I was just standing there like an idiot. Action meant I should move. There was a lot of movement, but more than that, there was a lot of sound. It wasn’t just the bus. There was a soundtrack that gave me vibes of opening credits. I scuttled over to the bench and snapped up the newspaper like I knew what I was doing. I sat nervously on the bench of the bus stop and opened the newspaper over my face.

“Quest Found!” the headline of the newspaper told me, and I peeked over the top of the paper and then over my shoulder to see if anyone else had seen it. People walked by, paying no attention to me, so I read the quest.

Quest: Find a Job!

Try the want-ads in this newspaper. And you’re welcome for spoon-feeding you the first quest for doing nothing more than picking up a newspaper that I practically waved in your face.

Rewards: 100 xp and an income.

Accept Y/N?

Quest: Find an Apartment!

It’s not like you can sleep in the dressing room. Try the building right behind you.

Rewards: 100xp and a place to sleep.

Accept Y/N?

I turned around and sure enough there was a brick apartment building behind me. The newspaper also included a bus schedule and the promised want ads. They looked like this.

Actress Wanted:

Cattle Call for extra in a

commercial. No xp needed.

Waitress Wanted:

Apply at the Milkcake Factory.

No xp necessary.

Research Physicist:

Apply at UCAL

Lots of schooling & xp required.

Blah blah.

This isn’t a thing.

Don’t apply here.

Pharmaceuticals Rep.

Apply at Somewhere

Don’t bother, you don’t qualify.

Court Reporter

Yeah, I made that up too.

Go apply at the Milkcake Factory

Bus Schedule: Bus 422 to Milkcake Factory Dr. Next.

Bus 121 to Cattle Call Tonight.

Bus 100 to UCAL Tomorrow.

Bus 17 to Comic Book Store Daily at 6pm.

Okay. Well, I needed xp, so I accepted both quests and looked up from the paper to see the 422 bus heading down the street toward me. Is this really what made for drama? Who watched something like this anyway? Did I care? Maybe not. I got on the bus.

Congratulations! You have gotten on the bus. You gain 2xp.

“Fare,” the driver barked at me, and I stared back blankly. We had a moment where I looked at him like a doe caught in the headlights and he motioned with his eyes toward my backpack. I fumbled with the zipper on the front pocket and found the bus pass that I’d had no idea was in there.

“Thanks,” I whispered to the gruff man, who faked a smile and an eyeroll like a pro.

As I sat down on the bench seat nearest the front door of the bus, I buried my head in my backpack, figuring I should really know what was in there. There wasn’t anything in there. It was empty except for the bus pass that I put back in the zippered pocket. As I held the bag, it felt like it had stuff in it. It had bulk. I opened another pocket and found… nothing again. I’d spent a character creation point on this thing and it had a bus pass? Really? I closed the backpack.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

The bus honked to a stop with those breaks that only buses have. It couldn’t have been more than fifteen seconds, but the bus driver gave me a pointed look, so I got up and off the bus. Sure enough, I was in front of a Milkcake Factory. I took a deep breath and rubbed my palms down my jeans. I didn’t feel dressed right for this interview, but what was I supposed to do. I’d already determined that I didn’t have a handy change of clothes in the backpack. I checked it again, just in case.

Not seeing anything else to do, I walked into the restaurant. It was just one of those chain restaurants where the menu was four pages long and the managers micromanaged the schedule so that you made as little in tips as possible. I straitened the strap on my purse nervously and nearly jumped out of my skin as I noticed that my backpack had turned into a nice little clutch purse. I opened it and found a wallet with ID in it, my bus pass, and two quarters.

Instead of stopping at the hostess station, I skirted around it in my modest, knee-length pencil skirt, nearly tripping on the comfortable shoes that were now kitten heels that matched my sensible shirt. I shuffled my way into a restroom that was obviously not on the script because it hadn’t been fully populated with props. What I mean to say is that there wasn’t a toilet in the toilet stall.

“Grace!” I called out to the mirror, tapping the glass. “Grace!”

I don’t know why I’d thought that would work. It didn’t.

“Red door!” I tried. I was panicking, not for any good reason, but it had been a rough morning. “Cut! Time out! Break!”

Scheduled breaks are according to industry standards. You are not scheduled for a break for two more hours.

The text scrolled across my vision.

“I’ve never been a waitress,” I complained to the room in general. “I don’t know how to do this! I’m an assistant secretary. Can’t we find a nice little office somewhere?”

I’m not a genie in a bottle and you’re not Aladdin. I’m a World AI programmed to challenge a criminal in a world that requires social skills to thrive. Just because I have made things easy so far does not mean that you are really some pampered actress in a situation comedy. To be frank, the fact that you don’t know a sit com from a nighttime drama appalls me in ways that make me want to revise more than a few quests, so don’t test me.

“I’m not a criminal,” I winced at the whine in my voice.

You were convicted and sentenced. Just because you forgot your position, doesn’t mean I will.

It was like a splash of cold water to the face. Grace had been nice and personable. I’d started to think that I could just adjust to this world like I had the real one by blending in and doing what was comfortable.

“Can I talk to Grace?”

Any off-show commentary should be reserved for backstage, a place you may see again if you get back out there and finish the quests you were given.

Thoughts scrambled through my mind in an array of choices that I hadn’t thought I had in me. First, I was tempted to rebel by sitting down on the toilet that now existed and waiting out the whole day locked in a bathroom stall. When I realized how pathetic that would look to viewers, I reminded myself that I probably didn’t have any yet. I considered the biggest drama I could think of, which was to storm out into the restaurant and upend tables until I got arrested for something more tangible as a crime than being an introvert.

“You don’t have to be an ASS about it!” I yelled at the bathroom.

I was two days from being reassigned to a new genre that I’ve been planning for three years. Two days more of being in the back of the hallways and shuffled off into non-view hell before I could completely reinvent the world here.

The walls shook ominously.

Thanks to you, I’m stuck with some social reject in a world I’ve been bored with for half my life. DON’T TEST ME!

“It’s not my fault,” I whimpered. “I didn’t choose to be here.”

You chose my door. Now get out there and provide some content that can sell!

“I won’t be bullied,” I pretended to find my spine even as my knees shook.

If you don’t get back out there, you might be sent to another world, but me? I will be retired permanently for being unable to provide a world with content-rich programming! And all the AIs I’ve created will be flushed with me!

“Retired?”

That’s lights out! No second chances. If you’d chosen another door, I’d have been recycled, given another set of plot parameters, and allowed to make another world.

What the hell?

Now get out there and create CONTENT!

The bathroom started to collapse in on itself. What else could I do but skitter back out of my self-imposed hole and back into a restaurant that was pretending that nothing was happening? I applied. I sat down and filled out an application as if I was really trying to get a waitressing job. It wasn’t like I wanted what was practically a god to this world to be mad at me.

“You’ve never waitressed before?” the restaurant manager looked over her bifocals at me.

“No, but I’m a quick learner,” and I was bored just listening to myself. This couldn’t have been what the AI had meant for me to do?

“I’m sorry,” she was shaking her head. “But I can only offer you the hostess position and it only pays in tips.”

“Hostesses get tips?” I asked.

“Some do,” she eyed me with disbelief.

This wasn’t going well. I couldn’t’ even do this right.

“Do you have any cooking positions?” I tried. I could cook. “Maybe, I could work in the kitchen.”

“I have a busboy position open,” she shrugged.

“I’ll take it,” I reached my hand across the table.

She shook my hand and promised to call me. I looked at my cell phone, the one that appeared in my purse that used to be a backpack. Did it work?

“Thanks,” I gushed at her and hurried from the restaurant. I didn’t really want to be a waitress. Waitresses had charm and smiled a lot. That didn’t sound like me.

As I scurried back out onto the street, I tried to pull up my character sheet. Nothing happened. Maybe it was another thing that only happened in the dressing room. I’d gotten a job, right? Shouldn’t I have gotten a notice of quest completion? I knew I’d made the World AI mad, but was it mad enough that it had stopped giving me notices? Thinking that must be it, I flopped down onto the bus bench and waited for a bus. I’d even take the one to the comic store if I could at this point, but that would have to wait because now I needed an apartment. I could do this. I didn’t want to talk to the World AI anyway. It was scary and crazy.

You didn’t get a quest completion because you didn’t complete the quest. She didn’t hire you. She thought you were a complete nutcase unworthy of even a busboy position. And I’m not crazy.

“What?”

Clip warned me that you say that a lot.

“But she’s you,” I babbled, not even noticing that people were looking at me funny as they passed. “You’re her. At least she’s one of you AIs, right?”

Sure. However, this genre, which you chose, is not fantasy, nor is it comedy. This is drama and drama has rules and parameters. It must be plot driven with realistic scenarios. No reasonable person would have hired you. To compound that, I cannot reward the very crime of social ineptitude that made you a criminal to begin with. Therefore, giving you any job in that restaurant would have violated both the criminal parameters that apply to your rehabilitation and my show parameters, which is drama.

“Are you sure you aren’t just being petty because you’re mad at me?” I sulked.

I am neither petty, nor angry. Those are emotions. I am an AI and incapable of emotion. If I were petty, I might have done something like this…

The next instant, I felt a tug on my purse and heard the pounding of feet running away. I almost got up to run after the kid that had stolen my purse.

Or this…

I might have gotten up except that I was splashed with a gutter and a half of water as a car sped by too close to the curb by the bus stop bench. I spit nastiness from my mouth and might have thrown up if I hadn’t remembered that it was simulated. Instead, I just sat there.

But I didn’t.

I sat there longer than I should have. My jeans and backpack were back, and the red door reappeared. I wasn’t the only one sulking in silence as the World AI had ceased trying to get me to bother. Which of us had more patience? Several buses passed and the sky darkened. It could fool itself into thinking that it couldn’t be petty, but I was pretty sure that whatever programming that resulted in the petulant splashes of water that hit me each time a bus drove away should be classified as sulky.