Quit. Wait six months. Apply to the position you want. Get hired. She'd heard it but didn't believe it. When Leila finally tries to change departments by following the method told to her by coworkers and supervisors as the only way to advance the company cracks down and she's now unhireable. A quick three months minimum turns into a six month maximum turns into years of unemployment without benefits as she gets ghosted again and again. Her friends, to cheer her up and get her away from her phone and computer where she checked every 5-20 minutes to see if she’d received a response via email, text, or call for her mountain of applications, suggest a shopping trip. She reminds them that her savings are almost out and she’s still unemployed and blowing money is at the top of the list of stupid things to do. After suggesting they use the window shopping as an excuse to get some steps in, she’s finally onboard.

Karaoke. Car karaoke. A quibble between misheard lyrics versus singing the song versus “the words are what?”, and now they’re trapped on the side of the road in the woods when they’d been on the freeway in a city. There’s a ton of wood scrap scattered off to the side and renfaire attendees who are being way too meta, but Leila hopes that she’s finally gotten a break. Maybe this is a coma and she’ll die soon. Then it won’t be her problem. Or she got isekaied into a low tech world. Hopefully they have magic.

Her jeans, tee, sneakers and hoodie are gone. She’s now in a very modest scrap shirt and capris. And barefoot. She wants to recoil but she doesn’t feel any discomfort. More proof that this is a dream or a miracle. Instead of her usual GoBag consisting of a backpack filled with urban survival basics, she’s got a fairly large drawstring sack made of some coarse woven fabric. As the others waffle between telling each other they’re not real, to arguing loudly over who caused the accident, to trying to build a plan to fight the crazy elites that have obviously drugged them and were going to hunt them, to wondering what reality show they were on, Leila does an inventory. She finds a thick patch of greenery to protect the bag from getting dirty, opens it, and is greeted with a brief popup.

https://i.imgur.com/nZskimqm.jpg [https://i.imgur.com/nZskimqm.jpg]

Burlap Sack [E]

Fire Starter [E]

50 Strikes

Journey Cake x3

Nonperishable

Canteen [E]

5/5 (Water)

Ball of Twine

20 yds

Steel Knife [E]

Durability 100/100

Coin Purse

(G60, S18, C32, T10)

Power Crystals [E] x8

(Clear)

Scrying Glass [E]

Durability 50/100

Healing Salve [F]

Doses 5/5

Unsurprisingly, the find of a paper doll and an inventory screen for an item in a mysterious popup did not rule out anything for Leila. She could be in a coma or isekaied into a world of magic. Hell. Maybe there’s no magic and it’s a System world. Fuck! Status! How does she check her status? Maybe she can find out what’s wrong with her! She cinches the bag shut, slinging it over her shoulder and hopes that no one can pick her pocket and take items out of the bag. Or cut it... She’d always kept enough money to pay rent on her to ensure that, if anything did happen to her bank account, hopefully she’d be covered until she could sort it out.

She fervently hopes that she doesn’t have to say it loudly in order to bring it up. She tries to think Status. No go. Self. Nada. Character. Face. Paperdoll. Nothing. Zilch. Negatory. Well, she’d seen a paperdoll when she opened the sack so maybe she has to actively interact with an item to get that to work. Is she just focusing on the wrong syntax or…?

The granola bars turned into journey cakes. She doesn’t want to unwrap one of the wax cloth items, but that’s telling in and of itself. There’s wax used for sealing and preservation of food goods and cloth instead of paper. Her lighter is gone, hell, her elastics, gum, pens, notebooks, and a variety of odds and ends are gone, but she’s got things in their place. Twine. Is that a substitute for the emergency sewing kit or the hair ties? She doesn’t have pockets on the clothing, and the sack, while limited, still seems quite capable of holding a lot. It feels empty though. At most it feels like it has a loose pair of socks. Does that mean she’s not limited to nine slots or is something stopping her from seeing her own things?

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“Has anyone found out how to use their status screen?”

She braces herself and is disappointed when her, maybe not so simple, question triggers ridicule. She still can’t tell if it’s a dream or not and casually points out to her tech savvy paranoid friend that their vest is gone, but have they checked out their pockets? Like her, Nick was dressed in scrap cloth shirt and pants. Like her, he was barefoot. Unlike her, he had a nifty little pouch instead of a cumbersome bag, and his shirt had six pockets. He usually wore a tactical vest filled with odds and ends and any trash that caught his attention and a fanny pack of emergency supplies which were usually just duplicates of what was in his vest. He had a tendency to keep broken things, claiming he’d fix them later, replace them, then refuse to throw out the replaced items.

“If you were paying attention,” he starts, cutting and rolling his eyes, and Leila thinks, not for the first time, that she should rip off his little caterpillar mustache if he keeps it up. “You would have heard me tell you, and everyone~ else. That obviously. I’m experiencing a ‘lucid dream’ or I’ve been transported to a ~new world~ and I’m the main character and our best bet for getting out of here.”

“Yeah, no,” Leila scratches her head as he smirks. “You said this was a government conspiracy to humiliate you into conformity because they found out that you’d been bypassing consumer taxes by dealing with refurbishers and getting benefits only company employees could get.”

“I--.”

“And then you said that we’d been kidnapped by a bunch of rich psychos for entertainment and our best bet was to sit still and not play their games,” she continues.

“Listen--.”

“And then you said that we weren’t going down without a fight and you had the perfect plan to hit them where it hurts so we better stick with you if we wanted to live,” Leia finishes, droning while trying to remember how many different theories he’d proposed, denied and discarded.

“Will you let me speak?” he hisses and Leila blinks at him.

“You’d been talking. Thought it was my turn,” she says calmly, blinking at him and waiting for him to try to hoard all of the attention. Which she didn’t want. She wanted answers.

“As I was saying,” he glares at her and she waits for him to get to the point. “I have, on my person, several items that may be of a magical bent, marking me as the intelligent member of this party.” He says while pointedly looking at her for emphasis.

“So did you figure out how to get to the status screen or nah?” Leila asks again and he sighs, obviously using great restraint and his famous~ patience to deal with her idiocy.

“If you would let me finish…” he hisses, fists clenched and his middle-eastern complexion looking more and more summer farm boy.

Leia sighs, turning back to the patch of greenery she’d used before to set down her satchel and pull out her “scrying glass”.

“How’d you get that?” Nick points at her, scandalized before fighting to his feet with his complexion turning a concerning shade of purple. “Thief! I should have known! You’re kind--”

“Dude, we all have one,” Ashley rolls her eyes, handling the shard of glass like a smartphone. “Yeah, there’s a status thing, but it’s not for the phone. It’s like your device owner information, or whatever.”

“Thanks, Lee,” Leila beams at their super chill, very unaffected friend, crossing her arms before turning back to Nick. Who looks devastated. “What was that about, ‘my people’? And exactly how am I a thief?”

She goes through the scrying glass, which, to her, is a near indecipherable mess of symbols that hover over the glass rather than rest on or “in” it. She cannot figure it out. Are these astrology symbols? Or astronomy? Or molecular structures…?

“Lee, is your phone in English or do you see a bunch of weird symbols, too?” Leila asks the disenfranchised, unregistered, thin, long-haired blond woman born to doomsday prepper hippies who were one bad day from starting a murder cult or becoming concerned citizens with a penchant for vigilantism, who casually keeps chewing the same piece of gum while blitzing through her phone like she’s already found a way to link it to every message board they should have left behind.

“Yeah, no, but it’s like super intuitive~…”

Ashley casually holds the last syllable so long that she manages to end all conversation as everyone watches her thumb blaze across the device. When the device starts changing shape and color, turning form a greenish blue chunk of thick glass to a sheet of silvery metal that reshapes itself and begins to float freely, everyone but Ashley panics.

“What is that?!” Serah asks, more gnomelike than ever. The small statured woman dances back with both fists raised as her lanky boyfriend hides behind her.

“Is she possessed?” AErin asks, eyes shining and face practically glowing even as he keeps his tiny powerhouse between him and a potential demon.

“Throw them away! They’re cursed!” Nick screams as he yeets his phone into the woods.

“Do you have wifi or…?” Leila asks and Ashley’s eyes turn the same shade of liquid silver as her dissolved scrying crystal. “Is that a yes…?”

“Sorry, you guys… I got distracted,” Ashley says lethargically before turning to regard them while her mind was clearly still on the moving liquid. “Yeah, no, I think they use the aether here… It’s super easy to tap into. It’s just like making a dream board or interpreting your dreams or reading runes. Super forgiving and open to interpretation,” she continues, her eyelids fluttering but never closing as she rolls her eyes.

“I don’t know how to read runes, but I bet I can read my foot up your ass!” Serah says, keeping her guard up as Ashley drifts to her feet then higher, floating a few inches above the muddy trail while stretching. “Looks like it says size 4 on your large intestine!”

While AErin tries to goad Ashley into revealing her true name Leila ignores Nick’s attempts to commandeer her crystal ball tablet instead of acknowledging that he’d made a wrong choice and needed to go hunt down his own. In the woods. In a world of magic and, potentially, monsters. After he refuses to stop asking, insulting her, and then flat out demanding she hand her Glass over, Leila loudly drowns him out by saying and holding the word “No” until he gets so annoyed by her lack of response that he wanders off.

Now how the hell does this thing work?