Eventually I figured out how to finish my character—it was by thinking about it for a few seconds consecutively—and named myself Alatar.

The redheaded avatar reached up and touched the mirror.

Everything faded to black. Then:

-Helpful Hints-

Tell no one you are a true human. Find me in the first dungeon.

They are going to find Earth. We have to stop them.

I read this a few times. Was I in a loading screen? Was the loading tip… warning me?

And then I woke up.

Dreams, you know? You always wake up when you get to the good stuff.

I guess I had to admit that I was curious—I’d actually gotten a little excited to play whatever fantasy game I’d rolled a character for, but my unconscious had apparently decided it was time to wake up to the sight of the sun filtering in through my window and, well, spend another day looking for a job.

I groaned. “Fuck you,” I said, aiming that phrase at—well, generally everything. I’m not a morning person.

I sat up and rubbed the sleep from my eyes, then smelled grass on my hands.

Okay, what?

I was lying on the ground. The sun was striking my eyes from where it had just risen over a distant mountain-peak. I was outdoors, wearing simple brown clothes. My hair was red.

I was still in the game.

I’d never woken up in a dream before. And besides, this all felt… how can I describe it?

It didn’t just feel real, it felt almost more than real: as if this was the first thing I’d ever experienced, as if my nerves were fresh and so the blade-points of grass that I brushed with my hand made them of the most delicate and sensuous things I’d ever felt.

I reached up and stared at the sun through my hand, my fingers splayed, squinting at it. I touched the fabric of my shirt and relished the sense of its grain against my fingertips. I drank in the scent of earth and grass, then walked into the shadow of the mountain to better get a view of my surroundings.

I was in the midst of a mountain-range, one that stretched away and upward in one direction. A dell lay below me, forested by a thick coating of pines, and a brook running down the mountain made a small waterfall whose mist had hung a rainbow at its base.

I stood there and drank it all in for a few minutes, and I thought:

I wasn’t dreaming, no matter how much that felt like the only explanation. The feeling was all wrong. I remembered going to bed last night, and my thoughts were fully lucid.

But this raised some important questions, those being:

- What the fuck?

- Were there other humans here, or had the loading screen been right?

- What would happen if I was hurt, or killed?

- Catgirls?

- Who were the humans who’d made this place?

- Seriously, what the fuck?

And these were all pressing, salient questions—things I definitely needed to keep in mind going forward.

I started along a narrow path down the mountain. If this was a game, then where were my stats and the like? The character creator had mentioned skill points, after all.

As if in answer to this thought, text and game elements appeared at the fringes of my vision—the user interface. The most peculiar thing about it was that I could read each word, each number, without focusing on it—something I realized immediately, in a dignified fashion, and not by spinning around in place like a dog chasing his own tail as I tried to focus on something that was permanently fixed in my peripheral.

HP: 50 / 50

Stamina: 50 / 50

Mana: 50 / 50

A red bar, a green bar, and a blue bar weren’t exactly unfamiliar concepts to me. Along with these came buttons—I could select them with the same mind-cursor I’d used in the character creator—to open my character pane, my inventory pane, my equipment pane….

The button to open my character pane was flashing green, so I opened it up:

Alatar

<< Level 0 – Choose a Class to Level Up >>

Hit Points: 50 / 50

Stamina: 50 / 50

Mana: 50 / 50

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Primary Stats

Agility 5

Strength 5

Focus 5

Spirit 5

Secondary Stats

Prowess: 0

Spellcraft: 0

Precision: 5

Haste: 5

Might: 5

Celerity: 5

Power: 5

Defenses

Defense Rating: 6

Divine Resistance: 5

Physical Resistance: 5

Psychic Resistance: 5

Magic Resistance: 5

This small pane, listing some basic information, had options to bring up other panes:

<< Show Inventory >>

<< Show Equipment >>

<< Show Abilities >>

<< Show Skills >>

<< Show Quest Log >>

I looked through these. My quest log was empty, but had a curious element that showed at the bottom of the pane:

Adventuring Clock: 11:56:38

The timer was counting down.

“Huh,” I said. No idea what that meant. I moved on to abilities, of which I had only one:

Fixed Ability - Make Camp

Use Time: 30 Seconds

Cooldown: 12 Hours

Duration: 12 Hours

You designate a small zone as your camp. Your camp is not a safe zone, but you and your allies’ Adventuring Clock will run up, not down, while you are inside it. You must cancel your current camp in order to begin the cooldown on this ability.

“Okay,” I said. So the Adventuring Clock was for some kind of resting mechanic. Next I checked my gear. Nothing interesting there, just some items:

Common Equipment - Roughspun Clothes

Basic starting gear made from course material. Provides nothing in the way of defense.

And some shoes to match. My inventory, however, had something that made me do a double-take, even if the character creator had warned me about it.

Legendary Boon Card - Chosen

Use this card to gain your choice of any chosen boon that you don’t already have.

You can have 1 chosen boon, plus 1 more chosen boon for each 10 levels you attain.

Special: As a human inheritor, you can have 1 more chosen boon than normal.

Warning: Using this card will mark you as one of the chosen, and players who kill you will gain a chosen boon card for each chosen boon you possess.

I stared at this for quite some time.

And no, it wasn’t just because I’d played games like WoW and D&D before and had a sort of pavlovian response to the red text and the word Legendary. My earlier question about being hurt or killed was becoming even more important—this card told me, very clearly, that this Colosseum game had PvP in it. Not just PvP, but highly motivated PvP, if I understood correctly that this card was both rare and powerful.

I could think of two reasons not to use it.

For one, I didn’t want someone to kill me, and the card made it clear that anybody I met would get a clear indicator that killing me was a great idea, at least in terms of character progression. Not a reassuring thought.

But secondly, now that I was taking things a little more seriously I had to admit how troubling it was to have read what I was reading, and what I’d read already, about humans. I’d never really given much thought to my species before—but what, exactly, did it mean to be a human in this place?

Which led me back to the flashing green indicator on my character sheet:

<< Level 0 – Choose a Class to Level Up >>

I selected this and a new pane opened:

Class Selection:

The only classes available to you now are common classes. Other classes may be obtained by using class cards.

Your class has 10 levels of abilities. When you gain a level other than the 1st level in a class, you will be given a choice of abilities that are specific to that level.

At 11th level and every 10 levels thereafter, you can add a class of the next-higher rarity, which right now is uncommon. Thereafter you will choose abilities from that class’s ability list when you level up.

After this came a list of the common classes, but before I could really start to peruse, I felt a hot stripe of pain move across my back—then watched my Hit Points fall by 4, to 46 / 50.

“Ow!” I said with a hiss. Then I had the sense to really start panicking—I had no idea what would happen if my hit points fell to 0, and I didn’t want to find out.

I closed the panes and wheeled in place, then saw the source of the attack nearby: a small, furry creature. It might have looked like a wild dog, except its head was a warped combination of flesh and metal, plates growing out of a disfigured muzzle like the petals of a flower, at their center a glowing red orb.

Just as I wondered something along the lines of: what the hell is that thing? A new pane opened in my field of view—its health bar:

Beamling - Level 1

Oh, I thought. It’s a monster.

Panic set my teeth on edge as its central, red eye began to glow with more intensity. It was obvious what had to happen now.

I had to fight for my life.