June stares ever harder at the ‘status’ screen in front of him. He’s read LitRPG stories before. He’s played JRPG video games and WoW, and he’s got a lot of random D&D knowledge from his high school years. He’s not stupid. It’s not that he’s surprised or not understanding the text in front of his eyes in and of itself, but the implications…
Am I dead? Or is it not that type of world? How did I get here? Why is system? Why not world be normal? And other such increasingly less intelligent questions bounce around in his head. He’s still human, as far as he can tell, and the first ‘page’ of his status screen seems to agree with him, referring to him as a ‘Human’, with an undetermined subrace (June assumes this to be something like an ethnicity) and the ‘Humanoid’ type.
The first ‘page’ seems to contain identity information, if he had to categorize it. His level, Exp to next level, something called a ‘title’, his supposedly ‘undetermined’ alignment, his name, and a ‘Common Names’ section he’s determining means aliases. If he went around introducing himself as “President Disney-Nestle-Amazon, God King of Everything”, the ‘Common Names’ and ‘Title’ sections would presumably update to include that. The first page also has a section for ‘Bloodline’, ‘Faith’, ‘Levels List’, all three of which are empty.
Well, Levels List is probably empty because he’s level 0. Faith and Bloodline actually are filled in, but they are filled in with ‘None’. He can vaguely feel three more pages, and so he tries to mentally ‘turn’ said pages. Sure enough, the identity tab, as he’s decided to call it arbitrarily, flicks out of existence and is replaced by a…
Character sheet? He’s not sure if it counts as a D&D style character sheet or not, but it is, somewhat amazingly, filled out in a different font, rather than the sterile text of his identity tab, which is in a sans serif font, the character sheet is in some sort of ‘written-like’ font. Probably to reflect June’s own preconceived notions of what a character sheet is supposed to look like, pencil on paper. Or it just works that way.
At a glance though, something is wrong with the information presented. It isn’t incomplete or anything-Far from it-but it seems to have information that… Frankly, June’s not sure what sort of RPG stat
Health/Maximum health is a sensible way of giving someone a sense of how much damage they can take, though June assumes his mileage will vary on the concept depending on what does and doesn’t count as ‘damage’. The ‘Injuries’ section is interesting, though. Is it for tracking things like long term damage from wounds? If I take 3 damage from a sword, that damage could heal, but I’d be left with an injury despite it? Makes some sense, I suppose.
His actual ‘core’ stats, if he were to relate it to D&D terms, are fairly self explanatory. Conspicuously absent from the group are the usual D&D names, also Strength is missing entirely, or Agility might have replaced it for some reason. In order, his stats are Agility, Constitution, Dexterity, Perception, Attunement, and the ever delightful and incredibly helpful
Actually, the reason strength is missing is obvious when he considers the implications of the injuries section; Constitution is a measure of how good his body is, physical strength is likely a massive part of that. A high amount of physical strength requires a body that can actually withstand its own strength’s forces, so the abstract “Strength” stat makes more sense as a subset of Constitution from the perspective of someone trying to simulate all of reality.
June is standing, barefoot, on wet rock. It isn’t wet as in slippery, though it probably is that if he tried to sprint or hold his feet on unlevel ground, it’s simply a damp feeling. He only knows it’s rock and not, say, gravel, from texture and context. He hasn’t actually looked down to check.
This is because he is very clearly in a very dark cave. ‘Clearly’ isn’t the right term. He’s ‘heavily visually obscured’ in a dark cave. The cave isn’t totally dark, there’s some sort of pale blue, distinctly unnatural light highlighting some of the cave further into the darkness, and a more natural, whiter light highlighting the cave behind him, probably from the surface. The reason he hasn’t taken any steps in either direction wasn’t obvious to him until he recognized the system in the back of his brain for what it was.
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Call ‘Gamer senses’, ‘Fight or Flight response’, or just pure survival instinct, June does not want to move a singular inch closer to the blue light, even if he must get at least half an inch closer for the sake of turning around to run away from it. Looking at the system tabs in his brain is a neat distraction from whatever primal fear is rooting his feet to the ground.
June’s actual entrance into the sunlight is far less gratifying than he assumed it’d be. Because of the feeling he’s being chased, no doubt, but he really couldn’t care less right now. Climbing up those rocks with his hands, feet, and knees was painful and exhausting, so if whatever that blue light was wants to make the climb in order to eat him, it can do so while he takes a breather to examine the scenery.
Said scenery looks as close to what June could describe as being a ‘temperate jungle’ as physically possible. Or, perhaps more aptly, given a peak upwards, ‘Jungle Dungeon’. There’s a heavy humidity to the air, and the trees, while ordinary in size on the face of it, extend all the way up to a massive rocky ceiling. The branches growing off of the trees are lush and green, and remind June quite a bit of both ironwood and oak, despite how much larger the leaves are than they should be.
The reason it screams ‘Jungle’ is how dense the ground is with foliage of so many different types that June can’t discern one plant from another. The branches have so many birds of so many types, little blue ones, big red ones, bigger brown ones, teeny tiny orange ones, flying around and sitting on them that it beggars belief. There is a distinct lack of squirrels or similar, but that might be because of how many birds he can see from his position at the top of some sort of underground hill.
The cavern itself is lit by some sort of massive crystal on the ceiling, glowing like an ovaline, white, sharp-looking sun. This scene… Ah… The chirping of the birds, the surrealness of the massive underground jungle, even the fear of the blue light in the cave, all of them combining into one single experience with no precedent, June understands why he can feel tears forming at the corners of his eyes. A beautiful world…
After an amount of time spent simply basking in his own emotions over the sight before him, June comes to his senses. Shaking his head as if to shake away all potential fears and anxieties that come with waking up in fantasyland, June tries to take stock of his situation from a practical, survival standpoint.
He’s underground, yet all this life is teeming around him. There’s a source of water somewhere nearby. Whether he can drink it is irrelevant, if he can’t drink it, he’s dead anyway. There is a shit ton of plant life, and quite a few underground birds. Something must also eat the plants, and the birds, or the ecosystem would have collapsed. There’s food here. He’ll need to find a way to eat it.
It’s a fantasy world with a gamelike status system, with room for a skills, abilities, and spells section. Meaning there’s a good chance stuff like goblins and slimes abound, too. He’ll need to defend himself. There’s a whole other two tabs of his status screen he hasn’t even looked at yet, but he really doesn’t want to spend any more time not moving. So he moves.
With no sense in hesitating at this point, June pushes his way through the undergrowth determination and gusto, doing his best to dodge the leaves of any plants that are large enough to not be trampled underfoot. The plants he does trample he simply hopes are not poisonous. His guiding principle of ‘find water, weapon, and wood for fire’ leads him to the general conclusion that he should head down the gentle slope of the underground hill, as surely any source of water beyond the heavy humidity in the air would be concentrated at the bottom of whatever the geography of the cavern is.
It might even be more likely that the cavern’s temperature, which June feels is somewhere just north of 80 Fahrenheit, along with the humidity, is caused by some sort of hydrothermal vent under a pocket of groundwater.
Sure enough, after a good hour of walking, June reaches a point where the dense foliage on the hill both levels out and thins out significantly, leaving him in a sort of flat (for a cavern) plain filled with the same sort of trees as the hill, but far less undergrowth. Likely because the angle of the trees protected the plants from the sun on the hill side, so plants that need more shade can’t thrive on this flat plain, given the lightcrystal is directly above me right now. Maybe even- Ah.
June gets his answer about a water source almost instantly when his feet touch the flatter ground of the plain beneath the light crystal, as his foot sinks a little bit into the cave mud. Looking around, June spots a pattern of erosion in the cave mud that looks quite a bit like rain, which probably explains why this area is flat and why the hill slopes to here. As for the source of the rain, the humidity itself would become the culprit after enough time, if the right amount of water and heat are present.
This means that his theory of a vent of some kind is out, since the heat source is probably just the big crystal above. However, the mud that his feet are slowly sinking in (only up to his ankles, it gets too dense for more sinkage after that) does naturally mean that enough water pools here for June to believe some greater spring of water exists somewhere in the cavern.
To find it, he feels the solution is simple. He walks a few feet in one direction, seeing how far he sinks into the mud, then repeats. After a few minutes, he finds himself sinking a little further in than just his ankle, meaning there is more water in the soil of that location than in the spot he first entered. Following this principle, ‘chasing’ the deeper mud should inevitably lead to a spot where there is so much water that it can’t mix with the soil properly and is left as standing water. Such is the theory, at least.