When the world ended, Wyatt Willaby Johnson was taking a crap.
This was unideal for several reasons, most of which should be obvious.
The one that immediately poked its chocolatey, semi-solid head above the rest was that this was not a voluntary crap. Nor was he in a real bathroom.
No, he was in what amounted to a porta-potty crammed into the back of a dilapidated tour bus, winding through Mexican backroads at breakneck speeds toward the tour group’s first ruins of the morning.
It felt like breakneck to Wyatt, anyway, who was having trouble not getting launched from the tiny toilet rim with every uncontrollable, increasingly liquid stream that burst from the depths of hell—aka, his anus.
It must have been that burrito. I thought it tasted weird. So did the water, though.
He’d gotten bottled water, but still, you never knew.
Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten the worm in that tequila.
He braced against the tiny room’s walls as what felt like an endless stream of near-liquid that really should have been solid evacuated itself with all due haste and without Wyatt’s consent.
The sweltering heat was making him sweat and slide around, and generally making the whole experience even more miserable.
Finally, blessedly, the tour bus came to a halt with an ear-piercing screech of overworked and underserviced brakes.
This had the downside of plunging the entire bus into silence.
Wyatt’s sphincter took that moment to unclench and let out another gushing stream of liquid excreta, accompanied by the loudest fart yet.
Like all shoddy bathrooms, there was a crack in the door that he could easily see the rest of the bus through, and several heads turned his way, before quickly looking forward again.
They could probably smell him as well as hear him, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that. When nature calls, you listen.
And it hadn’t just called this time, it had thrown a noose around his neck and dragged him to unexplored depths.
Thankfully the exit doors opened and everyone got up to leave.
A little too eagerly, despite the hungover state of most of them from last night’s shenanigans.
They looked ready to exit as soon as possible.
They can definitely smell it.
At a nominal capacity of eighteen, the tour bus was overlimit with the nineteen varied tourists onboard. There was Wyatt’s class of five, as well as five high-schoolers, one professor, one teacher, and seven others who’d been wrongly assigned to this group by the fly-by-night but very affordable travel agency they’d all used.
“Okay,” Camila—late-twenties, tour guide, grew up in small village yet speaks perfect English—said from the front of the bus, putting up her hands for quiet and preventing anyone from leaving yet. “The bus can’t handle the roads right now, which means we’ve got about a twenty-minute walk ahead of us. So make sure you have enough water. If you don’t, you can purchase bottles from me.” She gestured at the cooler that was between the driver’s seat and the first row of passenger seating.
“Rip off,” Tyler—seventeen, football player, likes dirty jokes, thinks I’m hilarious for some reason—chanted, as if this were a call to be taken up as well. They’d been chanting something about sex rituals earlier in the trip. Well, the boys had been.
“Only for idiots who didn’t bring their own,” a girl across from them said. Olivia—fifteen, wants to be an actress, looks up to Jasmine. When Wyatt’s current predicament was but a rumbling in his guts, she’d been crying, but seemed fine now. Other than the hangover she was clearly still nursing. The guy she had been talking to—Brandon, eighteen, CS major, has a thing for Faith, always bugging me to raid with him—was nearer the back of the bus, next to a different girl—Emma, unknown age, mysterious. This one wasn’t crying. Instead she was looking mysterious like always, ignoring whatever he was saying to her, but smiling slightly.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
There was laughter at Olivia’s response.
“Whatever,” Tyler responded. “YOLO, right?”
He and Jack—eighteen, dropout, does some social-media-something, smarter than he acts—high-fived.
“Yes,” Camila replied. “You only live once. So buy water.”
Several people did—even Tyler, despite what he’d said—then finally the truck blessedly emptied.
Wyatt let out a sigh of relief as a particularly powerful gush escaped him.
And kept going.
It has to be almost done now.
And going.
I’m going to die of dehydration.
Text appeared floating in front of him, which he saw but didn’t register at first.
Analyzing entity…
Liquid shooting from him in a seemingly unending stream, Wyatt just grimaced uncomprehendingly at the text.
Entity analyzed
Cholera, Bacillus cereus poisoning, ethanol toxicity, Norovirus, infectious enteritis
View full status?
Voices erupted from outside the bus.
“What is this?”
“Holy crap are you seeing this?”
“I knew there were microchips in that thing!”
BANG!
🞠
Wyatt sat up. Then he grimaced.
What’s that sme— Oh, right.
The smell was him.
He looked down at himself. His shoes were gone, as were his shorts. His boxers were down around his ankles.
At least my colon feels empty.
He stood up, checking himself.
He grimaced.
Toilet paper. I need toilet paper.
He looked around.
Where am I going to find toilet paper here?
Where is here?
He was in a sandy area. Several hundred yards distant was a large pyramid temple that looked in better condition than it should have. It reminded him of one of the first sites they’d visited on this tour, though the rest of the area looked different, so this must have been one they hadn’t visited.
Beyond this was dense jungle surrounding him on all sides.
He knew where he was, sort of. Mexico, on a tour to visit the various archeological sites. The only confusing part was that just a moment ago he’d been inside the tour bus’s shitty bathroom.
But there was no bus anywhere in sight.
Was I teleported? That seems impossible, but the only thing that makes sense. One second I was on the toilet, the next I was lying on the ground.
Unless, did time pass without me realizing? Is that why I feel better?
“Shit,” someone cried out.
There were people nearby, he saw now.
Were they there a second ago?
A few were sitting up as if waking from sleep. Several frowned at him.
One man, Carlos—mid-thirties, banker, really likes donuts—moved in front of his wife—Maria, early thirties, realtor, has a thing for little dogs, flirty—blocking Wyatt from her view.
Wyatt didn’t care. He wasn’t about to soil his boxers by pulling them back up. They had miraculously stayed clean despite him having been lying in a pile of liquid biohazard.
Though he did append insecure to his assessment of the man.
There was text before the crash…
He paused for a moment, recalling the message. He had a decent memory, so it wasn’t difficult.
Cholera, Bacillus cereus poisoning, ethanol toxicity, Norovirus, infectious enteritis.
Three different infections? Well, that explains the diarrhea. Am I cured? I don’t feel sick or hungover anymore.
Did the system cure me?
Is it a system? I shouldn’t make assumptions. Calling it a system in my head will bias my thoughts and actions in that direction. It was definitely a message. I’ll think of it as that.
It was obvious what had happened, though a bit hard to believe. Something had given him a status window and probably teleported him somewhere.
He was at once monumentally surprised, but also perfectly okay with it.
It was like winning the lottery. Sure, it’d be a shock, but he wasn’t going to complain, and he certainly knew the first thing he would buy.
Except in this case, instead of enough money to buy a mansion and build an epic game room, he got magic.
Maybe.
“Status,” he said, recalling the inquiry about viewing his full status from the first message.
Black text appeared in his vision. It stayed whether his eyes were opened or closed and was somehow easily visible regardless.
I can see black text on the near-black background of my eyelids. Direct to the brain then. Or maybe just the optic nerve.
You have acclimated
Time to acclimation: 17 seconds
Experimental time remaining: 4096 days
Trial 1 time remaining: 2 days
Calibration complete
Assigned Origin Skill: Debuffer
Wyatt Willaby Johnson
Level: 0
Stats:
• Nervous System: 13
• Immune System: 9
• Hard Tissue: 11
• Soft Tissue: 11
• Energy: 0
Skills:
• [Debuffer]
• Empty
• Empty