Journal Entry #1:
"The day began, like most mornings, with the sound of my rooster screaming—or rather, crowing—as if his house was on fire. Looking back, I’m mostly glad for what happened that day, but sometimes I still wish I had been able to punch that big bastard in the beak when I had the chance."
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“Molly! For the last time, stop eating that or I swear you are not getting any breakfast snackies!”
At the sound of my raised voice, I saw my sweet Molly raise her head from the chicken coop’s feed tray and look at me judgmentally, as if I were the one acting out of line. She cocked her head at me, and I swear she seemed like she was glaring at first before dropping her mouth open and letting her tongue roll out in what felt like a sassy smile. I swore half-heartedly, unable to maintain a stern face at such a cute sight, as she looked back at me with a twinkle in her eye and wet chicken feed covering her bottom jaw.
“Come on, baby, get out of there. You know Hennie and Big Red won’t leave the coop while you are over there.”
Molly shook her coat lightly before casually sauntering away towards her favorite tree this week, her tail wagging gently, clearly knowing that the threat of breakfast snackies being withheld was NEVER going to actually be a reality that she would ever face. I smiled, laughing softly to myself at what was basically a daily ritual between us at this point.
Molly would have been considered small for an Australian Shepherd if it weren’t for the extra twenty pounds of snack-weight that she had accumulated over the course of her life. Instead, she was, according to everyone who knew her, a Chonkocerous, a Chunky Bae, or Chonkaorus Prime. I had never really measured her, but I am pretty sure she was around two feet tall, and maybe an extra foot in length, if she didn’t have her fluffy tail extended. Covered in a thick black coat of fur, her face, chest, and paws had a touch of white to them, giving her almost raccoon-like coloration in those areas. I had inherited her from my grandmother, and so I wasn’t exactly sure, but I think she was roughly about 13 years old at this point. Even thinking about her age made my chest feel tight with a twinge of anxiety and imagined heartbreak. I know she might live longer, but she has already beaten the average for dogs of her same breed, so every day with her was a blessing.
Some people may think that I am a bit obsessed with my baby, and yeah, actually, that would be an accurate way to describe it. She wasn’t my first dog, and I wasn’t her first human, but right now? We were partners. After my grandmother passed away, the family initially tried to give her to my uncle to take care of, but she kept escaping his house to come over to my house and nap on my deck. On the fourth time that I had returned her to my Uncle’s house, he told me that if I wanted her, I could have her—a position that quite frankly I can’t remotely understand, but was grateful to take advantage of. With the exception of one particularly memorable moment where I witnessed her kidnapping one of my chickens and attempting to travel into the forested side of the hill next to my house with it still in her mouth, she never attempted to escape from my house. I was her boi. She was my girl. Okay, yeah, I get it, I’m obsessed with her, and I am not afraid to admit it. She is my baby! I would punch a tiger in the nose for her. Maybe. Or at the very least I would punch at a tiger before it brutally savaged me for being so silly as to engage a tiger in unarmed combat.
Shaking my head ruefully at my wayward thoughts, I tried to remind myself for what might have been the 7th time to take my ADHD medicine before I got too involved in working around the house. It was Saturday, and Saturday was always a busy day for me out here on the rural family property. At this point, I was the only member of my immediate family who still lived here, and I knew that if I didn’t feed the animals and do some work on clearing out this Spring’s overgrowth of brush and weeds, there was no one else to do it.
There were days when I felt envy over my friends who lived in the nearby little city of San Luis Obispo, but for the most part? Yeah, I definitely envied them for being able to just spend their weekends resting and recovering, but if I had to trade the work that comes with living in the country for living in the city, surrounded by hundreds or even thousands of other people in close proximity, I would happily embrace my introverted nature and never, ever, ever make that trade. Me? Live in the city? With all that noise? Ugh… the thought filled my stomach with nausea.
People are cool, but you know what’s way cooler? Chickens, bud. Dogs. Peace. Quiet. The complete lack of other humans within sight. The ability to lay out naked in the sun without having to watch out for the neighbor catching a peek at me while she took an unrealistic amount of time watering her garden that happened to be directly across from where I would lay out. Ewww… I still have bad memories of the year when I lived in the nearby city, and the previous neighbor’s tendency to choose to garden any time I wanted to get a little sun on my cheeks. Two days in a row you needed to water the peach trees? Sure bud.
Standing at 5’10", with thick, chest-length black curly hair, and eyes that seemed to range from green to blue-gray depending on the light, I didn’t personally see myself as being particularly attractive; however, my whole life, middle-aged women had repeatedly assured me that I had extremely beautiful eyes and hair. To the point where it just felt uncomfortable to be reminded of it. My ex was Punjabi, and once a member of her family described me as a term that I couldn’t exactly understand, and I remember, as soon as he said something to them they all immediately started agreeing. When I quizzed my partner about it, she had struggled to clarify but she left me with the rough impression that it inferred me as having some type of mythical creature in my bloodline that explained my eyes and my “spiritual” personality. I thought that was a weird way to describe someone who just had weird eyes and was Autistic, but to be honest I am pretty sure there was a lot I was missing from the description they had given me. Language barriers.
Maybe if I was more normal, I would be able to take advantage of the so-called pretty privilege that came with my looks, but it had always been my experience that my looks had hindered my ability to fit in, not accentuated my ability to make friends and socialize. It always felt like more of a weight around my neck. Prolonged looks from others. Comments about my eyes or hair. Uncomfortable amounts of attention from people’s mom.
“Merrrrrr……”
Pushing aside my morning whirlwind spree of thoughts, I again reminded myself that I NEEDED to take my ADHD medicine this morning. Soon. I was going to do it. Soon. Just later. After I emptied the bedding from the chicken coop. Later. Probably. Maybe. There was a chance.
Shortly after Molly had moseyed away and in the midst of my introspection, my rooster, Big Red, had hopped out of his coop with his usual anxiety-laden crowing and frantic sprint towards the cover of the nearby fruit trees. Following shortly after him, Hennie also came out rushing for the treeline, equally as frantically, and yet not nearly as loudly. Both birds were Speckled Wyandotte chickens, sporting beautiful plumage filled with red, black, gold, and hints of silver and white. Big Red was, like his name, predominantly red with black and gold hints. Alternatively, Hennie’s plumage mostly was gold and black with just the faintest hint of red and white along the tips of her wings. They were active and sweet babes; Hennie was exceptionally inquisitive and friendly, while Big Red was much more protective of the other animals and suspicious of strangers.
“Molllllly! Bring the bucket! Good girl, come on! Bring the buck-“ At that exact moment of me calling out to Molly, a sudden earsplitting sound reverberated from behind his eyes, making me feel as though I was hearing it come from the very sky itself. I watched Molly skid to a stop a half-step from the bucket and her head whip around frantically and then stare straight up into the air, and I realized the sound was definitely coming from somewhere far away and yet, everywhere all at once. The weirdness of the sensation made my mouth taste like iron, and with a start I realized I had bitten my tongue the moment I heard the sound begin. Suddenly out of the corner of my eye, I could see something blue flash into being.
With a frantic bawk and the sounds of a whomp, Hennie leaped from the ground and into my arms as I caught her. My eyes wide and my mouth still operating on rote, I finished my call for Molly with “-et over here….”
Again, at that same moment came that horrible eyeball-vibrating sound, and also the sudden rapid onslaught of blue screens appearing in the corner of his eyes. Each of them layering over the top of the previous screen and with each one it showed an additional number on top, rapidly increasing from the number one as being displayed, ticking up faster and faster as if it was the jackpot alert on in a Vegas Casino and I was the winner. My mind felt exhausted as it tried to process the rapid onslaught of numbers flashing within my vision, and I blinked as I noticed two purple boxes rapidly flash up and display themselves just under the section of his vision where the stack of blue boxes had coalesced.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
By the time the third alert had chimed, the reverberation from all of the alerts was causing my brain to feel like a squished piece of tofu, and by the fifth alert, I could vividly taste the iron in my mouth, undoubtedly meaning I had either bit my tongue or worse my brain had started bleeding into my mouth. I couldn’t even remotely focus on the words the Universal-System was saying, and in an effort to try to block out the overwhelming sensation that continued thundering into my skull, I desperately tried turning my head towards the direction I could see the blue and purple boxes that filled my lower right vision. However, the moment I turned my head, I instantly had my vision filled with the superimposed structures of the two bright boxes, completely filling my field of view and making the world around me disappear. To my surprise and the sudden release of pressure on my cranium, the sounds of the World Alerts disappeared as this happened, and I mentally moaned relief at the sudden silence.
With the two large boxes filling my vision side-by-side, I found myself first focusing on the blue boxes to the left, where the number began ticking upwards, albeit at a drastically slower rate than it previously had been raising. The number had already passed 29 thousand, and intuitively I could feel the gamer in me wanting to be one of those 29 thousand. As I focused on the blue box, I read the information provided.
A split second after I viewed it, I mentally found myself intuitively dismissing the alert and then found myself focusing on the next box.
“Merrrr….”
I found myself flicking through the blue boxes as fast my brain seemed capable of thinking, each time being confronted by the “REDACTED” message. As I stopped actively thinking of reading the upcoming blue boxes, my vision swam, and when it stabilized, I was witnessing the blue and purple boxes side-by-side again. This time, I focused on thinking of the purple boxes, and with an explosion of gold and lavender rays of light, my field of view suddenly displayed a much cooler message for me to read.
The box disappeared the instant I stopped reading it, and with a similar explosion of gold and lavender, the next box was visible.
As I finished reading the second purple box, it disappeared from my sight, and vision came back to the normal world for me. I saw that Big Red had run behind me and was hiding in my shadow while crowing fierc---
I screamed this time in pain as I felt the alert reverberate inside my facial bones, “Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!! MUTE THIS STUPID ALERT ALREADYYYYYYY!!!!!! AHHHHHHH!!!!”
And with that, the sounds and the all-consuming vibration stopped. I noticed a purple box, and then another purple box appear in the corner of my vision, all the while the blue boxes continued to tick upwards, having already reached forty-three thousand by the time my new two purple boxes had been added to my screen.
This time, I did not focus my eyesight on the purple or blue boxes but instead called Molly over to me and hugged her briefly and frantically while I shuddered and felt my breath catch raggedly within my throat.
“Is… this… am I… did I finally snap? This is like my LitRPG books… am I… oh merrrrrr….. this isn’t real, I am just going crazy. I’m going crazy, fuck, fuck, fuckkkkk! OK.. ok… it's in my mind, just do your chores and breathe, Travis… Merrrrrrr!”
Shaking my head violently as if I could shake the crazy away, I resolutely refused to look at anything other than the chicken feed container and proceeded to refill it with one hand while I continued clutching Hennie tightly to my chest. I could hear Molly whining frantically over the sounds of both of my chickens clucking in distress. Then, with eyes that felt blurry and glazed over, I found my way over to the water station for the animals and, acting on rote, I refilled it numbly while I felt a small, ok, a very large part of my brain SCREAMING at me in unintelligible sounds.
The fear of going crazy was something I have dealt with for much of my life; before I was a child diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, the oh-so-wise and intelligent adults in my life had me briefly committed to a mental health facility in order to assess my ‘delusional’ and ‘fantastical’ thinking. Initially, they suspected that I might be schizophrenic due to the ways that I was describing my experiences and the ‘odd’ ways that I would respond to adults and children. Later, after months and months of time spent in that institution, they came to the conclusion that I had Asperger’s Syndrome and that my ‘delusions’ were not delusions, that instead I was dealing with a fundamentally different way of experiencing events than the people around me. Interestingly enough, after realizing that I had Asperger’s Syndrome, they decided that since Asperger’s is highlighted by increased levels of cognition in certain areas, there was no need to educate me on my neurodivergence, and definitely no need to embarrass the family by putting me inside special schools that acknowledged these differences. So they threw me back into regular school, and my father taught me that if he got complaints from the school about my behavior, there would be punishments when I got home — punishments that as an adult, I now recognize would be labeled as physical abuse, but at the time I just thought was normal for everyone.
So I learned to mask. I learned to pretend. I learned that to be safe, you just had to look at the successful people around you and do what they did. I learned that sometimes if you shared your reactions to what someone says, they will think you are the strange one, not them. And…. I wasn’t really good at it. I was constantly getting into trouble. Constantly making friends while masking, and then losing friends when I shared my confusion at not understanding the social cues other people seem to find so easily. But through it all… I never forgot that feeling that the doctors gave me when they first said I might be schizophrenic and just hallucinating details in my existence. That fear of whether the reality I saw was the real reality. It still makes me mad to think about it. Medical gaslighting at its finest.
Later, way later, when I became an adult, I went to school for psychology because I needed to understand, to figure out why people did what people did. Why I always seemed to be wrong in what I thought others were saying or doing. It was then I learned Autism Spectrum Disorder and how the newest versions of the DSM-V 4 had incorporated Asperger’s Syndrome into the wider umbrella of Autism Spectrum disorder and what that meant in relation to me personally.
Shaking my head roughly, for what felt like the 30th time this morning, I reminded myself I needed to take my ADHD medication because I was absolutely swimming in the ennui of my thoughts. I decided to go grab that right now, so I put Hennie down and called Molly's name numbly. As I went into the house, I whistled Molly's favorite song, 'Party All Molly Day', to try to calm her and myself down as I ventured into the madness of the house to find my medication.
In the corner of my vision the blue boxes continued to stack up.
Once inside, I made my way to the kitchen counter where I knew I had left my bottle of ADHD meds earlier this morning. As I approached the counter, my eyes caught on the new light fixture that I had installed just yesterday, and I found my head tilting and my tongue poking out slightly as I started to really process how I felt about the way it looked in my kitchen. It was beautiful, really, and I could see myself really appreciating how much light it would throw off in the evenings when I would be trying to cook my meals. It was a nice change from the way my previous light fixtures had been constantly blowing a fuse on me. So, while I was happy with my choice, it was more about the fact that I had fixed it that made me smile so softly to myself. What the fuck was I thinking about? The world is.... doing something and I'm get distracted by lighting?
As my fingers made contact with the small circular bottle, I sighed a sigh of relief and quickly retrieved the bottle, popped the childproof cap off, and found one small green pill nestled safely within the orange bottle. Instantly a wave of relief filled me as a surge of dopamine rushed through my head at the sight of the pill.
The sight of that pill slipped away as I then promptly forgot what had brought me there as soon as I saw my cell phone blowing up with alert after alert after alert. And… I could feel my hand shaking as I grabbed the phone and took it in my hand to check the notifications. I knew. I knew the moment I saw the way my phone was receiving notification after notification that I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t hallucinating. SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING. IT WAS HAPPENING.
I had always day dreamed of that I was going to taken to an Isekai world by truck-kun, but I was ok with LitRPG System malarkey. I had read about this in depth.
I just needed to keep Molly and the chickens safe. My mom. Whatever friends I could link up with. I could do this. I will do this.
I had a quick thought flash through my head that I was definitely going to need to find my emergency Xanax.
I closed my eyes briefly, shutting them tightly to block out all the light. Then, I unlocked my phone, and the world changed.