When I came to I was in the shower.

Not my shower, though. No, this was still as abstractly a foreign situation as everything I’d experienced so far. The space was small and dimly but coldly lit, as if with daylight LEDs, and jets of pleasantly warm water were sweeping over my body from every direction. As I gradually regained more and more consciousness I realized I was lying on my back on a chilled, hard surface. I began to sit up and paused, prepared for an aggravation of the deathly migraine-shaming headache I’d passed out with—but was pleasantly surprised to find it had completely gone away.

Not all of the blood and gore had, but this shower was doing a pretty good job of at least washing it down to the floor. So I scrambled up gingerly to my feet to help it along.

Buff Detected! You are clean. All abilities +5% for the next 2 hours.

Buff Detected! You are healed. HP has been restored to 100/100.

Ugh. That was still happening, huh? Well. At least all the news seemed to be good news this time.

“Holy fuck.”

My voice had regained normalcy. That was nice. I felt generally good, too. Because of the buffs, I guessed? I stretched, enjoying the feeling of warm, fresh water pelting my naked body.

“Hey…” I mumbled, turning in a circle. “Where are my clothes?” The shower was a completely enclosed space. My clothing was nowhere to be found. I sighed. “Knew that was too good to be true. Nobody ever starts these stories with a coat and a backpack full of knives, heh.”

The water pressure trailed off and the sound of whirring machinery accompanied the clicks and snaps of the walls and ceiling parting ways, each out in a different direction. Brighter, and harsher still, light assailed me, and I blinked.

I was in a very large space after all, now that my shower stall had disassembled itself. Like, warehouse large. The lights looked like stagelights, like they were clipped onto booms and steel rigging high overhead, probably hanging from some distant ceiling. The floor was smooth, black, and reflective, and I could see it was assembled from tile. A strong gust of air almost threw me from my feet, and I dropped into some kind of half-assed crouch, my hand touching down, to not fall over. The sound was painfully loud. When it stopped, I realized my body and the floor had both been blown dry and clean. I worked my jaw a bit to try to unpop my ears.

One of the floor tiles slid to the side with a quiet whir, and a small platform elevated from the hole. Atop it sat my backpack, no shit. No coat, either, but hey. For whatever reason, just seeing my bag returned to me was like seeing water when you’re dying of thirst; I instantly clung to the idea of getting some scrap of normalcy back by reclaiming it, and I lunged across the tile, no longer slick, to grab it.

Item Acquired! Bag’o’Knives.

This is a spatial device modeled on the combatant’s found equipment, a literal bag of knives. What an interesting and prescient choice! Said knives have all been retained and catalogued, and a basic starter combatant outfit has been supplied by Celestial Studios, a subsidiary of the Samwert Company. Please equip your outfit.

I frowned for just a moment, then grinned as realization washed over me. “Free gear? I just got started and already landed a storage bag?? Fucking awesome! Half the time this is the foundation of the main character’s over-powerdness in the first place!” My eyebrows rose a little. “Well, that or being able to both cultivate and progress through combat, which I guess I can also do. Holy fuck. Coolest. Dream. Ever.”

“You’re right about your powers,” a voice, warm and intimately present, yet coming from seemingly nowhere, stated. I instinctively tightened up my body language and spun in a circle, looking around, but couldn’t find the speaker. “Wrong about the dream. Again. But more on that to come.”

“Uh… hello?” My voice sounded thin and tinny in the deep dark of the warehouse compared to the omnipresent god-like nighttime radio voice that surrounded me.

“Hello. I know you have many questions, and I have one or two answers. But before we have our chat, why don’t you put some clothes on?”

I shrugged and placed a hand on the Bag’o’Knives. A prompt appeared with a short list of its contents, including the previously mentioned outfit. I focused on that item and an “equip” option appeared. I gave my mental assent, and in the blink of an eye, I was dressed.

“Uhhh…” That was weird. Not painful or anything, but just… you know. One minute I was free, free ballin’, and the next, me and the boys were snug as a bug in a set of comfortably loose, flowing combat robes. You know. The kind the MC always gets. No cape for now, but hey, beggars and choosers, right?

I had on loose, gray pants that tapered at my ankles, sort of like a 90s windbreaker tracksuit, a matching shirt with a hideous v-neck, and yeah, the robe. I guess that was sort of like a cape. It was all comfortable enough, once I got used to the fact I had been nearly violated by the soft fabric. And a little screen popped up, forcing a smile to tug at my lips.

You have equipped attire set: combat robes, level one. This a non-growth starter set.

Buff acquired! Basic decency: you have donned your bare assets with the bare essentials. +10% HP recovery over time.

Buff acquired! Warmth: you have trapped your natural heat. +10% Stamina recovery over time.

Buff acquired! Combat robes: this set gives you a starting melee edge over other combatants. +1 base attributes in strength, agility, and constitution.

Hell yes.

“I have attribute stats?” I wondered aloud.

“Hold that thought,” the warm voice said.

“Yeah, probably for the best. No one likes it when all the momentum gets sucked out of a scene because the hero had to pull up three pages of decimals and percentages as if he actually had time to read it while whoever was meant to be speaking patiently waited their turn.”

“You always say the strangest things.”

“Always…?”

I lost my train of thought entirely as the room filled with pressure. My legs nearly buckled but I set my teeth together, determined to stay on my feet. This was quite clearly an aura or a spirit power or some such shit, and if there was one thing I’d learned from my hundreds—literally hundreds—of reads, it was that the main character did not give in to aura or spirit intimidation. Alpha, motherfucker, I thought to myself, trying to drown out the internal stress of my mind bending beneath the very real weight of the ephemeral presence that had presumably descended from the heavens. Be the alpha.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

With an audible *pop*, the presence diminished, and when the voice spoke again it was the sound of a normalish human male. “Always.”

I spun around once more and this time saw the man. Or, I guess—

“You’re an elf!” I blurted. It was pretty clear from the ears.

He was tall and lithe, with long, jet-black hair, pallid skin, and a stern, angular face. He was dressed in form-fitting emerald green clothing which appeared alien to my sensibilities but very clearly read as elevated. And a short, thin cape of black with bronze trim draped his shoulders. Motherfucker had a cape. I may have felt a twinge of jealousy.

He smiled, and although I had the sense the being before me was possessed of far greater power than I, I did not feel a threat in the smile.

“So you say,” he said. “Have a seat, Henry.”

My eyebrows shot up. How’d he know my name? “Uh… where—” Something pat the back of my shins, exerting just enough force to bend my knees. I fell, undignified, onto the chair that had risen as if by magic from the tiled floor. A chair likewise rose behind the elf, who sat with a nonchalant cape-sweep I very much noticed.

“Friends call me—”

“Quart. Or Quarter. Sometimes Quibbles. I know.”

“How the fuck—”

He waved a hand. “We’re not quite friends yet this time around. I thought I’d try your birthname to warm you up.”

“Huh. Well, uh, ok.”

He sat patiently, his smile grown passive but not diminished, looking at me. I sensed the next words should be mine.

“So. How ‘bout them Tigers.”

He chuckled. “As I said. It’s almost as if you remember, Quart.”

“Remember…?”

“Do you know where you are? Who I am?”

I shrugged. “Nope. Not really. It all looks very goth-chic sci-fi in here, and you sort of have that sexy man-elf vibe going like you bought the position of duke for this invasion, and I’m supposed to go monster hunting so I can sell carcasses and buy overpriced galactic laser guns from your tower shop, but you’re not exactly my type. Not that you’re not handsome, don’t get me wrong, and more power to the MC who does want to cozy up to the first OP’d NPC they find. It’s just, you know. Not for me.”

“And this is the part where you realize you’re emulating your favorite main character in trying to throw me for a loop by spouting a bunch of improvised nonsense so you can gain an upper hand in an alien landscape. So you told me last time.”

I turned my head to the side. This guy was pretty meta, even for me. “So what happened? Did I die in that mana-beam thing? Or did those burlap sackwiches get me?”

He shook his head gently. “No. No death. We beamed you up.”

“Ah. I see the problem, boss. You threw me with your lack of an obvious Scottish accent.”

“You, Quart, are an anomaly.”

“A glitch in the Matrix.”

His smile remained, but he ignored my interjections. “Upon invasion, sentient residents are meant to be contracted as assimilated combatants. Lower-intelligence beings, indigenous things.”

My face fell. “I heard what you really just said. Are you serious?”

He held up a hand. “I apologize for the unintended insinuation. The mixup, so far as we can tell, is not a result of your actual intelligence, which I think you’ll find is a perfectly comparable base stat to most early combatants. Some outliers excepted. This has more to do with a unique combination of events during the exact moment of assimilation. You were in bed.”

“Yeah. It was the middle of the night. Couldn’t have been that unique.”

“And a beam of pure cosmic Qi landed directly atop your sleeping body.”

I swallowed. Yeah, I remembered that. “Well? I saw beams all over the place. That couldn’t have been the only one that hit someone in bed.”

“It was the first beam of the invasion. Making it…”

“Unique.” I nodded. “I see. So that’s the big deux ex machina opener that makes me OP’d, huh? Gives me both combat XP and cultivation? A little tired at this point, but hell, I’ll take it; I don’t need a compelling initiating event to get set up for a wild ride if the rest of it works out. I mean, maybe my brain will backwrite a good narrative-integrated reason for that later, so, sure. We’ll take ‘the big scary fire rainbow caught me with my pants down’ for now; seems as good as anything. At least I wasn’t trying to pull my ex-girlfriend’s cat out of a fucking tree, heh.”

For the first time, his smile faltered just a bit. “Excuse me. Could you repeat that?”

“Out of a tree. You know, big, tall plants? Or oh, oh I see. The ex-girlfriend part. Yeah, total trope. One I take some issue with, to be honest. Why does the male MC always have to have a history of romantic victimhood with unsympathetic women? I mean I get that it sets him up for both character development and wish fulfilment later in the story, but, ach. What does it say about how we, the collective masculine consciousness, view our relationship with the feminine? Do we need to make it transactional to be clear in our delineation of us v. them? Or is it more Freudian than that, and it’s actually all about trying to climb right back up into the—”

“No, not that. The first thing you said. How, exactly, is it that you think you are, ah, OP’d, as you call it?”

“Oh you mean my obvious game-breaking hybrid character build? Yeah, classic trope too, but I’m a sucker for this one. Comes in many forms, dual-class, hidden class, but this particular one is my favorite. I get to fight and cultivate.”

Now he outright frowned. “That’s new.”

I squinted at him. “Dude. This is all new. I mean, obviously derivative, but new to me.”

He sighed through his nose. “Right. You don’t remember, so you don’t know what I’m talking about. It doesn’t matter. Here, take this.”

He flung a hand out and I barely had time to raise my own before the twinkling object landed in it.

Item Acquired! Pinky Ring Mini-Map.

“Sweeeeeet.” I slipped it onto my pinky without a second thought. He shook his head.

“You should consider exercising caution when equipping gear from strangers.”

“Ah, but we are clearly not strangers. I can read between the lines, bub. This may be my first rodeo, but I’ve read all the greats. We’re obviously in some sort of retrograde system here. Or is it called regression? Not sure if it’s a timeloop, a rebirth, a past-life thing, or what, but you have clearly spoken with me before.”

He nodded. “It continues to amuse me how you can somehow both present yourself as so very inane while also being—”

He paused mid-sentence, blinking, and it seemed to me like a series of colors were scrolling vertically over his eyes. I wondered if he was reading system messages like I had been, or communicating with someone, or just having a really bad sudden trip on exotic space-elf drugs. Were those a thing? Had to be.

“Sorry, you were saying,” I prompted, “while also being…” Dammit, it seemed like he was about to pay me a genuine compliment. Which came pretty rare these days, dream or no.

Another wave of suppressive power exuded from him, and this time I was ill-prepared to resist. I fell to a crouch, hard, my knee cracking against the tile. I received a -1 damage notification and attempted to curse loudly, but it came out as a whimper under whatever magical effects I was suffering. Eventually, the suppression faded, and the elf seemed again like an elf—whatever that seemed like. I did not, however, rise to my feet again. I was taken with a genuine feeling of awe, of the certain knowledge that the being in front of me inspired awe, and I felt fear.

“I’m sorry for that, Quart,” he said, distracted. He blinked and his eyes continued to scroll. “I, uh… I… there's this, uh, thing. Hang on...” He sucked in air through his teeth and muttered something beneath his breath. Yep. The intergalactic god-magic elf-man was definitely talking with someone else at the same time. I wasn’t in the sassy mood anymore, though. I waited patiently.

“I have to send you back now,” he said all in a rush. “I’ve marked a spot on that minimap. In green. Go there and find Bryan. He’ll explain the rest.”

I cleared my throat and began to supplicate myself. “Thank you, sir. Or, erm, Lord? How will I know—”

“Go.” He threw a hand out in a gesture, not bothering to spare me a glance, and I felt myself forcibly ejected from whatever space we had been in. There was a brief feeling of extreme inertia, like spinning upside-down on the Corkscrew, and then, poof. I was back.

Only I wasn’t. I was back on Earth, it seemed, but not on my block. I looked around, catching my breath.

“Ok,” I muttered to myself. “Ok. Shit just got real. C’mon, man. Let’s get it together.” This was a familiar turning point in most of my long-form narrative dreams. There’d been some interesting action/adventure play, a little exposition, and now came the tonal change from fun and exciting to total grimdark. I knew from the obvious cues. Dead bodies and pools of blood littered the parking lot before me, solid lumps and shimmering pools in the starlight; the usual aural backdrop of electric appliances and automotive engines was completely absent, replaced with a distant but all-encompassing hellscape of screams and growls; and my stomach felt decidedly queasy from coming into contact with the power of someone I could only classify as godlike, and then being forced through interdimensional travel. You know, the usual shit.

“This is where you decide. This is the moment. Who are you going to be?” I said it aloud, just above a whisper, trying to pep myself up. It got my head in the game just enough to think to check my new minimap.

The building to my back was labeled “Mall,” which would have explained its dark, abandoned character even if the grid hadn’t gone down. I didn’t recognize it or know which mall, but I had been alive before malls had ceased to be a thing, and I was vaguely familiar with this sort of structure. A blank, brick wall ran longways to either side of me, and off to the right I could make out a protruding façade that had that tall cabin-roof feel that practically screamed “foodcourt.” And based on the map, that’s exactly where Mr. Green Dot was waiting for me.

I took a quick swivel glance around to make sure I wasn’t about to tackled by anything nearby, ducked my head low, and sprinted for the dot.