Todd Reed was in the middle of telling off his asshole of a boss when the noise around woke him up. Well, fair enough. Only in a dream could he leave his minimum wage job as a store clerk. Not if he actually wanted to pay his rent and bills instead of returning home to burden his already poor parents. Sometimes he even wondered which was a lesser evil…
“Guys, can’t you be quiet for a moment?” Todd muttered as he opened his green eyes. Only to close them again, for his surroundings were way too bright.
It took Todd a few long seconds to realize that he wasn’t in his small apartment and that he wasn’t alone. The latter fact should’ve been obvious enough from the noise, but then again, it wasn’t his first time waking up after a party. Except, the last thing he remembered was playing Mortal Combat with his little sister and completely dominating her at it, by the way. Where would be his pride as a big bro if he lost to Lizzie, who was only fifteen, five years his junior? Well, if they competed in endurance or math, she would’ve probably destroyed him. Probably.
When his eyes adjusted to the bright world, it took Todd but a moment to conclude that he wasn’t at any of his friends’ home and that he hadn’t lost his memory from drinking too much. Alongside six other people, he was in a wide room of pure white. There were no lights on the ceiling and yet, as if the walls itself were fluorescent, everything was perfectly illuminated.
“What the Hell is going on?” asked a huge bearded man as he stood up some distance away from Todd. Now, Todd was the only person still not on his feet, which made some others give him a passing glance. He noted to himself that there were three men and three women among his companions, each wearing the same clothes—a white elastic suit covering most of their bodies and making them almost blend into the surroundings due to its color.
A strange sense of style they have… Todd thought before noticing his own outfit. Wait, it seems I’m wearing such a suit myself, what the..? Yeah, this can’t be real. There’s no way someone could get me in something like this without waking me up, first.
“Don’t worry, bro, it’s just a dream!” Todd said cheerfully as he raised his upper body and bent his knees, preparing himself for the struggle that was getting up. He hadn’t been in the best form lately, actually gaining some weight, though not enough to be called fat. With a muffled groan, the store clerk heroically got to his feet.
“Hey, I didn’t ask to be pinched!” the bear of a man grumped after one of the female strangers—a short ginger girl with glasses—pulled the skin on his forearm with her fingers. How she had managed to do this through his suit was a mystery to Todd.
“But you were just about to ask, weren’t you?” the glasses girl, who was probably a couple of years younger than Todd, replied nonchalantly.
“There was no point in pinching him, though,” Todd argued. “After all, this is my dream, not his. I mean, you guys can’t be real, right? You see that girl over there? She’s totally Emma Cameron. I’m her fan, so it makes a perfect sense that she will appear in my dream. Specially for me.”
The woman mentioned by Todd glared at him, her cerulean eyes locking with his emerald ones. She was a breathtakingly beautiful blonde in her early twenties, the white suit tightly enveloping her busty figure. For better or worse, their shared attire was rather thick, and its fabric far from translucent.
“I don’t know why I’m here, but definitely not for your ugly face,” the woman snorted.
“You see it?” Todd grinned at the glasses girl, who just blinked at him in confusion. “She’s already flirting with me! There’s no way this could happen in reality.”
“Who’s flirting with you?!” The supposed Emma Cameron, a Hollywood superstar and sex symbol, gave him a scowl. “Only in your dreams!”
“We are already in the middle of one!” Todd laughed. With each passing second, his theory seemed more and more plausible.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
He’d heard about lucid dreams from his buddy Frank, and, right now, Todd was in the middle of one…probably. In any case, he couldn’t let the opportunity to enjoy himself slip away. He worked up his mind and imagined Emma jumping into his embrace while taking off her clothes, but… it seemed that he still hadn’t gained an actual control over his own dream. His favorite superstar just turned her head away from him, completely ignoring his existence.
“Stop bickering, children,” a strict looking middle-aged man said, his voice commanding obedience. Now that Todd thought about it, that guy also seemed a bit familiar…
Isn’t he the CEO of Virtual Future Inc? Todd thought. Perhaps this isn’t a dream, after all, but some kind of VR experiments? Nah, in this case that guy would be the big bad boss, not one of the participants. Then again, wasn’t there an anime where the mastermind pretended to be one of the players?
“Something is about to begin,” another person shared his thoughts. A man—black, tall, muscular, with a deep voice and dangerous eyes. He had been walking circles around the room up until that moment, not paying attention to anyone else. Now, he had a pondering look as he joined their silently standing group.
Not someone to be trifled with, Todd noted to himself. Then again, if this is my lucid dream, then I’m invincible anyway. Yep.
For some reason, no one dared to approach the middle part of the place, despite it being empty. Todd felt his entire attention pulled to that place against his will. He didn’t even have the time to properly check out the third woman among their group before a change happened. A pillar of light and shadow descended strictly at the center of the room before taking a humanoid form.
The being standing before Todd and others was hard to describe with words. A human-like shape of white, gray and black, it was woven of incorporeal gas-like substance that was constantly fluttering and fluctuating. Its two abysmal whirlpools of darkness for the eyes indifferently regarded the seven people.
My name is Enigma, the System Arbiter.
The being didn’t have a mouth and so it couldn’t speak—probably—but it’s artificial robotic voice sounded right inside Todd’s mind, sending a chill down his spine. If before it was just an odd dream, now it started to slowly descend into a nightmare. His mental attempts to influence the situation with his imagination completely failed, taking Todd a step closer to accepting the disturbing fact—everything was real.
Congratulations, humans. For you were chosen to join the honored ranks of System Agents.
Considering the uncomfortable looks on other people’s faces, Todd assumed that he wasn’t the only one hearing things. And yet, when he tried to open his mouth and ask Enigma a question, he realized that he couldn’t move even his finger, his body paralyzed. He continued to stand in place and watch the mysterious being, only his eyes remaining under his control.
I understand that you may have a lot of questions, but you are yet to deserve the answers.
Judging from the fact that no one complained, Todd wasn’t the only one unable to move.
Not all of you will survive the Initiation, but those who do will be generously rewarded.
Todd didn’t like the idea of dying. Or seeing any of the other six losing their lives, for that matter. And yet, what he could do? Only continue to listen while burning the image of the creature in front of him into his memory.
And if by a stroke of luck, none of you perish, your entire group will receive special treatment.
Well, that gave Todd, and likely the others, some hope. It meant that whatever this Initiation thing was, it wasn’t impossible for them all to survive it.
As for the rest, I will leave it to the System. Let the fittest of you survive, and may the Fate be with you, humans. Until we meet again.
With those parting words, Enigma vanished into thin air, as if it was never here to begin with. In his place, a round table surrounded by seven chairs materialized in the middle of the room—all furniture was white, just like everything else in the room.
“What the fuck it just was?!” the first to curse wasn’t one of the men, or even the sharp tongued actress, but the girl who’d been keeping her silence until now. “I couldn’t move my body at all!”
The speaker seemed to be in her late twenties, but compared to Emma and even the glasses girl, she wasn’t very feminine, giving off a more tomboyish vibe. It didn’t help that she was tall, athletic and almost completely flat.
“This is the thing that bothers you the most?” The middle-aged man, a supposed CEO of a multinational corporation, shook his head. “Did you ever listen to what Enigma said? We are about to be thrown into something life-threatening, so we need to prepare.”
No one could refuse the man’s words. And as if it had been waiting specially for this moment, a holographic screen appeared before Todd. It was something taken straight out of a video game, a shadow-like semi-translucent box of text.
Welcome to the System, Agent! Your Party [EE-337] has been assigned.
Below this text, a table with information regarding Todd and his companions was displayed. An information that implied a simple fact…
Party Details
Home Sector: Earth (Type Epsilon), North America (subject to change)
Keeper: Steve Rogers (Rank E, Level 18) [Body Attribute meets the requirements]
Hunter: Alicia Hoover (Rank E, Level 19) [Nerve Attribute meets the requirements]
Slayer: Lance Dexter (Rank E, Level 21) [Body and Nerve Attributes meet the requirements]
Caster: Casey Monroe (Rank E, Level 19) [Mind Attribute meets the requirements]
Charmer: Emma Cameron (Rank E, Level 18) [Spirit Attribute meets the requirements]
Psyker: Elon Neumann (Rank E, Level 22) [Mind and Spirit Attributes meet the requirements]
Mascot: Todd Reed (Rank E, Level 9) [Chosen at random, winner of the lucky draw]
…a fact that, compared to the rest of the group, Todd was just a piece of trash.