> If you are reading this, congratulations! You might just survive the coming apocalypse!
>
> -"A Guidebook to Surviving the Coming and Forceful Isekai-ing of this Entire Planet," by Annaliese Macco
Never trust a fart. These were words that defined Claire’s life. Well, not really. But every time she trusted a fart, bad things started to happen.
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Like the time when she was seven and trusted the flying boy who had hovered outside her window, cracking fart jokes. He had told her stories of the places he had been and the people he had met. They were full of anger and friendship and revenge. He had been a hero and a villain and petty and cruel and heartless.
Claire had believed him when he had said that he would stick around forever, telling her stories of his life.
Never trust a fart.
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Like the time when she was fifteen and miserable, on account of a great deal of relationship drama that had basically boiled down to a love triangle; Claire liked Oscar, Oscar liked Steffan, and Steffan had sworn eternal devotion to his one true love, nachos.
Claire had met with a pimply stranger, a boy who was bereft of his childhood, terrified of growing older, yet no longer able to deny that he was aging. He had once covered every chair in her house with a whoopee cushion, and done so with such a sense of regret and sadness that made him seem so serene. Sure, it was a heartfelt expression of teenage angst and sentimentality of the sort only experienced by children, but it was more than that. It had to be.
They had sworn to fight the world together, to move heaven and earth to get to a better place.
Never trust a fart.
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Like the time when she was twenty and alone in college. She would spend every morning hunched over a desk, pen tracing out ever-larger loops as she outlined ideas for the approval of a single old man who would take the word of another student and check a box saying she could move on to better things.
A tall, confident stranger, a woman who sat ten seconds in silence before speaking her mind, had walked into her life. After a few conversations in which they had shared everything from their most deeply-held beliefs about the world to candle-lit dinner with each other, the tall woman had made a single fart joke and vanished from the world forever.
Never trust a fart.
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Like the time when she had rolled out of bed, pulled a pair of jeans on, and trusted a fart.
Never trust a fart
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Like the time when she heard a soft wooshing sound behind her, far too close for comfort, whirled around, and found herself adrift in the crystal tide.
Never trust a fart
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Claire was having a bad day. Most of her bad day was on account of her being pinched every which way by what felt like sea foam made of glass marbles. Her thoughts drifted back, on the softer tide of memory, to those ephemeral strangers who had tried to cheer her up, never staying long enough. She thought back to the very first one, who had mentioned this tide (because, dear reader, what good is a childhood friend who cannot give valuable and life advice?). He had told her that she could navigate the current with nothing but happy thoughts, if only she would believe.
Claire had not had many happy thoughts in recent months. But she tried to think. She thought of books that played and boys that read. (We stand on the shoulders of giants, dear reader, and that’s the best I can say)
Claire remembered how the first visitor had once blown a handful of dust on her, and sworn it would keep her safe if ever she tried to visit him. It had tickled and she had sneezed. (Fairy dust, dear reader, from an innocent and heartless child, if I must spell it out)
Claire was not happy as she had once been, and found that as hard as she tried, she could not fly (Adults never can, dear reader, unless they have been practicing, and that is a different kind of flight). But the bubbles changed around her and became softer and kinder and whisked her away towards an empty island, a dark void looming ahead of her.
There was nobody there, dear reader for they had all since moved away (except for corporate puppets, dear reader, reliving the same week over and over). And so Claire fled from that place, swimming furiously against the softer tide as it washed the last vestiges of fairy dust from her skin, until the sea foam hardened against her skin and thrust her unceremoniously backwards. She watched as a dozen lighthouses receded from view shimmering in the distance, and felt a crash that reverberated through her soul.
And where the crash had shaken her, she felt a change in herself.
Thus did Claire arrive in one of the smallest and strangest schools ever founded, an island that offered education (for free, dear reader, for knowledge is its own reward) to any fortunate enough to land there.
She awoke on her back, staring into a cloudy sky, so forcefully blue that she feared to continue looking up.
“Greetings! Salutations! You must be a new student!” Yelled a child from directly above her.
“A student?”
“Yeah! Everyone here is a student, so you must be too!”
“I’m not half so convinced of that as you seem to be.” replied Claire, puzzled. “I don’t remember ever signing up for school here—where is here?”
“Oh. Oh!” The boy replied. “You’re new new. I’ll go get a pafmlet.” (That’s how he said it, dear reader). He vanished, then, so suddenly he might never have been there at all, and returned with a stack of twelve pieces of paper, all folded in thirds and with brightly colored diagrams, and a pile of freshly stapled zines.
“So which of these applies to you?” He asked.
Claire read the titles of the miscellany of pamphlets and pulled two aside as she thumbed through the stack. The two she picked were a pamphlet entitled “So you aren’t where you used to be in some deep metaphysical sense: a guide to surviving your first time” and a zine labeled “Journal prompts for the truly confused.”
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Thanks for this.” She said. “But I really must be on my way.”
“That really isn’t advisable,” replied the boy, whose face contorted as if he were sucking on a lime.
“Who even are you?” Asked Claire, finally realizing that this was an actual boy in front of her and not some hallucination. (And, dear reader, wouldn’t you think you were hallucinating?)
“You can call me Jone.” Smirked the boy. “Everyone does. And you,” he began, breaking the fifth wall and addressing me directly, “Stop calling me a boy. I’m just a kid.”
“How can you talk to me?” I asked. “I’m an indirect representation of Claire’s views about the world. I’m not even a person.”
“I just have that effect on people.”
At this, Claire raised her hands with such emotion that we both fell silent. She turned to the kid with a disapproving frown.
“I’ll thank you not to mess with the narrator too much. She’s got a lot going on.” She then whirled to me and, without saying a word, glared so forcefully that I—well, I won’t have any more dialogue in this story.
After a long moment in silence, it seemed to Claire that there was no more good to be found in sitting with this strange kid and it seemed to Jone that there was nothing more interesting to be had around Claire at the moment. He was the first to break the silence.
“You’re boring. I’m gonna go to school now. Come join me when you’re ready.” He pointed to an old building, surrounded by moss-covered, weather-polished marble statues, and vanished.
Claire decided that since Jone had been so kind as to give her a bunch of pamphlets, it was the least she could do to look at them.
So you aren’t where you used to be in some deep metaphysical sense: a guide to surviving your first time
Congratulations! You have survived long enough to read this pamphlet!
With any luck, the strange unpleasantness that you experienced on your way here did a little bit to expand your worldview, so you are prepared to take this as fact.
You are in another world. Probably.
There are many worlds, anchored to different places in an aetheric tide.
For reasons unclear at present, the so-called aetheric tide resembles a river, despite the fact that rivers don’t usually have tides in the same way that oceans do. You had to go through that in order to get here.
You may have noticed points of light as you drifted through the tide. Each cluster of lights is a world and each point of light is a soul.
Different worlds follow different rules (and, indeed, those rules are set by different rulers). In general, the brighter a soul is, the more powerful its owner.
Feinbopulous’s classification divides worlds into three categories: System Worlds, in which some sort of omniscient computer program manages the world in an arbitrary fashion, High Fantasy Worlds, in which magic is common and flexible, and Low Fantasy Worlds, in which magic is rare, if it exists at all.
This pamphlet was printed on the island of Peppermint, a High Fantasy World dedicated to empowering those who visit here.
It is important to note that magic generally transfers better between similar worlds. A powerful wizard cast into urbane London would be much less powerful than that same wizard in the cave where she honed her powers.
The sole exception to this in the Aether, which allows powerful travelers to move more freely while oppressing and restricting those who have never had such power. One does not truly lose their magic until they crash in another world.
Steps to surviving
When you land in a new world, the authors recommend the following steps:
1. Determine the class of world you are in according to Feinbopulous.
2. Determine the level of hostility you are offered by the world:
a. If animals have tried to eat you, fight back and find civilization.
b. If nature is good to you, why push your luck? Find a way to learn about the world before blundering into major urban centers.
c. If people seem inordinately sedate, boring, dull, or repeat a phrase several times in a single day, flee.
3. Look for a tideswimmer’s guild. Most worlds that see a lot of aetheric traffic will have one of these. They can help get you situated.
Sidebar: Heroes
Some High Fantasy and System worlds have a history of pulling people through the aetheric tide in hopes that they will acquire increased powers or help with conflicts (by killing, mostly). People who summon “heroes” in this way are frequently charged with kidnapping and coercion to murder.
If you find yourself thrust into the role of a summoned hero, you should probably try to leave as expediently as possible.
Getting home again
Unfortunately for you, there aren’t many good ways to navigate the aetheric tide. Anyone with the strength of will or the power to traverse the river between worlds has more rewarding things to do than swimming for hours on end.
If your goal is to return home, and you manage to do so, then your experience of time might be slightly different that those of the people around you. There are varied reports, typically dismissed as fiction, of people returning home only to find their bodies restored to the point when they had left, or of returning home only to find that everyone they had ever known had long since grown old. Neither of these is particularly satisfying, so we encourage you to carefully consider at each point whether your current life is worth risking for your old one.
This is all academic, of course, because the aetheric tide only flows one way. To get to the world that you came from, you would have to fight against that tide for hours on end.
Gl;Hf
Please remember that no matter what vaguely terrifying world you live in, you probably only live once. So as terrifying and mixed up as your life might seem, it's more important that you continue to enjoy it than that you shield yourself from all possible danger.
After all, you might very well have been thrust into a world on the fringes of your imagination!
As frightened as you might be (and rightly!), we encourage you to stop and smell the roses.
So good luck, have fun, and feel free to explore the space of many worlds you you have access to.
... That was a lot. Maybe she'll read the rest tomorrow.