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"Uahhhhhh!" screamed a young woman, lying buck naked in the dirt. She panted heavily and held her shaking hands in front of her face. She was still screaming, but she didn’t really seem to notice it.
After a while of mindlessly flailing around, she seemed to calm down a bit.
"What the fuck?" Sarah asked herself breathlessly, after she regained her bearings a little bit. "Melissa?" She shouted and looked around her. But to her shock, she was alone in the woods. Or probably a swamp.
The next moment, she noticed that she was totally naked. "Shit!" She said it loudly. "Did someone put something in my drink and drag me out here to..." She couldn’t end this phrase. She couldn’t even think it through until the end. Too disgusting were the imaginations that waited behind these words.
"Melissa?" She tried again, but there was no answer coming back. "What the hell is happening right now?"
For a while, she just lay in the dirt, trying to calm her turbulent mind. She wanted to remember what exactly could have happened for her to be god knows where. And completely naked on top of that.
"What was this weird dream I had?" she wondered. "Was it even a dream?" It seemed more like a movie to her. Or a bad trip from a drug she would definitely never want to take again.
Her memory was still fuzzy, and she felt like she woke up from an eternity of sleeping while being completely drunk.
"I need to get out of here," she said groggily while trying to stand up. Just to be sure, she checked between her naked legs, but she didn’t notice anything different or painful. With a shaky breath, she stopped checking and tried to orient herself.
It couldn’t be too far away from the city she lived in. She often took hikes in nature. So if her mind would only be a little clearer, she was sure she could remember where she was.
At least she hoped that this was the case. With her bare feet, she gingerly started to walk on soft-looking parts of dirt and began shouting for help.
Her own voice was way too loud for her fuzzy brain. But the combination of walking and screaming at the top of her lungs seemed to help a little.
"There was a light!" She remembered. She was standing next to Melissa in the Ceasar Club, talking with one of her co-workers. And suddenly, a bright light started shining out of nowhere. She even tried to close her eyes, but the light was so bright that it didn’t help at all.
"And then..." she tried to remember, crouching down and holding her head. She heard certain... things. Or did she see it? Both? She wasn’t sure anymore. Weird stuff about some strange initialisation of a… "System?"
Suddenly, she saw and kind of heard something.
"What the.." With a gaping mouth and her hands still clasped around her face, she stared at the white holographic words hovering in front of her.
It kind of hurt her eyes to try to look at it. It seemed neither close nor far away. It was more like it was imprinted into her brain. Even closing her eyes didn’t work. The same was true for "hearing" it. It was more like she knew the words, like remembering someone saying something. It was a very unsettling feeling.
The system already had more to say.
"Please enjoy my what? Is this a joke? Hey, what the hell is going on? Who is doing this?" She screamed into the woods, but nobody reacted.
"Oh well, thank you so much for wishing me luck for having a LOW CHANCE OF SURVIVAL!" she angrily screamed at the now gone words. But nothing answered her.
"Are you kidding me? What is going on?" She asked herself. But disturbingly, she kind of knew that she had heard the truth.
It felt like there was new knowledge inside her head that just shouldn’t be there. Like someone just stuffed something inside of her.
As bizarre as it seemed, a system seemed to exist inside her mind. And possibly also inside the minds of other people. This weird entity placed her completely naked inside of something it called a spatial error. Whatever that meant.
The more she thought about it, the more the existence of the system seemed normal. Like it had always been there, just like her arms and legs. Her whole body started shuddering while she experienced her mind being altered in real time. It was by far the most unsettling experience of her life. She literally saw memories just vanishing. Afterwards, she was left with only the memory, that she had just forgotten something. And after a while, even this memory faded away, leaving her feeling completely empty.
The system took quite some time, rummaging through her brain and erasing everything. But at some point, the feeling ebbed down, and she sighed a breath of relief.
She knew that moments before, the mere concept of there being a system was bizarre to her. But now it was completely normal. The disparity between what she thought she needed to feel, and what she actually felt was enough to break most people’s minds.
While feeling disoriented, she heard a system prompt.
"Uhhhh." Sarah couldn’t help herself from looking at the prompt like a lunatic. She was trying to process all the things that had happened in the last few minutes. "What’s up with this weird achievement name?" She asked the system, but nothing answered her.
It was a deeply upsetting experience, but to the point of being the first one to not lose her mind or kill herself? That was a bit extreme.
‘Alright’ she thought to herself, while trying to stay calm and rationalize the situation. ‘The system told me something about my current situation. Me being in a spatial error and all and having to find my way back. Soooo what to do now?’
In a faraway corner of her mind, something told her that it was absurd to believe something like this. But this voice was continuously getting further away.
‘What did the system say again that I should say or think? Status?’
Right as she thought about it, another semi-transparent holographic screen popped up in front of her. She curiously gawked at it.
Details:
Level: 1
Name: Sarah Anna Fischer
Class: None
Race: Human
Status: Confused (50% higher MP consumption)
HP: 50/50 SP: 10/20 MP: 10/10
Achievements:
* How the hell are you still sane?
Affinities:
Mind (Mid) Body (Mid) Energy (Low)
Specialisations:
Mind (0/2)
Body (0/2)
Energy (0/1)
Basic Stats:
Strength: 4
Dexterity: 11
Endurance: 4
Resistance: 3
Intelligence: 20
Force: 1
Special Stats:
Magic Power :1
Active Skills:
None
Passive Skills:
Struggle (Conditional passive)
Slightly crazy
Mean eye
She blankly stared at the information that was written about herself. Especially the passive skills.
"What do you mean slightly crazy? Hey?!" She shouted into the air, but once again, the system didn’t answer her. She was a bit grumpy about that part, but it honestly didn’t really surprise her.
It was something a lot of people said to her during her life. She didn’t care, but she was slightly sorry for all the people she had beaten up because of this.
"So sorry, Tom, for your genitals." She said a prayer for a guy who was once her boyfriend and had a restraining order against her. But she had a hunch that this wouldn’t matter anymore. "Wait, what's a restraining order?" she asked herself confusedly, clutching her head in a sudden headache. Some moments later, the whole incident was forgotten, and she looked at the status screen again.
She studied it for quite a while but didn’t understand much. She only got more information about certain things when she thought about them. To be precise, her achievements and her skills. The name of the achievement and the skills were mostly silly, but they seemed to help her out.
Achievements:
How the hell are you still sane?: Resistance to mind damage increased by 10%.
Passive Skills:
Struggle (Conditional passive): Your resistance is increased in dire situations.
Slightly crazy: Most things won’t bother you that much. If certain conditions are met, however, there is a slight chance that you will go berserk.
Mean eye: There is a certain chance that other beings will momentarily freeze in fear when they look at you. Higher chance with sentient beings.
Somehow she thought that she had seen things like this in the past. But she couldn’t tell where or why. For now, the thing that made most sense to her were her basic stats, which were mostly intuitive.
Strength, dexterity, endurance, and intelligence seemed pretty straightforward. But she didn’t know what kind of resistance the system was showing her. Mental? Physical? And also, what exactly is force? If strength hadn’t shown up on the screen, she would have thought that force would be muscular strength. But it probably wasn’t.
For a short moment, she remembered a scene of two men in brown robes holding weird sticks made of light in their hands, and she chuckled lightly. In the next moment, she asked herself why she had laughed a moment before. Was "slightly crazy" really enough to describe her state of mind?
She didn’t know if her stats were high or low. But she wasn’t into any sports, so she probably wasn’t as in shape as she could be.
With a deep sigh, she thought about closing the status window. It closed immediately, like it had never been there in the first place.
"What to do now?"