It was Tuesday.
“Izzie, please wake up, I’ve made a terrible mistake!”
Isabelle’s eyelids cracked slowly. The bright, flourescent light of her dorm room greeted her a grim hello. The calming sound of a babbling brook, however, lulled her back to a trancelike state.
“Izzie!” said Erin.
Erin just had to keep pushing. Didn’t she know Isabelle’d been up all night?
“…whaddafuckdoyouwan…” Isabelle said half-consciously.
“It’s the toilet, Izzie! The toilet!” said Erin.
Isabelle looked with foggy glances to the floor. There was water pooling on the disappointing gray carpet. There was a soaking puddle under her laptop.
“Oh my god! My computer!” Isabelle sprung to her feet and yanked her laptop up, water leaking over her cold toes. “Erin, what the fuck happened?”
Erin pushed her short, black hair out of her eyes and chuckled nervously. “Well, um, I had this old apple core under my bed, it was really gross, and, um, well, our trash can was full.”
“And?!” Isabelle shook her computer about, spraying droplets everywhere as the ‘babbling brook’ in their connected bathroom continued running ever faster.
“So I tried to flush it down the toilet.” Erin chuckled again, pulling her crop top over her pierced navel.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, Erin?” asked Isabelle.
“I said I was sorry!” said Erin.
“No you didn’t!” Isabelle grabbed her phone, threw on a hoodie and stormed out of their dorm room. Erin was such a shitshow of a roommate.
Isabelle sat on a cold bench in the common area and opened her laptop. The screen was soaking, and none of the lights flickered on. She pressed the power button, but after she pushed it down, it didn’t pop back up.
“God damn it!” Isabelle slammed her laptop shut and cried. She felt a buzzing in her kangaroo pocket. Isabelle pulled out her phone.
Honors Thesis Presentation - Anthropology - 1 hour
Adrenaline coursed through her veins. Isabelle opened her university’s cloud storage, hoping she’d remembered to save her work to it last night.
“Fucking hell,” Isabelle spat. The last copy of her thesis she had online was from three weeks ago. It was the draft where she’d written in a swear every five words, and was really more of an outline than anything else.
“You look like you’ve had a rough night, Izzie,” said Sal as he walked by with a smirk and a chuckle.
Isabelle felt sick to her stomach just looking at Sal… his greasy hair, greasy skin… when she saw Sal, she thought grease. Maybe he’d just really liked reading ‘The Outsiders’ when he was younger. Maybe she ought to call him Pony Boy. But Sal wasn’t golden, he was far from it.
“Seriously, you don’t look like you’re doing too well. What’s wrong?”
If it had been any other day, at any other time, Isabelle would’ve told Sal to get bent. But she was weak. He knew it, and he kept standing there. In a stuttering flurry, Isabelle explained her situation.
“Oh, that’s no big deal. The battery’s probably in flux. You just need to do some simple data recovery.”
Flux? It sounded like bullshit, but Isabelle didn’t want to risk missing out on a quick fix. And Sal was, though annoying, also fairly persuasive.
“Look, I’ve got some recovery tools in my room. How much time do you have, again?” asked Sal.
Isabelle had fifty minutes.
“Shit. We better hurry," said Sal.
----------------------------------------
Isabelle sat in Sal’s grim, dark dorm room. Her teeth were chattering as he popped her laptop open and fiddled with it, looking like he was about to break a sweat. How was he warm in here? The thermostat must've been set to fifty four.
Isabelle looked down. Her nipples were hard! She crossed her arms over her chest. How embarassing.
Worse still, Sal seemed to be losing layers of clothing the longer he worked. He’d started in a thick leather jacket and three layers underneath. Now he was in a white tank top. And Isabelle’s laptop did not look any closer to being fixed. Isabelle crossed her arms.
“Um, Sal." Isabelle squirmed, seeing that she only had about half an hour left before her presentation. “Is this going to work, or isn’t it? I don’t have a lot of time.”
“You look cold,” he said, sidestepping her question. “Do you want to wear my jacket?”
Isabelle looked over at Sal's leather jacket, laying in a pile of stinky clothes in the shadows. She dry heaved.
“I’m good, thanks," said Isabelle.
“Okay.” Sal stretched and yawned, flexing his muscles. “Your laptop should be all good to go in about fifteen minutes. It just needs to sit and dry out a little at this point.”
Isabelle was getting irritated. “That’s too long! I’ll have to run to the classroom at this point!”
“Just email your professor and tell them you’ll be late. It’s fine. You’re stressing way too much about this. Who cares about a thesis, anyway?”
Isabelle almost choked on her own spit. “You can’t be serious! I’ve been working towards this for years!”
“Look, just calm down," said Sal. "If the whole degree thing doesn’t work out for you, my dad’s law firm is always looking for interns. It’s really not a problem. Now, why don’t we just lay on the bed for a second and relax?”
Isabelle looked over to the bed for the first time. It was twin sized, covered only in black sheets. Black sheets that showed every single dry, crusty stain that’d ever been placed on them, so much so they almost seemed to have a mottled texture.
“Give me my computer back," said Isabelle.
“What?” Sal cocked his head like a puppy pretending he didn’t understand.
“Give me my fucking computer, Sal," said Isabelle.
“Okay, fine,” Sal handed Isabelle her computer in two pieces, “But don’t come crying to me when it doesn’t work.”
Isabelle ran down the well-manicured sidewalks of her university, clutching the two halves of her laptop as if it were a precious child. If she really pushed it, she could still make it to her presentation. She was only about three minutes late.
Maybe someone in class would know how to fix her laptop. Hell, maybe Isabelle’s professor would see what happened and give her an extension. He liked her well enough. Isabelle just knew she couldn’t be another minute late.
Isabelle reached the final crosswalk. Its light was five seconds too short, so cars turning left always rushed through the red light.
The crosswalk told Isabelle not to walk forward, but anybody with a brain knew that if you looked both ways and saw that nobody was coming you could go ahead and walk. Or, in Isabelle’s case, run. So that’s what she did.
But it was a fatal mistake, because at that moment there was a cyclist riding from the sidewalk to the road at a breakneck pace.
“Shit!" said the cyclist, looking up from the phone in his hand just soon enough to notice Isabelle. "Hey, lady, watch ou—”
Isabelle felt the wind rush out of her lungs as she fell to her side. Her laptop crunched horribly on the asphalt. There was a horrible pain and cracking sensation in her neck and the back of her head. She couldn’t move.
“Holy shit! Holy fucking shit!” said the cyclist, clambering to his feet from the remains of his twisted bicycle.
Isabelle tried to respond, tried to scream, tried to cry, but she couldn’t do anything.
He walked over to her, “Hey, are you okay? I’m so, fuck, I’m so fucking sorry, I didn’t see you coming…”
His whining faded into nothing. Everything went black.
Isabelle opened her eyes again. She was lying on her back in a cot. A siren was blaring and machines were beeping incessantly around her.
“Stay with me! Come on, stay with me!” said someone with coffee breath that Isabelle had never met.
Isabelle pissed herself and passed out.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
----------------------------------------
A system appeared out of a rift from an unknown dimension. It was an apocalypse. It was the end of the world. Monsters crawled out of the rift and started killing people. One monster ate Isabelle’s ambulance. She died.
----------------------------------------
A green lettering appeared one by one in an otherwise blank, empty nothingness.
[Processing…]
[Processing…]
[Processing…]
[Soul Processed]
The letters blinked off. A low, soft tone echoed through eternity. More lettering appeared.
[Acquiring Vessel…]
[Acquiring Vessel…]
[Vessel Acquired]
[Preparing Soul For Acquisition…]
[Preparing Soul For Acquisition…]
[Soul Prepared]
[Loading Environment…]
[Loading Environment…]
[Loading Complete]
[Preparing consciousness for reintegration…]
[Reintegrating…]
[Reintegrated.]
[Welcome to Beaubinte, Isabelle.]
[You are set to start as a Level 1 Human]
[Please confirm your character acquisition.]
[Y/N]
[…]
[…]
Isabelle felt a strange coldness growing as the dots repeated before her sight, over and over again.
[…]
[…]
[Please confirm your character acquisition.]
[Y/N]
[…]
[…]
[Soul will experience timeout in 60s]
Isabelle was sure this had to be some sort of crazy hallucination brought on by painkillers, but really she’d just been eaten by a monster of the apocalypse.
[55s]
The green lettering was still waiting on her response.
[49s]
What did ‘soul timeout’ mean, anyway?
[43s]
Isabelle didn’t want to find out. But she also didn’t know what to do.
[38s]
She tried to say something, to scream, but Isabelle didn't have a mouth.. She felt in the moment as if all she was, was pure awareness.
[33s]
Isabelle concentrated on the green ‘Y’ staring her in the face, right next to the countdown timer, directing all her thoughts towards it. ‘Y,’ she thought with strain, ‘Y!’
[Character Acquisition Confirmed]
[Waking Host…]
----------------------------------------
“Hey, are you okay?” said a man's nasally voice.
“What?” Isabelle said, rubbing the softball-shaped welt on the back of her head. She felt absolutely abysmal but was lying in a soft bed in a dark room, and that was a lot better than nothing. Her vision was blurry.
“I asked if you were okay. You got hit pretty bad back there. You’ve got to be more careful around the shipyards," said the man.
“The shipyards?” Isabelle blinked, still unable to rightly focus on the figure leaning over her.
“Yes. I know you’re from Surtada, so I understand this might be a little confusing, but generally we don’t have a lot of humans unloading cargo around here. Then again, you do daylight deliveries, which is fairly convenient, so I guess I can’t complain too much," said the man.
“Surtada? My… kind?” Isabelle felt silly repeating this stranger so much, but she also couldn’t make out what exactly he was saying to her. It seemed like a bunch of nonsense. Maybe she’d had a stroke.
“You are from Surtada, aren’t you?” asked the man.
Isabelle finally found herself able to focus her vision. She gasped. The man was not a man, it was some sort of dragon-person hybrid. That dragon-person was leaning over her, tending to her wounds.
“What? What’s the problem?” asked the dragon-person.
“What are you?” Isabelle asked.
“What am I?” the dragon-person asked. He puffed out his jagged, ill-shapen chest. “I’m a baker by trade.”
“That’s not what I mean!” said Isabelle.
“Gods,” the dragon-person said with a sigh. “Haven’t you ever seen a kobold before?”
“A snowball?” Isabelle asked. She felt stupid as she said it, almost like her brain had been reduced to a sixth of its former size.
[Clarification: Your workable intelligence is directly related to your int and wis score, as well as your current level. You are level one, with a wis of 1 and int of 6.]
It was all Isabelle could do to keep herself from jumping as she beheld the green letters type themselves over her vision, just like before she woke up. What exactly was it talking about?
“A kobold!” said the dragon-person. "Not a snowball."
“What’s a kobold?” asked Isabelle.
“I’m a kobold! Gods, that head trauma must’ve done a number on your human brain," said the kobold. "Don’t worry, though. I ought to be able to find a potion or something that helps with that. Just, eh, just focus on getting better, okay?”
The kobold walked off, muttering to himself about humans and rudeness. And so Isabelle was left lying in the bed in shock.
Fifteen minutes later, the kobold returned, shrugging.
“I didn’t see any potions for memory or sanity. You might wanna check the corner store for that. Until then, here, have this.” The kobold handed Isabelle a loaf of bread.
She tore off a piece. Or, she tried to. She tried again to tear off a piece. A large chunk of bread snapped off, spilling brittle crumps in the air. Isabelle took a cautious bite. It was crunchy and stale and it tasted abysmal, like eating a moldy shoe.
“So," said the kobold. “How do you like it?”
“Oh, um.” Isabelle forced a smile .“It’s, um, it's delicious.”
[+2 hp]
Isabelle felt a little stronger and a little less faint, despite the foulness of the bread.
“Wow,” said the kobold. “You look like you really needed that. Be sure to eat more, hell, eat as much bread as you want.”
“As much as I want?” asked Isabelle.
“Of course," said the kobold. "I’m Tahsi, by the way.”
“Tahsi?” That was an odd name. Then again, maybe it wasn’t, for a Kobold. Isabelle took another crunchy bite. “Nice to meet you. I’m Isabelle.”
[+2 hp]
Were those green letters going to pop over her vision every time she ate?
Tahsi nodded, “I’m glad you like my bread so much. It’s not every day I get paid such a fine compliment.”
“Any time, Tahsi. It’s… lovely.”
[+1 hp]
Hmm. The number was lower that time. Then again, Isabelle was starting to feel almost normal now. As normal as she could, at least, talking to a kobold and eating his stale, brittle bread in what appeared to be some sort of stange alternate reality.
“Say, Tahsi, can I ask you something?” asked Isabelle.
[+1 hp]
“Does a Bugbear shit in the woods?” Tahsi asked back.
“Does a what?” asked Isabelle.
[hp full]
"Don’t worry about it. Ask away," said Tahsi.
“Thanks," said Isabelle. "Where exactly are we?”
“No problem," said Tahsi. "You’re in the Port District of Thres, Isabelle.”
“Thres?” asked Isabelle.
“Yea," said Tahsi. You know, capital of the Protectorate of Ozi?”
“Never heard of it," said Isabelle.
“Never heard of what?" asked Tahsi. "Thres, or the Protectorate of Ozi?”
“Neither of them," said Isabelle.
“Whew. You’re gonna stick out like a sore thumb around here," said Tahsi.
“I mean, I can’t be surprised about that. It’s not like I’m a miniature walking dragon," said Isabelle.
“Kobold, Isabelle, it’s not like you’re a kobold," said Tahsi. "Let’s not be offensive, now.”
“Sorry," said Isabelle.
A loud knocking echoed through the room. Tahsi got anxious.
“Oh dear. Get in the cupboard over there, Isabelle," Tahsi said.
“What?” asked Isabelle.
Tahsi suddenly looked quite hostile, which was not difficult for a kobold. “Cupboard. Now.”
Isabelle rushed to the cupboard door, swung it open, and stashed herself inside. With a click, she was submerged in shadow.
[Current visibility: 0/100]
Isabelle wasn’t sure how she felt about the green lettering.
“Answer this door now!” someone said from outside.
“Coming! I’m coming!” said Tahsi.
Isabelle heard Tahsi’s door creak open and heavy, metal boots clanking on the splintery wooden floor. There sounded to be a long chain dragging behind them.
“Tahsi Rokdi,” said a deep, feminine voice. “What have you been up to, baker?”
“Nothing, Kolti, nothing. Just, you know, tending the shop. Getting some sourdough ready for Nurptu Horte, in fact,” said Tahsi.
“Old Nurptu,” Kolti said with a chuckle. “They sure do know how to throw a good party, eh?”
“Yes, indeed they do, indeed they do,” said Tahsi.
“Say, Tahsi Rokdi, why do you seem so nervous?” asked Kolti.
[Speechcraft Attempt: Deceive]
Isabelle jumped at the apparition of this box of text, bumping her hip into a small can of beans.
“Oh! I’m not nervous. Not nervous at all," said Tahsi. "Truly.”
[Speechcraft Failed]
“Truly?” Again did Kolti pace, the foul chain dragging on and on. “Then why’re you trembling?”
[Speechcraft Attempt: Deceive]
“Oh. That’s just, well, that’s just a tick," said Tahsi.
[Speechcraft Failed]
Isabelle was queasy. Why was the text telling her Tahsi was lying? As if anyone would have trouble realizing that from context alone…
[Clarification: Certain players with emotional and situational debuffs, including a lowered speechcraft level in comparison to your own, would not have been able to tell that Tahsi was lying.]
Isabelle was surprised that the text seemed to respond to her thoughts. Absentmindedly, she reached to rest her hand on a shelf, accidentally bumping a broom against the wall instead.
[Current visibility: 35/100]
“Hey!" said Kolti. “What was that? Is someone else in here?”
Isabelle felt her stomach lurch as the footsteps came closer to the cupboard.
[Current visibility: 44/100]
“Who was eating all this bread?” Kolti asked.
[Speechcraft Attempt: Deceive]
“Oh, um, that was me,” Tahsi interjected.
[Speechcraft Succeeded]
“Sounds about right for a baker. Always stuffing your face, eh?” said Kolti.
Isabelle could almost feel Tahsi roll his serpentine eyes. If he even could roll his eyes. Could he? She’d have to remember to ask him, if they ever got out of this situation alive.
Isabelle sneezed.
[Current visibility: 58/100]
“What was that?” Kolti started hissing, slinging her chain around menacingly. “Alright, Tahsi. You’re hiding someone in here. A human, perhaps?”
Tahsi did not respond.
“What, Tabaxi got your tongue?” Kolti asked.
No response.
“You’re definitely hiding someone. The only question is where… hmm… maybe in… the cupboard?” Kolti said.
Isabelle felt the blood drain from her face as the lady stepped close to the cupboard door, grasping its handle and slowly pulling the door open.