Jacob walked into detention for the first time in his entire life. He was 16 years old and it was the first week of his sophomore year. He saw his best friend Max, who was the whole reason he was in detention in the first place, seated in a desk three rows back from the front. Max had black hair cut in a military style courtesy of his ex-marine father, and was already over six foot tall with signs he would be just as large as his father. Jacob shook his head and looked at the five other members of their impromptu club as he walked to the seat next to Max. Ramon, the typical jock with his letterman on and his shaggy, dirty blonde hair was in front of Max. Andy, who would definitely classify as a nerd, he had won the math decathlon for the school for the last three years, was in front of Ramon and with his five foot five stature and maybe being 100 pounds soaking wet he looked like a child. Mary, your typical girl next door, had long red hair and a light dusting of freckles under her green eyes. She was seated to the left of Andy and in front of Alexis, who was co-captain of the cheerleading squad. Alexis had the kind of personality that would scare children, she was also one of the prettiest girls in the school and could get away with it. The last member of detention was just coming through the door, Isabel. She was the other co-captain of the cheer squad but her personality could not be any more different than Alexis’s. She had long blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes, she was also the same girl I had a crush on since the third grade. I hoped she would take the open seat next to me but she sat beside her best friend Aexis instead. I knew she would sit there, she had hardly paid me any attention over the years and I supposed that made myself the stereotypical unrequited lovesick loser in this group. Finally there was the ancient and terribly mean teacher at the front of the class Miss Finsley.
“Alright you delinquents, you are all going to sit here for exactly one hour in absolute silence for missing the school assembly today,” Finsley smirked as she said those words “ I will be sitting here the whole time and if any of you break any rules then you will be seeing me here tomorrow again.”
Jacob looked around and noticed some of the others pulled out their homework so he decided he might as well get a jump on his Trigonometry homework himself. And so they all sat there in absolute silence with Finsley staring at them the whole time until 55 minutes had passed and everyone began to put up their things to get ready to leave. All of a sudden an extremely bright purple light began shining under all the students.
“Whoever is doing that will have a weeks worth of detention!” screamed Finsley while everyone else couldn’t figure out what was happening or where it was coming from. Just as Jacob’s eyes began to make out strange symbols mixed into the light, it was gone and so were all their surroundings.
“Welcome prophesied heroes!” Jacob heard, and that was when he noticed the people all around them. They were dressed in strange clothes like they were straight out of a renaissance faire and the one who spoke to them had a golden circlet on his head like a crown. Beside this man was a girl about their age who could compete with anyone in their high school in the looks department and come out on top. All the others were a mix of people in priest looking robes and fancy looking clothes.
Max was the first to recover and looked right at the guy who seemed to be in charge as he asked, “Who are you, and where are we?”
The leader smiled and responded, “excellent questions my boy, I am King Artorius of the Lightfell Kingdom, and you have been transported to our world from yours to save us from the Demon King!”
Jacob shared glances with everyone and they looked just as shocked and in disbelief as he felt. Before he knew what he was doing he blurted “you can’t be serious can you? Even if what you said about us going to another world is true, what can us teenagers do about it?”
The king didn’t look offended by the question, or if he did he hid it well, “another excellent question that I believe will be better answered later, if you would be so kind as to follow my daughter, Princess Alicia, she will show you all to your apartments in the royal castle where you may collect your thoughts and at dinner I will endeavor to answer all the questions you can think of.”
The girl next to the king, who I now knew to be the princess, curtsied to us and said “if you would please follow me.”
We all looked at each other before Max shrugged and began to follow her and once he started, we all followed him. The princess was silent and so were we as we followed her through all the twisting corridors in what had to be a massive castle until she stopped outside of a set of double doors and said “Inside here there will be a common area for sitting as well as individual rooms for each of you and two bathrooms. A servant will be by later in order to bring you dinner” and with that she turned around and walked quickly away.
“I get the feeling that she doesn’t like us very much for some reason,” Max said, then since he was in the lead he opened the double doors into the suite of rooms.
The rooms were absolutely massive! The common area was as big as Jacob’s family’s entire house and the individual bedrooms were similarly oversized. The bathrooms had multiple shower stalls with a shower head at the top and jets in the side walls. The rooms screamed opulence and they were far nicer than anywhere Jacob had ever stayed before. It was crazy to think they had all these nice amenities and he saw no less than three guards on the way here in metal armor with swords strapped to their sides.
Once everyone had explored all the rooms and the novelty had run out everyone was in the main common area seated on the couches and chairs there. It was quiet until they all seemed to start speaking at once “what are we gonna do?” “do you really believe what he said?” “they can’t seriously think they can hold us do they?” and no one could be understood until Jacob shouted “Hey!” and once he had everyone’s attention he felt extremely nervous. Some of these people were much more popular than him in school and the only one he really knew was Max. But he swallowed his nerves and told them what he was thinking, “I don’t know if that guy was telling us the truth or not, but after us moving from the classroom to here in an instant I think we should just go with the assumption that everything he said is true. If everything he said is true then when we all meet again I think we should have one of us ask him everyone’s questions that way we can get the answers we all deserve” Jacob felt out of breath after saying all that to these people and wasn’t making eye contact with anyone after.
“Who died and put you in charge?” Ramon asked aggressively.
“Lay off him Ramon” Max defended Jacob “ you know he’s right. The most important question to me is can we get home?”
The next person to speak was Mary “They said they wanted us to fight some Demon King, I don’t know anything about fighting.”
“That’s right! Who do they think they are asking us to fight their battles! They can’t make us do anything!” Ramon’s voice grew louder as he spoke and Jacob saw heads nodding around the circle.
“Who do we want to speak for everyone?” Asked Max.
“You spoke to the king earlier so why don’t you do it Max?” Alexis chimed in. Everyone else agreed with what she said so we spent the next hours ironing out the exact questions that we wanted answered and what order.
When the knock came to summon them for dinner they believed they had all their most important questions ready. They had decided that questions like “do y’all have cheeseburgers here?” were not very important despite what others believed. They wound down in the castle from their apartments passing massive tapestries and artwork that lined the walls. It was all themed after a shining figure slaying different monsters but always with the same golden sword. The stone corridors gave way to an absolutely massive room that was mostly taken up by the dark wooden tables. There were guards stationed around the room but other than them there were only two occupants to the room, the King and Princess. They were seated at the end of one of the long tables and it was there that the servant was leading them.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Come! Sit, and enjoy a nice meal and then we can begin answering all your questions when it is over” the King gestured for them all to take seats on either side of the table.
Ramon quickly jumped into the seat next to the Princess while everyone else just took whatever seats they could. Max sat right next to the king since he would be asking the questions for everyone and I sat next to him. Jacob was both excited and nervous when Isabel sat next to him. Once everyone was seated the doors at the back opened and in came servant after servant with silver domed trays that they placed in front of all of us at once before lifting the lids in sequence to reveal an amazing meal. It was probably the best meal Jacob had ever had in his life and even though there was no talking it didn’t seem awkward as everyone was just enjoying the food in front of them.
Once everyone had set down their forks the king looked at everyone “now while I know you have many questions, and I will be happy to answer them all, I believe it will help make everything more clear if you all were to think the word ‘status’. It should help you understand some things of this world.”
We all looked at each other and while we all shared in the confusion I just shrugged and went with it ‘status’ and before my very eyes words began appearing as if by magic! And from the startled gasps I was hearing from everyone, I wasn’t the only one.
Welcome to the world of Avaria Traveler!
Due to your status as a world traveler you will get an additional stat point to distribute on level ups!
Thank you for coming and may you succeed in saving the world from the Demon King!
Title: World Traveler
Jacob Lawrence Age: 16
Level: 0
Class: none
HP: 100
Mana: 120
Stamina: 85
Strength 8
Dexterity 9
Constitution 10
Intelligence 12
Skills: Universal Language
It was nuts! As if Jacob were in some kind of video game! And all these numbers, was an 8 in strength bad and a 12 in Intelligence good? Or were all of his numbers higher or lower than the norm? He wasn’t the only one who was shocked, everyone else was in the same boat and looking at each other and trying to compare numbers. I told Max mine and he told me he had an 8 in strength like me, 11 in Dexterity, 9 in Constitution, and 9 in Intelligence. Our stats were wildly different from each other and we had no clue what they meant.
“Now that you have all seen your statuses I can tell you that the numbers tell the direction in which you will most likely lean when it comes to your abilities. High starting strength means a warriors path of taking hits and giving them back, high dexterity is the path of rangers and rogues where the nimbleness can make all the difference, high constitution means you will be able to take more hits and heal faster which is much appreciated by most anyone and finally high intelligence is the path of mages and healers. These rules aren’t completely set in stone but it is a good baseline” the king explained to everyone “the average number for an adult with no level ups is 10. The stats are fairly straight forward in general, strength governs how much you can lift and the physical force you can apply to the world, dexterity controls your fast twitch muscles flexibility and reaction speeds, constitution is the sturdiness of your body as well as what governs the amount of health you have, and lastly intelligence governs the amount of mana you have. An increase does bring faster processing speed of your mind and allow you to utilize higher tier spells but someone with 7 intelligence going to 15 does not suddenly become a genius, you are limited by your natural gifts. There are some other finer points to the stats that we can get into but those we can worry about later. Now on to your questions.” The king looked at us expectantly as he ended his speech.
Max glanced at everyone before he started speaking “while I think we definitely all want some more information on all of that, everyone decided to elect me as the spokesperson to ask all of our relevant questions that way it was a smoother process. That being said our first and most important question is ‘can we go home?’ That is what we most want to know”
The king glanced at his daughter before answering “The legends tell us that once the demon king has been defeated his core holds the secrets to the saviors going home.”
“We have heard talk about this demon king and how y’all expect us to somehow be able to defeat him. We are just a bunch of high school kids that have never fought in our lives. What could we possibly do?”
“Ah but you are no mere kids, you are saviors! You receive one more stat point every level than everyone else and once you are awarded your classes at level 10 one of you will be selected as the Hero!” The king finished the last part with a look that said he thought the hero was some kind of saint.
“That doesn’t change the fact that you stole us from our homes and families with no choice given to us and then you expect us to fight some kind of war for you?” Max was practically shouting by the end before he got quiet again “what right do you have to take us from our homes and tell us we have to fight for you. We have no reason to fight your battles for you.”
The king looked troubled while the princess had an angry look to her face. It was the princess who was the first to recover saying “how dare you talk to my father like that he-“
“Stop Alicia,” the king interrupted her “he has a very good point. The gods gave us the summoning circle six thousand years ago and every thousand years we use it to summon new saviors to help us in our time of need. We are unable to defeat him, and without the Hero and his party we would all perish and our world would be no more. Of course to any savior that decided to stay in our world and not return to theirs then we would provide commensurate rewards and any that wish to go home must defeat the demon king. We will train all of you and develop you into the greatest fighters in the world!”
Jacob glanced at everyone’s faces as the king spoke and he noticed many of them feeling the same sympathies as himself when the king talked of them being unable to defeat the demon king on their own while he noticed Ramon got excited when he heard of the rewards for those who decided to stay. That made Jacob pause, if they did fight and defeat the demon king then would he want to leave? There was already magic and a sense of being important in this world while all he had to go home to were an alcoholic father and cruel mother.
He may have been making a hasty decision because he had no better home life to go to or maybe it was because his heart was moved by all those innocent people who would be hurt if he did nothing.. or maybe it was because the princess was even prettier than Isabel. No, it couldn’t be that! But he stood up and announced “I’ll fight for you and defend you from the demon king.”
The king was beaming at him while the princess didn’t look angry for the first time all night but Max and everyone else looked at him like he had grown a second head! “Are you crazy Jacob! This is real fighting. You could die!”
“Maybe but it doesn’t sound like we have much of a choice and I would like to do my part to save the world”
After that everyone thought about it and even though most of them were scared they all decided that they would try
“Excellent! Thank you very much” the king couldn’t keep the smile off his face afterwards “well I will give you three days to settle in before I put you with the instructors who will teach you how to defend yourselves and where you should focus your efforts.”
For the rest of the night the king told us a little more about the world. How health, mana, and stamina were calculated, how quickly they would refill which was the stat that determines them per minute so I would regain mana at 12 per minute. He told us the history of their world and how the demon king would keep reappearing every thousand years without fail and how they would summon heroes in order to save themselves. I thought it strange that their world had a monster who kept respawning every one thousand years without fail so far. By the end of the night we were all exhausted and we went back to our rooms with a farewell to the two royals as we left the room and went back to our own. We unanimously decided to go to the rooms we had chosen earlier in the day to sleep instead of talking about all we had heard. We could do that during our three day break before training.