Six a.m., exactly.

  November, maybe?

  A Tuesday.

  Dawn arrived like an acid trip wearing off and suddenly the night sky was just gone. The moon and stars winked out of existence faster than the human eye could perceive, replaced in a startling instant by blue skies and birdsong. The sun's rays beamed proudly, igniting a flurry of activity all over the world, bringing warmth, life, and most of all, the light.

  The fucking sun, Greg thought, as he shielded his eyes. Thinks it sooo fucking big, doesn't it?

  The small village of Blucliffe greeted the dawn with the crowing of roosters and the cozy sound of dozens of industrious feet hitting the floorboards, getting out of bed for another busy day of honest hard work, doing... whatever medieval peasants do. Bake, farm, fish. Talk shit about the Town Stranger. Occasionally, chase him with pitchforks and call him a witch.

  Greg had been awake for hours, tracking his prey. The son-of-a-bitch had already damn near taken his eye and now he was laying low, hoping Greg would give up the chase. No such luck, today. Even if Greg wanted to let the creature roam free, now it was personal. Plus, he needed the bounty for booze. He traced a finger along the bleeding slash, less than two inches from his eye. He adjusted his glasses and steeled himself for the melee to come. I wonder if it'll leave a scar... yeah, it was definitely personal now. Fuck the bounty.

  That chicken is dead meat when I get my hands on him.

  Most of the time, he couldn't sleep for shit anyway. He didn't technically need to, except to stave off the gibbering madness that sets in after about 50 or 60 hours. His body no longer required rest, unless he got hurt, or was really exerting himself, like he was doing now. Plus, he liked watching the jankass, poorly implemented sun "rise" and "set". It was his daily reminder, an affirmation: Nothing here is real. Maybe not even you.

  How much damage did that bastard cock do, anyway? He summoned his heads-up display and selected his Character Sheet.

  CHARACTER SHEET

  Greg Good

  Race: Human

  Class: Commoner

  Level: 0

  Vitality: 24 (25)

  Essence: 8 (10)

  Might: 1

  Agility: 1

  Fortitude: 1

  Intellect: 1

  Cunning: 1

  Willpower: 1

  Charisma: 1

  Manipulation: 1

  Appearance: 1

  A forgettable peasant with the physical presence of wet bread and the survival instincts of a startled pigeon. Drops nothing of value, including conversation.

  There was more but it didn’t get any more not-depressing. His stats were trash, and he was fine with that.

  Only 1 damage? It felt way worse than that. Greg was surprised. He'd been sure he was going to wind up with a cool facial scar. Fuck. I'm wasting Essence dashing around like this... fuck this shit.

  So, just like that, Greg gave up. There were easier ways to get booze money, and besides, if the Questgiver found out he'd stomped a chicken to death instead of returning it, his Reputation Score would probably drop and then he'd be banned from the Tavern. Again. Smarter to let cooler heads prevail and find some other way to scrounge up Copper Pieces. Revenge could wait.

  By the time his feet hit the poorly cobbled streets of Blucliffe’s town square he was no longer the first villager up and about his business. Which meant the tavern was open and time was wasting but it also meant that somewhere, Violet Chika was awake. And if she was awake, Greg knew, she was coming for him. Laying in wait, somewhere he'd least expect it. The town wizard might be small of stature and frankly, adorable (in a way that Greg found troubling), but she was much more dangerous than the chickens Greg was used to facing, if not that much larger.

  Life in Blucliffe was simple for Greg, most of the time. He was still a newcomer here and some people mistrusted him. Greg didn’t blame them for that. He’d shown up a few months ago without any explanation (or clothes). He'd tried to tell them that this was a computer simulation, that they were all just lines of code, that he was the only thing that was real. That didn't really test well with his audience, so Greg gave up (as usual) and kept the explanation to himself.

  As far as Greg knew, the explanation was that he was losing his goddamn mind. He’d bought weed laced with LSD or been hit by a bus or pissed off Satan himself or maybe all three and just… woke up here one day. The last thing he remembered was doomscrolling on his phone and his TV simultaneously, trying to fall asleep, dreading work the next day and then… suddenly he didn’t have work the next day.

  He didn’t have anything anything. Even pants.

  It wasn’t waking up stark naked in a field of alien flowers next to a village full of medieval peasants that convinced him he was losing his mind. He’d seen Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction? with Jonathan Frakes. He knew that the truth was sometimes stranger than fiction. It was the Menu Button.

  He called it a button, but it was really a mental command that summoned a heads-up-display, information about this world that only he could see. Open Menu, he thought, and suddenly he could see things that weren't there. Menus. All kinds of them, like in a video game.

  The first few days were a whirlwind. There were tutorials but he skipped them. He found the village and after a while, he found the Inventory screen. That solved his "no pants" problem, but not much else. He tried to ask questions, and he tried to explain but it didn’t take Greg very long to realize it was pointless. Nothing here worked quite like it did where he came from. Nothing here worked like the real world.

  There were menus for everything. For interacting with objects. For eating, for sleeping. There was a dialogue menu for having conversations. The opportunity had not really presented itself yet, but he suspected that even sex in this world would boil down to something like a Quick-Time-Event or a rhythm mini-game.

  Eventually, Greg could no longer ignore the fact that he'd gone to sleep and woken up in a video game, like some of kind of high school nerd's wet dream. Back in high school, it would have been a dream come true for Greg. He’d have set out on a killer adventure, fought all the bosses twice, and finished all the secret quests too. But for adult Greg, 31, divorced with no kids, stuck in a dead-end job, it felt like everything else: just another pain in his ass. Slaying Dragons and Saving The Kingdom sounded more like Unpaid Overtime. He just wanted to go home. Even if it sucked, it was home. But the game must go on.

  When he was a kid, he'd played games like this a lot. Actually, he’d played this game, or something like it. He and his four best friends in high school used to gather around a table in one of their basements every weekend and play Spellsword, a fantasy RPG where you and your friends make everything up: the world, the heroes, the bad guys, everything. Their friend Nick had been the “Storyteller”, and his world was full of elves and dwarves and stupid shit, including a small farming village named Blucliffe, so-named for the unique blue clay of its stony sea-facing cliffs (even though there’s farms…?) sitting on the northeastern edge of The Norderlands which were ruled by five kings who…

  Greg couldn’t remember the rest. It had been a lifetime ago. And a stupid game. That he gave up on as soon as he became more interested in girls.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  And now the game was all he had.

  He’d gone through all the stages already—grief, anger, denial, acceptance. The other ones. He’d run through every possible scenario. He’d read once about DMT, that the human brain produces a mass amount of the hallucinogen when you die and that’s why people who have near-death experiences report visions and their lives flashing before their eyes. It happens in a moment but feels like hours, days or even years to them.

  Surely, he was dying and eventually this weird game logic dream-loop would spiral into entropy, and he would finally and die and get to the real hell, or just stop existing, or reincarnate as a mantis shrimp like he actually wanted. But nothing happened. And kept happening. Finally, he thought about just doing it himself. He learned that starving himself would cause him to lose Vitality, but only a little bit every 8 hours, so even with his pathetic stats that would be a long, slow and painful way to go. Fall damage on the other hand…

  A few days later he found himself balancing on the crest of the roof of the tavern, looking down at the cobbled streets he was about to redecorate with his blood. Or maybe his body would just disappear when he died. He kind of hoped that was the case, for the villagers’ sakes. He started scanning through the tutorials to see if there was a fall damage formula; he didn’t want to end up in a bloody heap with 1 vitality point still left. He couldn’t find it.

  Standing on the precipice of his own death, he realized something that day: this wasn't so bad. The "life" he’d lost was a lost cause already, by his reckoning. He lived alone, had no meaningful relationships outside of work, couldn't flirt to save his life, and the only thing he was looking forward to was a 2% raise and dying before somebody reboots Back to the Future.

  But in Blucliffe, a new life was possible for Greg. A different life. Things were simple here. There was money, and so Greg realized there must be some kind of larger economy at play, but unlike the real world, the economy wasn't like a rigged game of Monopoly that had started before you were born. It just worked. For those who existed here, it was no doubt a crushing, feudalist nightmare, but compared to living in the United States, it was considerably more chill. Food and lodgings were cheap, especially for someone who barely slept and mostly eats booze. He didn't even technically need a place to live, as he could rest anywhere as long there were no monsters in the area.

  Finding work could be tricky as there was no place for him in the town’s… programming. So, he picked up whatever odd jobs he could wrangle out of people’s dialogue menus, from sweeping stables and milking cows to delivering garlic to the grocer. As long as it wasn’t a Quest. Copper or the occasional Silver Piece suited him just fine, but Greg didn’t want anything to do with XP or levelling up. He knew how these games worked. Quests just unlock more quests. Higher levels meant bigger threats. It never ends. If you do one Quest, you might as well do them all, and Greg was done grinding. He’d found a nice, quiet existence away from the rat race of his overpopulated, overstimulated modern world. He missed his Discord servers and his painstakingly curated meme collection, but aside from that, he was the happiest he'd been in longer than he could remember.

  But he was lonely, and of course, that’s where she comes in.

  Greg spent the morning and well past lunchtime trolling the village for work before he finally found something that didn’t come with XP. Curse that fucking chicken. Today’s "job" involved delivering a sack of particularly pungent garlic to the grocer, a task that paid a princely 5 Coppers, which was enough for 4 mugs of ale, with 1cp to spare for sleeping in the stables and healing his grievous chicken wound.

  Just then, he saw her, a 3 and ? foot tall blur of purple hair and whirling tunic. Violet Chika, with her hypnotic eyes and uncanny knack for appearing precisely when he didn't want her to, rounded the corner in visible hurry. Probably looking for him. "Assballs,” he muttered, trying to keep his cool. He needed a distraction, a diversion, a sudden meteor shower… anything. Greg ducked behind a suspiciously lumpy hay bale, a strategy he'd refined over months of trying to outmaneuver the perpetually observant halfling wizard. He peeked out, his stomach rumbling a mournful ballad.

  Violet Chika was the reason he never stayed lonely for long, but for all the wrong reasons. She was the only magic user in town, and some kind of experimental techno-wizard to boot, handling everything from repairs to supplies to settling town disputes if they got loud enough. She might as well have been the mayor, although the town had one of those as well. She also had never quit being suspicious of Greg, The Town Stranger. She watched his every move like a hawk and questioned him so randomly and so intensely that he felt guilty even when he wasn’t doing anything wrong. She knew something was… off, about him. He’d considered telling her the truth but then he remembered she’s a 3 and a ? foot tall halfling techno-wizard and went back to hustling for booze money.

  He was not in the mood for her puzzles or tests or interrogations today. He scrambled away from the hay bale and, in a moment of expertly controlled anxiety, made a beeline for the nearest thing that wasn’t trying to dissect him: The Gilded Gorge, Blucliffe’s premier (and only) tavern. He crept through the swinging doors, immediately stepping sideways and pressing his back against the wall, taking a moment to catch his breath. It was early afternoon, but already a few patrons littered the drinking hall. Even a quaint little hamlet like this had a few drunks, and Greg aspired to be one of them.

  His eyes scanned the dimly lit interior, finally landing on that vision of ethereal grace: Elowen Vale, a Cleric of Totth, the Elven God of the Sun. She was an elf herself (duh), her age as impossible to guess as her beauty was impossible to fathom. She sat alone in a shadowed corner, a goblet of ruby-red wine cradled in her delicate hands, her expression a symphony of sorrow and ancient beauty. Her silver hair, like moonlight spun into silk, cascaded over her shoulders, and her luminous green eyes held a depth of sadness that made Greg’s own pathetic existence feel like a walk in the park. She had arrived in town not long after Greg and taken up residence in the Gilded Gorge. The village welcomed a cleric, but no one knew why she had come. She just stayed in the tavern and drank, alone. As beautiful as she was, she didn't seem to want company. Especially from Greg.

  Meanwhile, Bartholomew, the barkeep with a belly that rivaled a prize-winning pumpkin, was already lumbering towards him, a stern look on his ugly, stupid face. "Rats in the cellar, traveler," he boomed, his voice echoing through the tavern. "Big ones. Need killing. You in?" Greg, still lost in his Elowen-fueled fantasies, just shook his head vehemently. Killing rats in the tavern cellar. Bart had been bitching about that since before Greg had pants. And probably would be forever. It was the Starter Quest, the only quest Greg had in his journal. It was the Call To Adventure and Greg could not Give A Shit.

  Bartholomew, undeterred, continued his relentless badgering about the rodent infestation, painting vivid pictures of cheese-hoarding vermin and their insatiable appetites. Greg, however, was utterly captivated by Elowen. She was an outsider, like him, but not… like him. She was an elf, for one thing and a woman for another but also she was from this world. ‘Aegis!’ Greg remembered. The name of the world was Aegis. Or maybe just the continent?

  He envisioned himself, a dashing hero, sword in hand, vanquishing some contemptuous heel and rescuing her from her sorrow, to earn himself a grateful, tearful smile from the beautiful Elven maiden. Then he’d get rid of the garlic in his pants, and they would get out of there.

  Yeah, right. She wasn't even real. Elves aren't real, dude. Put your boner away.

  Instead, he nervously waddled in what he hoped was stealth, close enough to trigger the dialogue menu. He examined his options.

  

  
1. I hear the Prince is raising taxes on Gorgloth again.


  
2. There seem to be a lot of monster attacks lately.


  
3. Nice ass.


  
4. Tell me more about the Elf God Totth.


  

  He didn’t give a shit about 1 or 2, and they didn’t lead anywhere as far as he could tell from his prior attempts at chatting her up; although, he was thinking about writing a strongly worded letter regarding the Gorglothian tax situation, which anyone could plainly see was ridiculous. Number 4, same deal. Lots of lore on Totth and his loving embrace, his ancient empire and few remaining servants, but nothing about Elowen—what kind of music she likes, her favorite food, turn-ons, pet peeves, height requirements, nothing juicy at all.

  Number 3 was true but obviously the option to piss her off, so he’d never tried it. He could try just actually saying whatever he wanted; that worked sometimes, but other times it could make the person glitch a little, or sometimes it just picked one of the other options instead. He didn’t want to work up the perfect opening line just for the game to translate it into “Nice ass”.

  As he tried to think of something to say that wouldn't earn him a withering glare, something remarkable happened.

  Her eyes.

  She turned to look at him, and for a moment, there was something about her eyes...

  Not the glaze of simulated, digital eyes that he was used to when talking to the townsfolk. The people here were convincing simulations, but they were "NPCs"—Non-Player Characters—and no matter how sophisticated, Greg could always tell. Because of the dialogue menu, they didn't talk like a real person would. They repeated themselves, and most wouldn't bat an eye if you asked them the same question 100 times in a row. They would just repeat their canned line and wait for the next prompt. Because they weren't real. Sometimes, he even caught them repeating the same movements, or animations, especially when they were idle. It was more life-like than any game Greg had ever played, but it was still just a game.

  Suddenly, the game felt real to him. She felt real. Could she be? Real, like him?

  He needed to seize the moment. Fuck the menu, I'm going in. He met her gaze and summoned the courage to speak, though he didn't know from where.

  "Uh, hi... I'm Greg." Think man, think. Goddamnit. Say something smooth. Keep it simple. Say anything. "Can I buy you a drink?"

  

  Invalid selection

  System Correction: [3]

  He could only stand and watch, helpless as his own words disappeared into the digital either, and the game spoke for him.

  "Nice ass."

  Can you dig it?