I’m not sure when the exact shift happened, but by the time I woke up, I was already boned.

  Like every morning, I reached over to the stool that I was using as a makeshift bedside table and grabbed my cell phone to look at the time and check social media.

  8:07 AM, and I noticed something else.

  “No signal,” I muttered. That wasn’t unusual, as sometimes high winds like we had the day before would knock out some piece of equipment on the lone cell tower on the hill. I was told by some locals that it seemed to happen about two to three times a year.

  There were a couple of other notification icons, but I would worry about that later. I put the phone down and sat up in bed. The sun was up, but it had to be a cloudy day, as the light sneaking in through the blinds cast a grey pallor over the darkened room. I rubbed the back of my neck while gazing into the middle distance, doing my daily ritual of convincing myself to get out of bed.

  “It’s Saturday Ken,” I told myself. “Get up and enjoy it.”

  I put two feet on the floor and pulled myself out of bed and onto the cold faux wooden flooring before exiting the room to the rest of the apartment.

  The one-bedroom basement level was showing its age and desperately needed renovation. Old cabinets, uneven floors, peeling paint, scuff marks, and an increasingly dodgy electrical system all gave the place a certain “run-down” look. It didn’t help that all my furniture was second-hand stuff left behind by the previous tenant, but for someone who had to restart life, not having to worry about furniture was a blessing. I do have to question the previous tenants’ tastes, though, as not a single piece of furniture matched, and I’m sure my mother would be mortified if she ever came to visit.

  Thankfully, she was on the other end of the country, and I made sure not to move my camera to give my living situation away during our once-a-week video chat.

  I shuffled to the combined kitchen and living room, craning my neck back and forth to work the kinks out. Part of it was the shitty mattress that came with the apartment, and part of it was age starting to creep up on me.

  A jolt suddenly went through the back of my brain, and I stopped mid-step. A feeling of nausea and disorientation washed over me, and I leaned against the wall as my vision began to swim. For a brief moment, I thought I saw a flash of text appear and disappear before I could comprehend any of it.

  Then my vision snapped back to normal.

  I stayed leaning against the wall. I was sweating and panting, and my mind was a jumble as it tried to piece together what had happened.

  I cautiously pushed myself away from the wall and took stock of myself.

  Everything seemed normal, and I now felt okay. I quickly checked my pulse to see if anything was out of whack, but even that felt fine.

  I shook my head and dismissed what had happened as a random one-time thing before moving to the kitchen. Maybe I was just hungry.

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

  “Scrambled eggs,” I thought. “Gotta get some protein in my system.”

  I opened the cutlery drawer and quickly grabbed a fork before turning to the fridge. I saw another flash of text that went by too quickly to read, and the fork... dematerialized in my hand.

  I stood in shock, looking at my now empty hand. I looked down at the floor to see if I had dropped the fork, but there was no sign of it.

  “What... the... hell?”

  Did I hallucinate picking up the fork? I turned back to the drawer and saw that one was missing.

  Something was very wrong.

  I shakily reached into the drawer to pull out another fork, but there was something, some kind of force, stopping me from grabbing one.

  Another flash of text, again gone too quickly to read or comprehend.

  Desperately now, I tried picking up a spoon, and then a knife. I couldn’t seem to hold onto any of them. Every time, I’d quickly catch something “written” in my vision that would disappear before I knew what it was.

  I could feel panic spreading through my body. I leaned against the wall again and closed my eyes while I tried to make sense of the situation.

  “This is crazy, I gotta be having some sort of mental breakdown.”

  I steadied my breath and once again opened my eyes, looking into the drawer. Gingerly, I put my hand in and tried to grab a spoon. Once again, something stopped me.

  “Okay, let’s figure this out,” I told myself. I was trying to stay calm, but it wasn’t really working. There had to be an explanation, and all I could think of doing at the time was to check the internet to see if I could find one.

  I moved back to my bedroom and grabbed the cell from the stool. Still no signal.

  My eyes moved to the notification list. There was a new entry.

  You are bound to the weapon: fork. Your weapon inventory is maxed out, and you may not equip an additional weapon until level 2. You may only unbind weapons with a wish spell. Management.

  I studied the screen, reading the message repeatedly, trying to make sense of it.

  I scrolled back through the notifications and saw that this particular one had appeared several times, all time-stamped to when I had been trying to pull out another item from the drawer.

  I stopped scrolling when I saw another notification.

  Welcome to the dungeon! Management.

  I sat on the edge of my bed, staring at the message. The only way my mind could make sense of what was going on was to believe I was being pranked somehow.

  I looked around the room again, still bathed in the grey pallor coming in through the blinds.

  “Right, I’m going to look outside, and everything will be normal.”

  I stood up again, moved to the window, and opened the blinds.

  I stepped back in shock as the expected view of the apartment building parking lot wasn’t there. There was nothing except grey nothingness. It was like a dense fog had rolled in and swallowed the entire building.

  I tried the latch on the window, but like the force that kept me from picking up anything besides a fork, I couldn’t move it.

  I saw another flash of text before hearing the faint ding of my cell phone.

  It was still in my hand. I looked at the notification screen again, which greeted me with a new message:

  Exiting the dungeon has been prohibited until it has been cleared. Management

  Dungeon. There it was again. The phone had mentioned it a couple of times.

  The concept wasn’t unfamiliar to me. I had grown up playing tabletop games, as well as Western and Japanese role-playing games on consoles and computers. I also read a lot of fantasy, and a tiny piece of my brain was telling me that I was now somehow “stuck” in one, but I couldn’t believe it.

  “This is a dream, a very intense dream,” I told myself. “There’s no way this is really happening.”

  There had to be a way out of this. I had to at least try leaving the apartment.

  I quickly got dressed and stuffed the cell into my jeans pocket before moving to my apartment door. I put my hand on the doorknob.

  “Alright, I’m going to open this and things are going to go back to normal... or I wake up.”

  I hesitated for a moment before pulling the door open.

  “Shit.”