May, 2022

  The first thing I remember from that morning was waking up in my bed out of a sound sleep, and hearing the loud crunch of cars hitting each other. Then came the sound of tires screeching and another car probably hitting the others. There were sirens and horns in the distance. Police, fire, and ambulance sirens. Each one was different, and they were sounds I knew too well. They all brought back terrible memories of a car crash a decade ago.

  My bedside clock glared 7:02 am in angry red numbers. Morning light edged around the blackout shades, casting soft lines across the dim room.

  That was when I saw it.

  Green letters and numbers filled most of my vision. They didn’t move when I turned my head or when I closed my eyes. I could still see them. It was a character creation screen straight out of a role-playing game. Either something had dropped me into one, or I was having one hell of a dream. I hoped I wasn’t.

  If this was real, it was something I’d wished for most of my life.

  I’m a gamer from way back. I’ve earned my starting to gray hair and beard one die roll at a time. Board games, miniatures battles, and I had decades behind the screen as a game master. I’ve built worlds, written adventures, and rolled way too many critical fails to count.

  So yeah, after I shouted “Yes!” and a couple of half-conscious fist pumps, I laid back and started reading. Character creation was no joke. This was me being remade. I skimmed every screen, every page, every option I could bring up. I’d read enough GameLit over the last few years to know what this could be. Apocalypse-style system forced on our reality? Check. Sudden interface in reality? Check. Sirens outside? Double check.

  Another horn blared. Metal crunched again, followed by some indistinct shouting. Someone had definitely rear-ended someone else. A siren grew louder until it stopped nearby. Red and blue lights flickered against my window shades. That was when I learned I could mentally shift the screen out of the way. The people outside might not have figured that out yet.

  The feces were flying into the fan blades, and the blades were spinning fast. Non-gamer preppers were going to be in deeper doo-doo than they ever imagined, right alongside the rest of us. Meanwhile, every gamer alive was having a fantasy-fueled nerdgasm.

  Grabbing my phone from the nightstand, I scrolled through news feeds and Reddit while I rushed to pull on some clothes. Everywhere, people were confirming it was real. So were the first reported deaths. Not from monsters, yet, but from the shock of seeing the Character Creation Screen itself.

  Rule number one of any good game master: read the rules. All of them. At least twice. The best players dig through every line looking for an edge. When I saw the list of standard character types, I skimmed it for the big picture.

  Most people would probably grab the first thing that looked cool or familiar. The system offered default builds by class and specialization, with helpful labels for the clueless. If someone had gaming experience, they’d go for the class they knew best. If not, they’d randomly guess. Or panic-pick.

  I’ve almost always been a Mage. I’ve been casting spells since the days we got one a day. That’s my thing.

  However, over the years, I’ve played almost everything to see what it was like. I played the stealthy types, but it wasn’t my thing. Healing was an option, but they don’t survive well outside of groups to protect them. I didn’t want to be a tank. Also, I didn’t have a group yet. That left me doing as much damage as I could and still protecting myself. I wasn’t sure I wanted to conjure demons or undead, but I’d hold that thought in reserve. I also didn’t want to rely on pets.

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  Before my accident a decade ago, I used to do some historical combat reenactment. I wore the armor, swung the sword, but those days were behind me. The armor’s still in the garage, probably rusting away in the armor bag. I did Three Musketeer rapier fighting as well. That gear’s in an old hard-shell rolling golf bag in the garage next to it.

  Now, I was years and physically past donning heavy armor and swinging swords at people, despite having done it. Really done it.

  Those weren’t my thing, and they wouldn’t take or do enough damage to survive if I had to do it on my own. Diving into the spell trees, the pre-built options weren’t bad, but they didn’t excite me either. All the usual suspects were there...fire, ice, lightning, water, earth, air. There were some interesting curveballs too: wood, metal, even weather. Those would be for the greens and ecology first types. Or a Druid/Mage multi-class.

  None of them called to me. Fire was likely to be most people’s first choice. It had too many problems in the real world.

  Nothing stood out, so I kept scanning. Mentalist was interesting. Lots of fun things down that PSYCHIC path, but very slow to build up to do serious damage. It stood out with its influence and control abilities.

  Digging further, I found all mages, or casters as gamers sometimes called them, could start with BOLTs, BALLs, and SHIELDs of their mage type. Those were the basic offensive and defensive spells for all the mage types. Single shot, explosive attacks, and protection.

  Last were the general spells anyone could take, like DETECT MAGIC or REVEAL STATS.

  Then I spotted the MANA spells in the general spell list.

  I’d never seen them before. That alone made them interesting.

  DETECT MANA? I guessed that means knowing where it’s strong and easier to replenish, or maybe that something, or someone, used MANA. It was a spell you’d normally take at higher levels.

  There were spells to pull MANA out of something, or someone. Or put it in something or someone. Plus, the basic spell types. My forebrain looked at the MANA spells and my back brain started giving me ideas for ways to use and pervert them. After all, what good’s a set of rules if you can’t pervert them and do things the designers didn’t expect?

  Then, I checked the scaling. MANA spells got more expensive as you leveled up, but the power curve was steep. It was a parabolic curve. After just a few levels, their efficiency improved dramatically. You could also feed extra MANA into any MANA spell to boost its effect. High cost, high reward.

  The key was staying alive long enough to get there.

  Backtracking, I looked deeper into the Mentalist powers.

  Mentalists worked like classic mages, but used PSYCHIC POWER instead of MANA. That opened a different toolkit...crowd control, influence, manipulation. Not flashy or long lasting at first, but dangerous over time. I went deeper and I don’t remember what I said when I found the ability to convert a MANA POOL to my PSYCHIC POOL and back again. It required being level 10 to get it, but two power pools to draw from that replenished on their own at the same time.

  ‘Veddy interestink. Und not sthupid’, as I recalled a line in an old rerun TV show from my childhood.

  Mages were INTELLIGENCE-based. Their secondary stat was WISDOM. Third was EGO.

  Mentalists ran off CHARISMA, with EGO second, INTELLIGENCE third. Two overlaps. If I could handle the Dual Class tax. It was an extra stat investment and weaker starting spells, but it could work. If I bumped my CONSTITUTION, I’d be tough enough to survive the early grind and combine damage and shielding from both pools.

  Pondering, I wondered if who or whatever was behind this knew what you could do by combining the two paths. I didn’t care. I didn’t care if someone else would find it. There were people who would figure it out. I might not be the first to find it. That wasn’t my goal.

  The goal was to survive and gain enough power to keep on surviving.

  Finally, I got out of bed and pulled on enough clothes to not get arrested for indecency. I headed for the kitchen and coffee. On the way, I ducked into my home office to dig out a notepad and a mechanical pencil...battle planning tools, analog style.