Name: N/A
Level: 1
Experience: 0/2
Health: 50/50
Stamina: 50/50
Mana: 5/5
Body: 1
Sense: 1
Mind: 1
Intuition: 1
Yin: 1
Yang: 1
Stat Total: 6
“Jonathan, are you ok?”
His’s head jerks up. Electric lights glow overhead. TVs and laptops and phone cases stretch out in ranks and there’s Kat, peering up through her glasses. He’s back in Kopernick''s.
“Did, did you see that?” he asks.
“See what?”
“The,” he has no words, “uh, the sky?”
“No?”
“You sure?”
“Yes?”
Kat’s looking at him like he’s crazy. Maybe he is. His heart thunders in his ears.
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
The stall door slams closed. It takes Jonathan three tries to shut the bolt, his fingers are shaking so badly. He sinks onto the toilet. He’s breathing fast and hard, his whole body vibrating with what’s just happened.
Maybe tomorrow he’ll be able to tell himself it wasn’t real. Maybe tomorrow he’ll think it was just a daydream, or that he had nodded off standing up, or that his meds are making him see things. People believe all kinds of shit to make their lives make sense.
But today he knows what he saw and nothing makes any fucking sense. Seven Gates took him somewhere else, an actual place he actually went. It wasn’t VR. Jonathan’s done VR, it didn’t hold a candle to Seven Gates, it can’t engage all five senses, and he wasn’t wearing a rig.
The most obvious, and absurd, possibility is that he was just isekaied. Jonathan’s watched enough anime to know how that’s supposed to work, and Seven Gates looked about right. It even had the blue text box. In unreasonable circumstances, unreasonable explanations start to seem plausible. The problem, though, is that he came back so quickly, and that Kat was apparently watching him the whole time. He can’t have been magically transported to another world while he was still in this one, can he?
Ok, how about this? It was a hallucination, the app sent out a specific sequence of colors and subliminal sounds to make him crazy.
Or maybe he was in a VR environment stimulated entirely in his own brain, like the Matrix, and the app just networked with a microchip they put in his head when he was getting his wisdom teeth removed or something. In this scenario, Kat shook him out of the trance.
God, he’s sounding crazy. Next he’ll accuse the government of colluding with aliens and slipping hallucinogens into the water. Though, compared to Seven Gates, that doesn’t even sound that crazy. His world is off-kilter, tipping further and further from what he knows.
The only way to figure it out is to go back in.
The moment he thinks it, Jonathan knows he’s going to do it. He was always going back. How could he not? This is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him, maybe the greatest thing that’s ever happened to anyone.
Wait. This thumb stops a milimeter from the Seven Gates icon. How will he get out? Last time he needed Kat to wake him up. Will he be stuck in here till DJ comes banging on the door asking if he’s still alive? Maybe he can ask Kat to get him. No, he’s in the men’s room, and anyway that’s weird as hell and how would he explain it to her? He’ll set an alarm on his phone.
How long? Two minutes, he should be safe for that long, right? But what could he really discover in just two minutes? He should go for three. No, five.
He sets an alarm for seven minutes. He takes a deep breath, watching the seconds count down on the screen. 6:57–6:56–6:55. Now that it comes to it, he’s scared. 6:54–6:53– He switches back to the main screen. Taps the icon.
The world changes, and he’s in. The castle, the statues, the wind, the sky. It’s all here, just the way it was before. Holy fucking shit, this is really happening.
Jonathan takes a deep breath of the crisp air. He jumps, feels the ground hard and real beneath his feet. Ok, what next? How do you tell if you’ve been magically transported to another world, or if you’re a simulation, or if you’re just plain crazy?
He walks to the edge of the terrace and leans on the crumbling balustrade. Maybe he’ll, like, find a clue out there? What he sees is sky. Above him, sky, on the horizon, sky, below him, and Jonathan grips the balustrade and leans out to see as far as possible, there’s an abyss of sky and swirling clouds.
There’s no bottom. He pulls back, gripped by vertigo. He’s in a damn flying castle.
Before Jonathan can sort out all the implications of this, he sees his arms extended, hands still anchored to the balustrade. They’re white. Not like, caucasian, but white-white, the washed-out empty white of mannequins in store windows.
He raises his arms slowly, turning them back and forth. The whiteness is uniform, the backs of his hands are no darker than his palms. He’s pretty sure these fingers are a little bit longer than his but that his hands are wider. The scar he got from falling off Logan Goldsmith’s bike in second grade is gone. These arms are completely hairless.
With a sense of rising dread, he looks down at his white, naked body. He doesn’t have a penis. He doesn’t have a vagina either, instead, his crotch is smooth and hairless all the way down. He probes with his fingers just to make sure and, yet, no opening. A completely androgynous body. Does that mean… He shifts his fingers around to the back. After what feels like an eternity, he’s sure. There’s no hole. No even a crack, his glutes grow together seamlessly.
He’s not sure how to process this. He’s never really thought through all the implications of the video game logic where characters are always wearing underwear and while they may eat, they never need to take a shit. Now he’s living it.
At least this makes the VR theory the clear frontrunner. If this was really another world, the people here would probably need to eat and procreate sometimes. And sure, he might be crazy, but could he really be crazy enough to imagine that he doesn’t have an asshole? I mean come–
Beep!
He’s back in the stall at Kopernick''s. His hands are his hands. There’s the scar from the bike accident. He can feel a comforting bulge in his jeans. He’s Jonathan again.
Beep!
He shuts off the alarm. It worked. This is amazing. So, it looks like wherever he goes when he’s in Seven Gates, part of him is still here, enough that something can catch his attention and pull him out. As long as he sets an alarm, he should be able come and go as he likes.
How long should he go for this time? Another seven minutes? Ten? How long before Kat gets someone to come looking for him? He’s been in here for what, ten minutes now? He’ll say he was sick, he’ll say he had indigestion. He can get away with twenty, twenty-five minutes, surely.
He sets the alarm for fifteen minutes. Taps the app.
He’s in. He does a quick one-eighty, taking in the sky, statues, and stone. Alright, what now? The first time in, didn’t a text box pop up? How did he do that?
“Uh, this is a game?” he says.
The box appears instantly.A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Welcome to Seven Gates,” it reads.
“Is this place VR? Like, virtual reality?” says Jonathan.
The little blue box doesn’t move.
“Am I in some kind of controlled hallucination?”
Nothing.
“Are you with the government?’
Nothing.
“Aliens?”
Nothing.
“Is this like, a real place, or is it just being created by manipulating impulses in my brain?”
The damn blue box doesn’t say a thing, just sits there smugly looking at him.
“Ok, look, what the hell am I doing here?”
Just like that, more little boxes pop up over the first one.
“This is the Tutorial Castle. Level up to proceed to the main game!
“Quest added: Main Quest; Reach level 10.
“Quest added: Bonus Quest; Find the Adventurer’s Remains.”
Well. That didn’t exactly answer his questions, but it didn’t answer them in the most video game way possible. This has to be a game. Jonathan’s played a lot of games, and he knows that most of them will feed you information as you progress. If he just keeps playing, he may be able to figure out what’s going on. How hard could it be? He’s good at this shit. He might even finish the tutorial before his alarm goes off.
With only one way to go, he heads toward the castle. The high arched gate stands open, but rubble’s fallen from higher in the castle and he has to clamber over it to get inside. The courtyard within is completely overgrown. The roots of huge trees dig into the cobblestones while their branches reach up, clawing toward the light. It’s shaded and pleasantly cool down here. As his eyes adjust he sees there’s a path through the foliage. He follows it as it weaves around trunks. A flash of red lying among the fallen leaves catches his eye.
“What’s this?” he says, squatting.
A blue text box pops up.
“Apple. A good snack for the trail.”
Huh. Jonathan had just been talking to himself, but if the menu is willing to answer questions about things he finds, that could be useful. He brushes off the apple, takes a bite. It tastes… not much like anything really. A little bit sour. A touch of sweetness, so faint he might be imagining it. He chews and swallows mechanically. Maybe this body doesn’t have much in the way of taste buds. Maybe the apples in Seven Gates are just shit. He throws away the rest of the apple and picks up a branch lying on the ground.
“What''s this?”
“Branch. Damage +1. Firewood. Possible crafting material. A weapon if you’re desperate.”
Nice. His first weapon. Jonathan gets up, takes the branch in one hand and sets off down the trail.
“What’s this?” he says, pointing at a hoary old tree by the path.”
“Tree. A source of wood.”
“Yeah, no shit. What about this?” he points at a much slimmer tree with smooth, shiny bark.
“Tree. A source of wood.”
“What’s this?” he asks, pointing at a fern.
“Fern. It may have medicinal properties.”
“It may have medicinal properties? I could have told you that. Is there a way to level you up or something, because honestly right now you’re kind of–hello!”
Rounding a corner, Jonathan finds himself face-to-face with a skeleton. It sits with its back against a tree, head tilted back and jaw hanging frozen in macabre laughter. It’s kind of gross, but it’s also kinda like a Halloween decoration with vines growing on it, and therefore no big deal. This must be the adventurer.
More interesting than the corpse is the sack Jonothat notices sitting beside him. A quest reward if he’s ever seen one, but someone else got here first. A small, furry creature squats on its haunches before the sack, rummaging inside it.
“Hey!” he says.
The animal ignores him. It has its whole head stuck in the bag.
“Hey, that’s mine,” he says and pokes it with the branch.
A remarkably hairy head pops out, followed by two long, simian arms. Little black eyes glare up at him. It’s bigger than he thought. Maybe fifty, sixty pounds.
“Shoo,” he says, poking it again. “Get lost.”
That was a mistake. Quick as a wink, the monkey snatches the branch from his surprised fingers and hurles it to the ground. It bares its teeth in an expression that could not possibly be interpreted as a smile. Jonathan backs up a step.
“Now, just hold on a–”
The monkey jumps. It flies through the air, startlingly quick, and sinks its teeth deep into his upraised hand. There’s no pain, but an unpleasant, tingling sensation shoots up his arm. Unbidden, words appear above the monkey’s head.
“Bearded Monkey: Lvl 1”
Beneath the words is a short red bar.
Jonathan’s own health bar appears in the upper left corner of his vision with a sizable piece missing. The black numbers on the red line read 43/50.
He screams. He grabs the monkey by its facial hair and he’s shaking it, pulling, trying to get it off. It lets go. Drops to the ground. But it lands on its feet, ready to spring, and before Jonathan can move it’s on him again, teeth digging into his thigh.
36/50
Jonathan kicks. It doesn’t let go. He kicks again, more violently. It flies off his leg and before it can even hit the ground he’s turning, running. He has to get away. He’s not ready. This isn’t the way it is in a game. In a game you just fucking click the button and the avatar does the fighting.
Here, he is the avatar.
Something hits him in the back, latches on. Jonathan stumbles. He looks back to see two mad, beady black eyes and a head of wild hair a moment before the monkey bites into his shoulder.
29/50
Jonathan screams again but he’s not looking where he’s going and his foot gets caught on a root and he’s going over. They hit a tree on the way down and he and the monkey bounce off in different directions. He hits the broken cobbles in a heap, air knocked from his lungs. The sharp, not-pain sensation is everywhere now, radiating across his body like a million tiny pins.
27/50
He doesn’t even make it to his knees before he feels the monkey’s little hands around his foot, teeth sinking into his ankle.
20/50
He’s going to die. He’s going to fucking die and he never got to show his mom that he could get better. That he could get clean.
“Leave me alone!” he wails, and kicks at it.
The first kick glances off its shoulder. The second misses entirely. The third connects so hard the monkey flies a few feet before crashing down into a fern. It wobbles to its feet almost at once, but there’s something dazed in its expression. A hint of fear in its eyes. Like its only now realizing precisely how much smaller it is than Jonathan. He gets a good view of its health bar, and a chunk''s definitely been taken off the top.
There’s so much adrenaline pounding through Jonathan’s veins right now he could tie a tourniquet around his own amputated limb and not feel a thing. He wants to scream. He wants to throw up. Millions of years of evolution deep in his nervous system see the monkey’s fear and reevaluate the situation. They smell blood, flip the fight or flight coin. It comes up fight. Fight all the fucking way.
And suddenly Jonathan is angry. Vastly, transcendently angry, like a volcano erupting in his brain.
He lurches towards the monkey. It bares its teeth at him, gleaming wetly with his blood, and takes a step back. Too late. Jonathan is on it.
He grabs it by the arm, pulls it close. It bites him. Jonathan doesn’t care. He gets a good haldful of the fur by its ear with his other hand and pulls it off him.
13/50
Now he has both hands on its head. He wrestles it down. The monkey claws at him desperately, fingernails leaving long scratches down his arms.
11/50
A tree root has split a cobblestone in two. One sharp corner of stone juts into the air. Jonathan manhandles the monkey over it.
9/50
He brings its head down, hard, onto the point. Its health bar plummets.
7/50
He raises it up, slams it back down again.
5/50
Again. Something crunches. The monkey’s hands drop. It lets out a despairing wail that echoes through the trees. He smashes the head down one last time. It’s like trying to open a fucking coconut. The monkey’s health bar drops nothing and vanishes. The animal goes limp beneath him.
He did it. He won. Without warning, a whole slew of system notifications appear one after the other.
“Defeated Bearded Monkey: Lvl 1”
“2 Experience Gained”
“Level Up!”
“Level: 2”
“Experience till next level: 0/3”
“Unspent Skill Points: 1”
Finally they stop.
“What.” Jonathan’s breathing so hard every word almost is a separate sentence. “The fuck. Was that?”
“Bearded Monkey. A low-level inhabitant of Tutorial Castle. Usually found by trees or in the upper levels of the castle. Often travel in groups and answer to a single leader.”
“These things.” pant. “Travel.” pant. “In groups?”
A long, angry scream sounds from the trees above. Jonathan looks up just in time to see the monkey plummeting toward his face.