01 – A brave new universe!

>>Welcome to Universe 772518<<

>Level up!

>Choose one:

>Improve random skill (1 point)
>Generate new random skill (1 point) (note: to increase rate of survival, luck is increased for the first few skill draws)

Martin C. Molotov was an all American citizen. Born of an absentee father and an alcoholic mother, he was proud that he still managed to gather himself and become a fine young man. His father had ultimately decided to pull a disappearing act, after a few years of back and forth presence in Martin’s infant life, and by the age of ten the young boy was already aware that he was going to be the one to keep the house together, nobody else.

Fifteen years old Martin realized how foolish he had been just a few years prior. He dreamt of a life where he was free, happy and loved. He returned home to see yet another unknown man manhandle his mother, or yell at him, or drink booze and pass out drunk with barely any clothing and the dire need of a shower. His thoughts went, as many times they had done before, to his gun hidden beneath his pillow. It would be oh so easy.

And time and time again he hesitated, listened to reason, held himself back.

By the time he was 20 his mother, house and youth were forgotten memories hidden away in a dark, dusty recess of his own mind.

Now he was 25. He had a job, a car, a rented apartment close to where he worked, and was seeing a pretty girl who was sweet and caring. He looked at himself in the mirror as he did every morning, sighed, put on a smile and repeated the same old words: I got here all by myself. I am proud. I am happy.

It was barely after he said them for the umpteenth time that it happened. Or, at least, this was as far as his memory went before he blacked out. He woke up on a hard floor made of stone, blinded by the sunlight and by words floating in front of him. He rubbed his eyes, groggily standing up and resting his weight against a tree so that he wouldn’t stumble. His legs felt weak and he had trouble keeping his balance.

“Has someone drugged me?” he muttered, and tried a few times to make the words go away by rubbing his eyes and looking away.

They didn’t. Wherever he looked, they were right in the middle of his field of vision, with no way to make them go away. Defeated, he tried to make some sense of what he was looking at.

“Improve… improve what? What does it mean?”

>Improving random skill…
>Skill: Master System improved to level 2!

Martin shook his head. Suddenly the words were gone, and he could see what his surroundings looked like without having to squint through those annoying glowing words. He was in a forest, it looked like, and the place where he had come back to his senses was a small stony clearing surrounded by tall evergreens. The temperature was nice, fit for his mid-season outside wear. What came to his mind was northern Europe, with tall mountains peeking from behind the trees, tall dark green trees that towered around him, and a dark hilly soil with just a tint of green undergrowth.

There was a path, lit by the sun, leading down the hill. He still couldn’t see what lied ahead, and a few paces down the path told him that it was winding and curving along some unseen edge, so that the trees were never quite aligned in a way that allowed him to see below. He guessed that he was high up, though, with the unknown certainty that gut feelings seem to always have.

He grabbed a pointy stick, thick enough to help him walk better. He still had some leftover vertigo from whatever was done to him on the way here. His holes were all okay, and he still had all of his organs, he checked. Shrugging, he decided to follow the path forward.

There were surprisingly few thoughts on his mind, he realized. The place made him feel calm and at ease, and despite the weirdness of the words, the worry of how he got here, and how he could get back home… he didn’t feel like he thought he should feel in this situation.

If anything, it was the last part, getting back home, that felt overbearingly anxiety-inducing.

A sound, coming from behind one of the thick trunks that surrounded the path, captured his attention. It was a splashy, liquid sound of rubbery feel, and as Martin tried to adjust his vision to penetrate into the darkness of the forest floor where light didn’t reach, the maker of such a sound hopped to the side and made itself visible.

A blob of bright, neon green gelatin was bouncing idly between two trees. It was not very far, barely at the second line of the unevenly spaced trees, but Martin judged it to be at least as big as a basketball. Curious, he got closer to it. He moved slowly, the way he would approach a cat, careful not to scare the thing away or make it aggressive.

He stared at the reflective, slimy and wet surface of the blob. Inside, a thicker gel was flowing around moved by the leftover forces of each bounce. There was nothing else.

His first thought was: “Is this a honest to goodness video game slime?”

Indeed, it looked like one. His second thought was to pop it.

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And so he did. He pierced its surface with his stick, and watched as the hole became a tear that ripped it apart, and the liquid flowed out. He recoiled away, making sure that the green sticky stuff didn’t reach his shoes, and stared at the outcome of his misdeed, arms crossed.

+1 exp

“What.”

The text came and went, this time the letters were not obnoxiously big but small and to the side, allowing him to see perfectly without having to dedicate a good portion of his willpower to ignoring them. It was, it seemed, a routine message that was designed not to hamper his vision.

He wanted to kill more. The small, but tangible rush of dopamine that he got from seeing the little number, coupled with the sadistic idea of popping these little, innocent balloons was too much to resist.

One hour later, he was deep in the woods, lost and covered in slime. He was stained by yellow, green and purple splashes all over, but his maniacally smiling face showed no care for his clothing. His teeth were shining with drool, and his head snapped to the side to focus on yet another source of sound.

He ran over there, stick at the ready.

+1 exp

>Level up!

>Choose one:

>Improve random skill (1 point)
>Improve chosen skill (2 points)
>Generate new random skill (1 point)

The level up notification, as impossible to ignore as it was, brought him back to his senses. He was vaguely aware that the state he had been in for the last hour was not right, not like someone like him should ever be. And yet…

“Cool.” He said. “I remember leveling up the system by accident. And now I have a new choice to choose from.”

He thought it over for barely a second, then rubbed his hands together. The choice was obvious, the promise of thrill was all but certain, and he refused to see himself as a potential gambling addict despite knowing full well that the rush of choosing the random option was just the same, only a hundred times more, as what he felt and successfully resisted countless times when he saw the slots bar on his way home from work.

He chose the random option this time.

>Generating new random skill…
>Skill: Blueflame Ball 1 (toss) generated!

He immediately decided to try it. The knowledge on how to use this new power appeared in his brain as if it had always been there, perfectly integrated and ready to use.

He snapped his fingers, just for theatrical purposes, and a small ball of blue fire appeared in the air right over his open hand. He stared at it for a moment, felt its heat and its light, almost blinding from this close, and he noticed that it was illuminating the darkening forest. It was almost dusk. He threw the ball at a nearby rock, even thought he wanted to do a tree because he felt bad at the idea of a forest fire. The rock exploded in a shower of small, smoking splinters.

Martin was very well aware of the fact that he spent the following thirty seconds motionless, eyes wide open almost to the point of tears, and mouth agape. Yet, inside his mind, a complex process happened where he dug up all his anger, repressed rage, fear, insecurities, hatred, worries and self-hate. Suddenly, their screams were muffled. Suddenly, the shadows that surrounded that tiny pinprick of light that was his consciousness retreated, revealing a barren wasteland that was as huge as it was empty.

Suddenly he was aware of the fact that he was no longer forced to be an upstanding American citizen.

His face cracked. The mask split open, and the manic laughter echoed through the forest and back to his ears. Unfocused eyes spun and spun around, wide open, seeing the trees go up and down, up and down as Martin ran, jumped, screamed. His voice trembled, throat hoarse and in pain. His muscles ached from laughing, crying, screaming of joy.

Eventually, and he never would know how much time it passed while he was in this state, he slumped against a tree and fell asleep.

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