Looking around, Kay was, to be frank, really pissed off at what he was seeing. Spread around him was a fairly beautiful field of green grass, interspaced with nice flowers of varying colors. A few hundred yards off behind him was the start of a forest that kept going as far as he could see, and very far off in the distance ahead he could see the edge of what was probably a mountain. The entire scene was gorgeous, just the kind of place he would love to travel to.

The reason for his anger was simple, at least in his mind. He expected to wake up in his damn apartment! Not some random field! He lived in Arizona dammit! There wasn’t scenery like this for hundreds of miles!

“Where the hell am I?” He muttered, doing yet another slow spin to try and find some landmark he might recognize. The sun hit his eyes as he slowly shifted around, exaggerating his headache. He covered his eyes with his hand. “If those idiots dropped me off in the middle of nowhere…” He growled, but internally he was very worried that wasn’t the case.

The last thing he remembered was getting together with his friends in his apartment to hang and out and drink. The first few hours had been the normal thing, playing games, talking, and just having a good time. After that things got… blurry. As much as he wanted to imagine that this was all some dumb prank, his friends weren’t the type of people to do things like that, hence why he was friends with them.

Also, logically thinking, there was no way that he’d drank enough to keep him unconscious long enough to travel out to a place like this without waking up at least once. He could have been drugged but… No, that wasn’t it.

“Alright.” He said to himself, looking down at his hands. “I know what this could be. No, that’s wrong. I know what my immature kid-self wants this to be. So let’s go ahead and debunk that theory so I can move on.”

Kay was, by his own admission, a nerd. Possibly also a geek depending on how one defined the term, but his personal choice of title was nerd. He liked video games and comics, fantasy and sci-fi stories, manga and anime, the whole thing. He was a nerd’s nerd and didn’t care much about what other people thought about his hobbies. One thing he hadn’t gotten super into was a newer trend in anime and manga called “Isekai”. Japanese for “Other World”, the genre was all about regular people from Earth getting sucked into various kinds of fictional worlds. While he wasn’t a massive fan of the genre, he’d read his fair share and had a few favorites. Waking up in a strange place with no memory of getting there was a big trope, and the excitable child in him was clamoring in joy at the thought of it happening to him.

The mature adult part of him was much more reasonably worried about the issue, and decided to just get it over with and check for it. There were some easily identifiable tropes to this sort of thing, so he decided to just run down the list of them, prove to himself that wasn’t what was happening, and move on.

First of all, he looked himself over and ran his fingers over his face. The clothes he was wearing were the same as he had been wearing when his friends came over, and it felt like his face when he touched himself. So he was still himself, no new body or reincarnating inside someone else.

Next he looked up into the sky, blocking the sun with his hand again. No extra moons or suns in sight, no floating islands, and no giant creatures that shouted “fantasy world!” anywhere in sight.

Finally he tested what he thought was the least likely of the three big tests to prove his “theory” wrong. A good number of the stories, especially the more western ones, were LitRPG, or “Literary RPG” stories, where the world had some form of RPG mechanics in it, in one form or another. He quite liked those stories, but his more rational side was once more insisting on all the reasons that could be really bad, so he dashed the nascent hopes stirring in his chest and prepared for nothing to happen.

“Status.” He said out loud, staring directly ahead of himself.

Kay had so convinced himself of the impossibility of being suddenly dropped into another world, one containing some kind of system or mechanics with a status page and such, that the partially-translucent screen that appeared in front of him startled him so much, he tripped and fell over.

Kay pushed himself upright and stared at the screen. It had followed his field of vision, staying in the exact same spot relative to him as he fell. He stared at it, sitting on the ground for awhile.

Then, in reaction to what the screen said as much as the fact that it existed, he shook himself and cursed. “Well… fuck.”

[Status Locked]