Yellow text on a black backdrop.

Much of it was gibberish. It flew by too fast to process. Long chains of indecipherable letters linked by symbols that seemed random.

It didn’t mean anything to Hirrus.

But it was all he had to look at. Just an endless sea of yellow text that continued to pour from nothingness.

When the flurry of nonsense stopped, he was able to read the last few lines. These were different. Much different. Here there were words. Actual text.

ERROR: Unexpected Target

ERROR: NPC Transformation Not Found

ERROR: NPC/PC Mismatch

NPC Autoresolve Function: Running...

ERROR: NPC Autoresolve Function Failed. Target Not Found

PC Autoresolve Function: Running...

But being readable text, with actual words and punctuation, didn’t make them readable. They were just less gibberish. It wasn’t enlightening at all.

Wasn’t he dead? Where was Julissa?

Where was he?

The black backdrop was abruptly replaced with a flash of colors. It was disorienting at first, before his mind caught up to what he was seeing.

And then it was disorienting all over again.

He wasn’t looking at his home. Or Dahlia’s place. Or anywhere he recognized.

But he was looking at something he knew very well.

Himself.

It wasn’t like looking at a reflection. In a mirror, the version of himself he saw moved as he moved. Blinked when he blinked. It was a small thing, but it was incredibly uncomfortable to be looking at his own face and seeing it blink and shift independent of his mental control. It became downright terrifying as the body he recognized as his own rolled its shoulder and rubbed the back of its neck, all with neither mental command nor tactile feedback.

He didn’t tell himself to do that, nor did he feel the rough skin of his neck under his hand, or his arm brushing his side.

Over his shoulder was another thing he recognized. It looked like the beast who had killed him. Hirrus tried to whirl around, as if seeing it behind him in a mirror. But this was no mirror. He didn’t actually have control of his body.

He was truly disconnected.

As soon as he realized violence wasn’t about to ensure - or at least violence he would be a direct participant in - he noticed other discrepancies. The scaled beast over his shoulder was wearing chainmail like his own, not the night guard brigandine. It also had a simple battleaxe instead of a shortsword.

Was that... him as a monster? Were both figures Hirrus?

And why was he seeing them this way?

As he rolled over that suspicion in his mind, he started to process the rest of what he saw. The two figures were standing on the side of a dirt road next to a field of corn. It looked like the outskirts of a farming village. It wasn’t Yenon, though. Yenon - and most of the kingdom of Hari - was too far north for corn. Yenon was barley country.

Instead of getting more information, he felt like he had less.

There was also a strange box next to these potential versions of himself, floating in the air. It included a list of body parts organized from top to bottom, divided strangely. The top of the list made sense, with hair followed by face, but after that it went unexpectedly, listing torso, then arms followed by legs. The granularity seemed odd, and without understanding what it was for he couldn’t figure out why the head was split into two different sections, but the rest of the body was divided into larger groups. Why was hair a separate part, but his hands and feet weren’t?

While pondering that, the top category flashed. The others faded and the word “hair” turned yellow, moving to the top of the box. Where the body-related categories had been there were now a series of white horizontal bars, each one with a silver marker somewhere along their length, labeled with various qualities. Color. Head Length. Style. Thickness. Hairline. Eyebrows. Sideburn Height. Sideburn Length. Moustache Style. Moustache Length Beard Style. Beard Length.

A vertical bar on the side had a silver marker at the very top.

Something in Hirrus' intuition tickled, and he focused his attention on one of the bars. Style. With an effort of will, he focused on the silver marker. It was located about three quarters of the way to the left side. As soon as he thought about it, it moved. Just a slight nudge to the right. Hirrus was startled by what happened next to him. Well, not to him. But to the version of him he could see.

It changed.

His hair went from a few inches long, swept back and parted along the right, like he always kept it, to a messy and tousled look parted down the middle. He mentally flinched, and the silver marker on the bar moved back to the left. His hair snapped back into its usual arrangement.

Hirrus stared at the arrayed bars. This was... his appearance. For whatever reason, he was being presented with the ability to adjust it, and judging by the options available, he could adjust it dramatically.

He wondered if there was a limit to the options available.

What if he could smooth out the scars on his face? Clean up the damage a lifetime of near-constant sunburn had done to his skin. He could make himself taller. Make his nose smaller. Erase the furrowing groove along his brow. He could even just clear the wrinkles and pockmarks he’d developed in the last few years, clear away his beard, and become his incrementally more handsome younger self.

He thrust the thought away.

It was abhorrent. No different than putting a mask on. It would never be his face. He’d earned these scars. He’d earned the heavy tan. For good or ill, he’d earned the wrinkles, too. This was his face. He wouldn’t trade it for another. And if he wasn’t going to change the little things he didn’t like about his face, he certainly wasn’t going to do anything with the rest of his body.

Julissa wouldn’t want him to change anyway.

He tried to mentally shove the box away, and after a moment, the bars vanished, replaced by the body area categories again.

Shortly after, the same mental shove made the bars vanish. They were instead replaced by something both more and less familiar.

Level 1

HP: 500

BUR: 5

SUP: 5

TEN: 5

ATT: 5

RES: 5

GLE: 5

These were the core statistics. Burliness, for physical power. Supple, for physical speed. Tenacity, for physical defense. Attenuation for magical power. Responsiveness for magical speed. And Gleylike for magical defense.

As listed, though, they were wildly inaccurate for him.

Hirrus knew that, as a guard, his level should have been 20, and his hit points should have been 70,250. But he supposed he didn’t understand what was happening at all, so he couldn’t properly gauge what was appropriate.

It returned his attention to larger scale questions. Where was he? What was happening? He had died, right? The only conclusion he could reach was that, for some reason, he was being given a second chance. He was being offered an opportunity to return to the world.

It took just a moment to recall the sight out Dahlia’s door in his last second of life, where he’d smelled smoke and heard screams. Yenon was in flames. The people he was supposed to protect were in danger.

That had to be it.

Somehow, for some reason, he had the opportunity to get home and do his job. Save people.

And, maybe, find who was behind the attack and exact justice on them.

He just had to figure out how to get back into his body, and then find a way back to Yenon.

An effort of will towards the body didn’t seem to be enough, so he pushed his attention towards the box of incorrect stats. Focusing on it made the text fade again, and this time, the whole box went with it. For a moment, Hirrus was left staring at just himself and that weird scaly monster form behind him. He wondered if he’d done something wrong, or if, perhaps, this was the actual afterlife, and he was stuck staring at this unchanging scene for the rest of eternity.

After a moment, though, salvation came.

Another box popped up, this time right over the middle of his face.

Skip Tutorial?

Beneath it were two boxes inside the larger box, one labelled very simply Yes and the other No. Hirrus didn’t fully understand what it meant, but he had the vaguest idea that skipping something would save time. People in Yenon were in danger now. He couldn’t afford to be slowed down.

He focused his attention on the Yes button, pushing the same way he had explored the other options presented to him.

The weird cornfield faded back to blackness. Yellow text on the black background he was left with fluttered by. Hirrus couldn’t focus on any of it.

Eventually it stopped, and the yellow text faded, leaving just the last line.

Generating New Character...