A young knight stood beneath a cloudless sky and a luminous blue moon. The moon flashed and became an eye, an enormous eye in the heavens that looked down on all that lived. The eyes of a great and unfathomable terror.

The knight drew her sword and prepared to meet the terror that hovered hidden within the black canopy of the sky, and all the stars in the sky began to laugh. Music began to play and angels began to sing. Then the world exploded, giving birth to countless castles.

Alex’s eyes snapped open. Her head was pounding. She’d had a dream but she couldn’t remember the contents. Normally that’d be no concern, after all, everyone had those kinds of dreams, all the time. However, this time it was different. This time it felt like last night’s dream was important.

Alex groaned. Rubbing her brow and finding it faintly feverish. Sticky with sweat and warm to the touch. She tilted her head back and looked out of the window that lay behind her bead’s headboard.

The sun was up, just barely cresting over the hills. The morning had arrived. And here Alex was, without the foggiest clue of how the hell she’d gotten to bed. She couldn’t even remember how she’d gotten home that night, and that usually only happened after she let Zara drag her out to a party.

She furrowed her brow trying to remember. She could recall leaving work, and going to the empty, overgrown, lot next to the old junkyard with Zara.

She could vaguely recall seeing the biggest mech that ever was appearing from within the pyre Zara built. Though that part felt like something she’d dreamt. She could remember agreeing to be part of something called the game of doors, and receiving “the app”. The interface application that would supposedly make all of Alex and Zara’s dreams come true.

Then nothing. There was nothing else that she remembered. It was like she was watching a film and someone ended the playback early.

Eventually, she got tired of trying to probe that numb spot in her brain. She opened her interface to see what time it was and was stunned to find that the interface had changed. It wasn’t a very big change. Just a change in the background and the addition of a few tabs.

The background was now an opaque-blue, with a long stream of numbers flowing through it. The ordinary options in the menu were now accompanied by an option that showed her level, listed an attribute called “talent”, she could also expand the tabs for magical affinity, skills, and abilities. Those last tabs had always been present but up until they’d been static.

A vestigial remnant of the days when the people of Channel 5715 were allowed to freely use magic and superpowers without licensure by the state and the higher-powers.

There was a final change she noticed afterward. An interface application that she couldn’t open, no matter how hard she tried to. When checked the taskbar menu, she found that the APP was already running. This APP was titled “Game of Doors” and seeing that name made Alex feel short of breath. Her body shaking as if she were standing outside in the buff during the coldest winter’s night.

She might have spent a whole day in bed, just trying to make sense of what she was looking at, but then she saw that she’d received a message. Marked in bold. Placed within the interface’s communication tab, there was a message from Null’s Office of Channel Moderation. Something that she shouldn’t have heard of before, but a life of browsing social media, and shitty conspiracy theory forums, had taught her, were the secret bosses of all of Uhrwerk.

The message congratulated her for joining the Game of Doors, informed that she’d been given 300 free talent points, one token to unlock a single initial ability, and a personal subspace. With a few extra words informing her that now that she was a holder of critical reality-altering code, ie. a “piece”, her personal reality would likely see some drastic changes.

Having been raised on a diet of RPGs and VRMMOs, after quickly using her interface’s help option to confirm that yes talent was indeed the system’s version of ability/attribute points. Alex cautiously invested 10 of the 300 free talent points that she’d received as a bonus for becoming a piece in the game of doors, into her constitution and immediately found herself feeling better.

The thunderous pounding in her skull was reduced to a faint twinge. Her fever immediately dipped to something that she could barely feel. She invested another ten points and found herself feeling refreshed and healthier than ever. Which spoke leagues of how poor her health had been before. The average person had at least 100 Constitution, and she’d had something around 60 constitutions, after having been sickly as a child, and only a little less sickly as a young adult.

Alex lay back in bed for a few minutes more. Looking up at her ceiling in that way one does when your world view has been thoroughly shattered and you don’t hate it. She eventually got up out of bed when she remembered it was a school day and she still had shit to do that wasn’t just lying in bed.

Besides the need to move on with her day, Alex’s past health concerns were such that if her mom woke up and she was still lying around there was a fifty percent chance that she’d end up having to talk the woman out of calling an ambulance for her.

Alex’s father had died of a terminal illness and Alex herself had spent her youth going in and out of hospitals. Alex’s health concerns had been extremely traumatic for both mother and child and they were still recovering from the experience.

After a shower, and a bus ride later, Alex found herself standing at the gates of the Diz Prep. By some stroke of terrible luck, she was actually early that day, so the school gates weren’t open yet.

Rather than just waiting, she doubled back, heading down the road and stopping by a local franchise cafe to spend a few credits on a coffee. She bought two because not feeling like crap for once, had put her in just that good a mood.

“Hey, Alex...What’s sup?” said a voice.

The voice belonged to Jenell Oneal, another kid from Alex and Zara’s neighborhood. Alex’s expression fell slack. She wasn’t that big a fan of Jenell, but then again she generally tended not to like a lot of the people she met or knew all that much. She blithely wondered if that made her the asshole but then decided she didn’t care.

Zara appeared two minutes later, saving Alex from five minutes of small talk. The school’s security finally opened the gates and the three youths joined the crowd of less than excited youngsters that pushed its way onto the school grounds.

Alex bumped shoulders with Zara and handed her one of the two coffee cups.

“We need to talk…”

Zara blinked, slightly surprised at the show of goodwill. She gave Alex a look before glancing over at Jenell.

“....I know...but later. After school.”

After school couldn’t come quickly enough. It took even longer because Zara had to shake off her girlfriend Jessy, who spent the whole conversation making kissy faces at Zara and bitchy faces at Alex. An act that made no sense to Alex.

The thick-headed lacrosse player had somehow gotten it into her head that Alex was trying to steal Zara from her. Which as far as Alex was concerned was the dumbest idea, Alex was mostly sure she wasn’t into girls, and even if that wasn’t the case, Alex and Zara had known each other for so long that they were basically sisters, or at least super-close cousins, and the idea of being with her in that way, held little to no appeal.

They went to their base, which for now was the empty lot by the junkyard. When they finally arrived Alex all but exploded. Unable to hold back the words and questions that had been building up in her head since the morning started.

“So are we gonna finally talk about what happened last night?” said Alex.

“We finally got it. We finally got the app. What else is there to talk about?” said Zara. Seeming to vibrate in place. The disbelief and awe clear in her voice.

“How about we talk about why I can’t remember how I got home last night? Or what that message meant by saying that Game of Door pieces might see changes of Personal Reality?” said Alex.

“Oh...Er…” Zara’s enthusiasm waned, as Alex struck upon some of the issues that she herself had been concerned about before quickly forgetting them in the excitement of seeing that she finally got the app. Her ticket out of town and her escape hatch from the nightmarish future she saw a window to, each time she saw how miserable her mother was.

“It means that your lives are in danger...And you must prepare if you wish to survive,” said a third voice.

The girls turned and saw a certain cute, plush, silver-blue, cat-fox hybrid. The morphed mech that had declared it was its role to serve as their personal admin and liaison in the game.

“Greetings, pieces. I’m happy to see you survived the uploading process. Now let me explain the rest of the rules to you…” said the fox-cat.