'There goes Mrs Figgs,' Shades thought, as he walked down the street, plastic bag in hand. The milk was low again. He thought he might as well have gotten some exercise and walked a few block to a store near him, sitting in front of a screen day and night can’t be the best thing. He finally completed the company’s app though, after two days straight. He wasn’t the best in the business for nothing, he thought with pride, smiling slightly.

His eyes drifted to the other side of the street, spotting some teenagers.

Tomorrow’s school… His smile evaporated. Holidays ended that day and the life of a common pleb awaited him again. He promised his mother he’d focus on his schoolwork and leave the other stuff for the holidays. She knew he’d completely forget about school if his mind got started on another project.

Not that he really needed to go to school. He was set for life with the earnings he made on every project, but socialising was apparently an important skill.

Even still, he barely 'socialised', sitting in the back of the class. The interests of everyone else wasn’t very…interesting. Luckily his high school days ended this year. He’d probably go travelling. He always wanted to see what the “city of glass” looked like. Maybe go on a month- or two long trip on a boat. Maybe pick up a girl or two.

His daydreams left him as he arrived as his apartment building, walking up the steps to the front door, he almost walked into his neighbour opening the door.

“Hey! Haven’t seen you in a while.” He almost covered his eyes from the dazzling smile she gave him. Some would call her hot, he just called her irritating. Swiping her hair every two seconds, blinking her eyes as if she was going blind, acting as if a camera was behind her every second of the day. Then again, she was a model.

“Yeah, just busy with some work.” He said, still standing on the bottom step.

“Work?” She frowned. “I thought school only starts tomorrow though??” She almost seemed panicked.

“It does. This was other work.”

“Oh.” She looked at him for a moment, before squeezing past, uncomfortably close. “Well, I’m off to the gym.” He only now noticed her workout clothes. Which was saying something, since a model with tights was pretty hard to miss. She seemed almost disappointed. He wasn’t gay! He just preferred it if the girl had an IQ higher than the length of her selfie-stick… Even if she did have a fantastic ass. He did not stare at her curves!

He merely glanced.

Putting the milk away, he fell into his bed. There was still a few hours before nightfall, but with the threat of boredom being the only foreseeable future, he just couldn’t take it anymore! The stress got to him and he passed out on his bed. Either that or sleep deprivation. He preferred the former.

“And so we’ll use this theorem to bleh out the bloop and measure the pow-wow in the meh-meh.”

The teacher said, scientifically, with Shades mentally providing the necessary edits to his speech where needed. It wasn’t that he didn’t find the subject interesting, but he’d already, accidentally, read the book last year… Don’t ask.

His internal musings on the hypothetical reasons for the teacher’s monotone speech was rudely interrupted by a flashing, golden spot in the corner of his vision. At first he ignored it, thinking it was a reflection of some idiot’s mirror or watch. The fact that it stayed in one location and just flashed brighter and dimmer, cured him of that notion fairly quickly.

He focused on it, trying to determine what it was. The moment he looked at it for more than a second, it expanded, taking up almost his entire field-of-view. It had a shimmering golden outline and looked like someone formed a wall with sunlight. Words started appearing, looking like floating smoke.

Intelligence determined to be at optimum level for early activation.

The moment his brain rebooted from the complete impossibility of the situation, he noticed that the smoky words changed. The golden, sunlight screen became smaller and looked to be separated into three blocks. Each block was filled with a single symbol, almost a stylized letter. Top was a big C. Left, a J. Right, an I.He blinked…

Focussing on the C, his view was replaced with something that looked like a sun, with three planets slowly orbiting it. Each one was a different colour. Red, green and blue. As his attention went to each planet, they connected, with a smoky line, to a dark obscured field of space, like something was hidden.

All the smoky lines connecting to the different things reminded Shades of an electronic circuit board.

‘Practically looks like a game.’ He thought. ‘And if it was a game, those colours would probably mean something.’ Thinking of a game he played the other day, he was guessing they were intelligence, dexterity and strength.

All this was fanciful guessing and he was sure he was finally losing his mind, or dreaming, since no one else seemed to have a glowing wall of sunlight or a giant star floating in front of them. They didn’t notice his, so he assumed they couldn’t see it, but none of them looked like they were staring at something in the air either. More than usual at least. Shades shook his head. Since he wasn’t panicking, he should still be in shock. Yeah, that was probably it.

The star in the middle of the three orbiting planets caught his eye. It was flashing like that golden dot did in the corner of his vision.

Focussing on that now, a warmth started spreading over his head, like he just started standing in the sun. It was actually quite a pleasant feeling, for the first few seconds. After that it slowly got hotter and hotter. Like pins-and-needles that just came out of a fire. He clenched his fists, not wanting to shout out and draw attention to himself. He winced as it became painful, like he forgot to turn the cold tap in a shower and the warm water was becoming scalding hot. He imagined steam coming out of his head and grit his teeth.

All of a sudden the heat concentrated at one point at back of his head and drilled into his brain. He couldn’t keep it in anymore and cried out as the pain became overwhelming. His vision became blurry and he fell out of his seat, clawing at the ground. It was as if his brain was vibrating with the heat and started to melt.

It seemed to last forever, when in fact it was only barely a minute before the pain started receding. As he opened his eyes, blinking through the tears, he noticed a black scorch mark, about a foot thick around him, as if someone burned a circle into the floor.

Everyone was watching him. They flinched when his eyes met theirs, some of them had hands covering their gaping mouths.

’Wonderful… There goes my chances at socialising.’ He thought gloomily. ‘Can I wake up now??’ He asked whoever was listening. ’This doesn’t seem like a very fun dream.’

Everyone backed away as he slowly stood up.

“I need to use the bathroom.” He said. He barely recognised his hoarse voice, wincing at the pain that simply speaking caused. No one said anything as he went to the door, glancing at the teacher.

‘At least that shut him up.’ He barely stopped himself from giggling like a crazy lunatic but he didn’t doubt there were at least a few who noticed his twitching lips.

Once outside of the classroom, he ran to the bathroom and locked the door behind him.

‘Only the girl bathroom has locks.’ He thought, though he didn’t particularly care just then.

As he leaned against the door, he thought about what happened. It was the worst pain he’d ever felt but now it was barely a headache, even that was fading. He did notice a slightly warm, fuzzy, if not downright pleasant feeling at the back of his head where the needle of lava stabbed into him. He gingerly touched it but didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.

He walked over to the taps, sighing. Looking into the mirror, he realised why people flinched when looking into his eyes. They were a dark red.

‘I’m not a sith now, am I?’ It looked like he basically joined the dark side. Why couldn’t he have gotten glowing, light blue or white eyes? At least that would have given him a zen-like, wise look. Now it just looked like he wanted to kill everyone.

He noticed the golden dot was flashing again. Focusing on it, he brought up another sun-screen.

Congratulations.

You have successfully activated your gene.

Due to being the first in this world to do so, awarding 10D.

Countdown until final immersion:

3:19

The countdown barely had three minutes left. Whatever it was, it was probably big. That other one said he had an early activation. Maybe everyone else would go through that as well? As least he wouldn’t be the only freak then.

Then again, what would a game be without monsters? Maybe that countdown was when they’d invade or something? ‘Immersion’ didn’t really say much. If monsters did invade, he should probably get the hang of this thing as fast as possible.

‘It said I activated my gene and got rewarded. Maybe something changed?’

He willed the three boxes to appear – which worked, surprisingly – and went to his ‘C’ screen. He noticed the sun had turned a dark, dull, ruby red, slowly rotating. Tiny golden lights were orbiting that. He could barely count them, but they were few enough that he could see there were ten.

‘So those are the 10D’s I was rewarded.’

Concentrating on them didn’t do anything, so he went to his three planets. Focusing on the blue one showed the same field of smoke, but this time he could barely make out more planets, smaller than the big three, like moons compared to actual planets.

‘There seems to be a general theme here.’ He thought.

He couldn’t see any details though, and the red and green planets showed the same fields of grey moons.

Going back to the three boxes, he focused on the ‘I’ box. Doing so caused his hand to start heating up. He winced, assuming the general theme of burning to continue. He wasn’t wrong. A thin red glowing outline of a circle, the size of a golf ball, seared into his hand. It felt like someone was cutting him with a red hot knife. It barely last a few seconds, after which the glow died down, becoming dull.

He noticed the box didn’t go away. After the mark was finished, the box connected to a hollow planet with nothing in it.

‘Like a container.’ He thought.

He took out a pack of gum from his pocket and tried putting it in the hollow, smoky planet, hovering in front of him. His hand just passed through it, disturbing the smoke momentarily. He was stumped for a few seconds before glancing at his hand with the circle. He put the gum against his hand and imagined it swallowing the packet. He almost freaked out as dark red smoke poured out of his hand and pulled it in. He saw a smoky packet of gum appear in the planet in front of him.

He smiled for the first time that day. He finally felt like he was getting somewhere.

‘So, following the general idea of this being a game: C is Character and I is Inventory. What could J be?’ He expected it to be a type of journal and wasn’t disappointed.

Focusing on that made it connect to a book, which materialised between his hands. It looked like it was made of dark grey smoke. Moving it with his hands just disturbed the smoke, so he imagined moving the pages. They turned but they stayed blank.

‘Maybe you need to think of a topic?’ He thought. He wondered what he’d ask it, glancing at the timer in the main screen. It only showed about a minute left. He then thought of the small glowing lights orbiting his dark star and decided that was as good a place to start as any.

He imagined the glowing lights in a questioning form and ‘asked’ the book what they were. Nothing else seemed to need his voice so he ‘asked’ it mentally.

He smiled again as the book’s smoky pages started turning, before stopping at a blank page where blood red words started forming. It made him wonder what was up with the dark theme – he wasn’t evil or murderous by any means – before just shrugging and moving on.

Dayle

Dayle is energy which can be used to reach greater heights. It is bartered in exchange for knowledge over the mysterious.

‘Knowledge over the mysterious? Bartered… Is it a currency? Well that’s not very informative.’ Shades thought as he looked over what was said. Maybe he needed to be more specific? There was half a minute left as he quickly asked it how to use the Dayle.

Instead of words, images seemed to blow over the smoky pages. It showed the glowing lights, like small stars, either flowing into a planet or orbiting one. He got the idea and went back to his Dayles orbiting his red star and tried to move them to one of his planets. It resisted, until he imagined moving them through one of the thin, barely visible lines connecting the planets to the star. A light flowed through one of the lines to the blue planet and started orbiting it. The light seemed to push back the smoke and revealed few of the desolate moons. When he tried moving the light to one of the moons to bring it to life, the light started becoming dimmer and the smoke started covering the moons again, causing the Dayle to move back to orbiting the planet, brightening it and making the smoke retreat again, revealing the moons.

Shades was stumped for a few seconds, wondering what to do to keep the smoke back. He got another idea and just about to see if it would work, when he heard it.

The screams.