He slowly waded through the forest/jungle (Forngle? Junest?), with no end in sight. He occasionally cut off leaf stems to make his path more clear, turning his head at every noise besides the constant buzzing and whirring that happened behind him.

Surely he would start habituating that sound. Yes, he knew words, he took a psychology class. He wasn’t a dumb person. He also wasn’t an outgoing one, or this would’ve been a much easier task to go through.

He had no visible supplies, no map, no sense of direction, and his feet hurt. He also put that list in reverse order. His feet hurting was the most stressing thing at the moment, while no supplies would cause him death fastest.

Could he use the screens to write on?

He tried focusing on parts of vision that were not natural, like the mana bar on the top left. Its glowed slowly from left to right, and he noticed that every few minutes the number would increase by one. He was currently at 79, which left him five uses of his Shield.

What a lousy repertoire for starting skills.

He eyed the number on the bottom left and was actually weirded out.

It had risen. He poked the number, and a screen, similar to the first one he’d seen when he woke up, appeared in his sight.

[10 followers]

What did that actually mean? Was he followed by someone? Hunted? Was this a game to some interdimensional hunters and he was the prey?

He tried poking it again, trying to not minimize it. He desperately needed a user manual. Maybe one with an actress from a certain sitcom. He wasn’t actually that old to watch it, but that situation struck him as funny.

Poking on the screen made the second line appear.

[Upgrades available for reaching follower threshold]

[Congratulations on obtaining your first followers!]

The sound of fanfares erupted and the screen expanded into a futuristic shelf similar to the one he had for the inventory, which he didn’t know how to access. There was only a single icon available on the shelf, a small backpack and a label that said ‘FREE’ below it.

You don’t look a gift bag in the seams.

He clicked the icon and a backpack true to image popped into existence. He opened the lip and undid the rope that tied the top, then took out the items one by one.

He had a flask with what appeared to be water, which was great as he was feeling thirsty. There was also a wrapped sandwich, the fillings of which eluded him for now, a machete that every forngle adventurer on film ever used, and a piece of rope.

There were also some sort of boots. How they actually fit in the backpack was beyond him, as it was clearly not large enough to fit the four aforementioned items, let alone the heavy black boots that looked like to be out of ‘Goth in 2009’ fashion magazine.

He quickly put the boots on, out of sheer joy of not having to make one more barefoot step through the dirt.

Now all he needed was a monkey and a map. A part of him wanted to say ‘Vámonos’, but that would’ve been too much.