Thanks to your efforts and your innate abilities, the Thirty have blessed you with their System again:

Your new race and class will be: Half-Dragon Pyromancer.

Richard hurled the sheets of his bed away from his body, unsure of what happened in his sleep. He flicked the light switch on, but the lightbulb on the ceiling must have shattered during the night, and only some dim sunrays filtered through the shutters of his now cracked window. But even if it was dark, his vision was still sharp, albeit with a strange yellow filter that stripped color from everything.

Richard’s sigh was much deeper than he had thought, like a rumbling sound coming from within him. A gust of wind was banging against the locked door of his room. That idiot of John must have left every window open yet again after he went to work.

He must have overslept, something that had truly never happened to him. Now he needed yet again to find some kind of excuse that Professor Brown won’t believe anyway, and this there was little which could save him from failing the class. Richard should be already in the bathroom to brush his teeth, but his body felt so heavy that it was like the frame of the bed below him had buckled under the weight and the mattress was now touching the ground.

A large drop of water that seeped from the cracks on the ceiling fell on his chest. Dark stains of moss had grown on the walls and the plaster had come off, revealing the bricks underneath. And was that moss growing at the feet of his bed? What the hell was happening?

Small legs were climbing on his index finger of his right hand, which was jutting out of the bed onto his bedside table. Richard smashed the cockroaches with his palm, splitting the rotten wood in two parts with a crack and raising particles of dust in the air. He should have been surprised that he had already broken the furniture he had bought last year, or that his room had been colonized by cockroaches just in one night, but there were much more concerning matters now.

The hand in front of his eyes, which shouldn’t be in any way his, had the back covered by sharp and ragged scales that stretched to the tip of the fingers, which ended on sharp and shiny claws. The palm was covered by a darker softer tissue, but it was still much thicker than a normal human’s skin.

He gasped when they tucked inside their sheaths after he stretched his fingers, showing only five pointy tips, and when he made a grasping motion, they came out again. To his horror, his hands weren’t the only thing that had changed during the night.

His night clothes were gone, and the rest of his body was covered with the same kind of scales of his arms, larger in size on his chest, abdomen and shoulders, but smaller on his sides. The only parts covered with skin instead of scales were his navel and the upper inside part of the thigh. His feet were hanging way past the bounds of the bed, and they were much longer than the ones of a human, with the four toes making more than half of their length.

All of this was impossible. He had just gone to bed for his usual four hours of sleep after failing to finish to work on his paper and there was no way he could wake inside… this thing. Maybe he was just in a very realistic dream because his room looked like it had been abandoned for one hundred years and he was very sure that it was not the case.

A window like the one of an operating system appeared right in front of his vision.

A new quest path has been automatically generated: tutorial.

Quest n.1:

You’re no longer the being you were before. Open the MENU to get accustomed to your new life.

Rewards: none.

If Richard tried to avert his gaze from the window, it’d snap back to the central point of his vision, and if he closed his eyes, it’d still float in the darkness. Where was this ‘menu’? There were no instructions…

Character info Map Skills Items System settings

Well, he just needed to want to open it to do it. Richard wasn’t aware that such an advanced technology already existed. This meant that this couldn’t be a dream, as the text should be nearly impossible to read. If his memory didn’t betray him, John had been working on a project of that kind, and Richard knew about it because he would never shut his mouth on how much awesome his job was and how he was lucky to be working for such a great company.

Quest completed!

Quest n.2:

You’ve awoken in a changed world after a long slumber. Explore the area to gain data for your MAP.

Rewards: updated World Map.

It was true that he couldn’t remain inside his bed for the whole day. If he had accepted to participate in a virtual reality experiment, he should have some recollection of it, but there seemed to be a huge gap in his memory. His mind had been clouded in a mist that made all the faces indistinguishable from each other, and the last thing he could remember was him rising from his bed during the night, something usual, but instead of going straight to the bathroom, he went to his window and then made a gap through the shutters, narrowing his eyes on something that was now unknown to him.

He needed to find John and as soon as possible. Something bad might have happened. His long legs wobbled as he stepped on the floor and he fell on one knee. He had to walk as if he was on tiptoes the whole time because his feet were different, and he just reached the door's handle with three strides.He had to pick on the key with the tip of two fingers, but when he tried to rotate it, he had put too much strength and it broke inside the lock with a snapping sound. Another stroke of luck.

The electricity socket near his bed looked like it was burnt, and his phone, which he would always leave to charge on his bedside table, was gone, maybe fallen somewhere when he had smashed the cockroaches with his hand. But when he tried to look for it, it wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

Sighing, he made a step back and rammed his shoulder against the wood. The entire door flew out of the hinges and fell out of the building. Richard’s scream was with a monstrous voice as his two arms grabbed the door frame and he dragged his feet on the ground to avoid from falling into the void.

Richard stared at what he had before his eyes with his mouth half open. The entire living room was gone, and if he looked below there was a rusty water pipe leaking brown water jutting from floor’s edge and copper cables waving to the wind. His door was lying inside the living room of someone who lived three floors below.

The Golden Bank building in front of his house was now a tall pile of rubble that blocked the whole avenue, with steel beams poking out of it. Grass had grown out of the cracks of the tarmac, while moss had climbed on the bonnets and on the roofs of the wrecked cars, with their windows and windshield smashed and their tires removed.

Now he really hoped that what he was seeing wasn’t true.