The world was grey as I opened my eyes and looked up at the sky. Clouds. I was alive? But… outside? I groaned, and noticed that my voice seemed a bout higher-pitched than it normally did. Odd. I must have gotten up to some weird stuff at the party last night…

I sat bolt upright, panicked thoughts clashing in my head. School. Graduation. Sasha.

The meteor.

I was on a hill, I saw, one covered with short, brown grass. An in fenced dirt road was at my right, and led down the hill and far off into what looked like a desert in the far distance, with little mountain peaks maybe beyond that. My head hurt, I realized, and I groaned as I clambered to my feet. I yawned, scratched at the side of my face, and then slapped at a mosquito that had landed on my arm.

I froze. My arm was bare, and knobby, and green, and warty. What the fuck? Someone had spray painted me while I was passed out? But no, my arm was just plain the wrong shape. Not as long or thick as it should have been (that’s what she said), and my fingernails were ridged and heavy. And, well, there were the warts. Unless I’d contracted the world’s fastest-acting venereal disease, those warts definitely didn’t belong on my arms.

And I noticed as I walked wobblingly up the hill to get a better look at the other side, my bare legs and feet were bowed and bent and green and warty as well. My feet stunk, I could now tell, and were sort of lizardy.

I was naked, as it turned out. And apparently my, uh, entire body had received the shortening, wartening, greenening treatment. I couldn’t see my face, but it seemed to have sharpened somewhat, and I had only a few strands of wispy hair on my head (I didn’t want to risk losing what little I had, so I didn’t pluck one out to check if it was green or not).

You’ll notice I’m relaying all this calmly, almost objectively. That’s the benefit of retrospective narration, my dudes. At the time, I was screaming with self-pity at my newfound shortness, baldness, ugliness, and… well. Not to be too vulgar, but I had been rather fond of my previously-proportioned porker.

I regained control of myself once I got to the top of the hill, thankfully. Rubbing snot from my face and syrupy-thick, nasty-smelling tears from my eyes, I was met with the sight of a definitely evil obsidian castle. Not the slightest hint of subtlety there: Black glass rose in twisting spires from the ground, surrounded by what looked like thousands of thick iron rods that glowed red-hot at the tips, and some sort of red smoke rose in a miasma from the tips of the castle towers. I swear thunder crackled a little bit.

So there I was, naked and green in a place I’d never seen before. There was a menacing fucking castle on one side of me, and a forest filled with hungry asshole predators on the others. Where would you have gone in that situation? I figured I was green, maybe some kind of goblin (unless I was still human and had been irradiated or something), and therefore the evil castle was probably safer than the forest. My decision made, I trotted down the hill, willie flopping jauntily in the breeze. The castle loomed alrger over me as I approached, and to tell you the truth it kind of smelled like shit. I stopped in front of this massive gate made of bones (human, no doubt) and knocked as decisively as I could on it.

A figure popped its head over the obsidian battlement above, something like a cross between an elephant and a vulture. “Oi, nekkid goblin! About time you showed up.”

“You were expecting me?” I asked, hands on hips. So I was a summoned hero. That’s how it looked, at least. “Care to open that there gate and let me inside?”

“Hold on,” the vulturephant said, and the head disappeared. A minute later it reappeared and a grizzly, clawed arm appeared with it, hurling a set of rags down over. “Make yerself presentable, we’ve got wimmin and childens in here!”

As I struggled to knot the muddy, ragged clothes into something that’d actually stay on my body without falling off, the gate creaked open. I tried to act as imposing as I could. I was the main character, after all. I needed to present a fitting image. Chest puffed out, I stepped through the opening, and into a courtyard filled with black-armored humanoid soldiers, each carrying weapons and muttering evil things to each other. Huge fire pits dotted the courtyard, and half-naked human slaves toiled at these, pulling metal from the heart of the fire to hammer it against rocks, or baking bread and meat in the coals. I looked at these poor fools as I marched along the giant blatant path in the middle of the courtyard and under the portcullis of skulls leading into the castle proper, grateful that I was a Main Character and not a wretched slave like them.

***

“…and every knight needs a squire,” said the Dark Lord. “Well, a slave, really.”

“What?” I squeaked, just about at the point of tears again. I was kneeling before a throne of red-hot steel, upon which sat Nehelimonion, Lord of Darkness. By my side stood Sasha, who had been transformed into a half-orc. Basically, a ripped humanoid with eight-pack abs, colossal tits, a thick brow ridge, and two cute little tusks rising from under her lip. She wore a minimal set of black steel and white fur armor, probably a Barbarian set, despite the Dark Lord calling her a knight.

Sasha had come into the word about an hour before me, had marched into the castle, and had been given a warm welcome by the Dark Lord. He had provided Sasha with the armor she now wore, and the artifact battleaxe (Imagine an axe made out of Lego bricks, except the Legos are bat skulls, each with little flames dancing in their eye sockets) now strapped to her back, and had fed her a great feast while he waited for “the other one” to arrive. Me, as it happened.

See, I wasn’t given quite the same welcome, because I was only there by chance. Sasha had been summoned out of her boring life, apparently, because she was the most vicious person on Earth. I had thrown myself on top of her at the party, to save her, and so the blast of energy that transported Sasha had also grabbed me. Apparently it was odd I hadn’t been vaporized (like all the other kids at the party) and so the Dark Lord was willing to give me a chance in his service also.

“But your majesty,” I said, as simperingly as I could manage, “if I’m going to do stuff in your evil service, wouldn’t it make sense to make me a hero too? I can do lots of things, I’m a great tactician, and I know all about worlds like this—”

“SILENCE!” roared the Dark Lord’s pet toad, a little creature with a sonorous roar.

Nehelimonion patted the creature on the head, and laughed. “If you were truly special you wouldn’t have incarnated as a goblin. I’ll give you a chance to prove yourself, but I’m not wasting good artifact weapons on a shrimp like you. The first adventurer to see you with a Vorpal Blade or Doomsinger would hit you twice and take my precious treasure from your still-warm corpse. No, you’ll be of much greater use to Lady Sasha.”

I stole a glance at my sexy companion. She stood menacingly, muscles rippling, breasts jiggling, eyes gleaming. Most vicious person on earth, huh? I’d never heard of her doing anything violent. But who was I to argue with a Dark Lord? Well. It was true I felt scrawny and weak as a goblin, even more than I had as a human. Maybe staying close to Shasha and letting her do all the dirty work wouldn’t be such a bad idea, in the short term at least. If this was an RPG-like fantasy world, there’d be a ton of opportunities for me to take my pick of the loot drops Sasha would get, especially since she already had high-tier equipment that’d be higher quality than most elite enemies we’d fight.

“Your majesty,” I said, “I gratefully accept this honor.”

Sasha yawned. “Pass. I don’t need a squire.”

“SO LET IT BE DONE!” The toad screamed, nearly having a seizure with the effort, and the Dark Lord shrugged.

“If you say so. Guards, send Pritchard to the sand mines.” He paused for a moment. “You know, I like a good gamble on fate. Give him a Hero Core, while you’re at it.” He turned to Sasha, ignoring my gasp of horror. “Lady Sasha, may you do terrible things in my name. Let the world become cinders, and your enemies dust. Purge the light from this world, and dominate it for my sake. Fare thee well!”

All the guards and slaves cheered as their new, sexy champion stomped out of the room with the quest of tilting the balance of the world toward evil. Their cheers, in fact, completely drowned out my outraged shouts and screams of wanting a fair trial and of Sasha being a bitch whore (I wasn’t a very nice person back then, but in my defense I had just been condemned to a life of slavery for no reason). I was whacked on the head a few times by a well-armored brute until I bit my tongue and stopped talking, and remained silent as I was dragged outside and shoved into a cart with obsidian barred walls, ostensibly to await carting off to the slave pits.

I’d had better days. Worse, too, but definitely better. I sulked for a long time, cursing the flippant cruelty of Sasha and of the Dark Lord. And fate in general. I had been happy enough with my life back on earth. What was the worst that could happen? Graduate? Then work all day at a shitty job? Go home every night and watch anime and post with my online friends on chat boards while eating junk food? That’s not a bad life at all.

What kind of loser gets sucked into another world and doesn’t even get to be the main character?

Life sucks. It really fucking does.