Quinten was jarred awake moments later by the shaking of the Jeep. The strange dreamlike void left his mind confused and cloudy. A particularly hard jolt cleared his mind a bit and he found himself at the wheel of a bouncing Django careening out of control. Out of panic, he grabbed the wheel went for the breaks. Just as he was about the stomp on the pedal, his journey came to a sudden and crunching stop. The airbag slammed into his face like a haymaker delivered by the great Muhammad Ali himself and for the second time in as many minutes, he was knocked the fuck out. This time his dreams were of a normal variety, albeit strange in their own right. Quinten found himself surrounded by black figures with glowing red eyes. One by one, they came to attack. Quinten knew these dreams well and started beating the ever-livin' snot out of the shadow monsters. "AHAHAHA! You fiends! You dare come at me? Die a worthless death!" He laughed maniacally at the shades and continued to chop them down with a dazzling two-handed sword like saplings in a forest. The sluggish motions of his body felt as if he was moving around underwater, but that wouldn't stop him from ending the lives of these sorry souls. He jumped around, higher than he ever could in real life, and floated down to strike an enemy from the air. He was unstoppable in the land of dreams and he reveled in the feeling of power. Soon his foes were piled up in a mountain of shadowy corpses, the red drained from their eyes. He had succeeded. Waking up once more, he groggily rose his head while pushing himself away from the smothering mass of airbag. The incessant horn died away as his face lifted away from the wheel. His head was pounding. A warm stream of blood ran down his face from a laceration in his scalp. With a groan, he rubbed his temples to try and ease the pounding behind his eyes. "Hope I don't have a concussion...", he absent-mindedly thought about the possible trauma as he took a quick internal diagnostic of himself. He rolled his shoulders noticing a bit of tightness in his neck and stretched out to check for any pain. "Nothing seems brok..." He trailed off when his focus was drawn to a pulsing red bar in the upper left corner of his vision. He tried to glance up at it but no matter how he moved his eyes, it followed the movements and remained in his periphery. Frustrated and more than a little weirded out by its presence, he just let his focus relax and he found he could see it without needing to directly focus on it. It looked like a health bar from a videogame. It was a little over 90% full and as he watched, a little red sliver drained away and his headache pulsed along with it. After a few moments of trying to comprehend what he was experiencing, a box opened up underneath containing an image of a red drop. The box flashed red and once more his health dropped by another percent. Another small wave of pain emanated from his forehead and he slowly came to realize the flashing box and red bar were tied to his injury. "Like a bleeding debuff" he mused to himself. "Kind of like a game..." He was pretty sure he was going mad. He rummaged around and found a roll of paper towels. He tore off a few and pressed them to the source of the dropping blood. After a few moments, the box flashed one last time and disappeared. The floating red bar stabilized at around 87% and his headache weakened a bit to something more manageable. He opened to door and hopped out of the Jeep into a field of tall grass, and staggered. It felt like a weighted blanket was thrown on his shoulders and working to pull him into the ground. His legs shook slightly, the recent blow to the head and the odd weighted sensation working in tandem to attempt to bring him to his knees. He rubbed his temples again from the residual headache while working against this newly perceived weight. He shook out his arms and bounced up and down to adjust to the odd sensation of stronger gravity. It was like the gravitational pull of the planet was increased compared to what he usually experienced. With that thought, he stopped what he was doing to finally pay attention to his surroundings. He looked around and froze. Not because of the temperature, (his surroundings were surprisingly warm and humid. Like the leading edge of summer back in his Midwest home town), but because last he checked, it was the middle of a snowy winter night. "How long was I out? Did I gain weight? What happened to the snow? It shouldn't be so warm. It was definitely just Winter. Where are the mountains? The fuck even..?" The air smelled fresh and stars littered the entire expanse of sky. The moon, easily twice as big as when he'd last seen it with a lot less impact craters, hung in the sky like a porcelain disk. It cast a dim light across the endless rolling field of hills and grass surrounding him. He had absolutely no idea where he was. Nothing was familiar. The road he was on was gone. There weren't any powerlines or bright lights of the city he'd just left. He was alone in an empty field. Well, almost. He had Django. And whatever was laying in front of the Jeep. He walked to the front to get a better look, the increased weight really messing with his proprioception, and what he saw disturbed him to his core. What lay in front of him, broken and bloody, struggling for each ragged breath, was a creature he'd never seen before. What he found looked like a mish-mash of a tiger and moose. He could see its legs, one of which being bent at an unnatural angle, ended in cloven hooves. Its light purple fur was patterned with jagged black stripes. The elongated, moose like face ended in a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. The creature had 2 large, spiky, spade-like antlers adorning the top of its head. Its eyes stared off into space, reflecting the moonlight with a dull hint of red, reminding him of his earlier dream. The black pupils resembled that of a goat, rectangular but vertical instead of horizontal. Its triangular ears were flattened against its head in fear and Quinten could see white tufts of fur sticking out. After a long minute of staring into the eyes of the beast, it took its last rasping breath and its eyes glossed over, its killer the last thing it will ever see. An audible chiming sound snapped Quinten out of his shocked state. With it came a tingling static-like surge throughout his body and a box of indecipherable text appeared in the center of his vision, obstructing the center of his view. He tried to look around it but it remained at the center of his focal point. Even after a minute, the box didn't go away. It had what seemed to be a small paragraph of text with two sets of symbols at the bottom, one of which was bold and highlighted. It seemed to want something from him but he couldn't understand what it said. He looked from the highlighted group to the other one and the highlight flashed to encompass it instead. He flicked his gaze back and forth and the highlighting flickered between the two groups of text. "Definitely weird," he said out loud. He just wanted it to go away. He attempted to swipe it way but it wasn't physical so there was nothing to touch. He tried to will it away but it just wouldn't leave. It was more than a little distracting seeing as how it obstructed a good portion of his field of view. He thought back to some of the MMO games he's played and usually this kind of prompt expected a confirmation of some kind, so he assumed that's what it wanted. He looked back to the left text to highlight it, thought about confirming his selection and the box finally disappeared. "Success!" He fist pumped and grinned. When the box vanished he felt something... Click? In his mind and a slight rumbling, buzz surged through his head. It lasted but a moment and he knew something changed but he couldn't tell what, if anything, had changed. Another box appeared with some new text but didn't stay long and faded out after a half a minute. He decided not to worry about it. There were more pressing issues he had to face. Namely, he was pretty sure he was in another world. Either that or he was somehow in a videogame, but that seemed ridiculous with the circumstances leading him here. The text boxes screamed "video game" but there was nothing like this back home, and you don't get transported into a game through a physical(?) portal. That just didn't make sense. It's just binary data. Getting transported to another world, however, sounds way more plausible, at least if you subscribed to the multiverse theory. "It's definitely another world. Great. I'm an isekai protagonist." He grinned at the scenes of Magic and adventure playing through his mind. "Wait! Does this mean I have some sort of cheatsy OP skill?" He struck a contemplative pose and tried to feel around for any earth-shattering magical power hidden within himself. "I don't feel anything!" He cried after a minute and fell to the ground, defeated. "Maybe what happened earlier was me getting my godlike powers?" He pondered as he searched his mind for any hint of difference. Nothing. He felt nothing. He tried to force something out, anything. He relaxed trying to let it out naturally. He even attempted to jump and blast out a Kamehameha but nothing seemed to work. All he got for his efforts was a little toot out the boot. "Pardon me." He looked around embarrassed. "Meh. I guess I'll figure it out later. Really wish I understood what the window said." He shook his head to clear away the depressing feeling of inadequacy. "Great, transported to another world and I'm just useless. Shouldn't I have at least received some sort of translation skill??". He couldn't help but complain since learning a new language was gonna be difficult, to say the least. After a bit more self-pity, he got up with a bit of effort, stretched and dusted himself off. Just then his stomach grumbled. "Oh right, I haven't eaten yet... If I'm stuck here I'll have to survive somehow." He glanced at the tiger moose thing. Toose? Mooger? Whatever it was, it was meat, and meat is food. He looked around and saw a little group of trees nearby. "Yes! Firewood". He reached back into the Jeep and grabbed the keys then locked the door. "That was useless," he muttered under his breath. "Who's even around to try and steal my stuff?" He looked around and headed off to the copse in the distance. It took around 20 minutes before he found himself in front of the first tree. By the time he made it, he was sweating profusely and his breath hitched in his chest. "God where's my inhaler when I need it??" He hadn't had an asthma attack in years so of course, he didn't have one anymore. He'd been pretty good about staying in shape so this effort was a surprise to him. But he made it none the less and a proud feeling of accomplishment welled up inside. The copse of trees was smaller than he thought, only consisting of 7 trees of an unknown species in total, but one of them was dead and had fallen over. "Nice, thanks for making it easy on me! Whatever gods are out there, please accept my gratitude for this boon!" He put his hands together and prayed, then set about collecting the materials needed. --------- Little did he know, the goddess that brought him here was listening and smiled at his words. She foresaw the era of change this human would bring. She conjured a bucket of popcorn and sat back to watch his story unfold.