>

“Fuck.” Despite her half-awake state, Laia heard the robotic voice’s words. She just couldn’t be bothered to comprehend them.

“Termination? What kind of shit is this?” Recalling her kidnapper, she made a face; wondering where he ran off to.

Her eyes felt sore and the skin around had swollen. Rubbing her face, Laia suddenly realized that something was very, very wrong. Her fingers tentatively danced over the planes of her face; a shiver ran down her spine at the feeling of something that had never been there before.

A nose bridge.

Quickly sobering up from her initial daze, she quickly took a look at her surroundings.

“Holy shit,” she breathed out, “Am I still on drugs?”

The bedroom she was in was about the size of her entire apartment–a fairly comfortable and spacious one, at that. A huge vanity encompassed the one wall. Mountains of lipstick and eyeshadow palettes framed the gigantic mirror. The floors of the room were tiled in rose marble; various heels with an assortment of weapons-grade spikes and red soles were sprawled on it. There was even a huge white rug that would have animal rights activists puking up blood in anger.

Laia’s peasant eyes had never seen the objects in that room that were all in various shades of rich and shiny. It might have been cheaper to have filled the room to the brim with hundred dollar bills. United States dollar bills.

Whoever owned this room seemed to have not known of the word restraint.

“Rain-rain, you’ve been in there for the whole day.” Laia almost had a heart attack because of the abrupt knocking on the door. “You know, your amazing, super cool brother will set things right for you.”

She wanted to pull a face at those words, but there were more important and concerning matters to attend to. Her eyes darted to the left and right, but no other sign of human life was found.

To repeat, something was very, very wrong.

Quickly piecing that fact alongside the addition of a nose bridge on her face, something inside her brain clicked.

“Raine?”

Raine. For some reason, that name sounded familiar.

The person on the other side of the door jiggled the rose-gold plaited doorknob.

Fuck. She couldn’t think of any other options.

“Yeah?” Her voice croaked as she finished; making it sound like she had just finished crying. Licking her lips, she realized the body she had somehow possessed probably had.

“Do you want to talk about it? About everything, I mean. Mom and dad are here, too. We’re all ready to listen.” The man who claimed to be her brother had a very soft and comforting voice. Laia couldn’t help but criticize her own brother who only knew how to make fun of her endlessly.

Thinking of that douche made her scowl a bit.

“Rain-rain?” The doorknob jiggled again.

“Uh,” her mind snapped back to the present, “I’ll come out in a few minutes. I just… need some more time to compose myself.”

A moment of silence followed. She could only hope that she hadn’t been exposed after a single sentence.

“Okay.” A sigh ended the man’s assent. He quickly followed up, “We’ll be waiting for you downstairs.”

She gave a soft okay. Another moment passed.

“Hey, sis? I just wanted you to know even if we don’t say it a lot– I love you. Mom and dad love you. Even that stinky old geezer does, too. If you want to leave that bastard, I’ll support you. We all will. If anyone has a problem with that we can have them buried six feet under in no time, alright?”

Laia suddenly gasped and clutched her head. Not because of overwhelming sentiment or shock at the ominous end, but because of the bolts of lightning that seemed to shoot through her temples.

>

The robotic voice from before chimed in again. Its words, the ones it said previously, and her current situation all suddenly clicked in her head.

Thankfully, ‘her’ brother had already walked away without waiting for her reply. His steadily fading footsteps were many beats slower than her racing heart.

Quest. Host. Termination. The words repeated themselves in her mind.

“This is just a dream, right?” She muttered. Her dreams had always belonged to a spectrum of plot lines and peculiarities. There wasn’t anything peculiar about this one, it was just more vivid than usual.

Her attempts to reassure herself failed immediately as she looked down to see a pale white hand instead of her usual tan one. Even in her dreams, she still carried the same appearance. The diamond ring on her finger seemed to be mocking her as it winked under the light.

“Calm. I am calm.” She just needed to wake up.

With long and elegantly manicured nails, she clawed at the skin of her arms.

“Ah!” She hissed; watching blood begin to collect at the place of her cut. Despite the pooling crimson, nothing happened to indicate that she was going to wake up.

She then slapped her own face. Hard.

Still nothing.

“Calm.” She exaggerated the word and took a very deep, very long breath.

Fiction was fiction. Fact was fact. She had always abided by that. Even though her career revolved around absurdities and make-believe, she had never lost her grasp on reality. But at this moment, there was only one thing on her mind that could explain the present. And that thought was high up on the spectrum of logical impossibility.

Quest. Host. Termination.

A foreign body.

Termination.

Italicize, Bold, Highlight: Termination.

“Fuck!” Laia laughed; debating slamming her head into the wall.

As someone who identified as an otaku (1), how could she not know the prime keywords for every system story?

Although– again– logically impossible, where else had she seen the setting with some random dismembered voice spouting out nonsense about quests? Maybe a reality TV show, but she didn’t think any of those had the budget to have some kind of science fiction operation to have her consciousness transferred to another body.

So yeah, a system story. She was somehow trapped in a system story and she was sure that kid had something to do with it.

Fact: she was very proficient in torturing her characters.

Fun fact: she was very willing and very ready to practice her skills on a certain kidnapper.

(1) Otaku: fan/stan of something (typically Japanese literature) to a degree in which it may even affect a person’s social life.