This time when I woke up I was looking at the sky. The sky was blue, as you might expect, and I was surrounded by trees. It would seem that SysAdmin Beam dropped me off in a forest of some sort. The weather was nice, maybe early summer? Late afternoon? I sat up and looked around. For the most part, it looked like any number of woods that I’d been hiking in on my world. SysAdmin Beam said this was a JRPG-like world, so chances were good that this was a “cursed” or “monster” forest or something. It was bound to be full of both magic beasts and would-be heroes grinding them for XP. So far, though, it all looked pretty normal; hopefully, there would be a town nearby. Why did Beam drop me in this forest? Though if you think about it, how many video games start out this way? I was eager to find out what the rest of this world was like, and I was determined to not be an NPC for someone else’s life this time around. I still had all my memories from my past world, so it would be interesting to see if they would be useful at all in this new one.

I looked down at myself and was a bit surprised to see that my body was now something decidedly inorganic. I examined my hands and they looked like some sort of fiber or cabling muscles like you see in diagrams of people without skin, except the fibers were black with very faint lights pulsing through them. On top of these fibers was a kind of light gray armor plating. I couldn’t tell if it was stone or some sort of metal, but just the same I could feel the air temperature and the light breeze on my... skin? Shell? Armor? Whatever it was, I seemed to have a sense of touch, so that was good. I hadn’t thought about that when I made my request. The shape was also a bit off. I had two thumbs, one on each side of my hand, and two fingers in the middle. I wiggled them around a bit as I wondered what my head looked like.

I stood up and tried to get a better look at my body; it had kind of a generic feel to it. Maybe I was upgradable. Everything moved in a fluid way without any thought; it was like I’d been like this all my life, which I guess technically I had as far as this “life” was concerned, all nine minutes and twenty-two point seven three seconds of it. Oh, I had an internal clock, useful. I spun my hand around on my wrist a full 360 degrees and it kept spinning like a drill, that was kinda neat. I held out my hand in front of me and noticed that there was zero vibration or shaking. If I didn’t actively think about moving, then nothing moved. I guess that was part of being a machine now.

At the corners of my vision, I could see little indicators for things like ambient temperature or wind direction. There were also some empty boxes, so maybe my “HUD” or Heads Up Display was configurable? I also seemed to have some sort of selector that could cycle through different light frequencies or overlay them on top of the “default” view. I really was a robot, this was amazing!

I was standing in the middle of a forest with no obvious direction to go; a map function of some sort would have been nice. I should have asked for that. Ah well, no sense crying over spilled Energon. I figured now that I was a sort of robot type thing I could make these jokes. Too bad no one here would get them. I was in a small clearing trying to decide what direction to go when I spotted a small animal digging at a spot on the ground. It looked like a squirrel from my world, except that it was bright red with a warm orange chest and belly and the edges around it seemed a bit hazy. It was pretty preoccupied with digging; I guessed it was looking for an acorn or something. Behind it though, creeping out of the bushes, I could see a dark blue fox. Its mouth opened and there was a ridiculous amount of saliva dripping from its jaws. It was as if a faucet was turned on, this thing had so much liquid in its mouth. The squirrel must have sensed it, and it jumped around to face the fox and was trying to retreat backward.

The little guy tensed for a bit then burst into a flash of flames, but they only lasted for a second. It tried again, but this time it didn’t get any flash, just a popping sound with sparks shooting off like it was trying to ignite but couldn’t catch. The thing looked terrified. I started walking over to where they were, and the fox looked quickly at me and then dashed back into the bushes. The little squirrel was still popping and sparking; it seemed to be in pain. It just looked at me in terror but didn’t seem to be able to do anything. I squatted down near it and put out a hand in a gentle way.

“Don’t worry buddy, it’s okay. I won’t hurt you. Wait, is that my voice?” My voice had a metallic echo to it. It sounded pretty cool if I’m honest. With my hand still extended to the popping and sparking squirrel, I called “[Console].” In front of me, a window of light opened up. It reminded me of what you’d expect in anime in video game worlds, and the contents of the window reminded me a lot of the Dev Tools I was used to as a programmer.

“Let’s see what’s going on here, guy.” At the top of the window, I could see that this was called a Fire Squirrel. It was only a year old and a level 1, whatever that meant. I could also see some stats regarding its health and abilities and what skills it had. There were a couple of tabs across the top, so I tapped on the one labeled “Console Log” and could see that the poor thing seemed to be caught in some sort of function loop. The function [Flame Aura()] was stuck hitting this guy’s mana in each loop but then just dumping it. I switched over to the “Source” tab and added a [Pause BreakPoint] in the function.

“It looks like you’ve got some sort of mana leak here, let’s add a check function to break out of the mana cycle loop and try again... and you’re missing a closing bracket?”

The squirrel froze mid pop. It was kinda weird. I then added a [Check If False] condition inside of the loop so it’d be able to break if it didn’t work, as well as cleaned up the missing bracket. I unpaused the script and it was able to break out of the loop, and the squirrel stopped sparking and fizzing. It looked up at me, very confused.

“Go ahead and try it again. We need to test it out.”

It seemed like the squirrel understood me and tensed then burst into sustained flames like a tiny furry Human Torch. It looked back up at me and chattered excitedly.

“Woah there buddy, you’re going to burn up all your mana pretty quick doing that. You lost a ton when you were caught in that loop. Here, let’s add an [EventListener] with a warning [alert()] for when you get close to running out... and done.”

The squirrel flashed a couple more times, then held out a tiny paw, and a tiny ball of fire formed in it then collapsed. It then shot a tiny stream of fire out of its mouth then looked up at me and jumped around a couple of times before scampering up me to nuzzle my cheek. “Haha, no problem, little guy.” I moved to stand up and held my arm out to let the squirrel hop off but, instead, it sat squarely on my shoulder. “I guess you want to come with me, eh?” The squirrel chattered in agreement. “How about I call you Sparky then?” The squirrel seemed to like it, so I stood up and looked around. I could make out a bit of a game trail, so I decided to follow it.