Chapter 1 - The Call

“Hey Pablo, thanks again for jumping on last night to take care of that incident for our live services. I know it must be a bother for you to get on last minute, but it really is appreciated by me and the company. Your hard work will NOT go unnoticed!”

Though we are on off-camera and working from home, I could could imagine the cheesy, corporate smile plastered across the face of my boss.

“No problem, sir, it’s what I do…”

I groan in resignation after I put myself on mute.

“Splendid! I hope the rest of you take example after Pablo here - he is willing to do anything and everything in his power to make sure the customer always comes first!”

As usual, no one else on the call responds to yet-another one of my manager’s pro corporate rants - no one here REALLY cares about the stuff we are doing, especially not me.

“Well, that just about wraps up our daily meeting. You all have your assigned tickets - be sure to work on them and give me great updates for tomorrow’s meeting!”

Wordlessly, all of my faceless teammates drop the call one by one until it’s only myself and my manager left

“Hey Pablo, I noticed you haven’t dropped yet - is there anything I can help you with?”

I snap back into reality, realizing that I had yet again drifted off into thought without intending to, especially at the end of a meeting.

“No sir… just stepped away to use the restroom and forgot to drop the call. Leaving now.”

“Good to hear that you are taking care of yourself! I’m expecting great things from you Pablo - looking forward to hearing your updates tomorrow!”

“Yes sir…”

I nodded apathetically to no one in particular and dropped the call.

Now I was all alone again, like I always was.

---

“Ding-ding!”

I suddenly jerked upright as I realized I had dozed off yet again.

Thankfully, it had only been about half an hour, because nothing would irk me more than waking up to several unread emails and direct messages clamoring for my attention.

I took a look at my work computer and noticed nothing out of the ordinary - a clean inbox and no new messages.

“Does that mean, that…”

I glance over to where I expect to find my smartphone among the clutter piling up on my desk, and pick it up.

“A new email message… but I thought I had unsubscribed from all those annoying marketing newsletters…”

I unlocked my phone and opened up the email app, and read the latest unread message.

“IT IS TIME - THE GRAND CHALLENGE”

The invitation came for a new virtual game I have never heard of. 

“The Grand Challenge?” 

Though this clearly seemed like spam, I scrolled down to read the rest of the email.

“The future needs you. We need you. Please hurry.”

Nothing else was included in the email besides a big blue button that said “Open on Retina Journey.”

“I don’t see why not… it’s not like anything important is happening at work, anyway…”

I clicked on the button, and I hear the sound of a new app downloading onto my virtual reality headset. 

But that sound usually plays when an app is done downloading, and I just started downloading it not even a second ago…

“That’s weird… maybe it’s a small app?”

Not thinking too much about the details, I put on the headset and opened the app.

“Ta-ta-ta!!!”

A fanfare of trumpets started playing as a ruined post-apocalyptic world began to form around me. A moment later, a giant banner with “THE GRAND CHALLENGE” unfurled before my eyes while a button underneath labeled “The Grand Challenge” appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

I clicked the button, and started losing consciousness as my mind found itself whisked away to someplace not here.

---

When I regained consciousness, I realized I was in a dark space with nothing but a spotlight surrounding me.

I glanced around at everything, I started to take notice of my virtual avatar.

In most VR games, I would normally just be a floating set of hands, but this time I was attached to a body, and a very detailed one at that.

VR also had a common problem of where it could not really ever figure out how tall you were, so when you looked down, your character would be crouching or have weird leg spasms, but this avatar was ultra-realistic in that regard too.

“How interesting… and with that fast of a download. Maybe it’s a cloud game? I do have fast internet speeds…”

I shook my head to no longer muse on how this game was rendered, and tried my next typical protocol - waving my body around wildly to see what kind of unusual and weird things would happen my avatar.

This time, however, I flailed around and smacked myself hard on the head, hearing a small yelp out of my avatar.

“Ow, what the heck, who just did that—”

I paused mid-sentence, as I realized what had just happened.

Did I just… feel pain? In a VR game?

“What… is this…”

I slowly got up and realized… that I got up from the floor. With my entire virtual body.

“It can’t be…”

In reality, there had been lots of fantasy fiction regarding the idea of being transported to another world through a myriad of seemingly ordinary summonings, and sometimes the activation was putting on a headset and starting a mysterious app.

But in those virtual reality tales, you wouldn’t log out until some sort of condition was met, such as beating the game.

“Peh, they almost got me. What a crazy idea.”

I shaped my thumbs to try and hold the controller and motioned my thumb to click the menu button, but all I was met with was empty air.

“That’s… really weird. Maybe I should try the hand tracking menu?”

In more modern virtual reality games which opted to remove controllers in favor of hand tracking, you would have to either pinch or swipe to bring up the menu.

I pinched several times, with each finger, on both hands, to no avail.

I also swiped with a huge variety of finger combinations and directions, but nothing seemed to take hold.

“This isn’t good… they might start calling me at work if I don’t stop screwing around.”

My last ditch effort was to try and lift the headset directly off my face. If this didn’t work, I was in a royal mess.

I lived alone, and the only people who knew of my existence was my workplace, and they would at most try to contact me in real life after a day of missing messages.

And by then, if this game is going to be like that one virtual reality tale where you dying in the game kills you in real life…

“Here goes…”

I focused my hands around the top of my head in a cupping motion as if to remove my headset, closed in on my head, lifted up…

And nothing.

“I should have figured…”

As I sat down to try and assess my next steps, a voice started to radiate out towards me.

“I see you have arrived, hero… or should I say, heroine?”

Heroine? What is this voice talking about? Who is talking to me?

In just a split second, the scenery shifted around, and I found myself sitting down in the sky, high above the earth.

“Wha-what???”

My vertigo kicked in as I started to flail in anticipation of falling to my grim demise…

But I didn’t move at all.

“Do not worry, heroine, this is simply the introduction chamber. Unfortunately, I could do nothing about the location…”

The voice from before now appeared before me, a beautiful goddess draped with simple flowing robes and an apologetic look on her face.

“No worries… I was just surprised, that’s all,” a young female voice said, squeaked out by my avatar.

Wait, a young female voice? And this person before me calling me a heroine?

…

Am I a female avatar?

Getting up shakily from the floor, which seemed to be an invisible barrier underneath me, I took a harder look at my avatar’s body—and could figure out nothing obvious.

I just wore a simple flowing garb shirt and some shorts, but after I took a look at my hands, I guess they were more on the slender side.

“Unfortunately… I don’t have a lot of time to explain, so I will try to make this brief.”

The goddess before me frowned from her originally apologetic face, further making me lose confidence in this introduction.

“You will be momentarily sent to another location, and be tasked with defeating the entity controlling the area.

I can’t send you with any weapons or powers — all I was able to do was give you this warning.

Take all of this seriously, and be careful. You won’t get another chance if you di-“

A noise like a window cracking interrupted the goddess before she could finish, and visible cracks started to appear in the environment around me.

At the same time, the goddess lost balance and began to stumble forward, grabbing onto her forehead with one hand while catching her fall with her free hand.

“I’m sorry… this was all I could do. Do your best to survive, and good luck.”

The goddess managed to hoist herself upright with her free hand to look at me with a sad smile, and used her other hand to start a spinning motion.

“Wait—what is going on? Where are you sending me?”

I shouted at the goddess to no avail, as I felt the air around me begun to spin and enclose me, and as my questions screeched to no one, I was once again wrapped in darkness.

---

The walls around me began to spin outward as if unraveling me, and once they all dissipated, all that remained was a large and sprawling area that can only be described as an abandoned junkyard.

Garbage and other forgotten items stacked as high as the eye could see, with several man-made hills littering the landscape.

“You must be joking… even the smell…BLECH”

My body started to retch as the disgusting stench of the junkyard entered my nostrils.

“This is insane… why?”

Trying to ignore the hyper-realistic smell, I pressed my foot into the ground to test its stability.

Years of neglect made some of the ground loose and difficult to traverse on, but a good chunk of the junk had caked into solid material.

Some of the garbage looked recently dislocated, with giant footprints nearby to imply that something huge had just passed by recently Is this the entity the goddess was talking about?

“…?”

Another wave of anxiety flowed through my body, but it wasn’t my anxiety.

It was… my avatar’s anxiety?

What was going on here?

Realizing it now, I did not actually know WHAT I looked like.

Glancing around the junkyard, I focused my vision to look for something shiny and reflective-

“Aha.”

I strolled over to a smaller pile of junk nearby and managed to retrieve a hand mirror that was still intact.

I carefully pulled it out from its lodging as to not have the pile of junk tumble onto of me and began to observe myself.

Despite its trashed status, the hand mirror itself was quite beautiful despite its simplicity, and just a single crack split its surface.

But what caught my attention was not the surprising condition of the hand mirror, but what I saw in its reflection.

Me.

Me?

A young girl barely in her late teens met my gaze.

What I expected to see was a happy-go-lucky avatar with a generic face, but the detail in this person was immaculate.

The way the eyes looked uncertain, how the mouth was biting into its lip in the corner, and just a general aura of uneasiness was reflected onto my visage.

“Who… are you?”

My avatar spoke to me as I continued gazing into the mirror, and I froze.

Me? I am the player. In terms of being someone, I am just like any other player for this game.

“…Game? … Player? What are these words you are saying? This isn’t anything like [[Sital]] said it would be…”

My frustration grew a bit as my avatar questioned my involuntary participation in this experience.

Sital? Who is Sital? I kind of understand you not knowing words like game and player if it’s not in your world’s vocabulary….

I trailed off, realizing now I was conversing with my avatar, yet neither of us seemed to grasp what was going on.

“Sital… is the woman we were speaking with. She promised that if I underwent this trial, I could possibly be granted powers to help save this world, but instead….“

My avatar began to speak, and then stopped as she tried to find the words to describe what I could only imagine to be her disappointment.

Me.

A disappointment yet again.

Listen, I-

As I began speaking to try and learn more about the situation, the ground beneath me (us?) began to rumble.

I turned around towards tho source of the vibrations, and on the horizon of our vision was a moving pile of… junk?

Could that be…?

Focusing my vision, the piles of trash that were lazily heaped in the landfill began to tumble and dissipate in the wake of this walking monstrosity, and a chill ran down my spine.

Wait, so if this is a game, albeit a hyper-realistic one…. this boss fight should be a normal one, right?

The fear of the unknown washed over me quickly as another familiar feeling began to crest into my heart - excitement.

With absolute conviction in my course of action, I started sprinting towards the monstrosity.

“What… are you doing? Do you have a plan, Player?”

This was standard scenario in role-playing games - a lone monster lumbering around its stomping grounds meant as a tutorial for new players to overcome.

In terms of fighting a behemoth several multiples of the player’s size, the typical trope is to get beat up a little bit until a cutscene activates.

This cutscene would grant you a weapon or power so that you can fight back and defeat the monster.

“Hey ugly, look over here!”, I shouted through my avatar.

I finally arrived at the site of the rumbling, and shouted at the giant humanoid pile of trash before me.

Its body was a patchwork of broken appliances, twisted metal, tattered clothing, and mounds of decomposing organic matter.

“Why are you agitating it? Are you trying to get us killed?”

As the monster turned to face me, it roared a loud and bloodcurdling howl, and began to wind up one of its fists to try and hit me.

Do not worry - this is all part of the sequence to trigger the cutscene and awaken your power.

“You are insane! Please get out of the way!”

A large fist barreled at me as I made no attempt to move out of the way, and my avatar found itself sailing across the junkyard.

I can’t believe… I forget….

As the sensation of being pulverized rippled intense pressure and pain over my body, I remembered when I accidentally slapped myself in the introduction room of this experience, and it hurt.

This… hurt so much more.

Why… is this happening… is this… blood?…

Just as I was starting to realize that this was more than just a game, I stopped sailing across the sky as I was forcefully imprinted into a pile of junk.