And Then There Was Pain

I took up the torch and brandished it against the darkness. I was answered by silence and the distinct scent of shit. I glanced around the ground, and what I’d first thought were lumps of calcified limestone or other residue were, to my horror, ancient turds turned white from age. The presence of petrified shit confirmed my worst suspicions. Despite the vast size of the pit, it was at one point, and worse, possibly still was, a goddamn toilet.

That damn bitch threw me down a toilet. Technically not a toilet, but a latrine. Regardless, it was a place where shit went down, and smelled miserable all the same. There were other smells down here too, the foetid smell of decay, stagnant water, and rotten flesh. There was some kind of airflow, as indicated by the slight breeze that caused the torch to lightly flicker. At the very least, I was not trapped.

I needed to calm down and collect myself. Somehow, I was in the body of a child, in horrific circumstances, with no one around to help me. Worse than no one to help, the one person here was actively hostile to me. Those floating words that looked suspiciously like a status screen had disappeared during the trip down here, somewhere along the way. In terms of equipment and tools, I was wearing a burlap sack with sleeves and a rope for a belt, and strips of cloth for shoes. The only actual usable tool I had was this torch. Certainly, the torch was a boon in a dark, dank, mysterious underground lair that appeared ancient beyond reckoning, but I was still an unarmed child in a spooky place. I am almost guaranteed to die, unless this was all some sort of elaborate prank to give up my SSN, horrific drugs, or my brain giving me a horrendous final send off in my death throes as I died in my bed in reality.

Either way, this may have started out like a dream, but it clearly wasn’t. There was a sluggishness to a dream, and the sensations felt muted, like the way cotton muffles sound. The rough texture of my clothing, the cold, hard stone against my feet, the blinding light of the torch, all those things felt too immediate, they lacked the degree of sensory removal that dreams induced. And then there was pain. Oh, did I feel pain. All of me ached, like I’d not slept on anything soft in a lifetime, and every bone that hit the ground when I fell throbbed. Hunger lingered and bit in my stomach, although that was at least something I could deal with.

No, this was too real to be a dream. That augmented reality-esque menu I saw earlier appeared just like a menu in a VR game, but no game could be so immersive. By graphics alone, this went well beyond what even the best that cinematic CGI could offer, nevermind the sensory stimulus I experienced. Besides, I couldn’t even afford a VR headset, those were for people with a little too much money or a little too eager to be a virtual refugee. This couldn’t be a game, surely. But that stupid status menu that I saw couldn’t have been a hallucination. I felt stupid for trying it.

“Status.” I said, and behold, that menu re-appeared.

+++

Name: Loiel Krieger

Class: Lord of Tyranny (Slave Knight)

Species: Ursine Therian

Level: 1

HP: 12

+++

Now that name was a familiar one, even if it had been a long time since I’d last seen it. Loiel Krieger was me, or rather, it was the name of my character from Otherworld Online, an MMORPG I used to play religiously. The demands of work and life had taken me away from it, but I’d been eyeing going back to it with the release of a new expansion pack.

Otherworld Online was an MMO based on a traditional tabletop RPG more than 50 years old. Like the source material, it had a rich historical setting and background which took place in a high fantasy world. What set it apart was its customization and character building flexibility. 50 years was a long time for all sorts of official and unofficial material to pop-up, and all of that fed into the game design of Otherworld Online. Players could mix and match different classes, and with hundreds of classes in existence, this meant tremendous flexibility and unexpected synergies. Sometimes the devs would even bake in hidden synergies, which resulted in players making dozens, hundreds of alts, in whatever combinations they thought could work, or could not work out of hopes of finding one of those hidden synergies.

There was some attempt at reigning in overpowered builds and imposing some balance, but for the most part that was secondary to building the character you dreamt up. The focus of the MMO was roleplaying, and so rather than trying to be the most powerful thing you could be, players built characters to match the roleplay they were engaged in. If your group of friends or local community were running a low fantasy, or gritty adventure roleplay, everyone limited the strength of their characters to what was humanly plausible. If you were engaged in a high fantasy roleplay everyone would roll up demigods. I remember there was even a roleplay group that pretended to be the Greek Pantheon who would crossover with another group who roleplayed Greek heroic myths, and they crossed over with another group that would roleplay as historically accurate Greek city states. Someone had posted a 100 episode long series on their interpretation of the Trojan War, put together from footage collected by members of their community. Absolute cinema.

Loiel Krieger had been my general roleplay character fit for campaigns, groups and sessions that didn’t have a thematic focus beyond demigod level strength. I called the build ‘Lord of Tyranny,’ although in reality it was made from cobbling together some very diverse classes; Conquest Paladin, Deathpact Warlock, Blood Sorcerer, Frenzied Zealot were the core classes, among several other ancillary inclusions. It was not a top 10 build, not even a top 100 or top 1000 build, but it was my build. It was designed to inflict enemies with debilitating debuffs, while I had several auras running causing dot damage in my vicinity, backed up by enough raw strength to punish opponents who tried to run, and go toe to toe with enemies who stood and fought. It felt great to watch hordes of enemies die in terror for simply being nearby. After all, a tyrant never punches up, they only punch down, and they do that by dragging everyone else into the dirt.

But, that was all irrelevant. Though I was Loiel Krieger, and my class was listed as Lord of Tyranny, I was level 1. And a child. Still, there had to be more, wasn’t there? As if reacting to my thoughts, more information appeared.

+++

Name: Loiel Krieger

Class: Lord of Tyranny (Slave Knight)

Species: Ursine Therian

Level: 1

HP: 12/12 FP: 10/10

Attributes: Vigor: F-, Mind: F-, Endurance: F-, Strength: F, Dexterity: F-, Agility: F- , Intelligence: F-, Faith: F-, Luck: F-

Equipment: -Torch, -Sack Clothes

Effects: -Slave Mark

Class Features: -Unarmored Defense, -Reckless Attack,

Proficiencies: -Simple Weapon Proficiency, -Martial Weapon Proficiency, -Shield Proficiency, -Light Armor Proficiency, -Medium Armor Proficiency, -Heavy Armor Proficiency, 

Skills:  Perception: F, Athletics: E, Survival: F, History: F, Religion: F, Medicine: F-

Racial Traits: -Dark Senses, -Relentless Endurance, -Untrammeled Savagery

+++

It was about as bad as I’d thought. No, it was worse. A numerical grading system would’ve at least given me an idea of where I stood, but letter grades were too vague to be reliable. An F- spread across the board was to be expected from a child, but it was weird to see that I had a flat F in strength. How much of a gap was there between F and F-? Focusing on the attributes brought up no additional information, neither did saying them aloud. Same with the equipment, and most worryingly, the effects.

A slave mark. It was too dark to make out any details, but looking down the head hole of my sack revealed some kind of tattoo across my chest. My best guess is that’s the slave mark. I wonder then, what did the class (Slave Knight) mean? Was that overriding my actual class? That actually reminded me of what that woman had said.

“To free us from the tyranny of class, and make all people under the sun equal.“

What did she mean by that? Class, as in a category? A racial, social or economic class? Or, could it be an RPG style class, like listed on my character sheet?

Lord of Tyranny ( Slave Knight )

That's what the status screen reported my class as. Slave Knight seemed relatively straightforward, even if it was a little unusual when a little bit of thought was applied. To be a knight was a social class denoted by fealty to a sovereign lord, and etymologically referred to a servant. Slave was, well, a slave. A person stripped of most, if not all, rights and treated as property in a fashion similar to livestock.

So it was strange to use the word slave as a modifier to knight, since that implied a warrior servant-slave of some kind. A little nonsensical. But in the world of RPGs where class, profession and skillset are closely intertwined, it could be interpreted as a slave warrior, a professional warrior who specializes in fighting in heavy armor and possibly on horseback. Maybe it implied something similar to the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire. And this status screen that continued to stubbornly follow me was a definition RPG character sheet. But, who was the player then? Their name, or at least their account name, would be lingering just above the character name, but there was nothing. There was no player.

Who was I? Automatically, without a hint of hesitation, I had automatically assumed that I was ‘Loiel Krieger.’ Strange, I could remember a life from earth, snippets of events and history, both personal and of the world at large. I could remember the lore of something as obscure as the Lorica Segmata of the Roman Empire, the horrific strife and the economic depression I’d spent all my life in and my favorite color, but I couldn’t remember my name. I could remember my friends and family, the people I knew, my co-workers, my job, but I couldn’t remember the specifics. I couldn’t remember the faces and personalities of the people dear to me, even though I could remember what we’d done together. Worse still, all the emotion of those memories were stripped away, and I felt only a lingering disconnect. Even though my reach, grasp and height had changed, my sense of spatial awareness had perfectly adjusted to what I had now. It’s like my past life was something I’d experienced through a book, a game, or a movie. My face, my body, all of my past self-recognition, gone.

I was no longer me, but someone else who held the lingering echo of me.

Whatever it was, I didn't like it. Neither did I like the situation. Trapped in a child's body, in a dark subterranean shithole, I felt painfully mortal. I'd thought about killing myself every day for the past twenty five years, and now that I was very much in a crisis situation, dying no longer seemed attractive. Funnily, or stupidly enough, the mystery of my circumstances made me want to live, for the first time in a decade.

Convinced that I’d find no new information, I decided to move on to more important things, like surviving.