The Book of Earthly Character sat in my hands and I almost forgot what I was doing with it.

  “Oh, right, the inventory,” I said, setting it back down on the pedestal. It made a soft ‘thump’ sound as it hit.

  I opened the book near the front and at first thought maybe there was some sort of mistake. The pages were empty - or appeared to be.

  I started flipping through them and each one was made of some sort of flimsy plastic material. It was like someone tried to make paper with Suran wrap or something.

  There was a subtle glow to the pages and when I got to the center the book flew all the way open with enough force it almost fell off the stone pillar. Once it was open fully I could make out some writing and shapes.

  At first it populated slowly and what was on there didn’t make any sense but then I recognized that it was a map of my immediate surroundings. I was represented on the map by a simple white dot.

  The map itself seemed to end at the four walls but there were hints of other objects on the edges as if it were trying to pick them up through the stone.

  I noticed that the page on the right was stiff and this made it raise up and away from the rest of the pages. I grabbed the corner of this and turned the page.

  The next page was already populated but was in a language I didn’t understand or recognize at first. After a moment the strange characters on the page started to slowly form into English, their shapes churning and moving as if alive.

  Soon I was able to make out different words I recognized and saw that this was a stats page:

  Player: James Harlow (Jaarlo)

  Race: Human

  Class: None

  Religion: None

  Height: 6’4”

  Weight: 260

  Health: 100/100

  Stamina: 98%

  Mana: Locked

  Armor: 2

  Debuffs: None

  Buffs: None

  Curses: None

  Blessings: None

  The stats just continue from there in a long list of weirder and weirder things. I noted mana being ‘locked’ and was curious about that.

  There was another tab that had something more closer to core stats and it covered pretty standard things like constitution and strength. The fact I was enough of a nerd for this to feel familiar in some way was not lost on me.

  I didn’t spend much time on the details though I noted that my ‘core’ stats were kind of all over:

  Strength: 15

  Dexterity: 10

  Constitution: 14

  Intelligence: 11

  Wisdom: 11

  I didn’t know what the max amounts were or what was considered average but for some reason it felt like these were roughly correct. After covering my general stats it went on to skills.

  I wasn’t anything like a super gamer like my son seemed to be, but I had played enough to see this was borrowed from most games. It reminded me more of tabletop gaming information that I had some familiarity with.

  It had been a long time since I last played but I remembered the basics. The book had a long list of skills from running to jumping to stealth to… pole vaulting? Skiing?

  I realized that the page was scrolling on its own as my vision got to the bottom and if I concentrated I could control the scrolling up and down. It made me a little dizzy at first but after a few tries I got it to feel a little more natural.

  Honestly some of the skills were just absurd. Skiing just didn’t make any sense unless this game world opened up to some sort of ski resort or something. It was weird that so many of the skills were ranked as a ‘1’ even though I had no knowledge of some of them.

  I certainly didn’t know how to ski, or at least I hadn’t since I was a teenager. It made me wonder if this was just some sort of joke or foreshadowing.

  Some of the skills seemed to make a little more sense like ‘bludgeoning’ and ‘dismembering’ but those also made me go cold with the realization that I was actually going to be fighting something to the death.

  I hadn’t even left the first room and there had already been a crazed goblin creature trying to kill me so I guess that meant anything was possible.

  My imagination was running wild trying to consider what other types of creatures I would be going up against and I had to will myself back to focus.

  I was having a hard time taking in some of the other skills. The list went on forever but eventually I reached what looked like the end. Well, not quite the end but something close where the words were blurry. It appeared as if the rest of the skills were either blocked or were just things I didn’t have yet.

  Maybe there were items or something that gave me these later. I had no idea how this all worked and wasn’t sure how much time I should be spending on trying to figure it out. It wasn’t clear what kind of information the game system was going to give me.

  I turned the page again and here was an inventory page I had been looking for originally. It was almost a spreadsheet with rows and rows of boxes. This was what the announcement had meant but I wasn’t sure how this was something I could use in my HUD.

  It was weird that both would be an option. Opening this book and digging for this page did not seem like a very user-friendly experience.

  To be fair, I also had no idea why an extraterrestrial mass kidnapper would care at all about providing a user-friendly experience. Either way, such a thing wasn’t looking too good for me.

  I found the Rat Sticker on the first page and looked closely at it until the description tooltip popped up. This time there was a 3D model of the exact item it represented rather than the crude drawing as before. I tried to use my mind to manipulate the object but that didn’t seem to work.

  It was also possible I just didn’t know how to make it do what I wanted. Hesitantly, I reached up and tried to touch the image with my fingers. My hand went through the knife like it was a projection and it seemed to also adjust the image itself.

  On a whim I decided to try to use a pinch motion like I was using a cellphone and sure enough the image shrank a bit. I reversed the motion and the image zoomed in. The figure of the knife seemed anchored to the book but as far as I could tell it wasn’t being projected out of anything.

  It looked more like some sort of AR interface, or at least that was what my brain was settling on. I could not fathom why some things seemed to be controllable with my eyes and some things did not. It was like different parts of this whole thing were designed by different systems or something.

  On the next page there was more inventory information but it was arranged much differently. It had a really basic drawing of a human male with the body being separated at different points.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  This represented what types of armor or clothing would count towards my stats. Next to the drawing on both sides were boxes and an arrow next to each one pointing to the different sections of the drawing. There was a box and arrow pointing at my head, chest, feet, etc.

  A few of the sections had two boxes representing items such as my chest and my thighs for some reason. It must be to separate actual armor versus clothing I could wear in those areas. Feet were separated this way, and I had a slight laugh imagining magical socks of all things.

  Anything was possible at this point and I would bet that magic socks were the last strange thing I would be encountering. My smock was in one of the chest spaces and my canvas pants in another.

  The old man slippers were down in the feet section. When I looked these over, I was given descriptions and armor ratings.

  Apparently, it was all of these items combined that gave me an armor rating of ‘2’ in my stats but I wasn’t really sure what this meant. Did it mean those points gave me a full 2 points anywhere or was that just a total and each item would only give me armor if it were struck?

  How specific were they going to get with this sort of thing?

  This section of the book also housed the healing items I was given and a few other empty boxes that didn’t give me any information. The original announcement had said something about food, and I wondered if that meant I would have to carry it on me wherever I went.

  However I even found food in this place.

  I shuddered at the possibility of what I was going to have to do to survive. Hunting wasn’t exactly my thing on earth and it certainly wouldn’t have included literal monsters.

  Thinking about earth started to really rev up my anxiety and I tried to bring my focus back on the thing in front of me. I turned to the next page, but this one was blurred out and had an icon with a lock on it in the middle. The little icon spun around in a simple animation, and I was slightly impressed with the tech.

  The next few pages were the same. I wasn’t sure what else I was looking for outside of the help section. I was getting a little concerned that there wasn’t one in the book, but I finally found it near the end.

  Welcome to the help section.

  Here you will find useful submenus full of helpful information. This section will constantly be updated as you progress through the game. As always, we are here to help!

  The page only had these words on it at first but as I continued to look at it a list of titles began to populate. The list seemed to operate in the same way as the list of skills from before.

  I noticed next to most of the titles there was a small asterisk that I assumed meant it was new or had not been viewed yet. Above the list and below the welcome section there was a rectangle that looked like something you could search in but I had no idea how that would work.

  The author of this section, if that was even a thing, was clearly trying to be funny or snarky. This really pissed me off even though it had warned me that the system would try to fit its vernacular around my personality.

  I’m usually all for humor in terrible and traumatic situations, but it was something different when an unknown space computer was deciding to be tongue-in-cheek about life and death stuff.

  It was like it was not only being dismissive of the insane shit show I was in, but it was also trying to be buddy-buddy with me and I didn’t have time for that. Some of the menu headings were just weird and seemed wildly unnecessary:

  You’ve Been Cursed and Now You’re Spreading Curses to Your Friends

  What to do When You’ve Been Killed by the Undead

  So, You’ve Come Down With the Bubonic Plague

  Oh No! Your Flesh is Falling Off on its Own!

  How to Use Utensils

  I went into some of these submenus and there wasn’t much by way of helpful information. The section on being killed by the undead just simply said:

  You probably shouldn’t be reading this if you are dead. And if you are undead and you are reading this then you aren’t going to understand it anyways.

  Or you aren’t actually undead and should turn to: I Think I’m One of the Undead, But I’m Really Not.

  The section on the plague at least had some helpful information regarding the types of creatures that seemed to carry it. I was hopeful for the utensils section, but it just had a sarcastic paragraph detailing how I should already know how to use utensils and the fact I didn’t was probably why I was single.

  I kept scrolling until I found what I was looking for:

  How to Use Your Inventory

  To use your inventory, open the section of the book that has your inventory in it. Once there, use it.

  And that was it.

  I tried scrolling or moving the page around but nothing. All I could do was back out of the page.

  “What the actual fuck!” I yelled at the walls. “You said I could use my inventory without using the book and that using the book was just different! But you didn’t tell me how to actually use it!”

  The list of super unhelpful bullshit just kept coming and I didn’t see anything about the inventory outside of that one section. I went back to the inventory page and looked closer at what was there even though I had already done this.

  There just wasn’t anything that would tell me how to open a separate inventory, and I was growing increasingly frustrated.

  While I was manhandling the book I felt the strap of my paper smock brush against my leg. I grabbed it and tried to reach back to tie the straps back together but felt something in my way.

  I dropped the strap and clumsily felt as far up my back as I could. Somehow, I was wearing something on my back.

  Somewhere around my arms near the shoulder I could feel a strap there. The strap only felt like it was there when I touched it with my hand but when I stopped I couldn’t feel it at all. Moving my shoulders like I was taking a backpack off didn’t seem to make anything happen.

  I dropped my hands and was about to try to shake whatever was on my back loose when I noticed something was floating around my fingers. I held my hands up and the one that had touched the strap on my shoulder was holding a semi-transparent menu by the bottom corner. It felt very similar to how a VR game allowed you to access certain menus.

  Bringing the menu up in front of me revealed my inventory page. So my actual inventory was held in some sort of backpack and they made this the way to access it directly.

  It was bizarre because it didn’t seem to affect my smock, but I could sort of feel it when I was trying to tie the straps back together. Without direct contact it was weightless and invisible.

  I could hear my stomach growling, and I realized I’d been in this room quite a while. There was no way of knowing how long it had been since I’d eaten but I could see something new in my neural display down in the right-hand corner near the boxes.

  It was an icon in the shape of a sandwich of all things. It was filled partway with a greenish color.

  There wasn’t a number inside it like the other icons and when I focused on it the tooltip only said ‘Satiation’. I was going to have to figure out the food situation soon. And water.

  I put my smock back on and pulled the book into my inventory. When I did this, the pedestal slid into the ground with a low rumble and vanished like it had never been there.

  It was mesmerizing and I just stared at where it had been for a moment, trying to digest what I had seen. How was I supposed to get used to any of this?

  The feeling of panic was creeping up on me again and I did my best to shake it off. I looked around and remembered the torches on the wall and walked over to the one I was closest to. The torch came off the wall easily enough and I examined it.

  “Oh good, this thing is really light,” I said, chuckling weakly at my terrible joke.

  At that moment I deeply missed my wife and my son. I delighted at making both of them groan as my impossibly terrible jokes and puns. The loss of it slammed into me out of nowhere and I had to take another moment to bring myself back to focus.

  I could feel tears coming and blinked them away.

  This place better have some kind of medication available because this shit was a fucking roller coaster. With effort I returned my concentration on the torch and a tooltip popped up:

  Torch

  Uses: 8/10

  Common

  Crafting: Not Learned

  This is a torch and can be used as a light source. It can also catch things on fire due to it being, you know, fire.

  If it is put out it will need to be relit. Relighting will cause it to degrade per use. This item will go out if it is stored in your inventory unless it is stored in your quickuse bar. One usage will burn for 1 hour.

  (Note: this item can be used as a weapon but each time it strikes an enemy it will degrade by 1 use even if it does not cause burning damage)

  I had figured out how to get things in my quickbar and wanted to do the same with moving things in and out of my inventory. When I focused on it the way I had the rat sticker from before it poofed away followed by the notification it had been added. Now I just needed to figure out how to interact with it in my inventory.

  The first thing I noticed was it hadn’t gone into a hotbar which means it had gone out as well. I could bring up a general description, but it didn’t provide the details that were present when I had looked at it through the book’s inventory manager.

  After a few attempts I was able to figure out how to pull the torch out and it appeared in my hand, unlit. There was an option to light it. After I did the description showed it had one less use remaining. Thank god I didn’t have to try to figure out how to actually make fire.

  While I had been messing around with it I had discovered that while in my inventory I could bring up sub-options that included destroy and add to hotbar. That meant I didn’t have to have the item in my hand to add it to my hotbar. Finally some convenience and efficiency.

  I wanted to spend more time getting used to this but my stomach grumbled again and I saw that the sandwich icon in my HUD had gone down a bit. It was now a greenish yellow color and was closer to the middle.

  This caused a new type of anxiety as I had no idea what being hungry meant but also figured that if they had some sort of notification for it then it was not good.

  The other torch went into my hotbar so it would stay lit. At least now I can avoid possibly ending up in the dark somehow. I held the torch up so it would illuminate the simple, plain, stone room.

  “Now to figure out how to get out of here,” I said, with absolutely no idea how I was going to do that.