Restart_LitRPG Series Read online

  Bummer!

  This was a fail to end all fails.

  The blue bar meant Vigor. Vigor, of all things.

  Well, what could you expect from someone who’d designed a red (not green!) health bar?

  Actually, whose idea was this?

  Who had come up with all the system messages? Normally, game makers hired special people to write them. But this wasn’t a game, was it? This was real life. I wasn’t dreaming. My brain was perfectly healthy, so no chance of hallucinating, either.

  Where did it all come from? All these gaming terms and the system itself? Who calculated my social status or my Satisfaction points?

  If you took that guy, the security guard — “Boss”, wasn’t it? If I asked him about his purpose in life, what would he say to me? Would he say he was a level-4 wrestler? I don’t think so. He might say he’s a security guard, or a human being, or a bodybuilder, an athlete, an avid angler, or her mother’s son — take your pick. His answer would depend on the timing and the asker’s identity. Still, according to the system he was a wrestler, period.

  And how about Yanna? A level-3 office worker? Yeah yeah.

  In any case, why was it happening to me of all people?

  Just think of the mayhem that would have ensued in the social media if something like this would have become known! A RealRPG! This wasn’t some viral video of a cute cat or a celebrity wardrobe malfunction. The Internet would have exploded!

  Still, there was no sign of any such breaking news anywhere. I’d spent the last forty-eight hours scouring all the newsfeeds and tabloid sites; I’d even posted a few questions on various forums with provocative titles like “What would you do if...” In those posts, I’d described my own case as a gamer’s fantasy. Admittedly, my posts had garnered a wealth of replies — but none of the commenters seemed to have taken my question seriously. Some dude called Igor_Bogeyman even wrote that he would have “leveled up soccer” and “finally brought Russian soccer under the spotlight”. His comment was seconded by several more guys — probably enough to make Russia’s new soccer team in time for the World Cup.

  I tried to remember everything that had happened to me prior to this weird glitch in my perception. Still, I couldn’t think of anything. I might have overdone on WoW, that’s for sure. But that wasn’t how it was supposed to happen, was it? If you think of it, Bruce Banner had had to suffer a blast of gamma radiation in order to become Hulk. Peter Parker became Spider-Man after he’d been bitten by a radioactive spider. Tony Spark had built a powered suit of armor which turned him into Iron Man. Virtually all superheroes had a very clear transition from “before” to “after”. While in my case...

  Having said that, my ability to divine other people’s attitude to me was a superpower, wasn’t it? In which case I too had a “before” and an “after”.

  One thing I couldn’t yet work out was what had actually happened in the period between the two.

  I’d read a book once where the MC was ported to a world that worked similarly to an RPG game. His surprise lasted for, like, half a paragraph. He looked around himself and immediately started leveling up. As in, Look at me! I’ve got a level-1 Observation skill! Cool! I should be leveling it! Because while you sleep, your opponents are leveling up. He then spent hours “observing” while lifting some weights and prancing around in order to improve his Strength and Agility too.

  What a lot of BS.

  Admittedly, I too had acted stupidly at first. Just think of me hopping and skipping all the way to the newsagent’s to get the old man’s paper! But that was understandable. I’d still been in shock. In moments like those, your brain goes into auto pilot. Which in my case meant switching to familiar patterns of game behavior.

  And as for my going on a jogging marathon after Yanna had left me — well, that was an experiment of sorts. An important one, too, which had allowed me to finally work out the logic of this new game world...

  No, not a game world, of course. Just the world the way I saw it now. How else did you expect me to do it? It wasn’t as if there were any guides or manuals available.

  Let’s take XP, for instance. How were you supposed to earn it? Where were you going to find mobs and how were you supposed to smoke them? How about quests? I hadn’t received any XP for the sole quest I’d completed, fetching the paper for Panikoff. Since then, I hadn’t come across anything that even marginally resembled a quest.

  And what was this social status thing, for crissakes? Was it the same as Popularity? Or Fame? Hardly. Could it mean your contribution to society?

  My head was about to explode with all the questions. Never mind. As my Granddad used to say, you should do it one step at a time.

  I needed to study the interface and the stats, everything that the few available icons had to offer. I had to work out their leveling scenario — but that might take some trial and error. I’d almost run out of money; new bills were coming soon; my fridge was empty. I needed to find a job. I also had to contact my clanmates, explain the situation and take a hiatus from the game. Then there was Yanna...

  So basically, I had myself and my problems to sort out, relationships to mend and a life to fix. Once that done, I could finally afford to look into all this and decide whether it was a gift or a curse, then try to locate the person who’d bestowed it on me and why. Following that, I could always save the world if necessary.

  I focused on the icon depicting a human silhouette and pressed it.

  Chapter Eight. A Noob To End All Noobs

  “The meeting with ourselves belongs to the more unpleasant things.”

  Carl Gustav Jung

  AGILITY HAD ALWAYS been my characteristic of choice, even in the old text-based browser games. It was probably because in real life I was anything but agile even if you pointed a crossbow at me. Klutz was my middle name. Or could it be my inner shrink telling me that I simply loved frequent crits and high dodge numbers? Whatever the reason, I’d never for one moment hesitated over my character choice. A Rogue. A thief. All stealth-stun-combo-vanish, rinse and repeat. And if by some chance my enemy had survived, I’d dart for my dear life.

  No wonder nobody likes the rogue. It’s a mean class who likes playing dirty, its trickster nature far removed from the noble chivalry of the paladin or the dignified integrity of the warrior.

  I opened the character window. Uh oh. So much for my playing a rogue in this game.

  The window’s modest layout matched the austere design of the rest of the interface. I couldn’t see my picture anywhere. The 3D figure of my character was missing, as were the gear slots.

  All I could see were a few lines of text against a translucent gray background,

  Philip “Phil” Panfilov

  Age: 32

  Current status: gamer

  Social status level: 6

  Class: Unclassified

  Married

  Wife: Yannina “Yanna” Orlova

  Children: none

  Main Characteristics:

  Strength: 6

  Agility: 4

  Intellect: 18

  Stamina: 4

  Perception: 7

  Charisma: 12

  Luck: 6

  Secondary Characteristics:

  Vitality: 74%

  Satisfaction: 48%

  Vigor: 97%

  Metabolism: 83%

  In order to access more data, you need to level up Insight.

  Unclassified? Status, gamer?

  My already plummeting megalomania took a further dive. Judging by my stats, I’d been leveling as a wizard, clumsy and charismatic.

  Big mistake. This world didn’t have any magic, did it?

  I tried to click on the stats to see the meaning of each of them and hopefully work out how they were supposed to interact.

  Nothing. Either the interface designers were some cack-handed hack artists or the interface owner — the game’s user? — was supposed to know it all.

  At 18, my Intellect wasn’t that bad, at least
compared to all the other stats. Then again, it could be average — or low even — compared to other people. I was no Nobel prize winner, that’s for sure, but I can’t have been that dumb, either. So if we assumed that my Intellect reading was a tad above average, then all the other characteristics should have been in the 12 to 15 range.

  Which meant that they were way below par.

  Then again, what did I expect? Was I fit? Hardly. So these stats seemed to reflect the current state of affairs.

  What was their effect on my life? This, too, was pretty self-explanatory. If the elevator in our apartment block broke down, I’d never be able to climb the stairs all the way to my apartment on the tenth floor. Could I swim a few laps? Yeah right, I just might drown halfway. And if I tried to perform a little juggling act, I might just get killed in the process.

  I was quite surprised at my high Charisma reading. Then again, it might only mean that I didn’t make other people puke on seeing me.

  I spent some more time staring at the stats window before finally closing it.

  No idea what I did wrong. Maybe I sent a wrong mental command or just blinked unintentionally, but the window simply disappeared. If I’d expected it to disintegrate into a gazillion glittering fragments, or fold into a swirling vortex and be sucked back into the icon, I’d been wrong. No pretty animation, no visual effects. It was just gone.

  “Miaow!” a demanding howl disrupted the silence.

  It was Boris, apparently suffering from nighttime munchies. She rubbed against my leg expectantly. I heaved a sigh, rose, gave her a pat on the neck and headed for the kitchen. As I poured a generous helping of cat food into her bowl, she purred like a tractor, polishing my legs with her fluffy flank.

  I left her in the kitchen and returned to the room. This time I sat on the couch, just in case I zoned out again.

  I clicked on the icon with the book.

  A huge field of text opened up before me.

  It was a complete list of everything I’d learned in my lifetime since day one: from learning to walk to my recently-acquired dart-playing skill.

  Skills:

  Playing World of Warcraft: 8

  Russian speaking skills: 7

  Russian reading skills: 7

  PC skills: 7

  Russian writing skills: 6

  Empathy: 6

  Online search: 5

  MS Word: 5

  MS Excel: 4

  Vending: 4

  Social skills: 4

  Intuition: 4

  Deception: 3

  Creative writing: 3

  Manners: 3

  Photography: 3

  Decision-making: 3

  Learning new skills: 3

  English: 3

  Seduction: 3

  Cooking: 3

  Self-discipline: 3

  Driving: 2

  Self-control: 2

  Plan-making: 2

  Marketing: 2

  Leadership: 2

  Perseverance: 2

  Pushbike riding: 2

  Public speaking: 2

  Map reading: 2

  Walking: 2

  <...>

  DIY skills: 1

  First aid skills: 1

  Singing: 1

  Insight: 1

  I spent some quality time going through the list which unfolded in the best-to-worst order. I had so many skills still at level 1! I kept scrolling through them but the list seemed interminable.

  It looked like the system took meticulous stock of everything I’d ever tried in my life. For instance, I even had a “knife handling” skill. That must have had something to do with our childhood games of throwing knives at the shed wall. Couldn’t be anything else: the only thing I’d ever used a knife for was to cut myself a slice of bread.

  I also had a level-1 Agriculture skill. Of course. Hadn’t I helped my parents with their cottage garden? I used to weed it and dig it up, I’d even planted some potatoes for them at some point.

  Running, swimming, skiing, skating... all level 1. Plus playing soccer, poker and chess, and dozens of half-forgotten computer games which I used to passionately play in the past. Most likely, a skill’s level dropped when it fell out of use.

  I even had level 1 in Poetry — I had indeed dabbled in it once — and Sewing (probably from my college attempts to fix a hole in a T-shirt). Also, Wrestling. Back at school, my father had signed me up for a judo class where I’d lasted all of two months.

  That wasn’t what pissed me off. According to the list, the area of my biggest expertise was game playing! Logical, of course. I’d spent at least a hundred and fifty thousand hours mastering the wretched thing. No wonder its level was comparatively so high.

  So that’s who I was, then. I wasn’t an author at all. I was a deceptive WoW user with decent Googling skills and a good working knowledge of Microsoft Word.

  In everything else in life, I was a total noob. A useless noob who could only get through life by trailing in Yanna’s powerful slipstream.

  My reading and writing skills were worse than my game playing. That was all you needed to know about my life over the past twelve years. Twelve years! I only had another thirty left till my retirement![3]

  How very nice of you, Blizzard guys, thanks a bunch.

  Oh. My vision blurred again. I felt weak.

  A new debuff message appeared before me,

  Apathy

  Duration: 18 hours

  You’re emotionally drained. Your central nervous system needs some rest. We recommend that you get some quality sleep, a balanced diet and some exercise.

  Warning! The state of Apathy can easily escalate to Depression!

  -5% to Satisfaction every 6 hrs.

  -1% to Vitality every 5 hrs.

  -6% to Vigor every 6 hrs.

  -2% to Metabolism every 6 hrs.

  -5% to Confidence every 6 hrs.

  -2% to Willpower every 6 hrs.

  What a nasty debuff. As if the nicotine withdrawal wasn’t enough. This way, I might not live to see the weekend. I’d just drop on my back on the floor like a beetle and expire.

  Which was something I couldn’t do. My old parents needed help. My sister was a single mother who could use my support too. I had to fight to win Yanna back, dammit! Plus I had so many projects.

  Apathy, they said? I didn’t give a damn.

  What did they want me to do? I couldn’t get quality sleep at the moment, not until I was finished with that wretched interface. A healthy diet? The only healthy foods I had in the house were an onion and a box of green tea. The remaining half-bucket of KFC wings hardly counted as a balanced meal, let alone a healthy one.

  That left exercise.

  I cast a doubtful glance at the clock. It was past two in the morning. Chuckling, I peeled myself off the couch, started my favorite playlist and began warming up like they’d taught us to in that long-forgotten judo class. All the bending, stretching and rotating: wrists, arms, knees and hips... Now ten sit-ups.

  My head went round. I had to stop to catch my breath, then did ten more. I was lightheaded again. I walked into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Should I do another ten?

  My legs were rubbery, my knees weak. My hands were shaking. My teeth began to ache.

  I poured some boiling water over a teabag, leaned against a stool and did five... six... come on, just one more... seven pushups.

  I hurried to peel and slice the remaining onion and made myself a quick cheese and onion sandwich with some dry rye bread. I left it on the table next to my tea and walked out onto the balcony to catch my breath. Then I returned, dropped to the floor, hooked my feet under the edge of the couch and tried to do a few crunches.

  These proved to be the trickiest. I couldn’t do a single one. In the end, I just lifted my feet off the floor and tried to keep my legs up for as long as I could.

  Which wasn’t for very long. I tried again. And again. My abs were killing me. I was sweating buckets.

  Enough. Shower time.

&n
bsp; I lingered under its hot-and-cold jets, getting rid of all the sweat and grime. Finally, I received a new buff: my Metabolism was on the rise, both Vigor and Satisfaction were in the black.

  A new message arrived, informing me that my Apathy debuff had been reduced to 12 hrs.

  Excellent. I ate my sandwich, making sure I chewed properly, washed it down with some tea, then returned to the couch and continued my research.

  Strange that my creative writing skills were so high though. 3 points! Could it have been all the countless blog posts I’d written?

  Wait a sec. Where was my Finance? I’d spent five years in college studying that. I had a degree, for crissakes! And it wasn’t even level 2? I’d studied hard enough; I’d taken all the exams and had very decent grades throughout. Admittedly, my professional experience had been limited to a one-month internship at a major engineering plant where I’d registered the incoming email and helped the bookkeeper girls replace printer cartridges and create user profiles at various dating sites. That had been the extent of it. Whatever experience I’d had afterward was limited to online buying and selling. No wonder my Vending skills were so high. If you applied RPG rules to real life, I was entitled to a 15% discount everywhere I went.

  What a shame this wasn’t virtual reality.

  My high Empathy levels weren’t a surprise to me though. I’d always had this ability to divine what other people were feeling. The moment Yanna walked through the front door, I knew what kind of day she’d had. I could tell my Dad’s mood just by the way he was breathing and knew what Mom was feeling just by looking into her eyes. I didn’t even need to see the person: show me a text message, and I’ll tell you what the person was feeling while writing it. Most of the time, anyway. The emoji culture has a lot to answer for.

  The fact that the mysterious game system so effortlessly listed the names of certain programs — like MS Word and Excel, for instance — made me think that the generation of those system messages actually took place in the user’s head. It was as if someone had scanned my character’s brain — my brain, — then analyzed and classified its entire database.