Chương 4: Ghost Town - The Specials (3:43)

CrimsonProphecy88 In the immortal words of Catherine the Great to anyone who wasn't a horse: "you're doing it all wrong, and I am disappointed." This fanfic is boring man. Everyone knows you gotta start your story with some action. All the best fanfics start with a fight. Drop your readers in mid-brawl or with a rooftop chase or something like that. Nobody clicks on a fanfic because they wanna read about trains and bars. VoidWyrm69 ^this. You need to hook your audience. That's basic narrative 101.

You ran away from a fight, which is the exact worst thing you can do in a fic. You should have tackled the crazy lady and wrestled the gun from her. Give us some action man. PaperSnake You also need to establish your self-insert angle a bit better. Tell us who you are and bring up any special talents you got. You need to make the audience relate to you and/or cheer for you. Also, figure out which type of fanfic you're writing. Most fics (especially the popular ones) all fall into two different categories.

The first is the Fix It Fic. That kind is all about writers trying to undo whatever narrative crimes the original author committed. Think about a Harry Potter fic where Harry doesn't go to live with the Dursley's and instead grows up with Sirius as his godfather. Or hell, even one where Sirius tells Dumbledore that he didn't kill Peter and that they're all unregistered Animagus and that Peter is a rat who was the secret keeper of the Potters and is obviously in league with Voldemort.

You can also do a Terminator fanfic where John Connor yanks Arnie out of the molten pit at the last second and decides he's gonna create Skynet and teach it to be better to humans. Or a Star Wars one where Luke and Leia didn't get separated at birth and instead grew up together on Alderaan. The second kind of fanfic is the Power Fantasy type. This is the one where you drop your OC into an easily recognizable world and make them smarter, stronger, and hotter than everyone else.

They also get some kind of cheat skill which they use to beat everyone else. They beat up the bad guy and kiss the hot chick and unlock the secret god tier spell. InnerMarrow Also, what game even is this? It feels like you Frankensteined a bit of Emberveil with some small pieces of Null Protocol. It's cool and all… but you gotta give us a little more information about which world you're having this all take place in.

VoidWyrm69 A fic where Luke and Leia staying together and being raised on Alderaan would make a bunch of sense actually. Vader didn't know that Padme gave birth to twins. He didn't even know that he had a daughter until Return. What would make him look twice at two kids adopted by Senator Organa? Instead, we got Vader's step-bro taking care of a young boy whose last name is Skywalker. On the very same planet where Anakin was born. Not exactly witsec there.

Z3ke (Original Poster) Appreciate all the replies, but I need to state something right off the bat: this isn't a fanfic. I'm not trying to write a Fix-it or a Power Fantasy or anything else. This happened to me. It's still happening to me. I know that's an impossible thing to believe. You're not going to actually think that someone got isekai'd into a messed up world based on a video game. I get that. But that doesn't mean it's not happening. Binary_Arcana Yea okay. And I'm the reincarnation of Elminster.

You're missing a beat though. If you really got isekai'd into the Fracture-verse… how are you posting this? You got magic wi-fi or something? Hambone Oooo. Juicy plothole. You're gonna need to address that Z3ke. How are you posting on the forum? Cursed MacBook? StoryLeech ngl kinda digging the vibe here. MushroomCleric Your class is bartender? Just bartender? Not a rogue or a mage or a fighter or gunslinger or anything like that? You mix drinks? Z3ke (Original Poster) That's what the little popup screen told me.

Bartender MushroomCleric Well shit. I'm in. PaperSnakes Samesies. Not sure if this is a psychotic break, the start of an ARG, or a fanfic that is bringing up a random ass useless job, but i'm gonna be refreshing this thread hourly. StoryLeech Keep going bartender. Let's see where this rabbit hole leads. Z3ke (Original Poster) So the screen appeared. It didn't just blink on or slide into view or anything like that. It manifested. That's the best word to describe it. No sound or prompt or alert or anything.

It just suddenly appeared in the corner of my vision. [Class Unlocked: Bartender] I stared at the screen. Blinked. Kept staring at it. Have you ever been really tired at night and you're in bed, reading on your phone, and your brain recognizes that "yes, those are indeed words," but you can't make sense of them? It was exactly like that feeling except… existential-like. Bartender. Of fucking course.

The absolute best case scenario for what was happening to me was that I was living every anime fan's ideal situation and that I'd fallen through the cracks of reality and somehow ended up in a strange new world where fantasy creatures existed. The worst case was that I'd had a stroke or aneurysm or slipped into a coma or something and all this was a figment of my imagination. Maybe my post-shift shot had been laced with something.

Maybe my body was still stuck on the subway, just doing laps throughout New York and now I was in the afterlife. Whatever the hell was really happening, I decided right then and there that I was gonna operate under the belief that I'd somehow been tossed into an entirely different world. I probably should have been freaking out a bit more, but my brain was fried from all the newness and strangeness of everything and I just decided "why not lean into the crazy, amirite?"

I'd woken up in some lab where I'd been floating in some massive water tank. Then I ran from a crazy lady with a gun and had to step over dead bodies wearing lab coats. I found orcs who read newspapers and dwarves who poured drinks and a train that was being run by Lance Reddick's older body double. And my reward for all that craziness? My grand metaphysical designation? [Class Unlocked: Bartender] That was it. That was the sum total of who I was in this world. That was the universe's idea of a punchline.

You'd think that if you were dropped into a strange new world and screens started popping up all over the place telling you that you unlocked a "class," it would be something cool. Maybe rogue or mage or barbarian. You'd get something useful. But not me. I got slotted right back into the one role that I'd been living out every day for a thousand nights in dim-lit bars with sticky floors and bad pop playlists. Like I said before, I'm good at bartending. Really good.

It's been my hustle and the only real skillset that I've ever been talented at. I can mix a drink and read a room better than most people can do anything they've ever practiced at. But staring at that floating screen with those glowing words was… disheartending. It felt wrong. It felt like everyone else got to play with a bunch of cool shit all day, and here I was being handed a plunger or a shovel or a pickaxe and told to get to work.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. I tried ignoring the screen and instead only focus on the bar car around me. I tried pretending to care about all the plush leather seats and the warm brass railings and the faint scent of pipe tobacco that clung to the air. But no matter how much I turned my head, the screen kept hovering in the corner of my vision. Quietly persistent. It was like a spoiled kid poking my shoulder and demanding attention.

In short, it was annoying as shit. The screen drifted into my vision enough times as I glanced around the car that I finally got fed up with it and tried to swipe it away, half-expecting that nothing would happen as I waved my hands. Thankfully the screen disappeared and I was left with nothing but a dwarf staring at me with a look of curiosity on his face. I wandered over to the bar and dropped down onto one of the stools.

The dwarf, seemingly unbothered by the fact that my nose was still bloody and my clothes were still drenched and I was clearly going through an existential crisis, just gave me a nod and stepped closer.

"You look like you could use a drink," he stated as he placed the glass he was polishing off to the side. I flashed him a weary smile and almost ordered my go to drink: a whisky on the rocks. That's when I remembered what had happened with fake Lance Reddick when he'd asked for my subway pass. I patted my pockets out of instinct, habit, desperation, or maybe a combination of all three.

Maybe I was stupidly hoping that my wallet and keys and lighter and cigarettes had all somehow magically stuffed themselves back into my pockets without me feeling it. But instead I was met with nothing. Just lint and disappointment.

"I don't have the money," I sighed.

"Or, anything really. I don't know where I am. I don't know what the hell is happening to me. I don't know… anything right now." The dwarf took a moment to give me a sympathetic look as all my frustration and fear just started pouring out of me. I was starting to break down as I sat there, finally having a moment to myself to truly think about all the craziness that had happened in the past… twenty or thiry minutes. Jesus, had everything that happened only taken up thirty minutes?

Finally, the dwarf nodded once and reached down beneath the counter and pulled out a heavy rocks glass and a bottle filled with something amber-colored. He poured the drink and slid it my way like he was offering a solution.

"First round's on the house," he said.

"I heard the Conductor talking about an outsider being on board." There it was again. That word. Outsider. The way he said it made me think that it was some sort of label. I took a sip of the drink while trying to collect myself. So many questions started running through my head and the dwarf saw them all start to bubble out of me. Before I could ask anything, he offered up an answer.

"You stand out," he said, gesturing towards my clothes and bloody nose.

"We don't get many tourists in tees and rubber soles around here. Even less come running full-tilt out of a bathroom and smash fast first into a wall. It's a dead giveaway that you're an outsider." I felt a flush of embarrassment at that and opened my mouth to ask my many questions but all that came out was a scrambled "whmmpf." Every question that had been bouncing around in my head tried to force itself out, but instead of coming out in legible words, the questions appeared in a tangle of: where am I?

How did I get here? Is this a dream? A punishment? A reward? An elaborate LARP gone wrong? Is this a prank and I'm on some new reality show? Who was that woman with the gun looming over me? Who were all the dead guys in that building? What was that building? It seemed like a research facility with all the machines and gurneys and tools and everything, but how did I fall asleep on a subway and wake up in a research facility?

For that matter, how the hell did I go from a research facility in a warzone to a passenger train that had one of the fanciest bars I've ever seen? I paused and tried to put all my questions into an orderly fashion, but before I could ask anything the train lurched and stopped and all the hairs on the back of my neck stood up again. Fake Lance Reddick was there, hovering behind me. Same uniform. Same beard with streaks of grey flecked through it.

Same eyes that stared into my soul like they'd seen my browser history.

"Your stop, sir." I wanted to protest. I wanted to turn all my questions on him and force him to answer. And with his words, a whole bunch of news questions started forming. What stop? Where? Why me? As I write this, I'm sure a bunch of you are going to give me a shit ton of flack. You're all going to ask why I wasn't more assertive and demanding and Karen-like. You're gonna complain that I didn't push hard enough to get any answers.

You'll complain that I was too placid and all my decisions were wrong and that I'm an idiot and a fucking waste. My answer to all those complaints is this: get yourself isekai'd to a world you don't understand, wake up drowning, race through a lab that is filled with a bunch of dead bodies, slam yourself face first into the wall of a train that is filled with a bunch of Victorian-era LARPers. Then, wander around and take in all the strange shit that confuses you and leaves you baffled.

Do all that while having a fake Lance Reddick looming over you, and see if you can operate at 100%. I was too foggy, too off-kilter, and way too many steps outside my comfort zone to start demanding answers to my questions, let alone tell the most intimidating man I'd ever met that I wasn't gonna be leaving the train. There was something about him that threw me off balance and made me go along with whatever he suggested I do. He had an energy about him. A presence.

It made me want to apologize for everything that I'd ever done in my entire life. I don't know if it was because his eyes looked through me and felt like they saw way more than I could ever lie about, or if it was just the subtle power that hummed around him like he was a Gandalf who'd taken a customer service job and decided to menace train platforms instead of Balrogs. Either way, I didn't put up much of a fight as he ushered me to the exit of the train.

He opened the door of the train with a wave and I found myself deposited on a train platform. The rocks glass of whisky was still in my hand. I took a quick look around to figure out where i'd been let out, only to notice that none of the green that I'd spotted from the train windows earlier was anywhere around. The entire landscape was just dusty desolation. I turned to ask the Conductor where exactly I was, but found him standing at the entrance with his hands behind his back and a half smile on his face.

"Good luck." Then the train pulled away. And just when I thought that things couldn't get any weirder… the train fucking vanished. It's not like it sped up and disappeared over the horizon, or it turned a corner and broke my line of sight. The entire train faded away. Almost like it had never been there in the first place and it was all a fever dream. Or like reality had just deleted it out of existence. All I could do was stand there and watch as the air shimmered and warped and settled and the train disappeared.

I stood there for a couple minutes, half-hoping that it would pop back into existence and fake Lance Reddick would wave me forward and say "oh, sorry sir, there's been a mistake. This wasn't your stop. Please come back to the train where it's something slightly normal in this weird ass world." That obviously didn't happen. The train disappeared and I was left alone on a platform with a rocks glass in my hands. I turned slowly and looked at where I ended up, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do now.

The platform definitely wasn't in Brooklyn, that much I was certain about. There was a town in the distance, about 500 meters from where I'd been unceremoniously dumped. From what little I could see from so far away, the town reminded me of a road trip I'd taken a few years back. Some friends and I decided to trek out to Chicago one week. We cut through Ohio and Pennsylvania on our way out there and ended up passing a bunch of old steel mill towns.

Every time we'd drive through one of those towns, it all looked the same: once-glorious cities that had been filled with manufacturing. But that had been a long time ago and they'd since morphed into gray shells of their former glory. With each mile of our trip, we witnessed plenty of boarded-up malls, rusted-out factories, and entire towns that had been forgotten by both God and Google Maps. Where I'd been dumped had the exact same aura as those old steel towns.

I could imagine what the place looked like fifty years back. It had probably been a boom town; the kind that was filled with people who made things with their hands. It was the type of town that existed back when the American Dream was a reality. But time had dragged the town into a back alley and worked it over with a pipe wrench. The streets were all cracked and in various states of disrepair. The lawns were overgrown.

There was the occasional toy or chair or bicycle half-buried in the grass, looking like artifacts from a vanished civilization. I couldn't find any cars or people. And what's worse is that I hadn't seen any animals either. There was nothing living in the area. The largest building in town was a squat drag grey thing that was draped in ivy. A faded sign out front read: HARBOR GLEN PUBLIC LIBRARY. The doors groaned when I pushed them open and the entire place smelled like old paper and dust and abandonment.

Nobody was manning the front desk as I entered. And nobody was wandering the aisles peering at books as I made my way through the place. I drifted around until I found a spot in the library that had a whole bunch of dusty computer terminals. They were all lined up on a series of shelves and they looked like ancient things. Beige plastic. Boxy CRT monitors. Keys that clacked like a typewriter. They were exactly the same computers you'd expect to find in a Cold-War era spy movie.

Since the computers were really the only thing of interest in the entire place, I sat down at one and clicked the keyboard to try and wake it up. It wheezed and whirred to life. Then it glitched out. The screen fuzzed. Lines squiggled up and down the monitor. An icon popped to life in the upper-right hand corner of the screen. I immediately thought I'd broken the computer just by turning it on. Despite the fact that I was pretty sure I was alone in the place, I couldn't help but glance around guiltily.

Hopefully nobody would sneak their way around a bookshelf and head over to me, only to find that I'd broken one of the library's ancient computers. I quickly stood and moved down to the other end of the row of computers. It was far enough away from the evidence of my crime that if someone did show up to question me, I'd have plausible deniability. No matter that I was the only one around. I'd gaslight anyone who said differently.

I clicked the new computer's keyboard and it whirred to life before also glitching out. Another icon popped up in the upper-right hand corner of the screen. By now my brain was completely fed up and overwhelmed with all the weird shit that had happened to me. I was tired of my strange new circumstances and didn't want to test my luck starting up a new computer, so I just muttered fuck it and started tapping away at the computer's keyboard.

When the computer finally stopped glitching out, I was met with an altogether different problem. This computer was a relic. Positively ancient. Back when I was a kid, my Dad managed to buy an old computer at a flea market. It was a Tandy 1000. Something most people have probably never heard of. Tandy was one of the oddest computers ever sold. The Tandy corporation was more known for fine leather goods rather than electronics, but for some reason they produced one of the earliest known home computers.

The thing about Tandy computers is that they aren't very user friendly. There was no Chrome or Firefox or Opera or Internet Explorer. There was no Windows or other OS that gave you a bunch of icons and menus and all that. Hell, they didn't even have a mouse you could use to click on things. To do anything at all, you needed to use massive floppy disks that were about the size of two hands put together. The ancient computer I found in the library reminded me of that old Tandy. It didn't have a mouse.

There wasn't any way to navigate its menus except through basic typed commands. Eventually, after a few minutes of fruitlessly poking around and typing, I found something that pretended to be a browser and managed to claw myself onto the internet. The speed was early dial-up. Like, "we'll show you one pixel every three seconds" levels of pain. I waited through the hissy dial-up sounds and the hourglass animations like it was 1996 and I was trying to sneak onto AOL while my mom was in the other room.

A quick search for maps gave me nothing. Same with news and locations and basically everything else I bothered looking up. Nothing worked. Websites half-loaded before timing out. Locations bounced back an "unknown" message. The more I typed away at the computer, the more I felt like I was screaming at a brick wall and achieving nothing.

Maybe it was the frustration, maybe it was my desperation, maybe it was all the pain that still radiated through my face, maybe it was just being tired of the dial-up internet and the slow loading times. Whatever it was, I threw my hands up in disgust and leaned back in the chair and felt like breaking down. I had nothing. I'd been left in a weird ass town with no people. My face was throbbing with pain. I wanted to scream and curse and rage, but I didn't even have the energy to do all that.

Sitting there, staring at the computer with a feeling of resignation, I finally noticed a small weird icon in the upper-right hand corner of the screen. It was impossible. This was an ancient computer with no wallpaper or icons or anything ike that. Yet somehow, there was a tiny shortcut icon there. I typed out LIST to get a list of all the programs the computer had access to, and there it was at the very bottom. DEEPFRACTURE. I typed out run: DEEPFRACTURE and the computer blinked at me. Then dimmed.

And finally a website loaded. This website. Filled with all you guys. I said it before, and it's probably counter to my best interests in bringing it up again, but I have to admit to never having played the Fracture series. It just wasn't my type of game. I will say that I had a buddy who was obsessed with the games. He spoke of them like they were holy scripture.

He loved all the lore and the mechanics and the storytelling and everything else about the games, and was always desperate to talk to whoever would listen about what his character was doing. I played Fracture once at his house. Quickly grew bored with it and went back to shooters and Madden. That kinda feels like a mistake now. Of course, I never really believed that I'd be isekai'd into this weird ass world. Who would? But here I am now. Bartender. Mediocre at video games at the best of times.

I haven't even finished Skyrim. Now I find myself half-believing that I was isekai'd into a video game series that I never played. All because an ancient computer in an abandoned town has access to this forum. Honestly, I was a little iffy about posting on this forum. I figured that nobody would believe me when I explained what happened to me. What's even worse is that I feared nobody would want to help me out. There's a chance that everything that I type out is gonna be met with jeers and derision.

But somewhere between a whole bunch of panic and a little bit of resignation, a tiny voice in my head whispered: you might as well try. So that's it. I've paid the toll that you all demanded. I typed up my story. Now it's time for you all to help. I'm stuck in a weird decaying city with no one around. I have no idea what's happening to me. I have no idea where this city is in relation to anywhere safe where I can hunker down and ride out whatever drug-fueled hallucination I'm stuck in. And I'm asking for help.