Chương 6: Dildos and Monster Cans (The Essentials for Reincarnation)

The problem with waking up was that she couldn't determine whether she had woken up. The grass was pink. The grass smelled like the Sephora display on the ground floor of a mall. The sky had two suns and one of them was blue, the color of a ring pop, and the math of two suns at slightly different positions was making her vision do a thing where she could not focus on either one without the other one demanding attention. Maddy sat up. Her hand was holding something. Her hand was holding Bolt. She looked at Bolt.

Bolt was wet. She was holding a wet Umbreon-colored silicone dildo on a field of pink grass under two suns and her last conscious memory was a wall coming into her apartment at the speed of a Cybertruck. Her engineer brain went online. It went online the way it always did when the inputs didn't match. It went into a state she had a name for. She called it INTAKE.

INTAKE was the part of her brain that took in data without judging it, that listed observations in order, that resisted the urge to interpret until the dataset was big enough. She had developed INTAKE in her freshman thermodynamics class when she had genuinely thought she was going to fail and had instead just refused to feel anything about the problem set until the problem set was solved. INTAKE. One. She was outside. Two. She was in a field. Three. The grass was pink. The grass had a smell.

The smell was not a grass smell. The smell was a synthetic perfume smell, specifically the kind of perfume that came in a bottle shaped like a flower. The smell did not match the visual. The smell was wrong for the object. Four. Two suns. One yellow. One blue. Great. Five. She was wearing the crop top and shorts from her apartment. The Air Force 1s were on her feet. The shorts were the shorts she had grabbed off the chair. She remembered grabbing them off the chair. She remembered the chair. Six.

She was not wearing underwear because the shorts had been too short for it. This had been a decision she had made. Seven. She was holding Bolt. Eight. The reason she was holding Bolt was she had bent down to pick Bolt up off the floor because if she died someone would find Bolt and judge her. She had bent down to pick Bolt up. Nine. Then the wall. Ten. She was alive. Or she was dreaming. Or she was dead.

Or her brain was performing some kind of last-second simulation in the four-second window between the wall coming in and her actual neurological death. She had read about that. INTAKE. She put the dildo down on the pink grass. She looked at her hands. Her hands were her hands. Her nails were the gel set she had gotten three weeks ago, light white with a little holographic shimmer, the right ring fingernail chipped because she had used it to scrape a sticker off her laptop. She had specific memories of the chipping.

The chipping had happened on a Wednesday. The chipped fingernail was the most expensive piece of evidence in front of her. If this was a dream, the chipped fingernail was a level of detail her brain would not bother to render. Dreams didn't do continuity. Dreams forgot what fingernails looked like. Dreams put six fingers on a hand because dreams were generative models with bad training data. This wasn't a dream. She knew what dreams felt like. Dreams felt like a slight membrane between her and the world.

Dreams felt like watching a movie of herself. Right now every single sensory channel was reporting at maximum throughput. The grass under her palm was the texture of grass. The wind on her thighs was the temperature of wind. Her left ankle had a small itch from where her shoe was rubbing because she hadn't put on socks. The itch was a normal itch. The itch had a real shape. This wasn't a dream. This was something else. She sat very still on the pink grass and let the analysis keep running. Eleven.

Her shoulder was sore. Her right shoulder. The shoulder of the side the wall had hit. There was a slight tenderness there, like a deep bruise that hadn't surfaced yet. Twelve. Her body felt different. Twelve part b. It felt different in a way she couldn't articulate. Lighter, maybe. Or smaller. Or younger. Or just slightly off, like wearing someone else's contact lens prescription, which really sucked because she experienced it twice for some reason and each were worse than the other. Focus Maddy. Thirteen.

A screen. A pink screen was floating in front of her face. What the fuck. She had not noticed the screen until now because INTAKE had been processing higher-priority inputs, but the screen had been there the whole time, hovering at eye level, soft glowing pink with a slight bloom effect around the edges, and the text on it was in a curling cursive script that she had seen a million times before on Instagram story templates. The text said: [You're glowing! Sparkle] She blinked. She read it again. [You're glowing! Sparkle] A fucking sparkling emoji. This was a UI. She knew what a UI was. She had a computer engineering minor. She had played enough Pokémon games in her life to recognize a heads-up display when one was floating six inches from her nose. She had read enough LitRPG novels in high school—a secret shame, kept in a Kindle folder labeled MISC—to recognize a System Notification when she saw one. She was in a LitRPG. She was in a LitRPG and her UI looked like a sex shop ad.

"Oh my god." Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. She said it out loud, in a small flat voice, and it came out of her mouth in a way she could hear, which meant she had a mouth and the mouth was working and the mouth was attached to a face and the face had vocal cords and the vocal cords were producing real sound waves into a real atmosphere.

"Oh my god." She tried to touch the screen. Her finger went through it. She tried to grab the corner of the screen. Her fingers closed on nothing. She tried to drag it sideways like an iPad notification. Nothing happened. She waved her hand in front of the screen to see if the screen had any kind of motion tracking. The screen did not respond. The screen continued to say You're glowing! Sparkle with the soft bloom. There had to be a settings panel. There had to be. Every UI had a settings panel.

Every UI in the history of UIs had a settings panel because every UI had been written by someone who had needed to test something, and you couldn't test anything without a way to toggle states. Even the worst UIs, the UIs designed by graphic designers who had never actually used a phone, had a settings panel buried in a hamburger menu somewhere.

"Settings." The screen sparkled gently.

"Settings. Menu. Options. Configure. Help. Inventory. Status." The screen did nothing.

"Stats. Character sheet. Player info. Profile." The screen flickered. A new panel slid in from the side, in the same bubblegum white-girl-pussy pink, in the same loopy cursive. [Stat Sheet—Maddy!] The exclamation point. The fucking exclamation point. The screen had punctuated her name. Level: 1] [Class: Unselected] [HP: 98/100] [MP: 24/24] [STR: 6 | DEX: 11 | INT: 17 | WIS: 12 | CHA: 11 | LCK:???] [Skills: None] [Titles: Newly Arrived] She stared at it. Strength six. Six.

She did not know enough about whatever system this was to know if six was bad, but she could feel in her bones that six was bad. Six felt like a number you got for being the kind of person who could not open a pickle jar. Six felt like a number you got for being the kind of person whose left thigh cramped after eight minutes of riding a silicone dildo. INT seventeen. Okay. Okay that was higher than the others. That had to mean something. INT meant intelligence in literally every system in the world.

The system had given her seventeen INT. The system had clocked her. The system had read her transcripts. The system knew she was an engineering major with a 3. 8 GPA and had assigned her stats accordingly, like the system was trying to make her feel smart about the character she was about to lose to a goblin. Luck question mark for some mysterious fucking reason. She was going to throw up. She was actually going to throw up.

INTAKE had run its course and now her body had decided that it was done collecting data and it was time to feel things, and the feelings hit her in a single wave. Her shoulders went up to her ears. Her hands went to her knees. She pulled her knees to her chest. She started crying.

She cried in a way she had not cried since she was a child, in a way that came up from her stomach instead of her face, in a way that wasn't really sound at first and then became sound, choking small sounds, the sounds of a person who was not in the right room and could not figure out which door to leave through. She cried into her knees. She cried into her thighs. Her tears dripped down onto the pink grass and one of them landed directly on Bolt. Bolt on the pink grass. A tear on Bolt. She cried harder.

She was crying on a dildo. She was crying on her dildo.

She was crying on her dildo on alien pink grass under two suns and her UI was made of bubblegum and she had STR 6 and she had no panties on and her shoulder hurt and she didn't know if her mom would ever find her body and she didn't know if there was a body to find and she didn't know if she existed at all anymore in the place she came from and her last act in her real life had been bending over to pick up a sex toy off the floor of an apartment she had been late to a Stochastic Processes lecture for. She cried.

She reached for the Monster can. The Monster can was in her hand somehow. It had survived. The can had made it through the wall and through the death and through the reincarnation and the can was, miraculously, half-full. The can was lukewarm. She drank. The Monster Ultra Paradise hit her mouth and it tasted exactly the way Monster Ultra Paradise tasted, which was to say it tasted like a vape pen, and she let the carbonation burn in her throat, and the familiarity of the burn was so violent that she cried harder.

She heard a sound. The sound was wheels. The sound was also. A footstep. A footstep on dirt. She lifted her head. Walking up the road toward her was a man. A tall man, in a long coat the color of a desert, with a wide-brimmed hat. He had a beard. He was leading, by a rope, an animal. The animal was a camel from the neck down except the legs were too short and the body had a weird hump situation. The animal had wings folded against its sides, two pairs, translucent and veiny like a dragonfly's.

The animal's head was the head of a small elephant. The trunk was swinging gently as it walked. The eyes were placed wrong on the head. Maddy stared. The man stopped about fifteen feet away.

"Oh! A traveler." His voice was warm and oily, the voice of a man who sold things. Maddy did not say anything because she was crying and her throat was full of whatever sticky wet shit throats did and she was holding a half-drunk Monster Ultra Paradise in one hand and a wet sex toy was on the grass beside her. The man tipped his hat.

"And where might a lady like yourself be headed, on this fine afternoon?" he said, in a cadence that suggested he had said this exact sentence sixteen zillion times before.

"I myself am en route to Mossgrove, to peddle my perfumes and spices. The road is a long one, and the company is sparse. I would offer you a seat on my dear Lefant here, if you'd care to share the road." Lefant. The camel-elephant-dragonfly was named Lefant. A fucking pun that wasn't even a pun, it was just straight garbage.

Maddy was on her ass on pink grass in a crop top and short shorts and no underwear, crying on a wet dildo, and a fantasy merchant who looked like he had been generated by a Minecraft mod had just offered her a seat on his Lefant. She stood up. She stood up because she was scared.

She stood up because the merchant was bigger than her and the camel-elephant-thing was bigger than both of them and her STR was 6 and she did not know what Lefant could do with those wings or that trunk and the merchant's smile was the smile of a man who had read the script and was now performing it, and the only thing scarier than a real person in this field was a fake person who had memorized how to seem real. She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. A small ding. A new panel slid in. [New Quest!] [Travel to the village of Mossgrove Reward: XP, Class Selection, Glow-Up Activated. Sparkle] Glow-up. Glow-up activated. She wanted to die again. She was going to die again. The merchant was waiting politely.

"I—" she said. Her voice cracked.

"I—" She closed her mouth. She nodded. She nodded because nodding required no information she didn't have. The merchant smiled wider, a smile that did not reach his eyes because his eyes were doing something else, something background, like an NPC eye animation running on a separate loop.

"Wonderful! Wonderful. Come, come. Lefant is gentle. Lefant has never thrown a rider in all his years. I shall walk alongside, I prefer the exercise." He led Lefant forward. Lefant walked over to her on legs that bent in a way legs were not supposed to bend, and stopped, and looked at her with one elephant eye that was on the wrong side of its head. The wings folded a little tighter against its sides.

The trunk reached toward her experimentally and she flinched and the trunk retracted with what might have been politeness. The merchant offered her a hand. She did not take it.

She climbed onto Lefant herself, which was an engineering problem she solved badly, because Lefant was the wrong height and her shorts were the wrong length and her STR was six, but she got up there, and she sat sidesaddle because she was wearing no underwear under shorts that were two inches long, and she gripped a strap of leather across Lefant's neck. She still had the Monster can in her hand. She had not put it down. She had not put Bolt down either. Bolt was in her left hand.

She had picked Bolt up off the grass on her way up to Lefant because some deep automatic part of her brain had decided that if she was getting on a winged camel with a stranger, she was not leaving her dildo behind. The merchant began walking. Lefant began walking. Maddy sat on Lefant and stared straight ahead and tears were still coming down her face slowly and silently. After a minute, the merchant spoke up from beside Lefant's neck.

"If I may ask, traveler. Are you perchance a dual-wielder?" Maddy looked down at him. He was looking at her hands. Her left hand had Bolt. Her right hand had the Monster can. He had clocked the weapon energy of both items in her hands and had decided, in the calm whatever interior of his NPC merchant brain, that she was probably a dual-wielder with two unusual weapons, possibly a class she was building toward, possibly an exotic combat style from a far land. He looked genuinely curious.

He looked like he was about to ask her about the lore. She opened her mouth. A small wet sound came out. She started crying again. She cried into Lefant's neck. Lefant did not appear to mind. The wings shifted slightly. The trunk swayed. The merchant's smile faltered for the first time.

"Ah. My apologies, traveler. I have spoken out of turn. I shall not pry further into your... arsenal." He kept walking. Lefant kept walking. The pink grass kept being pink grass and the two suns kept being two suns and the screen kept floating gently beside her head, sparkling occasionally, in italics, with a stupid emoji she wanted to eat out of spite. [You're glowing! Sparkle] She held Bolt in one hand and her Monster can in the other and let the merchant walk her toward Mossgrove on a winged camel with an elephant face, and at some point in the next hour she fell asleep, which was the only way her brain could think of to keep going.