Chapter 2: System
The next morning, the first thing Nolan saw was white. A pure, endless white that made his eyes ache. He blinked, trying to focus, and the white resolved into a ceiling.
A tiled hospital ceiling. Fluorescent lights hummed quietly somewhere above him.
His head pounded with a dull, heavy ache, like someone had parked a car on his skull. The rhythmic beep-beep-beep of a machine kept time next to his ear, a sound he recognized from a hundred TV shows. He was in a hospital.
'Why am I in the hospital?', he thought.
He tried to sit up, but a wave of dizziness washed over him, pushing him back down onto the thin pillow. He let out a slow breath and just stared at the ceiling, waiting for the world to stop spinning.
A few minutes, or maybe an hour later, a door swished open, and a woman in a white coat walked in. She was in her late twenties, with kind eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses and her hair pulled back in a tight bun. She held a clipboard.
"Ah, Boy. You're awake," she said, her voice calm and professional. She pulled up a plastic chair and sat beside his bed. "I'm Dr. Evans. How are you feeling?"
"Like I got hit by a truck," Nolan mumbled, his voice raspy.
Dr. Evans gave a small smile. "Not a truck. Lightning, actually. You were found collapsed on the sidewalk on near the park. A witness said they saw a flash, and you just went down. Bystanders called an ambulance."
The memories slammed back into him. The rain. The pain. The blinding white light felt like it was tearing him apart from the inside. He remembered the sheer, impossible force of it. The burning.
"Luckily," the doctor continued, adjusting the clipboard in his hands, "the lightning didn't actually strike you directly. If it had… well, no one survives a direct lightning strike."
Nolan blinked slowly, his mind still foggy.
The doctor gave a small shrug. "What most likely happened is that it struck somewhere very close to you. A side flash, maybe. The electrical shock and the blast wave knocked you unconscious."
He flipped through the medical reports again.
"Your scans are perfectly normal. Your heart rhythm is stable, your nervous system shows no abnormalities, and there are no internal injuries." The doctor looked at him with mild amazement. "Honestly, Mr. Drake… you're an extremely lucky young man."
'Lucky?'
The word sounded strange in Nolan's ears.
His brows slowly furrowed.
Without thinking much, he grabbed the front of the hospital gown and quickly pulled it open.
The thin cloth slipped off his shoulders as he looked down at his chest.
He even pressed his fingers against the skin, feeling it carefully.
But—
There was nothing.
No burn.
No scar.
Not even a faint mark.
Nolan's eyes widened slightly.
I felt it…
He could clearly remember the blinding flash and the violent force that slammed into him.
'I felt the lightning hit me.'
'Then why was there no trace of it?'
Confused, he is staring at his chest as if a mark might suddenly appear if he looked hard enough.
Then he suddenly felt a gaze on him.
Nolan slowly raised his head.
The doctor was still sitting right there beside him.
For a second, the two of them stared at each other.
Realizing what he had just done, Nolan immediately grabbed the hospital gown and awkwardly covered his chest again.
The doctor raised an eyebrow, then chuckled lightly.
"Relax, Boy," she said jokingly. "There's nothing there to hide."
Her eyes casually glanced over Nolan's thin frame.
He knew it too.
He has a handsome face. But his body had always been weak.
"Well.....We want to keep you for another hour or two just for observation, but everything points to you being perfectly fine. Just a bit of a headache to show for it," the doctor continued.
Nolan looked up from his chest, his brow furrowed. He opened his mouth to ask a question, to tell her about the pain he'd felt, when it happened.
Right in the middle of his vision, between himself and the doctor's face, a translucent screen flickered into existence. It was like a piece of thin, blue-tinted glass had materialized in the air. On it, words formed in crisp, white text.
[System Initialization Complete]
Nolan froze. His mouth hung open, the question about the pain completely forgotten. He blinked hard, twice. The screen stayed. He shook his head, a quick, jerky movement.
Dr. Evans stopped talking and looked at him with concern. "Mr. Drake? Are you alright? Dizzy again?"
He wasn't listening. He was staring right through her.
More lines of text appeared below the first, scrolling into view on the impossible screen.
[ Name: Nolan Drake ]
[ Tier: 1 ]
[ Balance: $100 ]
A final message pulsed softly at the bottom.
[ Note: All purchases can be authorized via biometric scan (fingerprint / facial recognition). ]
Nolan stared, dumbfounded. He could see it perfectly. It was as clear as the doctor's face, hovering there in the air, independent of where he looked. He tried to look at the corner of the room, and the screen moved with him, always centered in his vision.
His mind raced.
'The lightning. It did something to my brain. I'm seeing things. I'm hallucinating. Great. Just great. A broken heart and now brain damage.'
He was so focused on the impossible text floating in front of him that he completely forgot about the doctor.
He was staring, wide-eyed, his jaw slack. Unfortunately, because the screen was centered in his vision, and the doctor was standing right in front of him, his gaze was fixed on a point that happened to be directly on her chest.
The doctor's expression shifted from concern to confusion, then to a slow, dawning realization.
She glanced down at her own white coat, then back up at Nolan's wide-eyed, unblinking stare.
Her cheeks flushed a deep red. She jerked back from the stool as if she'd been stung.
"Boy!" she snapped, her voice sharp with indignation.
Nolan finally snapped out of it, pulled from his panic by her tone. He saw her face, saw where his eyes had been pointing, and his own face burned with horror.
"No! No, no, no, it's not… that's not…!" he stammered, sitting up straighter, wincing at the head rush.
He was desperate. He had to explain. "It was a mistake! A total accident! I was just… umm…"
He looked at her, then back at the space where the screen was, which was, unfortunately, still in the same place.
Desperate for proof he wasn't a pervert, he pointed a shaky finger directly at her chest. "Doc, do you see that? Right there?
She is looking down, where he is pointing towards her chest again, her eyes widened, first in shock, then in pure, unadulterated outrage.
She snatched a metal chart from the foot of his bed and whacked him on the arm with it. It wasn't hard, but the message was clear.
"Pervert!" she hissed, her face a furious shade of crimson. She turned on her heel and marched stiffly towards the door.
"I'm not! It's a system!" he called after her helplessly. The door slammed shut.
An hour later, a different doctor, a stern-faced man who didn't make eye contact, came in. He avoided looking at Nolan as he quickly went over the charts. He declared him perfectly fit, with no signs of neurological damage, and practically shoved a discharge form and a pen into his hands.
"Sign here. You're free to go. Take some over-the-counter painkillers if your head still hurts," he said flatly, and then left as quickly as he'd come.
Nolan sighed, got dressed in his old, slightly scorched-smelling clothes that were in a plastic bag, and walked out of the hospital.
The world outside was bright and normal. Cars honked. People walked by, chatting on their phones. And hovering stubbornly in the corner of his vision was the ghostly system screen.
[Balance: $100]
It was still there. He wasn't crazy. Or, if he was, the hallucination was very, very consistent.
He was standing near the hospital's main entrance, next to a small courtyard. He was thirsty, his throat still dry from the hospital air. He spotted a vending machine against the wall, filled with snacks, sodas, and water bottles.
He patted his pockets. Empty. Of course. He'd spent everything he had on that stupid, beautiful ring for Lila.
The memory of the night before crashed into him with full force. The scene. The words she said, ' Let's… continue what we were doing.'
The pain in his chest was suddenly a hundred times worse than the ache in his head. A cold, hard knot of anger settled in his stomach.
He leaned against the wall, staring at the vending machine but not really seeing it.
'I don't care what it takes,' he thought, his jaw tightening.
'I don't care if it's the last thing I do.
I will make her regret it.
I will make her beg.
Literally on her knees.
For everything.'
At that time, the screen in his vision pulsed, as if reacting to his thought. The words [Balance: $100] seemed to glow a little brighter.
[Use the money,]
The text wasn't a command, just a simple, helpful reminder. It was so absurd, so out of place with his dark thoughts, that he almost laughed.
He looked from the floating screen to the vending machine. It had a small, glass-topped scanner for credit cards and, he noticed, a little silver square for fingerprint payment.
It can't be real. It's a hallucination. Brain damage.
But he was already walking towards the machine. He stopped in front of it, choosing a cheap can of cola. He took a deep breath.
'What's the worst that could happen? It doesn't work, and I look like an idiot pressing my finger to a vending machine.'
Feeling like a complete fool, he reached out and pressed his thumb firmly onto the silver scanner. He didn't have a card linked to it. There was no app on his phone for it. But as he pressed, he thought about the system. He thought about the balance. He thought about spending one of those phantom dollars.
Click. Whirrrr.
The machine's internal mechanism groaned to life. A second later, a cold can of cola dropped into the retrieval bin with a satisfying thunk.
Nolan just stared at it, his heart hammering against his ribs. He bent down, his hand trembling slightly, and picked up the can. It was real. Cold. Wet with condensation. He held it up, and in the sunlight, he could see his own stunned reflection in its shiny surface.
The system screen immediately updated, right in front of his eyes.
[Notification: $2 Spent]
[Remaining Balance: $98]
He read the words, then looked at the can in his hand, then back at the screen.
A slow, disbelieving grin spread across his face for the first time in what felt like forever. It wasn't just a hallucination. It was real. It was all real.
Before he could even process the magnitude of it, another notification came into his view below the balance.
[New Beginner Objective Available.]
[Objective: ???]
[Reward: ???]
[Accept] [Decline]
Nolan stood there, a man who had been broken by a woman, struck by lightning, and accused of being a pervert, all in the space of twelve hours.
He was holding a can of soda he'd paid for with thin air, staring at a menu from a video game that was apparently now his life.
He didn't know what the future held. He didn't know what the objective was or what the reward could be. But for the first time since he'd seen Lila with another man, he felt something other than pain.
He felt hope. He felt curiosity. And he felt a dark, simmering excitement.
Without a moment's hesitation, he tapped on the word [Accept].
The screen flashed once in acknowledgement. The game, whatever it was, had just begun.