Yeah, it’s mostly an exaggeration. I just wanted to have a player who everyone thinks can play chess be absolutely schooled by someone like Martin, and this was the only way I could think of that happening.

The Horace Tower was going to fall.

People were panicking. Chooser, a hero with lasers that he could shoot out of his index fingers, had accidentally fired a ray straight through the infrastructure of the Horace Tower, throwing the whole metropolis into chaos. The battle was still raging on, as heroes attempted to battle the Core of Fear out of their stronghold in the old city. Explosions, back and forth, chewed through the earth, as the Core of Fear simply attempted to cause as much chaos as possible before escaping with their lives and as much money as possible.

I, of course, had been on standby for the last couple months, and I could feel myself straining. That strength in me, begging to be unleashed. The "Inner Justice" I called it, trying to egg its way out, trying to show itself. Still, I was only on standby because I had a different job- I worked as a cook in an old diner, one of the few remaining mom and pop shops in the larger, much more corporate metropolis of Pinkerton.

I looked around the store real quick. We were on quiet time- not many customers came in for the little gifts, jewelry, and food that Papa Harold liked to sell, at noon.

"Hey, imma head on break real quick." I noted to Harold.

"Sure, just be back in 15." he waved me off.

"Got it!" I smiled.

I darted out the back of the store, and, looking at Horace Tower, blinked.

I felt my "Inner Justice" start to surge, flowing through my body. Slowly, I felt my heart start to pump a little harder in my chest, before I felt another pumping in sync, on the other side of my chest. I felt an aura, as if I was being hugged, come over me, the aura of my power- my super power- start to form. It was transparent, unseeable, but it radiated outwards, nothing quite like it.

I only then heard the other voice in my head.

>You only wake me up in times of crisis, babes. Can't we just chat once in a while?
>
>Oh, come on! It's not like I have much time in between you and Linda.
>
>Oh, there's a Linda now? You never told me about a Linda.

I felt something rub my hair.

>Well, I'm sorry, you tend to mock me over that stuff.
>
>Well, I'm sorry that being the literal spirit of the universe means that my consciousness isn't normally all that connected when I'm not awakened by you. Do you know how boring it is to sit around doing nothing?
>
>No, but I do know that that tower is going to be destroyed if nobody does anything, which seems to be a problem.

I pointed a finger at the tower, while using my eyes to glance around at all the people fleeing it.

>Well, that seems to be an issue.
>
>Wanna do something about it?
>
>Will you keep me awake more often?
>
>When I'm not at work, yeah.
>
>Your promise?

I sighed internally.

>Fine, I promise.
>
>Well then, let me do my thing.
>
>Alrighty, go ahead.

Immediately, I felt my arms and legs move without my consent, my body flying up into the air at mach speeds. My eyes could barely keep up as I was essentially puppeted through the air by a benevolent, godly force, placed right in front of Horace Tower, and saw some small text in the bottom of my vision.

^(Execute HoraceTower.spawn.exe)

The tower, all the grime and dents and wear and tear that showed in the structure from 25 years of constant use by big name companies, immediately ceased to exist, replaced by one with all the equipment that was previously inside, intact, and all the info, undamaged.

I looked down, and the people once there immediately went from panicked, to cheering, no confusion, none at all.

>Oh, and by the way...

I wrested control back of my neck, and looked down at all the fighting going on in the old city. Thankfully, nothing of importance had been destroyed yed.

>Oh shit, that's Jerry! Yeah, I wanna mess with that little bastard.

My eyes were turned towards one of the Pillars of the Core of Fear. Some sort of explosive power, that allowed him to turn himself into a living bomb and regenerate instantly, essentially acting as TNT.

^(Disabling PvP and World Destruction Add Ons...)

The heroes and villains continued to fight for a little while, at least 10 more seconds, before none of them realized they were doing anything. Jerry tried exploding. Not even a hole where he once was.

>Should we eve re enable PvP?
>
>Oh, trust me, it makes it more fun when we do.
>
>You know what? Fair.

I looked down at the people. Most of them were cheering, looking up at me, shouting.

"Banana Man! BANANA MAN! I LOVE YOU!"

Something struck me that I hadn't thought of in a while.

>Hey, so I don't have any sort of transformation when I summon you, right?
>
>No, I don't think so. You awaken me, and that's it. Why you asking sweety?
>
>Nobody has ever recognized me when I awaken you. Even when I show them you, nobody remembers. You know why that is?
>
>Oh, you finally noticed?
>
>What do you mean, finally noticed?
>
>Look at it from their angle for a moment.

Suddenly, I was looking not from my own eyes, but from one of the cheering crowd members. I looked not like David, the cashier for a small trinkets shop, but like a literal, ten foot tall banana. I tried shifting only my head back, but it literally just disappeared from their view. Then, as it reappeared, I felt their memory shift.

I was being messed with.

>Oh, fuck you!
>
>You still willing to go out for dinner?

I grumbled.

>You're paying.
>
>Finally!

The way I interpreted the prompt was like this:

Imagine if, after your whole life, learning how to use hands and feet, living with the idea that after this it was over, you gave up everything to be with your loved ones. They were with you the whole way. Thousands of great memories. Life changing moments spent with the ones you love.

Then, in a moment, that's all stripped away from you.

You wake up in an unfamiliar body that doesn't feel right, being talked to in a language you understand but don't like hearing, and every single feeling you ever felt deep in your heart was chalked down to nothing but a simulation where none of what you felt was real, and where what you were ripped from turned out to be nothing but pixels on a screen.

How would you react to that?

Of course, I wanted to make it a little more eldritch, so I added some mild body horror and a possibility that the world he woke up in is all a simulation too, but that's the general premise of it. If you want to add another layer to it, I'd love to read it.

By the way, I mean no hate to OP. Just wanted to make a meta prompt, because, as said before, I was bored in a class that wasn't teaching me anything. My ED101 class is about to start as I type this, hope you all had fun reading it!

"Why am I even doing this."

"Huh?" The writer glanced behind him, to see me, Ben, glowering.

"It's another dumb r/WritingPrompts prompt."

"Huh?"

I glowered at him, and back at my screen. The teacher on my Zoom screen talked about the end of the semester, but she didn't notice I was on Reddit. And Honestly? She probably didn't care.

"Well, at least it isn't superheroes or aliens, I guess." I muttered. "Might be able to get some good comedy out of this."

"No, no, man, I don't know who you are." the writer stood back, confused. "In fact, where am I?"

"You're in a study room in the High Library at Elizabethtown College. It's 1:29, and you've just been made up by a bored college freshman in the middle of his english 100 class." I rolled my eyes. "You're a person I made up for a writing prompt because I was bored of talking about things I already know about."

"Like what?"

"Going over logos, pathos, and ethos for the fifth time this semester." I grumbled. "I really just wanted to write something, to be honest. Didn't want to hear about TED talk analysis and research that we went over a month ago."

"No, like, how did you get in my room?" the writer looked around, confused. A tic-tac-toe game was on the whiteboard. I had done it myself, out of sheer boredom.

"This isn't your room, idiot." I repeated. "You're in a study room. I created you 5 minutes ago when I saw this prompt by u/ReadyDude3849 that looked interesting enough to pass 30 minutes before I head off to my ED101 class." I explained. Of course, I wasn't actually explaining. I was just writing out words as if I was

"Wait, so I'm not real?" the writer titled his nonexistent head.

"Nope." I smiled.

"So, what is this all about?" he asked me, technically.

"It's a meta prompt about me struggling not to write about superheroes or aliens, mostly." I said. "The prompt references how the subreddit seems to go through the same aesthetic over and over again, unable to pry itself away from the superheroes and aliens that so many people want to subvert." I wrote down. "Still, I have some issues with the meta prompt, so I wanted to make my own short story."

"Wait, so this is a meta prompt? Aren't those like, the next most common thing behind superheroes and aliens?" the writer looked scrolled through the subreddit.

"I mean, that's true-" I started. "I just don't think the OP realizes how diverse the actual prompts on the site are." I sighed. "Sure, the posts are usually about superheroes or aliens, but the stories themselves are diverse." I finished.

"Huh? What do you mean by diverse?" the writer challenged me.

"Well, good thing you asked that random question. Let me explain." I smiled, and left the class Zoom, as my teacher finished up with the lecture.

"The aesthetics of the prompts aren't always too creative. The ideas we make are normally recycled, but coming from a writer, I think that can sometimes be a good thing." I said, smiling. "The prompts themselves, at least, the aesthetic of the month that we like so much, doesn't really matter. Just looking at all the ideas by themselves lets me come up with whole new worlds, new characters, and even other prompts for other people to explore."

"Like me?" The writer used his nonexistent hand to point at himself.

"Exactly!" I chuckled to myself, as I kept writing. These meta jokes are fun. "Heck, I've even seen prompts exactly like this one at least 3 or 4 times this month, and honestly, I didn't want to write at that time. But now, looking at the prompt, an idea came over me, and because I was bored and had time, I could post it here for everyone to see. If anything is important, I think it's that, at the end of the day, people will read what I write, and have fun. The prompt doesn't matter as much as the story that comes out of it. And seeing stories by great people like u/shalidar13 and u/ApocalypseOwl makes me smile. The stories themselves are creative, and that's what matters. " I switched locations to an actual classroom, where class was soon going to start.

"Wait, where are we now" the writer asked.

"Doesn't matter." I said. "The point is, the creative process often recycles the same ideas, but its how we expand on those ideas that makes it all the better. The stories we produce and enjoy here are all unique. I just like seeing cool people write cool stuff, and that's why I'm here."

"Ok, I get it, your cheesy lecture hit. Still, where are we now? This room is way more bright than before." the writer looked around at all the posters that, honestly, were for young kids. We were in a basic spanish classroom.

"You don't exist anymore." I said.

As I finished writing the prompt, a couple of my friends came to sit down at my table to chat before class started.

I did a quick runthrough of my prompt response, and with a good feeling in my chest, hit "Comment."

​

>Player: Jack Portman
>
>SCORE: 98
>
>TOP ACHIEVEMENT: FAMILY MONARCH- Have at least 7 grandkids by the time you die!
>
>Highlight: Marriage to Kirsten Mackenzie, July 16th, 2007.
>
>Would you like to Spectate, Play in Creative, Start A New File, or Return to Hub?

I was dead. I knew it. I heard the flatline, felt the tears hit my face with a splash as my sister, in her old age, saw her lifelong best friend and closest confidant pass from this world. I heard my son scream, wishing he had a punching bag, as he fell to the ground in tears. The room smelled homeless, sterile and insincere, but the aura of the room was anything but. Poor little Jack Jr, my daughter Lilly's kid, had only been born a month before, and didn't know what was going on. I was happy to see my successor before I passed.

The words haunted me.

>Spectate, Creative, New File, Return to Hub

I remembered everything. My birth, if hazy, was there. My brain knew that I was human, I had to be. I'd just lived a solid 98 years, after all! It wasn't like I was just... playing a game. No, I had a wife I loved, a construction job that I had done for 35 years, and a management job I had done until I was 73 and broke my hip. I had grandkids, my daughter Lilly was a lawyer, my younger son was a wonderful househusband, and my older son was a human rights advocate and had spoken to the UN. My family was successful. It wasn't just... simulation. It couldn't be.

My family was real.

Kay-baby was real.

I felt the helmet get yanked off of me, as bright lights blinded me.

The face staring down at me was one that took me a real good while to recognize.

Feeling came over me again. My limbs felt awkward to move, after having two very mobile arms and grippy fingers to work with. My own skin felt slimy, gross, like I was leaking. My body felt flat, lumpy, like it was falling apart. I could feel each and every wrinkle in the... table I was laying on. I felt my eyes shift around, muscles in my head moving them into different sockets so I could see from a wider angle. The idea that I had hands, and feet, solid, flowing together perfectly, felt foreign, as the muscle memory I had developed tried to find precise, detailed ligaments failed to work properly.

(the dialogue in this scene has been translated from Ygriggian in order to provide reading pleasure)

"How do you feel?"

The voice was tangy, tinted with a scent of orange that scraped against my very soul that I thought I'd had. My core shivered, as my memory of my old life failed to materialize. It was all I could do to scream.

"Are you okay?" He- no, it- placed a ligament on me, and the slimy gross feeling that I was experiencing was nothing but torture. I tried to smell, but recognized I had nothing to smell with. I opened what I thought was my mouth, to feel no tongue. Little but rows and rows of sharp teeth.

"Hey, hey, man, watch it!" he backed off. "I know it may be rough, but-"

I screamed.

I screamed, screamed, and screamed again. I made sure that the God I now knew was fictional, created by a machine, could hear me. I made sure that whoever created this machine, to convince me of a world where I was happy, cared for, and loved, would know the hell of leaving it.

Deep in my subconscious, I saw them.

>Spectate, Creative, New File, Return to Hub

Deep in my subconscious, I knew what I had to do. If the last world was a simulation, all I could hope for was that this one was too. Simply returning to that fantasy would give me nothing now.

Somehow, somewhere, the being opposite me in the room reacted. "No, stop that! You can't! Please, I have a family, don't-"

Deep in my soul, something clicked "Return To Hub"

I heard another flatline, and my eldritch body went limp.

Kay-baby, I know you aren't real. You're a character created by my mind.

But I am too.

And I'm going to wake up.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

“I hate visitors.”

Not exactly, no. Where did you see one?

Notes- Semester 2- 1/14/23- Magical Defense

• "Defense is for pansies who think battle scars get bandaged by their mommies." - Dr. Luke Constantine from Fraudulan University
• Offense = Best Defense?
  • Someone who is defending can't attack themselves.
  • Damage Over Time > Big Hits Over Short Period
  • Pain prevents casting spells
• How to gain "the high ground"- Advantage
  • Counterspells
    • Low Level spells- Protection Magic
    • Low Level Physical attacks- DownB
  • Traps
    • Both the explosive and catboy kind work as distractions.
  • Cunning
    • Tricks like lying and [teleports behind you]
    • Romance if required.
• What to do when on the advantage
  • Cause as much pain as possible.
    • Anything that may break their concentration is important.
  • Important spells to practice-
    • Worm/Parasite summoning
    • Flame Magic
    • Water Creation- Only use if you can target lungs.
    • Gun-
    • Torture Magic
    • Itching Magic
    • Gun, but Bigger
    • Electricity Magic- especially if your opponent has electrical nervous system
    • Soggy Pizza Magic.
  • Prevent Spellcasting-
    • Wand Removal Lessons
    • Force Feeding Soggy Pizza
    • Gun, But Massive(wrong section, rewrite later- fuck you Jeremy)
    • Anti-Magic Wards.
    • Gun
• Conclusion
  • When in doubt, attack first.
    • Feel > Function