“Menus!” Maya announced.

Nothing happened.

“Luck stat!”

Nothing.

“Disappointing,” Maya muttered. “Status.”

A window rose up in front of Maya.

Name

Maya Sullivan

Race

Human (Tier 1)

Level

0

Titles

Stranger in a Strange Land, Lost Soul, Unstable Survivor

Physical

Tier 1

Mental

Tier 1

Soul

Tier 1

Luck

18

Fortitude

2

Foundation

3

“I was expecting a lot more,” Maya said looking at the status screen. “Well, I have titles and pretty high luck.”

She tried tapping on the words “Luck” and nothing happened. Frowning, she tried tapping “Fortitude” and nothing happened. “I’m seeing a pattern here,” she muttered and tried “Foundation”, nothing.

She tapped “Physical” and a new menu opened up.

Physical

Strength

5

Endurance

4

Stamina

5

Dexterity

4

Perception

3

Willpower

6

Recovery

3

Channel

2

“Slightly more complicated,” Maya said. She considered herself athletic, three times a week spent at the gym and a couple of marathons under her belt. Something her father had drummed into her was physical fitness, plus it was an excellent stress reliever.

“So the Physical number doesn’t correspond to what my Physical stats are?” she wondered. The Physical, Mental, and Soul stats were all at one, but her actual stats under those were all over the place numerically.

She pulled up the Mental Stats.

Mental

Strength

6

Endurance

2

Stamina

2

Dexterity

5

Perception

2

Willpower

1

Recovery

2

Channel

1

“I guess that’s mental strength then,” Maya said. “I got a pretty buff brain.”

She paused. Yeah, she was smart, Maya knew, but she also had a tendency to wander off of topics and couldn’t stand studying for a long period of time. The sad ‘one’ in Willpower seemed to mock her.

“This is a bit intimidating and intrusive,” she said. Her hand moved toward the “Soul” button, wondering if that would display her sins or something.

Soul

Strength

2

Endurance

2

Stamina

1

Dexterity

2

Perception

1

Willpower

2

Recovery

2

Channel

1

“That hurts. What does soul even do anyway?”

Was it belief, prayer to a higher being? Did the System or whatever it was called want her praying to it so that it would grant her gifts? Maya didn’t think it was that, but there was a purpose for it.

Physical and Mental were the easy answers. Body and Mind. The Soul, probably had to do with the essence and mana that she had read about in the introduction letter. Weren’t some games about soul powering magic or something? Maya wished she had played more with her brothers.

“Maybe I’m just not good at magic, then,” she said out loud.

It didn’t bother her. The world seemed to have changed, but shooting fireballs from her hands didn’t seem like a change she’d be comfortable with.

“A beginner’s guide would really be useful right about now,” she sighed.

She waved her hand and closed all the windows, leaning back in the truck seat for a moment and rubbing her eyes.

A lot of new information had been dumped on her and she still wasn’t feeling all too well from apparently being transported from Earth to this dimensional wherever.

There was the pure strangeness of everything that was happening, but there was also the practical things that needed to be done too.

One, she needed to pee.

Two, she was thirsty.

Three, she was hungry.

The world might be ending and she was lost somewhere even the System didn’t know, but nature couldn’t be ignored.

Maya peered out the windows and into the side mirrors to see if anything had approached while she was occupied with her menus. The ground was undisturbed and from the short distance she could see, nothing seemed to be on the flat gray plain. She extracted the crowbar from her inventory and opened the truck door.

The ground was dry and crumbled as her foot touched it.

“One small step for woman,” Maya whispered as she set her second foot down. The gray ground felt like a dusting of snow that had frozen overnight, a slightly hard shell on top and then it was soft and spongy underneath.

Maya made a quick scan of the area around the truck. There were no tire tracks or any sign that the truck had moved. It seemed the truck had just appeared parked upon the gray plains. It was another creepy thing to toss upon the pile of stuff that she had decided to wait until later to unpack.

The ground crunched as she walked to the rear of the truck and fumbled with her keys to unlock the back doors. She hurried into the back of the truck and closed the doors behind her, peering through the windows to see if anything had tried sneaking up on her.

The back of the truck was a cramped kitchen, propane grills, ovens, a large water tank, and coolers for the food she would have been selling. Enough meals to feed fifty people, with side dishes and snacks to make it a real meal, as her Pops would say.

The ovens and grill ran on a pair of one hundred pound propane tanks, there was fifty gallons of potable water meant for cooking and cleaning, not to mention the bottled water and soda. There was enough food for twenty five days if she stuck to two meals a day. What Pops called comfort food was a calorie dense meal that she had guessed was over a thousand calories a serving.

Twenty five days was a long time, but she knew that she would run out of diesel by then. The food truck wasn’t what one would call fuel efficient. It was a big diesel engine that was hauling a lot of weight, she was surprised if it got more than fifteen miles a gallon. The good thing was that the fuel tank was large, but that still meant she probably had less than three hundred miles to find some kind of safety or rescue.

There was also a small Honda generator that was used to run machinery and a small freezer, but it had been only meant to last the eight hour shift she was supposed to work. It unfortunately didn’t use diesel as its fuel source.

The coolers that stored the food were of good quality. She remembered her father bragging about the deal he’d gotten for such quality coolers. They would supposedly hold their temperature for up to four days if undisturbed.

She drummed her fingers along the stainless steel counter. She could probably load up the small freezer with water and the cold packs, re-freeze them in a few hours and only use the generator to keep making ice. That would allow her to extend the perishable meats and vegetables for two weeks.

There were plenty of canned foodstuff and other snacks that she could save until it became a desperate need. A large can of sweet corn didn’t seem appetizing, but if she were starving, she’d probably gobble it up.

“A person can survive without food for three weeks, without water for three days,” she had heard that one on some survival reality show she had watched long ago.

Maya was staring at the coolers, when she had a thought. Something she had read or heard about, but she didn’t know if it were true. She had a Dimensional Inventory, could that keep her stuff fresh?

In one of the coolers, there were prepared meats that were surrounded with cold packs. She picked up one of the packs, feeling the cold coming from the frozen pack and willed it into her inventory.

She brought up her Inventory and played around with it for a moment, tossing out a few items she knew she didn’t need and also seeing if they would somehow be effected by the cold pack. They felt the same temperature as they had been when she put them into the dimensional space.

There was another tool box in the kitchen space and there she found a large flashlight and various other tools. She took a hammer for a secondary weapon.

After rummaging around for a while more, Maya packed several stackable bottles of water in her inventory and made herself a couple of sandwiches from the perishable breads and meats.

After half an hour, she wasn’t so sick from her brush with dimensional death and climbed back into the cab of the truck.

Drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, Maya pondered what to do. She couldn’t just stay in this desolate spot. She was trapped in an unknown dimension. Therefore there would be no rescue for her. She had to rescue herself.

There was no sun to determine the direction, but Maya decided that it didn’t matter. She would go straight and see what there was. If it was nothing but plains, she had three hundred miles and twenty five or so days to figure out something.

Maya turned on the truck and shifted into first gear.

***

[Explorer] Level 1

You have traveled 100 km in a strange and unknown land.

“Shit!” Maya gasped as the words flashed in her vision. She felt her heart nearly stutter to a stop in her chest. “Damn it! Stop displaying those messages!”

She didn’t know if the System heard her.

Maya eased her foot off the accelerator and took a slow deep breath, calming her racing heart. She had been traveling in a dead silence for well over an hour, heading toward the distant peaks.

Normally she’d be listening to music on any long drive, but caution and the gloomy world around her told her that was a bad idea. She didn’t want to die from some monster attacking while she was blasting K-pop at full volume.

The drive so far had been spectacularly boring. She normally enjoyed driving, the feel of the road and the sights to be seen, but those were all absent here. The gray ground was unchanging. It was dry, crunchy, and created a billowing cloud of dust behind her. The mountains didn’t seem to be coming any closer either, but the longer she stared at the horizon and where it met the sky, the more it hurt her eyes and gave her a headache.

The ground wasn’t as solid as she thought, the faster she drove the more the truck fishtailed. She wasn’t about to crash her only vehicle, so she had kept the speed to residential speed limits.

The gloomy landscape, the headache inducing sky, and the slight illness she still felt, Maya could definitely call this the second worst road trip she’d been on. The first being the year previous when she and her friends had decided to try and attend South by Southwest in Austin and they’d all succumb to food poisoning from eating at a dive diner.

She felt her heart resume its normal beats and with a sigh, continued onward.

After thirty minutes of driving, Maya spotted something dark on her left. It stood out like a neon sign in the completely empty expanse of plains. Maya slowed the truck and from her inventory pulled out the heavy duty flashlight. The light beam glinted off what appeared to be a red metal object a hundred feet from the truck.

It was the first non-dirt thing she had seen in the nearly two hours she had been driving. Curiosity pecked at her to investigate, but caution won out. For a moment.

“Only idiots get out of a safe vehicle and investigate strange ass things in a strange ass world,” Maya muttered as she shut the truck off and then picked up the crowbar that had been lying on the newly cleaned seat. “Aliens, don’t let it be fucking aliens.”

Her shoes crunched into the gray dirt. It gave slightly but was firm. She took a step forward, the crowbar in her right hand and the flashlight in the left. The only sounds were the crunching of the dirt as she approached the red metal object.

Twenty feet from it, she still didn’t know what it was. It was ten feet long with a large bulge that was half buried in the dirt. It was a machine, she realized. Somekind of machine that had been abandoned. She thought of her own method of traveling to this place. Maybe not abandoned. Perhaps it, like her, had been struck by black lightning and was brought here.

Up close the metal was scuffed and scratched, weathered for the gods only knew how long. She touched it and it was chilly, but not cold. She took another moment to brush off more encrusted dirt and saw that there were dozen of small mechanical nozzle on the under the bulbous hood.

She followed what looked like a length of tubing that entered the ground and used the crowbar to pull it out. It was buried under several inches of earth and with a hefty grunt, she dislodged it from its tomb.

It was a tentacle of some sort. She shuddered at it, she hated octopuses. But it wasn’t the creepy slimy tentacles of an octopus, it was a long metallic tube that gleamed in the dim light. The tentacle ended in a four digit mechanical hand, not claws or pincers.

It was some kind of sci-fi machine, she thought.

Maya then noticed a red flashing light at the edge of her vision. She took a slow breath and then swiped at it.

Tonari Corporation All-in-One Heavy Industrial Bot

“Well, holy shit,” Maya muttered. “Is that Evaluation coming into play?”

A small blue sign hung over the industrial bot. Maya touched it hoping to get more information, but she received nothing. Apparently she was gifted with the ability of looking at something and knowing what it was, very helpful. Maya grinned.

She took another few minutes to dig around the fallen machine and found more tentacles and brushed off dirt from its body. There were what appeared to be runes and inscriptions under the metal of its main torso and along the tentacles, they were a dim blue and were packed on every flat metal surface.

She touched them with her crowbar, but there was no reaction. The System gave her no answers as to what they were.

“Tonari Corporation,” Maya said. “That means aliens, right? Somewhere, maybe even some when, someone made this thing. Then black lightning and flash, here it lays, its purpose unfulfilled.”

The thought of taking the industrial bot flashed through her mind, along with a small fantasy of fixing up the machine and using it to find her way home. She dumped the idea as she rose to her feet and dusted off her pants. She leaned on the crowbar and smiled at the machine in the dirt.

“Pretty. But not helpful,” she finally said.

She got back into the truck, casting one more look at the red machine and then left.

“It was aliens,” she said.

***

Name

Maya Sullivan

Race

Human (Tier 1)

Level

0

0/100

Titles

Stranger in a Strange Land, Lost Soul, Unstable Survivor

Physical

Tier 1

Mental

Tier 1

Soul

Tier 1

Luck

18

Fortitude

2

Foundation

3

Physical

Mental

Soul

Strength

5

6

2

Endurance

4

2

2

Stamina

5

2

1

Dexterity

4

5

2

Perception

3

3

1

Willpower

6

2

2

Recovery

3

3

2

Channel

2

1

1

Universal Credits

0