“Man! This is nothing like what it should be!” the kid whined as he all but collapsed in a heap next to me. Evidently he’d finished his laps and scored his 5 in DEXTERITY.

“What do you mean, what it should be? You know how being conquered by a bunch of arrogant aliens who change all the laws of physics and read minds is supposed to go?” I barked, probably more antagonistically than was strictly called for, but the kid wasn’t the only one who’d been mentally jerked from pillar to post and then physically run half to death that day.

“Well … yeah?” I couldn’t decide if the qualification in the kid’s tone was uncertainty, or if he was afraid to tell me what he thought.

I wondered if I cared.

“Well, which is it, you know or you don’t know?”

“Um … I know?” I was about to bite his head off again, but the kid found some steel in there somewhere and continued, “This is all exactly like an RPG video game! Stat screens, levels, classes, even down to that jerk of an ork,” here he flicked his eyes over where Sgt. Asshole was talking to Squid Man, I guessed waiting for those trainees to get through with the practice swords. ‘Ork’ rang some bells in the back of my mind, some movie I saw a clip of once, maybe. “To elves” a nod of the head towards the girl (who’d stopped crying some time back), “gnomes,” (the little guy with the big ears), and even a Cthulhu!” This with another flick over at Sgt. Asshole and Squid Man, I guessed he was talking about the Squid.

“But nothing’s happening the way it’s supposed to!” I thought he was going to break down crying again and I wondered if I’d have to punch him. Then, I felt bad, and wondered where that had come from. I mean, we were all in pretty much the same boat here, confused and without any real choices in the situation. Maybe I was just that big of an asshole in my ‘real’ life and it was starting to bleed through?

God, I hoped not.

I decided to see if I could figure out what the heck he was talking about; who knows, maybe the kid did know something that might be useful. Maybe we could team up and do better together?

“So, what’s it all supposed to be like, anyway?”

Kid looked thoughtful for a minute. I appreciated that he was trying to get control of himself, organize his thoughts, not let it all get to him.

“Well, everything went well when I woke up in the woods, this morning. That SCHEMA system screen popped up and, I have to tell you, I was like ‘YES!’ This is something I’ve dreamed about my whole life, living for real in a video game world!” He was starting to warm up to the subject, excitement tinging his words.

“So, like, I can’t tell you how much I’ve thought about what I would do if it ever happened to me for real. I had whole notebooks full of builds!” (whatever that was, as long as he wasn’t crying anymore,) “I saw my stats, flicked through my MENU items and then SCHEMA asked if I was ready to end the informational part of the BEGINNER TUTORIAL and I was all, “Hell yeah! Let’s go kill me 10 rats!”

“What does ten rats have to do with anything?” I immediately regretted side tracking him, but you gotta admit that sounded kind of random crazy.

“What? You never played an RPG?” Like playing whatever the hell an Arpy Gee was would answer every question in the universe, or like I was some kind of freak for not having done so.

“OK, first, lets just get this out of the way. No, I have not played any Arpy Gees, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s going on, or at least can’t figure it out, so we can drop that as having anything to do with anything. Right?” To which I added a pointed stare that dared him to disagree.

“Um … ye-e-a-a-h, OK, but that, well, kind of makes everything I got to say difficult, you know?”

“Obviously, I don’t.”

“Right.” Then he thought some more, shooting nervous glances the whole time towards the two trainers’ pow wow, making sure they weren't about to focus their attention on us. “OK, in most RPG video games, most people who have played one before kind of skip through or at least skim over the boring parts of the BEGINNER TUTORIALs, going straight for earning XPs and gaining levels. I saw in my JOURNAL …” (here he shot me a smug look, probably expecting that I didn’t know about the JOURNAL, and seemed somewhat disappointed when I just returned his look with a stony expression) “So, I saw in my JOURNAL that we get 100 XP (which is when I figured out he must be talking about experience points) for finishing the TUTORIAL, and that’s how I know we get ‘em, XP, that is …” he kind of tapered off as I just sat there staring at him, but finally continued on when I didn’t comment. “Anyway, it’s kind of like a joke, because so many games use it, but one of the first quests noobs usually get is to ‘go kill 10 rats’ for some farmer or the innkeeper.”

“OK.” I wasn’t giving him squat. I had the feeling that he was trying to act like he knew what was what while all the time complaining that what was not what.

“Um … well, anyway, I moved through my pages pretty quick and then the SCHEMA guy told me to follow the yellow brick road down here, and I thought I’d, you know, pick a rusty sword out of a barrel and hit a wooden dummy a few times and get the sword skill and be off to,” he shot me a nervous look, “to, you know, kill my ten rats, heh, heh, heh,” and he just kind of tapered off and sat there.

“And so, you basically skipped the whole information section of the BEGINNER TUTORIAL and came here, and nothing’s turned out like it was in them video games you thought you was in, and you’re all wanting to go home, does that about sum things up?”

“Not just some things, EVERYTHING!“ he cried. “That ork trainer ran us until we puked, like we were soldiers, not free adventurers! We haven’t even touched a sword! And we puked! PUKED, for God’s sake!” and here he looked over at the elf lady, like to make sure she wasn’t listening in, and leaned over all big secretish and whispered loud enough for everyone in the whole clearing to hear him, “...and, I gotta PEE!”

I think my mouth may have dropped open right then, but without checking my RECORD, I can’t be sure, but if it didn’t, it should have.

“A-a-a-n-d?” I prompted, doing the universal rolling wave, ‘let’s get this show on the road’ hand signal.

He leaned in closer, because by then everyone was looking at him, “And nobody ever has to pee in a video game!” Then he sat back and threw his hands out, palms up like ‘fait accompi mofo!’

I just broke out laughing. I couldn’t help it. Some of the other trainees joined in (including the elf lady whose laugh was just as musical as I could have ever imagined.)

When I finally had control of myself enough to stop laughing, I slapped the kid on the shoulder and said, “Thanks kid, I really needed a good laugh after all that running, but seriously, haven’t you figured out that we’re not in a video game? This is our world, now. We’re living in this; it’s reality. I get now that everything kind of looked like a video game on the surface, but you should have kept on through the rest of the information TUTORIAL, at the very least. Did you even get your stat bumps from getting a definition on race and all your stats?”

“Stat bumps? What do you mean? My race says Human; I know what a Human is!”

I just cradled my weary head in the palms of my hands and sighed. There’s no fixing stupid, as they say.

“Kid, dude, I’m sitting on 6 DEXTERITY right now while you’re at 5, all because I made SCHEMA tell me about being Human. Yeah, it was kind of boring, but I got points in INTELLIGENCE and a whole shitload of points in WILLPOWER. I even got a CHARISMA and LUCK advancement out of making SCHEMA define Every. Single. Word. In all of my MENU tabs. Do yourself a favor and select or focus on every word of every line in your MENU, maybe it’s not too late, maybe you can still get the extra points, but do yourself another favor, too, and get it into your head that we are not in a video game, and maybe you’ll survive long enough to kill them rats you seem all worked up about killing, OK?”

Then I got up and moved towards the edge of the woods near where I thought my trail had let into the clearing while most of the trainees were furiously working their hands like they were checking through their screens.

Kid wasn’t the only one who needed to pee.