Okay. What had been said about his situation so far? The most common term used for what was happening to him was “transmigration”. Which just meant… moved? Somewhere else?
The somewhere else could mean his new (used?) body. Or it could mean this unfamiliar city. But the goat and the girl had made it sound like he was going to be living in a story.
Huh. It kind of sounded like Ghost Writer was running this whole thing.
Okay, so he was moved to a story. He was supposed to start in an action scene. He’d woken up in a coffin.
Danny mentally shuddered, the memory of seeping mud and things that wriggled overwhelming. His body, unconcerned, rescued an uneaten, still wrapped-in-foil hot dog someone had just dumped in a trash can.
Gross. Well, at least it was covered. It was even still warm.
What else? He had a quest. This whole thing was trying to be some kind of video game. Ghost Writer collab with Technus? Anyway, what was the quest…
The screen obligingly displayed his current quests for him. Well, quest. He only had the one right now.
Active Quests
Tutorial Quest (Main): What Resurrects You Makes You Stronger
Achieve the “Peak Human” ranking in 10 skills by the end of the tutorial period.
Reward: Unknown
Failure: Nonstandard Ending
Ten skills in four years, huh? Danny wasn’t sure what “Peak Human” meant to the system. He had no idea how long getting a skill to that level would take, but it had to be plausibly doable in the allotted time frame, right?
What did it mean by a nonstandard ending, was another question. Would it boot him back out of this body? Was it just another path this life could take that didn’t result in the original story?
Well, he needed to make some assumptions if he was going to get anywhere with this. So… Jazz had once read a book she’d gone on about that claimed it took 10,000 hours of practice to master any skill. For right now, that was as good a guess as any.
One of his benefits allowed him to learn skills five times faster than normal. Say it takes him 2,000 hours to get to the required level for each skill. He needed to practice enough for ten skills. That’s 20,000 hours.
Uh… that sounded like a lot?
How many hours were in a year? In four years?
Danny thought really pointedly at his screen about a calculator app. After a pause, one actually opened on its display. Finally, a convenience. He plugged in a few numbers to find out how many hours were in four years.
He frowned.
Then he checked how many hours would be left when accounting for 8 hours of sleep at night. If his mental state could be reflected in his body, his eye would have twitched at the result.
If Danny did… 16 straight hours of training a day, he’d have enough time for sleep and roughly one day off per week.
What.
Wait, so the two days he was spending zombified… those were the ENTIRETY of the free time he was allotted for the next two weeks?!
There’s no way. Bring on the nonstandard ending. Danny had been a half-ghost and a ghost-ghost, what could this world even scare him with?
【System Message】
A new entry has been generated and added to your codex: Nonstandard Endings.
Did he really want to look?
The answer was no.
He looked.
【Codex】
Entry – Nonstandard Endings
All Joker routes
Amanda Waller route
Black Mask route
Cadmus route
Court of Owls route
Despair route
Dollmaker route
Gnomon route
...see more
Selecting a route displayed a blank, rectangular area with a title caption. The blank area seemed like it was obscuring an image he hadn't unlocked, but the title caption was visible. Below that was a section labeled “Summary” that was, like the images and unavailable sections of the System Store, locked.
Daniel looked through a few routes, then picked up speed as he scanned through more and more.
Even after the “see more” it seemed the title captions didn’t change in flavor: Brainwashed ending; Zealot ending; Mind-Controlled ending; Specimen ending…
【System Store】
Looking for the perfect ending? Want a little variety in your new life? Give yourself another chance! And another, and another! Buy the Regressor Package to do it all over again. Collect CGs from every route!
Buy for 100 credits
Who would want that?! Every single ending implied mindless slavery!
Also, why does the system have pop-up ads? ...It was probably time to check out that options menu.
Kekipi had been sitting in the coffee shop for quite some time, reading a book and sipping on her coffee. It had been a nice day today and she wanted to go out, get a coffee, read a book, maybe head to the park later. She heard this town had a nice park so she would stop by it before she headed out of town. As she read her book, someone caught her eye walking by the window. She looked up and her brows raised. That... Guy looked really familiar.
She quickly got up, leaving her coffee and book. She didn’t care about those items at the moment, she had to catch him before he got away. When she got outside, she watched him walking away before calling out to the man:
That was her first task of her mission. Survive using her own wits and the skills she has possessed. The second task? Find Bruce. She doesn’t know where the giant is and she knew he still couldn’t find him. If she can him then she is considered safe from Achim’s grasp.
But now, she’s on a run still from Achim. Natasha knows he won’t stop until she’s back in that facility, back in that chair, back to being a weapon. Back to being Dullahan.
Natasha has been hiding in a poor looking depleted warehouse no one dares enter. Unless you’re a bunch of teenagers she could easily scare off with just the sight of her face or better yet, her headless body.
The noise of an empty can she ate out from earlier on was kicked, startling the runaway experiment out from her dreamless sleep. Survival mode is kicked in and she backed herself against the wall, hiding in the shadows, holding her breath, and silencing herself. Waiting to identify who is this stranger that comes here at the time of night.
A loud clatter and an ominous change in the room’s orientation brought Danny’s attention back to his surroundings. His body had been harshly throwing itself against its bindings, and the gurney had knocked into a mobile medical cart placed too close to it. Something had fallen on him—a tray, spilling medical tools as it fell—and the way his body had thrown its weight, the bed he was strapped to was now tilting in the opposite direction from where the tray had come from.
Danny had better not be about to die ag—WHOA!
One hand had twisted in its restraint to catch a scalpel as everything fell. After his rough landing, Danny found himself hanging sideways from his restraints. He stared at the scattered tools and fallen tray in front of him while the hand with the scalpel worked to cut through the wrist cuff.
Was… was that intentional? Was this body really just working off instincts? What the hell were these instincts?!
Of course it chose to be hypercompetent now instead of earlier, in the middle of traffic, in the scenario that would have prevented any of this. Well… at least his body was taking care of the restraints; Danny just had to figure out things on his end.
After scanning his system for options, he saw that he’d missed system messages. One was from a sender he’d never seen before. These names were all overlapping, though. Nothing about this afterlife game could be convenient. “System Support,” huh? Right.
So, there was a “Transmigrator Support System”, which he accessed with his screen. That seemed automated by comparison to the email-looking message he’d gotten from Peerless Cucumber. This “System Support” was probably… like customer service? Support for users having issues with the system itself. That was promising.
Danny read the message. His account was no longer under review, so he could actually buy things from the system store now! He really needed to find something that could remove the debuff.
【System Message】
Your preferences have context-sensitive advertisements set to “off”. You can change this setting in the options menu.
And now the system was giving him attitude. Great. Well, it was also hinting that it had a solution, which would be actually great. Since his body was doggedly sawing through his restraints, he should probably find something sooner rather than later.
Actually… why had no one come to check on him? That had made an incredible amount of noise. Why was everything so quiet? Someone had strapped him down and just… left him here? With a bunch of tools?
Danny was pretty sure you didn’t need restraints on people you thought were dead. If most dead people were in his place, the restraints would do nothing because their corpse wouldn’t try to escape. In Danny’s case, the restraints would have done nothing because he was dead. Well. If this irritating system weren’t so fixated on nerfing him, anyway.
Danny’s body thumped to the floor as his mind browsed through pages of items in the system store. His body finished freeing itself and stood. It shivered in his hospital scrubs, and his eyes fixed on the sheet covering the table on the other side of the room. He found himself ambling toward it, and refocused his attention on the world around him.
‘No,’ he thought at his body. ‘Bad! Do NOT take the sheet off a corpse! I don’t care how cold we are!’
The good news was that Danny did not have to wear a sheet plucked off a corpse in the morgue.
The bad news was that it was because whatever was under the sheet started moving before he could get all the way across the room.
But hey, there was more good news! Danny couldn’t control his body, so he didn’t let loose with a high-pitched squeal of terror when presented with this horror movie development! You really had to appreciate the little things when the big things were all terrible.
For instance: his human body was always cold from the way his unreleased ice powers cooled his core temperature, and it wasn’t helped by the cool air of the morgue. That was a terrible, big part of his reality. The small bright spot? Apparently, the chill that ran down his spine at the unexpected movement was even worse than the overall cold, because instead of continuing toward the sheet to warm him up, his body instantly changed course to sprint for the exit.
He couldn’t see whatever was going on behind him, but from the scrabbling noises and soft thumps, he didn’t think that whoever that was had been restrained. Because of course they hadn’t. Why would you put restraints on a corpse?
Danny wished he could punch just like, one thing. For, uh… survival purposes.
AO3 link
The problem with random selection is the same as with gambling: sooner or later, you’ll end up with a losing result.
On this night, when the dice landed, Danny Fenton’s phone vibrated. He was on his way home from a dinner out with his friends, walking down a sidewalk lit by streetlamps. When he pulled the phone out of his pocket, the streetlamp just behind him flickered. He ignored it as he checked the text message preview on his lock screen.
We’ve been trying to reach you
about your life’s extended warr
“Oh, ha ha.” Danny rolled his eyes and unlocked his phone to delete the text. When he opened it, however, the body of the message was completely different.
CONGRATULATIONS!!!
You have been selected as one of the GRAND PRIZE WINNERS of our “Transmigration: Public Beta” Bonus Package! To accept, all you need to do is click the link below.
Note: There are only a few of these prizes available. Hurry to claim yours before they run out!
jfeojaglszf.kysmsh/suslnk
Danny had barely glanced at the text before his thumb was moving to delete it. Then his eye caught a phrase in it and he paused to actually read the strange message. "Beta?" he murmured. As the word exited his mouth, he exhaled a cold mist and something happened in the world around him. Startled, he looked up to see his parents’ Ghost Assault Vehicle just as it swerved up on the sidewalk toward him. He had no chance to wonder how he’d missed hearing or seeing it before it impacted his fully-corporeal, half-human form.
In the sliver of time between the initial impact and when he’d gone under the treads, his grip spasmed over his phone. His thumb slid over the link on the open text message and pressed down before the phone was sent flying out of his grip.
It was installing software even before it hit the ground. Seconds after, it vibrated once more, unnoticed by anyone.
Confirmation Message:
You have successfully claimed the “Transmigration: Public Beta” Bonus Package! We hope you have an enjoyable experience, and please report any bugs to our helpful support staff!
The screen flickered, then went dark. A progress bar appeared. When it had filled, the screen went dark once more before flashing as a bright Welcome screen appeared.
~~~
Danny opened his eyes with a sharp exhale of frost, his hands frantically patting himself down from head to torso.
Miraculously, he found no injuries. The overwhelming pain he remembered had vanished, leaving only its memory. “I’m alive!?” he said in disbelief. “Uh, wait—”
“No, you’re not!” several voices called simultaneously from around him. Yeah, he hadn’t been alive to start with. Then he startled. Who’d even said that?
Danny’s focus shifted from his self-evaluation to his surroundings. He’d appeared in a room that looked a lot like a DMV. Danny was seated in a folding chair in the middle of a row of other chairs. In front of and behind him were rows upon rows of even more cheap-looking, uncomfortable plastic folding chairs.
Most of the chairs were filled with seated people, and sporadically, more people would appear in or vanish from them. In the seat directly in front of him, a girl in purple and black popped into existence, shaking her head confusedly. Her outfit kind of reminded him of Clockwork's, from what he could see of it.
“I’m alive?”
“No, you’re not,” came another chorus.
“Oh maaaan,” she moaned. “I did not want to die today.”
“Yeah, join the club,” snarked someone nearby.
Uh. Were they all DEAD dead? Was that real? Did he just get mowed down like Undergrowth beneath a lawnmower? He—he remembered seeing the vague outline of his parents through the windshield of the GAV.
If he’d looked… what would their expressions have looked like? Was that an accident, or—
DING!
“Now taking RB76745.” The voice sounded like it came from a speaker system. Danny looked up to see a counter beyond the sea of seats, segmented into several sections in large circle. Behind each walled section was a terminal manned by bored-looking ghosts of a variety of species.
Above the counter, mounted on the roof of the building he’d appeared in, was a series of display monitors matched to each section. On the monitors he saw a list of numbers preceded by two letters, and the letter combination differed between every counter. Danny couldn’t see the RB counter; it must be on a side of the ring he couldn’t see from this angle.
Someone’s head intruded into his field of view. A man with gelled-back blonde hair had invaded his personal space, and Danny jerked backward in his seat. The guy was looking down at something in Danny’s hand.
“EM62131, huh?” he remarked. “You’ve got a wait ahead of you.”
Once the man had backed off to his own seat again, Danny took a look himself. In his hand was a slip of paper; a ticket with EM62131 printed on it. Curious, he glanced back up at the monitors and found the section with EM prefixes. The top number on the list was 200 below his.
“Hey, so… where are we?” Danny asked the guy. Danny wasn’t sure if he’d even have any information, but it was worth trying, at least. “What’s the wait for?”
“They’ve been doing overhead announcements every once in a while,” his neighbor replied. “We’re dead. You probably remember that bit. Apparently, this is some place called the Transmigration Placement Center.” He nodded toward the counter. “We’re all just waiting to see where they send us.”
Danny had never heard of this. This must be a part of the zone he’d never explored before. What was transmigration, anyway? Public transportation of some kind? But you didn’t get a choice about where to go?
That didn’t sound like something he was interested in.
He’d just head out and see if he could get his bearings outside the center.
Danny tried to stand up. Something held him in place. Danny tried harder. The pressure increased; to the point where he could no longer move his limbs.
Seeing him strain, the guy next to him winced. “Ah. Yeah, none of us have been able to leave our seats, except for when they call our numbers,” he said with sympathy. “If you stop trying to escape, it should ease off.”
Danny did, then thought for a moment. If he shifted to his human form, he should be able to phase right through the building. Whatever they had keeping him in the chair probably didn’t extend below it. He focused on returning back to life.
Nothing happened. No ring of light; no transformation. Confused, Danny looked down at himself once more and did a double-take.
He wasn’t in his Phantom form. He wasn’t wearing his hazmat suit, just the street clothes he’d been wearing that night. When he pulled a lock of his hair down to eye-level, it was black, not white.
He must really have died. Again.
He wondered why the colors hadn’t inverted this time. Come to think of it, everyone sitting down in the waiting area looked pretty mundane, other than some of the outfits. Not a single person had skin tones he wouldn’t expect from a living person; no green or blue anywhere in sight. They were very… human.
The people behind the counter were more exotic, like what he’d come to expect from the zone.
Anyway, Phantom form or not, Danny still was a ghost. Maybe even a full one now? He lifted up his hand and shifted it invisible. It was just as easy as it always was in ghost form. This must be his new normal, unless he had two ghost forms or something. But he could check that later. For now, he tried to make himself intangible.
He started to slide through the chair easily enough, but then the pressure returned, worse than before. It was almost crushing. He quickly picked himself back up and stopped using his powers.
“Holy shit, kid, what was that?” His neighbor looked impressed, and he’d drawn a few stares from other people as well.
“Uh. Well, we’re dead. And dead people are ghosts. Ghosts can be invisible and go through stuff, right?” Did he still need to hide why he knew this? He probably shouldn’t keep babbling. Danny stopped talking while he was ahead.
His neighbor’s eyebrows lifted high. “Can we all do that?” He lifted his own arm, but when he visibly tried to focus, his entire form started flickering wildly, in and out of visibility.
The guy directly behind him irritably grunted. “Cut it out, Flickers.”
His neighbor obliged with good humor.
He hadn’t managed to get any one area to stay invisible for more than a second, and he hadn’t gone entirely invisible even once. Still, he seemed pleased with his first try. “Thanks!” he enthused. “Hey, let me pay you back. My ticket’s only two people from the front. Why don’t we swap?” He held out his ticket to Danny with a broad smile.
Danny supposed getting to the front sooner would get him answers sooner. He reached for the ticket.
“Have you checked the back of your ticket yet?”
Danny paused. The girl in front of him, the one who’d appeared just after he had, was turned around in her seat. The white lenses of her dark mask looked at Danny from beneath a purple hood. Danny’s neighbor looked annoyed at the interruption.
“No?” Danny responded, taken aback. “Why, what’s there?” Danny flipped his ticket around.
Listed on the back side was a key explaining the meaning of the letters at the front of each person’s ticket number. Apparently, they were abbreviations for various words and phrases.
“They’re tropes.” The girl explained. “Whatever’s going on with this, uh, afterlife, the labeling system they use for it uses transmigration tropes. Which makes sense, if it’s the Transmigration Something Center.”
“Tropes, like themes? What’s transmigration?”
“Sure, like themes, close enough. Transmigration is,” she paused, seeming to struggle for an explanation, “you know, like ‘isekai’ or ‘portal fantasy’.”
Danny looked at her blankly.
She slumped a bit, then straightened, holding up her ticket. “Okay, so mine starts with SH, right? The key says that’s short for Summoned Hero or Heroine. It’s common in stories where someone powerful and influential wants a person capable of becoming strong enough to destroy some great evil.” She paused. “Or great enemy, anyway. Not like I’m an expert.” She frowned at her ticket for a moment, then shook her head and refocused.
“What’s yours?”
He showed her his ticket.
“Okay, EM. Looks like that one is… En Media Res.”
“Oh, I know that one,” Danny realized. One of Lancer’s after school sessions he’d been guilted into paying attention to had gone over it. “That’s when a book starts in the middle of something exciting happening, right?”
“Or a movie or whatever, yeah,” she confirmed. “If that’s what’s going to happen to you when you get shipped off to wherever, that… actually sounds pretty rough.” Her fingers drummed against the top of her chair for a moment as she considered him. Then she shifted her gaze to his neighbor.
“Hey, didn’t you check his ticket earlier?” Her voice was skeptical. “You would have known that, right?”
The guy next to Danny scratched the back of his neck with his empty hand.
“Okay,” he said. “You caught me. I was concerned for you, kid. You look like a stiff breeze could knock you over.”
“Hey!” Okay, that was true. But to be fair, Vortex would also knock this guy over.
“I’m just saying! Anyway, I don’t feel right about leaving you to something like that, so here.” He pushed his ticket at Danny, reaching for the one in Danny’s hand.
Danny noticed, with dawning suspicion, that the guy’s thumb was covering the letters of his ticket. Danny couldn’t quite keep the edge out of his voice when he asked, “What exactly were your letters, Flickers?”
The guy clicked his tongue before dropping his ticket and diving for Danny’s. He leaned over as far as he could without quite leaving his seat. Danny hurriedly moved his hand out of the way. Flickers pulled Danny back toward him with one arm around his neck and grabbed for his ticket with an arm longer than Danny’s own.
DING!
“Now taking PZ52728.”
Just before grasping fingers could close around the slip of paper, the man vanished. Danny whipped his gaze upward to check for the PZ monitor. It was just at the edge of the visible sections. His former neighbor was at the counter, straining against what looked like nothing. He struggled the entire time the employee behind the counter spoke to him, right up until he was swallowed by a swirling mist rising up from his feet. The same mist had swallowed everyone who’d gone up to the counter so far.
“Attention Transmigration Placement Center candidates,” a voice spoke over a PA system. “Please keep hold of the ticket you’ve been provided, as supplies are limited and no replacements are available. This is your notification that transmigrating without a ticket will not improve your placement. It will, however, prevent you from binding with a system on arrival and accessing transmigrator privileges. Thank you for your patience; an agent will assist you soon. Happy travels!”
“Oh boy,” the girl in front of him said. She looked up from the key on her ticket. There was a pause, for a moment, like she was going to say something, but in the end, she turned back around in her seat and slumped into it, head lolling back to look up idly.
Danny frowned and looked at his key.
PZ. Patient Zero.
He wondered what that meant. It felt like he’d heard it before.
Danny was used to being attacked. It happened with depressing regularity. But still.
“Thanks, Purple,” he said. “You really helped me out there.”
The girl bunched the fabric of her cape in one hand and lifted it above the chair. She waved it in the air at him, not moving otherwise.
“It’s eggplant, not purple.”
“Huh,” he considered the outfit. “Color me surprised.”
The girl snorted, dropping the edge of her cape to once again drape down the side of her chair.
“Thanks, Eggplant,” he said. She shot a languid two-fingered salute toward the plain white ceiling.
He settled back to wait.
From somewhere behind him, a breathless voice asked, “I’m alive?”
【System Support】 Peerless Cucumber
Re: possible hacked client - unlocked skills; spectral abilities; no this really is your final form (for now)
Ticket Status: Closed
Notes: Assessor didn’t flag returnee status. Flag is now active, which should prevent more false ‘suspicious activity’ alerts. Unlocked skills from alpha should now have skill growth bonuses applied. Spectral abilities approved, but nerfed while in a human body with no ectoplasm infusion. The spectral form is denied until ectoplasm levels hit the prerequisite for unlock.
(Ha! You broke the story flow in the first five minutes! That idiot running the quests team is going to strangle whoever did your assessment.)
【System Message】
System synchronization failed. Unable to launch Transmigrator Support System.
Running diagnostic…
User already synchronized to a system.
Transferring data...
Checking world status…
Updating scenario…
Cold air escaped his lips.
Danny’s eyes blinked open so naturally that it took him a moment to realize he still wasn’t in control. He processed the steel gray ceiling and walls, the medical equipment, and the discomfiting fact that he was strapped down to a gurney.
Every hospital Danny had seen had white walls. If he’d woken up in a lab, he was going to be terrified pissed.
There was a series of rectangular locker-like doors against the back wall. The air was cool, musty, and smelled of antiseptic and an unfamiliar blend of chemicals. Three metal tables were lined up in a row across from him. Two were covered in white sheets that hid lumpy contents beneath the fabric.
Oh. A morgue. Yeah, that tracked. Danny was sure whoever worked down here was going to have a fun shift.
His body immediately got to wriggling. He wished it luck.
Danny took the opportunity to check his debuff timer. It was an instinct that came even before he thought to wonder how he’d gotten here. The urge to be in control was maddening.
51:22:23
No. That was wrong! What—what happened? Why was it—
The memory came back to him. Then he wished it hadn’t, actually. He’d been fine with confusion. Because, with roughly 14 hours remaining before he would have been back in the driver’s seat of this body…
@overkilled liked this short starter call (for Liam!)
“Why exactly did you help me when you found me out on my own?” The question comes from Jax’s lips almost absently as he messes with a tear in the knee of his pants. “I know I didn’t have much control of myself and I really could’ve fucked things up for you. I guess I’m just havin’ a hard time understandin’ why you’d risk so much for a stranger.”
