Tutorial Island
LitRPG. 2,500 words, 8 minute read. With Gemini.
The air in the Northgate High computer lab was a stagnant cocktail of floor wax, warm plastic, and the faint, metallic tang of ozone. It was a smell Cullo associated with a specific flavor of dread—the quiet, humming dread of a Tuesday afternoon suspended between a past he couldn’t remember and a future he didn’t want. He sat slumped in a molded plastic chair, the ancestor of which was likely a medieval torture device, staring at the monitor. His history paper, SILK_ROAD_ESSAY_FINAL.docx, remained a blank white void, the blinking cursor a tiny, mocking heartbeat.
He wasn’t really procrastinating. Procrastination implied a future intention to do the work. This was more like a silent protest. A sit-in. He was occupying the space his life had assigned him, but he refused to participate. Instead, he scrolled. His thumb, moving with lifeless autonomy on the trackpad, guided a cursor through an endless digital river of inanity. A cat falling off a counter. A politician saying something dumb. A new dance that made him feel ancient at seventeen. Each image was a little puff of dopamine that did nothing to fill the hollow space behind his ribs.
He glanced around the room. Twenty-nine other students, twenty-nine other blank pages. To his right, Amelia Jensen wasn’t even pretending to work; she had her phone propped against her monitor, her fingers flying in a frantic rhythm as she typed out a comment on a friend’s post. Across the aisle, Ben Carter’s head was down, his shoulders shaking with the silent, suppressed laughter of someone watching videos with the sound off. They were all doing it. They were all waiting for the bell, the next bell, and the one after that, all of them ticking down the clock on a life that felt pre-written.
Cullo saw his own future reflected in the smudged screen, a branching path with only one destination. He’d seen it last night at the dinner table. His father, Seth, a good man with kind eyes and a weary slump to his shoulders, had detailed a fascinating new municipal zoning ordinance with the same tone one might use to describe the color gray. His mother, Margaret, had listened with a patient, practiced smile, occasionally glancing at Cullo and his sister, Veronica, her eyes holding a familiar, hopeful pressure. Veronica, a supernova of effortless achievement, had then recounted her victory at the state debate championships, another trophy for a shelf already groaning under the weight of her potential.
And Cullo? He’d pushed mashed potatoes around his plate. He was the quiet space in their family portrait. Not a failure, not yet. But he was potential energy that had forgotten how to convert to kinetic. He was on a conveyor belt, and at the end of it was a sensible degree, a sensible job like his father’s, a sensible mortgage, and a sensible, quiet desperation. The grind.
A flash of purple in the corner of his vision snapped him back to the present. A notification on the school’s messaging client, a system so famously porous it was less a walled garden and more a picket fence—with most of the pickets missing.
He clicked it.
The sender ID was a strange one: Aethelred_the_Unready.
> That looks fun.
Cullo frowned. He looked at his screen, at the meme of a confused-looking golden retriever.
Cullo: What does?
The reply came back instantly, the text appearing as if typed by a ghost.
Aethelred_the_Unready: The scrolling. The waiting. The slow decay of possibility. Very… beige.
A chill, unrelated to the lab’s aggressive air conditioning, traced a line down Cullo’s spine. The message was too specific, too insightful. He scanned the room. No one was looking at him. Mrs. Davison, the media lab proctor, was staring intently at a screen filled with brightly colored shoes.
Cullo: Are you in this lab? Who is this?
Aethelred_the_Unready: Think of me as a recruiter. I see people with potential who are stuck in the tutorial level. And you’ve been stuck for a while, haven’t you, Cullo?
His name. The stranger used his name. Cullo’s hand recoiled from the mouse as if it were red hot. This was a hack. Some creep who had gotten into the school’s network. His instinct was to slam the laptop shut, to report it, to run. But he didn’t. A dark, dangerous curiosity unfurled in his gut.
Cullo: You haven’t answered my question.
Aethelred_the_Unready: Questions are for the world you’re in now. A world of rules and consequences and boring, linear progression. I’m offering a different set of questions.
A hyperlink bloomed below the text. It wasn't blue and underlined. It was a shimmering, silvery thread of characters that twisted and warped like liquid mercury. It seemed to pull the light from the monitor into itself, a miniature black hole of code. www.elysian-odyssey-beta.io/portal_initiate.
Aethelred_the_Unready: An upgrade. Fully immersive. Deep-dive. No VR rig, no haptics. Just a new reality. A world that pushes back. A world with much better loot.
It was absurd. A prank. A sophisticated virus that would probably brick the school’s ancient desktop. He should close the window. He should go back to his blank essay and write about the economic implications of Parthian intermediaries on Roman silk acquisition. He should get back on the conveyor belt.
But the word ‘beige’ echoed in his mind. That’s what his life was. A beige existence, stretching out into a beige horizon. This link, this scam, this probable digital disaster—it was, if nothing else, a splash of color. It was a choice. A real one. Maybe the first one he’d made all year. It was a small, stupid, and possibly catastrophic act of rebellion against the crushing certainty of his own future.
His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, desperate rhythm. His hand, slick with sweat, closed around the mouse. He took a breath, the stale air of the lab filling his lungs for what felt like the last time.
He clicked.
For half a second, the world held its breath. Then, the universe tore apart at the seams.
The first thing to go was the sound. The low, omnipresent hum of fans and electricity didn’t just stop; it was violently sucked out of the room, leaving a vacuum that popped his ears. The monitor in front of him ceased to be a source of light and became light itself, a blinding white rectangle that bleached all color from the world. A sound followed, not a sound he heard with his ears, but one he felt in his bones—the shriek of reality being dragged through a digital sieve.
He watched, paralyzed, as the edges of the monitor began to fray. The plastic bezel dissolved into a cascade of glowing blue pixels that spilled onto the desk like sand. The desk itself wavered, its wood grain shimmering before breaking apart into a torrent of brown and black data that swirled into the air. The phenomenon spread. Amelia Jensen’s phone, her face, her very existence, unraveled into a blizzard of light and color. The entire room was collapsing, its atoms forgetting their purpose, its matter unwriting itself.
The floor vanished.
He was falling. Tumbling end over end through a churning vortex of raw information. There was no up or down, only a terrifying, limitless void stitched together with threads of lightning-white code. The sensory ghosts of his life assaulted him, deconstructed and remixed into a meaningless cacophony. He felt the rough texture of his basketball, smelled the chlorine of the community pool, heard the specific, grating cadence of his father’s morning podcast, saw the exact shade of lilac in his mother’s garden—all of it shredded into digital confetti and scattered into the abyss. He was a corrupted file, his entire existence being erased to make room for something new.
He tried to scream, but the void stole his breath. Panic gave way to a strange, floating resignation. In the infinite blackness, he saw it. A single, distant spark. A pinprick of impossible brightness.
It grew. With the terrifying acceleration of a freight train, the pinprick swelled, resolving itself. It wasn't just light; it was a place. He could see swirling continents of emerald green, oceans of sapphire, and twin suns—one gold, one lavender—casting a kaleidoscope of hues across the clouds. It was a world, impossibly beautiful and rushing toward him with terminal velocity. He didn’t have time to brace, only to register the overwhelming, all-consuming light.
Impact. White. Silence.
The first sense to return was smell. A rich, loamy scent of damp earth, the sharp perfume of pine, and an undercurrent of something alien and sweet, like rain on hot flowers. The second was touch: the feeling of something soft and cool and alive beneath his cheek. Moss.
Cullo’s eyelids were heavy, leaden things. He forced them open. He was looking up, not at a popcorn ceiling or acoustic tiles, but at a living cathedral. Trees whose trunks were wider than his father’s car soared hundreds of feet into the air, their bark shimmering with a faint, pearlescent sheen. Their leaves were the color of spun gold, and through them, the light of two suns streamed down, creating overlapping pools of warm yellow and cool violet on the forest floor. The air was so clean it felt like drinking from a mountain spring, each breath a shock to his system.
He pushed himself up, his head throbbing, his mind a fog of confusion. The fall… the impact… he should be dead. He should be a crater. But he was here, completely unharmed, wearing the same t-shirt and cargo shorts he’d had on in the lab. A hallucination? A vivid, dying dream?
Ping.
The sound was soft, melodic, and seemed to originate from the center of his brain. In the top-left quadrant of his vision, three bars of light materialized with the slick, polished animation of a high-end operating system. They hovered there, translucent and unwavering, regardless of where he turned his head.
HP: 100/100 MP: 50/50 STA: 120/120
Cullo stared, his mouth agape. "No," he whispered. "No way." He squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head, willing the after-image to fade. He opened them. The bars were still there, a calm, rational, and utterly insane display of data floating in the air. This was a concussion. It had to be.
He needed his phone. He had to call someone. He reached into his right pocket, his fingers closing around the familiar smooth glass and metal rectangle. The moment his brain formed the intent—get phone from pocket—a new sound echoed in his head.
Vwoop.
A large, transparent panel shimmered into existence before him. It was a grid, and at the top, in a font that was both elegant and futuristic, were the words: INVENTORY. His hand, still in his pocket, froze. On the grid, an icon representing his phone suddenly glowed, and the text beneath it pulsed once: [Mobile Phone (No Signal)]. He looked at the other occupied squares, his horror mounting with each one. His keys. His wallet. His student ID, complete with the dorky photo from sophomore year. And there, a perfect 3D model of the half-eaten, slightly crushed granola bar he’d forgotten about.
The pieces didn’t just click into place; they slammed together with the force of a tectonic collision. Aethelred’s messages. Tutorial level. Fully immersive.
A world that pushes back.
This wasn’t a dream. This wasn't a hallucination. This was the beta test. This was Elysian Odyssey. The link hadn't given his computer a virus; it had given his reality one.
"I'm in a video game," he said aloud.. The sheer, crushing absurdity of it washed over him, a wave of vertigo that made him stumble back.
A sharp crack from the undergrowth to his left cut through his panic like a knife.
Cullo’s head snapped toward the sound. Every muscle in his body went rigid. Peering from behind a massive, feathery fern were two points of yellow light. They weren't reflecting the suns; they were generating their own baleful glow. A growl, low and serrated like stone grinding on stone, rumbled from the shadows.
Slowly, the creature emerged. It had the basic shape of a wolf, but the resemblance ended there. It was enormous, its back reaching his chest, its body a corded mass of muscle beneath a coat of mangy, charcoal-colored fur. Bony, black spurs protruded from its spine, and a thick, viscous drool dripped from its jowls, sizzling faintly as it hit the moss. It moved with an unnatural, fluid grace, its paws making no sound on the forest floor. It was a predator, built by a game designer whose sole purpose was to evoke terror.
As the beast fixed its intelligent, hungry eyes on him and lowered its head, a final, damning piece of the interface materialized in Cullo’s vision. Floating just above the creature’s head in stark red letters, he saw the text:
[Dire Wolf - Lvl. 3]
The world snapped into terrifying focus. He was in a game. But there was no screen separating him from the monster. There was no keyboard to frantically mash. There was only the fifty feet of moss between him and a Level 3 predator, and the chilling, absolute certainty that in this game, HP was not just a number.