Episode 1: Tutorial (1)

"Haaahn... ♥!!"

"Ding!"

"What the hell?!"

I was mid-stroke with porn still playing when something like a hologram window flared up and cut straight across my vision. The shock of it knocked the fact that I was a heartbeat from coming clean out of my head, and I lurched up out of the chair.

Vrrrrrt—vrrt!!

"...Ah, fuck."

Cum erupted from my cock and splattered across the laptop and the desk. The sight dragged my eyes shut, and the curse tore out of me before I could stop it.

"...Haah. Wipe it up first."

I decided the mess on the laptop and the desk came before any thinking about holograms. Once every streak of cum was gone, I stared at the window still hanging in front of me, face twisted in pure bafflement. I tipped my head up, down, left, and right. I blinked. The thing tracked my gaze and refused to disappear.

"So what the hell is this?"

"Doesn't feel like a hallucination..."

I was a man yanked around by his sex drive, sure, but I wasn't so far gone that I couldn't tell a hallucination from the real thing. On the off chance it would actually respond, I lifted a hand and pressed a finger to the Yes button.

Ding!

The instant I pressed the button, an alarm chimed in my ear, and a congratulatory message spilled out with a rush of information behind it.

"...A genre I want?"

The demand to pick a genre hit me so sideways that my head went blank. Then, in the space of a blink, a revenge-thriller drama I'd enjoyed years ago surfaced in my memory.

"I never said I was picking a revenge thriller."

So that was it. Because I'd unconsciously pictured a revenge thriller a moment ago, the genre had locked in.

The question resolved, and in the same breath something swallowed me whole.

"...?"

When I came back to myself, I was hanging in a silence so complete it felt padded. My senses had gone dull. Only my body remained, drifting weightless in empty air.

"What?! Where the hell am I?!"

Dropped without warning into a place I didn't know, I whipped my head around in a panic, but the dark gave me nothing. Not a shape, not a glint. It was like being shut in an underground cell where not a single light had ever been lit.

While I was still drowning in anxiety and fear, a message window like a game quest materialized—and with it, a desk and a laptop appeared right in front of me.

"No! Isn't the ironclad rule that the information just downloads straight into your head?! I've never written a single thing in my life!"

The quest was so absurd I couldn't even dignify it with the word tutorial. I denied reality hard enough to want to call the whole thing a dream, and with nobody else in that void, I dumped every complaint I had into the dark.

"...Ngh."

Then the basics I would need to write a script—craft, structure, the rest of it—came surging into my head like a wave.

"This can't be real."

I was still reeling from knowledge that hadn't been there a second ago when the laptop on the desk powered on, as if to ask whether I was done complaining.

"Haah... sink or swim. I'll just write."

Watching the screen come alive, I let out a breath and chose, for once, not to look away from what was in front of me. I would write the script. The decision settled, I walked up to the desk, sat, set my hands on the laptop, and began.

The System's mental-focus buff took hold the moment I started. Even the ordinary hungers of a human body fell away, and I sank into nothing but the writing. Now and then the System fed me the references and draft material I needed and handed back feedback, and I became, in the most literal sense, a machine that wrote.

"It's done!"

Eight years of thinking about nothing but that script, and at last I had something worthy of clearing the quest.

"Seriously, what would I have done if the System hadn't given ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠me that mental-focus buff? I got stubborn halfway through and nearly killed myself revising the thing over and over."

The rewrites had eaten time, but what sat finished in front of me was so complete I could hardly believe my own hands had made it.

Ding!

I was still marveling at the script I'd written when the same alarm I'd heard on first entering this place rang in my ear. A message declaring the quest complete rose in front of my ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠eyes at the same time.

"Get me out of here right now!"

The moment I saw that I could go back, I didn't hesitate by so much as a hair. I shouted at the System to throw me out.

The words had barely left me when a crushing pressure closed in, and I had the sensation of being flung. The scenery around me swapped out in an instant.

And I was back in my studio apartment—the room I'd been in before I dropped into that strange space.

"...Ah."

Home again at last, I couldn't get my head around any of it. I just stood there, staring blankly at the wreck of the room.

Ka-tok!

"I'm back! I actually made it out of that place!"

I'd been gazing dumbly around for a long while when the messenger chime from the phone on the desk snapped me awake. I shot to my feet, paced the room in circles, and whooped.

"Did aliens grab me in my sleep and rebuild me? Or... is this some kind of superpower?"

It was just past noon. Once I'd finally wrestled the excitement down, I drifted into pointless brooding, spinning one wild theory after another about the bizarre thing that had happened to me. Then the laptop sitting on the desk caught my eye.

"Hnn... should I try writing it?"

I dropped into the chair and set my hands on the laptop as naturally as an old habit. What I was reaching for was the work I had built while trapped in that space for a full eight years.

Of course I remembered it. Every stage direction, every line of dialogue, down to the last one. How I'd built each character, how every situation turned. What had happened in that room was branded into me, sharp as a brand on skin. I called the memories up one by one and set the script down on the laptop.

Tack—tatatatack—

Under my hands, the story took shape. The male lead, a victim of school violence, had been enduring one day at a time on nothing but a faint hope: that it would all be over once he graduated high school. Then even that brittle hope shattered. The perpetrators, who had left traces while stealing an exam, dressed the scene up to look like his work and pinned every bit of the blame on him.

I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wrote this, but damn, it's actually good.

Thread a little darkness through it, so the mood sinks into something bleak.

The framed protagonist pleaded that he was innocent, but the students and teachers—terrified of the perpetrators and of their influential parents—either looked the other way on purpose or took the perpetrators' side outright and began to squeeze him. In the end he couldn't endure the endless harassment and isolation. He dropped out of high school, and his life started its slow collapse. The story begins there, in the middle of despair.

Tack—tack—

The genre of this drama: revenge thriller.

For eight years in that subspace I had polished every line of dialogue and every stage direction, and I had designed the mid-to-late settings and the foreshadowing down to the grain. I'd even fretted over what the props and the spoken lines would mean once they reached the screen, so finishing the script didn't take me long.

"Whew. That's all of it."

With Part 1 and the synopsis both done, I stretched and looked over the script my own hands had produced, satisfied down to the bone.

"I figured it was good because the System handed me a grade, but writing it out here in the real world, it's even better."

The moment I saved the finished script to the desktop, a system window unfolded in front of my eyes.

The window bursting into my vision startled me for a second. I settled myself and read it through, line by slow line.

"I've got Points and a voucher. Might as well step into the Shop."

The message finished, I confirmed that the Shop—locked until I cleared Tutorial (1)—now stood open, and I went in.