2 I am a stone

I was stunned. My head was a mess and I was thrown into a complete state of disarray. I did not know where I was or how I got there. The truth is that I didn’t remember anything at all… or maybe…

I had a flashback of the moment when my life was turned upside down. I was working just like any other day… until a truck almost killed me. I managed to avoid it, but a bunch of rocks fell over me… That was the last I could remember anyway...

‘Wasn’t I buried by some rocks? Just, what exactly happened? Well… relax Peter… try to calm down a bit… First I need to figure out what's going on here. Let’s see… Where the hell am I?!’

I forced myself to calm down and analyze my surroundings to look for clues. But, as I suspected from the first time I laid eyes on this place, nothing seemed familiar to me. Neither did I have any idea why I was lying here, right in the middle of nowhere.

I was in the middle of a prairie covered in waist high grass and trees at least thirty times taller than me. Far away, I could see the peaks of a high, cloudy mountain range.

‘Which mountains are those?’

I knew the mountains near my city quite well. After all, I had spent five years of my life hiking on them and I was able to recognize them at a glance. However, I had never seen those in my life.

‘Ehm… Ok Peter, remember what I said earlier, calm the hell down!’

Not only was I in a completely unknown place, I could not find any trace of human activity in the vicinity. There were no telephone poles, electrical wirings, paved roads or even a simple dirt path. The height of the grass surrounding me also made me think that nobody was taking care of the place. It did not seem like hikers passed by on a regular basis either, since there was no sign that the grass had recently been stepped on by.

No matter how hard I tried, and I was trying with all my might, I was unable to remain calm. And being lost in a place I had never seen before was not the worst, the worst was that I could not move at all. My body just would not obey my brain. I could not feel any part of it at all.

I tried my hardest to lift my hand and bring it into my line of sight, but the damn hand does not deign to listen to me. And it wasn’t just my upper half, my legs also refused to obey me, so I wasn’t able to move an inch…

‘Oh my god, what in the world is going on… I can’t feel my own body!’

I wanted to scream… but no sound escaped my lips. Also, for the first time, I noticed that I wasn’t blinking either.

‘What the… Am I paralysed from head to toe? Wait a moment…’

So it was not a dream. My memories of the truck accident were completely real. What must have been tons of stone had fallen over me, and my coworkers obviously reacted the same way any average human would in such a problematic situation...

‘Those bastards! Did they leave me for dead and dump me in the middle of nowhere to make it look like a disappearance?! What a bunch of assholes! If I get out of this I will kill them myself!’

Yes, that must be what had happened. The rocks left me half dead and to get rid of all evidence they dumped me here where no one would find me. They probably realized that I was alive, but didn’t care. They washed their hands of the whole ordeal and thus avoided having to testify before the police.

‘I knew what Iosu was capable of, but I never expected this from the others… Ahhhhhhhhhh, what an unfair destiny, left for dead, betrayed by my best friend, and unable to move.’

I could do nothing but sink into despair while staring at the distant, blue, cloudless sky.… When all of a sudden I saw a huge, exaggeratedly huge… and ugly... bird flying at full speed.

It looked like a chicken that had lost half of its feathers. The remaining feathers shone under the sun with a bright multicolor light, resembling a broken disco ball.

‘What’s with that ugly, suspicious-looking bird? I have never seen anything like it before. I wonder what species it belongs to... It’s pretty... unsavory…’

But that chicken was not the only thing in the sky. Soon after that, another one of those animals you can expect to find anywhere made its appearance: a dragon. The gargantuan reptile caught the bird between its jaws and swallowed it whole… Yeah, nothing weird about that, not at all, just another day at the office.

‘Wait a moment, is that… a dragon? A fucking dragon!’

The colossal winged red lizard kept flying in a straight line, ignoring anything around him. The only thing to be found in that direction was me, so it was quite obvious what the next item on his menu was.

‘What… What can I do? What can I do? What can I do? What can I do?!’

I was panicking big time. However, making a fuss was useless. After all, I still was completely paralyzed and there did not seem to be anything I could do about it.

‘Well, there is no point in despairing. It is what it is. Is not worth worrying about my life. After all, I’m already dead, this will only speed up the process… Maybe this is for the best, it will spare me some pointless suffering.’

With these thoughts in mind I regained my composure for the first time. I stared quietly at the approaching dragon, waiting for the imminent attack… but that bastard simply flew away without paying me any attention at all!

‘That dragon didn't even look at me… Am I that insignificant in its eyes? Wait… does that mean that it thinks that I taste bad? Come back right now, you stupid oversized flying lizard!’

It left just as fast as it had arrived, leaving me alone once again. Anyway, seeing a fucking dragon actually knocked some sense into me and made me reevaluate the situation.

‘Hold on, dragons… do not exist… do they?’

It had been a while since I realized the enormous size of everything around me. Was everything indeed gigantic or was I very small?

I scanned my surroundings a couple times more and finally realized that I was an idiot. All that time I had actually been able to look in every possible direction. I could even turn around 360 degrees without a problem. In other words, I was not entirely paralized. And I sure hoped it wasn’t only my head that was spinning… otherwise someone would soon call a priest to perform an exorcism...

‘This is starting to feel more annoying than scary. However… the existence of a creature such as a dragon can only mean one thing…’

Exhausted from focusing on the dragon and not being able to make any sense out of the situation, I decided to try what seemed to be the most logical answer to me: I had read countless books and was enough of a nerd to understand that when one runs into animals which shouldn’t exist, it usually means that one is no longer on Planet Earth. In addition, new worlds tend to have features similar to a game. Therefore, the first thing one must do is...

‘Open the menu panel!’

Unsurprisingly, nothing happened…

‘Ehm… I mean… Show me my personal info?’

Still nothing happened…

‘Of course, what am I thinking? Even if this world is completely different from mine, it would be too strange to have something like a status window from a game…’

In that very instant, a blue screen appeared in front of my vision. It felt like the world itself was mocking me and saying something along the lines of: What are you even talking about? Just say status, you retard!

‘The concept is the same! How could you not understand what I was talking about! Hang on… Who the hell am I even talking to? I’m losing my mind here in this place…’

Without wasting any more time with such nonsense, I began checking my status.

Status:

Name: Peter Gravel

Kind: Common stone | Race: -

HP: 5/5 | MP: 20/20

Stats:

Vitality: 0 | Strength: 0 | Agility: 0

Intellect: 10 | Magic power: 20

Special abilities: Help: 1

Titles: Thinking stone

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I slowly closed the windows and stared at the horizon again. The whole place was completely silent, allowing me to clearly hear the whistling of the wind blowing past me...

‘I think I may have misread that….’

I opened my status again.