It was a perfectly white room, there were no shadows anywhere. As if every surface was glowing with a soft light simultaneously.
There wasn’t any sound either, it was like those sensory deprivation rooms that had been used as a torture method. Complete isolation. There was no telling it was even a room to begin with, as white spanned equally in every direction, floor to ceiling. Without any markings, to differentiate things for all I knew I could be in a white void expanding infinitely in every direction
“Huh…? How… d- don’t tell me I died or something?” It seemed there was no echo either.
Standing up to explore the featureless white room, I turned around and discovered that it wasn’t as featureless as I thought, as there was a podium with some kind of wooden table behind it.
As I walked toward the podium I discovered the difficulty in walking, my steps weren’t steady as I had no idea where the ground was, there was nothing to provide any point of reference, not even my shadow appeared on the ground
As I made my way step by step cautiously, I arrived at the podium, there was a thin booklet placed on top the size of a pamphlet while the podium itself was made out of some kind of marble or quartz material that matched the rest of the room, albeit not perfectly making it difficult to distinguish from the rest of the room.
The most eye-catching thing about it was the pamphlet on top. In plain English, it read ‘Mastery Roulette’ with a subtext at the bottom reading ‘Master a skill with the spin of a wheel!’ Wheel? Roulette?
Upon closer inspection of the table behind the podium it indeed looked to be a roulette table and was undoubtedly the most eye-catching thing in the room. As it was made from a varnished wood I couldn’t identify but was completely mismatched from the perfect white room around it.
Turning my attention back to the pamphlet sized book on the podium, I opened it up and the only two pages in it had a tally of ‘Spins’ which had ‘1’ underneath it on the left page and 3 different ‘objectives’ as the title described on the right page, the objectives read as follows: Save a person’s life 0/1. Break into a place 1/1. Win a Nobel prize 0/1. At the bottom of the page in small text, barely legible was ‘Objectives refresh at 12:00AM’.
So, it looks like I’ve invertedly completed one of these ‘Objectives’ and I assume that’s how I gained the ‘Spin’ listed on the left page by breaking into my own apartment. Well, it seems I don’t own it anymore, though.
There was no further information on the back of the booklet or anywhere else on the podium, so I decided to walk towards the roulette table.
“So, this thing is supposed to be the ‘Mastery Roulette’?” It was a roulette table you could find at any casino anywhere there was a blank plaque in front of the wheel that was in the middle of the table. “Why would it be blank?” The slots where the numbers on the table were expected to be were instead replaced by question marks, but the familiar red and black pattern was present.
I also noticed a ball was already in the wheel, was this the ‘Spin’ the book was referring to? It was opaque and looked similar to a marble, but clearly wasn’t. I tried to pick it up, but I couldn’t. It was absurdly heavy and wouldn’t budge at all, I was having difficulty pinching my fingers on it even. It was like trying to pull an extremely powerful magnet off a metal object with raw physical strength alone.
Hmm.
“It is a roulette table and I do have a ‘Spin’ or whatever, so I might as well, right?”
Saying so, I reached onto the knob on the top of the roulette wheel and gave it a spin.
Remarkably, the translucent marble-like object, despite the trouble I had even moving it slightly before, spun around the wheel with ease, the question marks on each plate of the slots spun with it hypnotically before eventually slowing down and coming to a complete stop.
The marble then landed in a slot, though that by itself didn’t mean anything as they were all unmarked and indifferent from each other.
The previously blank slate that adorned the table before had begun to glow as the marble itself began to disappear is a flash of light, turning my attention towards the mystical slate, in glowing letters ‘Lockpicking’ was written.
“Lockpicking? Wh-“ Was all I managed before my mind was faced with an onslaught of a headache. Knowledge was being crammed into my head at the pace of a bullet train, before long it proved too much and I blacked out.
