3 years, 8 months, 14 days, 10 hours, and 10 minutes later.

Keiran stepped off the train and made his way to his workplace. Usually, he wouldn’t have bothered to come in but it was his last day as a CO-OP and he wanted to get some face time with some of his colleagues and office friends. Dressed in a pair of blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and thick brown jacket, Keiran sported a pair of sturdy boots and backpack. Nothing impressive since he still was technically a college student but he didn’t look like the stereotypical programmer shown in the media. He didn’t have much planned for the day either. Laze about for a few hours, turn in his office equipment, and wrap up an exit interview with human resources. Kieran was feeling pretty pleased with himself all things considered. He had already gotten an offer letter to join as a full time employee once he got done with his Masters. His college friend circle was strong and guaranteed success and today had been an especially pleasant day. Whether it was the hottie in apartment 308 accepting to go on a date this evening or that Monica social feed had imploded this morning after finding out her ex-fiance had been sleeping around town and had 4 kids, excluding the twins he gave Monica, leading her to drop out of college, who is to say. With a grin plastered on his face, he made his way into the office building after scanning his ID badge. Deciding he’d rather not lug around his office laptop while he made the rounds, he made his way to IT to drop off the laptop. 

Scanning his badge he entered the IT section of the office space. IT was laid out much in the same way as the rest of the office, the only difference being the two additional sections, one for the on premise server room, why we had one in this day and age was anyone's guess, and a store room full of laptops, keyboards, mice, monitors, etc. Spotting a middle aged woman in black company hoodie and jeans, Keiran made his way over. “Hi, morning. I was told to come here to drop off my office equip…” Keiran started politely before being cut off. “Leave it on the desk by the door and complete the form. If you forgot to drop off anything, we’ll send you a box to ship it back” she said before heading into the kitchen for her morning fix. Well, that suited Keiran just fine. He filled out the form, dropped his burden for the day, and exited the IT section. He kept the office badge for now, mentally promising to no one that he would drop it off after the exit interview. As he exited the room, he was stunned to see something in front of his eyes.

Keiran stood there by the door, his body stiff, mouth dry, and eyes blinking rapidly. He felt like the world had come crashing down on him. I absolutely cannot have a mental breakdown right now! he thought. He was in full panic mode. It had been years since he had signed up for World of Avesta, he had no recollection of ever signing up. It didn’t help that he signed up using a spam email account, otherwise he would have seen the plethora of email reminders and monthly updates spanning the past years. C’est la vie!

Keiran decided he would enter the IT section again and spun around while fumbling for his badge. If he was going to have a mental breakdown, he might as well be near people who can call 9-1-1 quickly, he thought. The sweat in his palms made him drop the badge. Fuck!

He quickly grabbed the badge from the floor and spun around. The sensor takes a second to acknowledge it and beep.

Grabbing the door handle, he pulled it open. Freaking fire safety regulations cost him precious few milliseconds ran through his mind. “HEL-”

With that Keiran disappeared from Earth. A lot of drama and mystery surrounds his disappearance from an office building. Allegations of security camera footage being tampered by the company to protect key C-suit executives to demonic sacrifice were thrown out as possibilities. As the years went on the case went cold and was relegated to a recurring special about unsolved mysteries once every few years and online conspiracy theory on old forum boards.

Keiran on the other hand was greeted with a barrage of new messages in a dark void. He doesn’t know how long he spent shouting and screaming at the message in front of him. However long it was, it was not enough to come to terms with whatever it was that was happening to him. He begged his supposed captors to release him, promising all his future stock options. He even promised to send over all his ByteCoin, not that he had any. When the messages refused to reply, he raked his memory bit by bit for any explanation. Unfortunately, nothing sprung to his mind. Admitting defeat, he finally decided to make peace and focus on the message.

There was nothing else to do except acknowledge the message. Gee, at least I won’t be butt-naked. Silver linings! Is armor class what I think it is?

Keiran was left speechless about the T-shirt. Everything else before this had a really good durability, whatever that meant. This was not great. Stealth, that seems important. Luckily it wasn’t too bad, he thought.

Keiran was excited about the list of skills he could get. Horribly regretting giving up the laptop now. He quickly ruled out Peerless Archive skill. If he could become his own library, that would be far more useful long term. Peerless Archive definitely would be far superior in the short term as he could learn more about Avesta. Telepath  sounded nice but was very situational, no doubt good for private conversations but he suspected there had to be a catch, either limitations in people he could use the skill on or distance? Savant seemed more appealing to him. If there were attributes, the more points he had the better off he would be. So he made his selection, Savant and Perfect Recall.  

After making the selection, he was presented with yet another message.

Judging from the attribute distribution, Keiran could only assume Humans had a +1 to all attribution scores. Hopefully, that comes in handy. He decided to bump up his Strength to 16, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma to 14. Finally, dropping the last remaining point into Wisdom. Once finalized, the System(?) shocked him again. 

There was only one thought going through Keiran’s mind, FML.