The drive back home was thankfully uneventful. The twenty minutes on the open road let me simmer down, and the frozen dinner I ate when I arrived brought me back to my sanity. I munched on the freezer-burned turkey and dry mashed potatoes while sitting in front of the TV, thankful that the mind numbing entertainment distracted me from my mediocre meal. Most of the shows were ones my parents used to watch, and as far as I could tell, they were pretty much the same from back home… minus the sexual tension between the actors.

And I didn’t mean the characters, I meant the actors themselves; they were all ready to find some privacy as soon as the cameras stopped rolling. Surprisingly, it made things more entertaining. I made a game out of finding out who was having sex with who based on how their acting changed between scenes. Usually the ones who looked the most constipated tended to mellow out in unison.

As the current block of shows ended, so did my meal. Despite how old the frozen dinner was, probably having been sold last Thanksgiving, it wasn’t all that bad. It was at least filling. Of course, it didn’t match up to a cup of instant ramen, but when in New Jersey, you make due with not starving. With my stomach filled, I was finally thinking clearly again.

I brought the bag of library books to a small table and took out the first one; a children’s tale filled with thick, cardboard pages. If I wanted a better idea of how this world and so-called System worked, I’d have to read these things all the way through. The more information I had, the better. I didn’t want to get caught in any hidden gotchas, like some kind of forced Skill activation or this “Lord of Words” showing up at my doorstep.

I froze in place, letting silence consume the apartment, and slowly craned my head towards the door, half expecting someone to knock on it. Just then, a shiver went down my spine as I heard someone walking away from just outside my curtained window.

“You know what? Fuck this,” I whispered to myself as I got out of my seat and headed towards the kitchen. I grabbed a box of salt, taking it to my front door and pouring a line across its width. There was some supernatural bullshit going on, and this was the go-to defense to supernatural bullshit according to a bunch of old stories. Beyond good nutrition, proper hygiene, and overall politeness, at least.

Finally feeling a little safer, I made my way back to the desk and opened up the book. I skimmed past the beginning, which consisted of a supposed nobody getting RPG-like superpowers and grinding out their stats to superhuman levels.

“Simon was a man who loved babies, because they are cute! He wanted the world to have more babies, so he set out to make as many as he could.”

I flipped the page, eyeing the cartoonish drawing of a baby. It was pretty standard, as baby drawings went, thankfully. What did that say about me if I had those kinds of expectations? I continued reading out loud.

“He made many women pregnant, and through the powers of the System, he was able to make more and more women pregnant more easily. They only had to touch his seed with their hands to do so. As time went on, even seeing him and feeling love would work!”

That was some biological warfare shit, right there. Imagine dropping some of that magical splooge into a town’s water supply? Everyone would get pregnant just by taking a shower! I had no idea how the hell this book was able to treat something like this so casually.

“Simon made so many babies, that they renamed his country after this accomplishment. It is now called Otroka, after the Slovenian word for children. It is a paradise for anyone who wishes to have babies and take care of them.”

Was Otroka an actual thing? I pulled open a history book from the bag and flipped through its pages until I found a section on the country. It was an actual thing apparently, and took the place of Slovenia when Yugoslavia broke up. Hold on, did that actually happen in 1950? I could’ve sworn it was much later back home. But was it really caused by a System user here?

The very end of that chapter in the textbook had a line about it. “Local legends attribute Otroka’s founding to the System fairy tale, possibly as an explanation to the record-breaking fertility rates during the time period.”

I eyed the children’s book and sighed. Looked like it wasn’t actually a myth after all. I turned the thick, cardboard page and continued reading.

“Our hero brought babies to every woman in the country. In doing so, the Lord of Words wanted to thank him for making the world a much more interesting place. But before He could, Simon disappeared.”

And that was it. That was the last page. There was no epilogue, explanation on who this Lord of Words was, or what this so-called “thanks” or disappearance entailed.

I put the book back and pulled out another one. It started out the same as the last one, so I skipped ahead to where it diverged. “Our hero had always wanted a wife. Someone who would always love him and he could love back. But he couldn’t settle for just one. However, the System made him so beloved, everyone in his village wanted to be his wife!”

So he started a harem or something? Seemed pretty standard for a shitty harem romance anime. I had the displeasure of watching a few back in my previous life.

“But our hero did not know who to choose, so he left his village and traveled to a big city. However, everyone there wanted to be his wife as well! Every man was also jealous of him because nobody wanted to be with them anymore, but they soon came around and realized that they just wanted to be our hero’s husband, just like the women wanted to be his wife.”

Huh? Well, LGBT representation was definitely something I wasn’t expecting in a children’s book from 1980. Hold on. That cop from earlier was probably hitting on me, and a lot of those romance titles at the library sounded anything but straight! It looked like the gay rights movement came to this world early.

I flipped open the history textbook again and found a chapter about it. The civil rights movement in this world took place in the 1920s instead of the 70s, and was spearheaded by both the black and LGBT communities. So that led to expanded rights for both of these groups, along with many others. Well that was nice to know, but it was still 1980 and I was more than happy to continue being a straight white man.

I turned back to the storybook and continued reading it aloud. “Seeing how captivating our hero was, the Lord of Words came to him and thanked him for bringing great want and desire to the world. The End.”

Again? What was up with these stories ending so abruptly? It was probably just poor storytelling, or maybe that was just a theme with these System fairy tales. Maybe it was the fact that these books were written for little kids? But on the bright side, it didn’t look like there were any major gotchas that could come along and bite me in the ass. Though the books never mentioned if those weird effects were toggleable. I didn’t want to accidentally grab a Skill that would get me paying child support for half of a country. I can’t even afford to support myself!

I took a deep breath and slowly let it out. So… now what? As far as I could tell, I was stuck here for the foreseeable future, and I wasn’t interested in playing the game set aside for me. But could I just live a normal life? I didn’t even have to watch porn to know how the plot usually worked; someone tries to do their job, but gets distracted by somebody attractive, and… yeah.

Was that going to happen every time I tried to do my job? Would I even be able to do my job at all? How would anyone be able to do anything at that rate? The fact that my pipes weren’t clogged and the refrigerator was running meant that someone was able to get their job done, otherwise we’d all be living like cavemen.

So there! Someone must’ve been keeping things running in the background. Tradespeople who actually got things fixed, scientists and engineers who built devices to work without breaking, politicians and businessmen who could extort people out of more than just their bodies! Those were the kinds of people I had to find and emulate. Well, maybe not that last group.

And by the looks of things, I was already on my way to doing so, or rather, Mike was. He already had a job, one that I’d get back to tomorrow morning, in fact! At 8 am. On a Sunday. As a retail clerk at a clothing store. Oh god.