Jason woke up naked, face down in the grass. That was not how he expected to wake up, having goo sleep in his own bed and his own Darth Vader boxer shorts. From the feel of cool grass on his uionables, he had been removed from his bed and shorts both. The st thing he recalled was doing what he did most nights; pying video games until he got tired and fumbling his way into bed.

  The grass he woke up on was weirdly fortable; a dense bed of lush green softness. It wasn’t like any grass he had entered before, which was a little unusual. His father was a ndscape architect, and Jason had grown up learning more about grass than he ever wanted. Mostly because it was the only escape from his mother’s Japanese lessons.

  Jason rolled himself over and sat up. He was feeling very odd, beyond just the circumstances. It wasn’t a bad sensation, more like waking up after a really long sleep. There was the lingering sopor, but also a feeling of refreshed energy. He ran a hand over his head, only to be startled to realise his hair was missing.

  “Uh…”

  He felt about his head with both hands, but his head was balloon smooth. He made a quick check with his eyes and hands, realising there was no hair at all. No eyebrows, nothing on his chest, or arms, or… other pces.

  “I thought it was meant to look bigger when you trimmed.”

  He pushed himself to his feet and started assessing his enviro. Casting his gaze to the sky, the sun was high and the air was warm. It was unbroken blue, the bzing orb burning away so much as the merest hint of cloud. Sunburn, more than cold, was likely to threaten his exposed extremities.

  Looking around, he was boxed iween two long, tall hedges. Looking up and down the dead-straight seemed to turn at sharp right angles iher dire. The self was wide and grassy, with plenty of room for unscious sprawling. The hedge walls were meticulously trimmed.

  After an unhappy gnce down at his bald, naked body, he set off at random to explore. He quickly discovered he was in a hedge maze, the living walls having been cultivated to almost twice Jason’s height. Jason’s first thought was to climb oo get a better sense of his location, but a closer examination of the hedges ged his mind. Instead of the usual boxwood, the hedges were something very prickly, and he was very naked. He looked up and dowh he was on, with her way looking aer thaher.

  “What the bloody hell is going on?”

  As if in respoo his question, something appeared in front of him. It looked like a touch s, floating in the air, disembodied. He reached out to touch it with an experimental fihe s shimmering as his finger passed straight through.

  “Hologram?”

  He looked at the ground and the nearby hedges for some kind of projector, but as he started moving, the s followed. There was text on the s, which he started reading.

  New Quest: [Stranger in a Strange Land]

  You have awoken in a pce you do not know. Explore the area to discover more.

  Objective: Explore the hedge maze 0/1.Reward: Simple pants.“Huh.”

  He looked around, suspiciously. He even carefully probed the pointy foliage of the hedge walls, looking for hidden cameras. Looking up at the sky, he didn’t spot any camera drones. What he did notice was the moon, pale and easy to overlook in the daylight. Theiced another moon.

  “That ’t be right.”

  Jason looked down, at the floating s, then back up at the sky. Still two moons.

  “Am I going nuts?”

  Jason sat down on the grass, unsure what to do. He kept gng up at the sky and the extra moon. In front of him, the s still waited patiently.

  “This is crazy. I mean, a quest? I’m not a level 1 sorcerer.”

  Another s appeared o the first.

  Jason Asano

  Race: Outworlder.Current rank: normal.Progression to iron rank: 0% (0/4 essences).

  Attributes

  [Power] (no essence): normal.[Speed] (no essence): normal.[Spirit] (no essence): normal.[Recovery] (no essence): normal.

  Racial Abilities (Outworlder)

  [Interface].[Quest System].[Iory].[Map].[Astral Affinity].[Mysterious Stranger].

  Essences (0/4)

  No Esseno Attribute] (0/5)

  No Esseno Attribute] (0/5)

  No Esseno Attribute] (0/5)

  No Esseno Attribute] (0/5)

  “Is this a character sheet? Am I meant to uand any of this?”

  He shook his head in bewilderment.

  “It could have at least goh a game system I know.”

  He looked over the s again.

  “Map,” he read, tg onto something familiar. “I know what maps are. How do I see the map?”

  A new s obligingly appeared, but as the third s, the spa front of him was getting crowded. He absently thought it would be ve for the other ss to close, which they immediately did.

  “I’m sure that’s good.”

  Things were getting harder to expin away, even ign the extra moon. Some kind of voiand hologram was impusible, but not impossible. Mental and holograms were something else entirely.

  “I’m being increasingly ed.”

  Hoping it wouldn’t work, he started experimenting. He was able to open and close any of the windows with a simple thought.

  “Maybe you’re unscious,” he reassured himself. “Maybe you have a brain tumour and you’re in a hospital somewhere. Or passed out on the floor. Halluating in an asylum. A nie, with a big garden. But no hedge maze.”

  He closed his eyes with a groan. “How is this the way I’m trying to yself?”

  He took a deep breath, letting it out slowly before opening his eyes again. The ss were still there, waiting.

  “Just go with it, I guess,” he told himself. “Reserve judgement until more information is avaible. That’s the rational approach.”

  He turned his gaze back to the map floating in front of him. It looked like a map from any video game, plete with a location listing.

  Zone: Vae (Hedge Maze).Also like a video game map, it was mostly obscured. The only unveiled portion was the small se of the hedge maze he had already explored. He tried moving the map with mental ands, finding he could zoom it in and out as easily as he could open and close the disembodied ss.

  Zooming all the way out he reached a world map that looked both familiar and unfamiliar. Although the details were obscured, he could make out the outline of the tis. Disturbingly, they weren’t quite the same as the ones he knew. South East Asia was a singur ndmass, pushing Australia south a where it looked to have ed New Zeand. The Iberian and Arabian peninsus were missiirely, leaving Africa wholly disected from Europe and Asia. Sri Lanka was further south and several times rger, making for a huge nd mass in the middle of the Indian O.

  “Well, that’s not what the world looks like. Lax cartography?”

  Acc to the map, Jason was in south-west Africa, somewhere around innd Namibia. He looked at the rich, green hedges boxing him ihe lush grass under his feet. He felt the hot, but not dry air on his skin.

  “This doesn’t feel like the Kahari Desert.”

  He sighed, closing the map.

  “This is some strange business.”

  He pulled up his character sheet again.

  Racial Abilities (Outworlder)

  [Interface].[Quest System].[Iory].[Map].[Astral Affinity].[Mysterious Stranger]. “Shouldn’t my race be human? What’s an outworlder?”

  Jason half expected another s to appear, but nothing did, so he started looking down the list.

  “Interface seems obvious. Quest system too, I guess. Iory?”

  A windoeared, dominated by an almost empty grid of i slots. There were five spaces down a across, for a total of forty. There was also what looked like a currency ter at the bottom.

  “Well, that’s certainly a cssiventory,” Jason said. “ I really put stuff in here?”

  There was oem in the iory, occupying the first slot. It was some kind of red i, presumably representing an actual item.

  “Alright, Jason. Time to see how nuts you’ve really gone. How do I get this thing out?”

  After some quick trial and error, he discovered it was a simple as plug the i straight out of the s. The i vanished and the item appeared magically in his hand. a medallion the size of his palm. It looked a like polished red marble with gold engravings on both sides. It leasantly warm to the touch. On one side the engraving icture of a fire bird, while the other had symbols reading ‘Authority of the World Phoenix.’

  “Well, that just magically appeared out of thin air,” Jason said. “That’s definitely not possible. Wait, why I read this? I never even learned Japanese properly.”

  Jason’s father, Ken Asano, was born in Japan, but raised in Australia from a very young age. Proving there is like a vert, Ken was all about the Australian lifestyle, from pub rock to footy matches and weekend barbecues. He fell right in with the family of his wife, Cheryl, who were as Australian as he could ask for. Miners and farmers, trag their bloodline back through bushrangers, victs, and indigenous Australians. Ironically, Cheryl was the one fasated with Japan, trying to engage her children with their father’s cultural heritage. Despite very strong support from her mother in w, results were mixed.

  Jason tried putting the red tablet bato the iory. His first attempt was just shoving it into the s, which surprisingly worked. It vanished from his hands and reappeared as an i.

  “That’s discerting.”

  Jason’s grip oy was feeling increasingly tenuous. The ss were definitely odd, but could ceivably, if impusibly, be the product of hidden hologram projectors. It was whearted responding to his thoughts that he started to get worried, and now he ulling objects out of thin air. He closed the iory and pulled up his character sheet agai down the ability list was the map, which he’d already looked at, then astral affinity.

  Ability: [Astral Affinity]

  Increased resistao dimension effects and astral forces. Dimension abilities have increased effed transdent damage is increased.“No idea what that means.”

  Only one ability remained.

  Ability: [Mysterious Stranger]

  Language adaptation.Essence, awakening stone and skill-book absorption.Immunity to identification and trag effects.“Language adaptation? Is that how I read the weird writing oablet?”

  He took the tablet out again.

  “What is this thing?”

  Item: [World-Phoenix Token] (transdent rank, legendary)

  ???. (able, ???).

  Effect: ???.Effect: ???.Uses remaining: 1/1“Question marks. That’s enlightening. Do I have to pay a wizard to identify items?”

  He put the tablet away, closing all the open windows except for the map.

  “Alright, then,” he said, looking up and dowhway he was oher offered anything to reend it over the other.

  “It’s no yellow wood,” he told himself, “but I guess it’s time to Robert Frost this thing.”

  He picked a dire at random a off.

  “I really wish I had clothes on.”

  ***

  Jason was walking through the maze, the map open in front of him. It was being unveiled as he walked, so his current pn was to reveal enough that he could plot a way out. He froze when he heard a rustle in the hedges.

  “Um, g’day?” he called out, hands moving to nervously hide his uionables. “Hello? Buenos días? Guten men?”

  There wasn’t any response.

  “Maybe it’s not m. Guten tag?”

  There still wasn’t any response.

  “Yeah, Jason; that was the problem. You got the time of day wrong.”

  He shrugged.

  “Makes as much sense as anything else here, I guess.”

  He was about to resume walking when a windoeared.

  New Quest: [No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service]

  For unknown reasons, your immediate area has bee ied with lesser monsters.

  Objective: Discover the reason lesser monsters have ied the area 0/1.Reward: Simple shirt.Bonus Objective: Defeat ten lesser monsters 0/10.Reward: Simple footwear.“Monsters? That doesn’t sound pusible.”

  He was looking around suspiciously when something small came hurtling from the bottom of a hedge. His hands shot back over his privates, which left his head an exposed target. He was blinded by something tg onto his face, something sharp digging painfully into his scalp. He ya off with both hands, screaming as a k of ski with it. He dropped to his knees, smming the thing into the ground, over and over until it stopped struggling.

  You have defeated [Potent Hamster].Defeat lesser monsters 1/10.Jason released the creature and scuttled back, still on his hands and knees. His heart was rag, the wounds on his head throbbing. Blood was trig down his fad he wiped it away from his eyes.

  “What in the merry hell is happening? How did a hamster jump on my head?”

  Jason looked over at the creature. Acc to the windoopped up it was some kind of hamster, but was easily as big as Jason’s head. That made it bigger than any hamster he had heard of. It was distended from being pounded into the dirt, as well as streaked with blood from Jason’s head. He crawled forward cautiously, ready to jump back. Extending a hesitant finger, he poked at it.

  Would you like to loot [Potent Hamster]?Jason rocked back, hands clutg his bald head. His fingers found the wound and he yelp in pain.

  “What the hell is going on?”