Lorelei stared at the half-empty cardboard box on her desk and couldn't help but feel somewhat judged by its contents.

  Or, rather, by the lack of them.

  You'd like to think that when your day of defenestration came, you'd have gathered enough knick-knacks to feel like the colossal mountains of shit you'd shovelled for the powers that be over the years had been worthwhile. Yet all she seemed to have collected was a dead cactus, a framed picture of her cat, and a 'World's Best [   ]' mug gifted by her ex-boss.

  An ex-boss who was also now one very, very, VERY ex other things.

  Call her cynical, but it kind of felt that her choice to make him the latter might have had a little something to do with him choosing to become the former. Among the bubbling cauldron of emotions smacking her in the face right now, the shame of becoming such an office cliché was simmering near the top, right alongside a growing desire to punt that stupid cactus out the window.

  ‘We thank you for your many years of dedicated service . . .’

  Of course, the irony of it all wasn't lost on her.

  After ten years of pulling the 'You're Fired' trigger on everyone she'd been pointed at, that particular email template had finally landed in her inbox this morning to end her time at Glyde and Glyde. It might have been nice if they'd not used the pro forma she designed for them just for this purpose. But, you know, Karma had apparently forgotten to take her anti-bitch pills this morning.

  How many of those emails had she sent out over the years? "We thank you for your years of dedicated service, but yada yada yada fuck off and die." She was willing to accept the wording was probably a little more subtle than that, but the general meaning had always been clear.

  You compromised, and you compromised, and you compromised. Then, when it was your neck on the block, there wasn't anyone left around to have your back. Now that was a fucking contorted metaphor - and one that deserved to be locked up in a dark room with no possibility of parole. The ‘agenda Nazi’ had lost control of the agenda. Irony upon irony.

  Dragging her feet through the lobby, Lorelei—carrying her sad little box—gave one last look up at the massive chandelier that dominated the space. The damn thing glittered like a diamond-studded monolith representing every soul-crushing hour she'd spent here. With a resigned sigh, she pushed through the double-glass doors for the final time, avoiding the eyes of the various security guards who appeared to be itching for her to try something. Quite what they envisaged her five-foot-nothing skinny arse was going to try in the middle of a grey Tuesday in Birmingham, she wasn't entirely sure.

  She needed at least a few sips of Smirnoff's finest before getting up to those sorts of shenanigans.

  Exiting onto the vast, grey expanse of the Belgrave Middleway, she appreciated the effort of a world doing its best to mirror her mood. Rain crashed down in thick, stringy lines, drenching her thin overcoat and soaking through her cardboard box. In moments, the whole thing had lost its integrity, and her pathetic pile of belongings splattered to the pavement like last week’s roadkill.

  Thunder rolled, and water fell.

  As she watched, a puddle formed around the soggy remains of her office life, and she swore the damn cactus waved her goodbye as it sank into its watery grave.

  Seriously, that was her go-to descriptive technique for this crucial life moment? A fucking pathetic fallacy? Apparently, that was the pathetic level to which her life had descended. For shame. How many of those poorly conceived metaphorical musings had she cut from every letter the Prick with the prick had churned out over the last decade?

  Fuck him, fuck it and fuck this fucking weather.

  As she made her way slowly – and wetly - home, Lorelei found herself in such a funk that she didn’t notice the strange, discordant hum in the air or how her shadow flickered unnaturally as she moved. Somewhat in a daze, she ignored all the signs that something extraordinary was happening in the sky of downtown Birmingham and crossed the road to go down the steps towards the underpass.

  The overpowering stench of yesterday’s urine greeted her as she entered the dark, concrete tunnel. Nice of it to hang around to make sure she didn’t miss it. Mind you, it looked like a number of the locals were doing their best to keep the bounteous flow going.

  Fuck, she hated the city centre. She couldn’t understand how she’d been persuaded to give up her lovely, quaint little house near the park to ‘move closer to work.’

  Come off it, girl. Of course, she understood how! She moved to be near a married boss who really liked having her . . . ‘expertise’ on tap. He’d even set her up in a nice modern apartment just a short stroll from the office. All so very convenient for that early morning/late night shuffle he so enjoyed. He’d even had his own set of keys cut for easier access.

  That train of thought led to a logical conclusion that derailed her mind to an abrupt, crashing stop. The shuffling morass of people packed in around her on their early evening commute somehow opened up a gap as they passed, meaning she narrowly avoided being run over by hundreds of entirely indifferent feet. So, today wasn’t a complete wash. Nevertheless, the full ramifications of the dawning horror of her situation finally hit home. If the Prick had summarily fired her when she finally broke it off, what were the chances she’d find her stuff on the pavement and the locks changed when she got ‘home’?

  No. He couldn’t really be that petty?

  Could he?

  Of course, he fucking could be. It was only last week that he’d spent an hour trying to prove his dog walker returned to the house after fifty-eight minutes of ‘walkies’ rather than the full hour. CCTV footage from the Ring doorbells of six neighbours had been involved.

  So, wasn’t that awesome? Wasn’t this the day that just kept on fucking giving? She was not so much ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ as ‘Homeless in Edgbaston’. Somehow, though, she didn’t think Tom Hanks would be coming to her imminent rescue . . .

  Lorelei stood frozen, trying to gather the motivation to get moving towards what was obviously going to be a shit outcome. As she was thinking things really could not get much worse, Lorelei was repeatedly buffeted by the tide of increasingly fast-moving bodies sweeping around her. Was there something going on out there? By the ninetieth time she was nearly bumped off her feet, the words of her favourite poem came unbidden to her mind. “Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled // And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.”

  “You what?”

  She looked up and into the eyes of a man far too old and heavy to be seeking to pull off a white branded hoodie. “Eliot,” she offered as a way of lame explanation.

  “What the fuck are you talking about? My name’s Steve.”

  “No. Not you. Eliot. As in the poet who wrote the words I said.”

  His face creased in confusion. “Poet? What the fuck are you talking about? I’m a sparky.”

  “Alas, I sense not so much.”

  She went to join the tide sweeping up the stairs, but the man roughly grabbed her arm.

  “You’re a fucking snooty bitch!”

  “Yes, that does appear to have been the general opinion. You should see my file of complaints from just this year alone.”

  Steve was saved from attempting further conversational niceties by a shudder passing through the underpass, shaking everyone to the floor. Bodies hit the ground and then froze where they lay, their eyes fixating on something in the tunnel above them. Lorelei’s gaze left the hand of the man still tightly gripping her and lifted upwards, where strange symbols had begun to manifest against the concrete. It was like watching ink spill across virgin parchment in real-time.

  [System Initialization Commencing. Assigning Classes to all individuals…]

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  The words made little impression on Lorelei’s mind. It was all just too strange. By the sound of confusion rippling through the others around her, she wasn’t the only one not to be wholly up to speed with integration etiquette.

  Then, a screen of light appeared in front of her eyes, revealing a bunch of images depicting a range of fantasy archetypes: Warrior, Mage, Healer, etc.

  “Choose your Class,” a voice demanded. It sounded quite like the guy who did the voiceovers for movie trailers. The gravitas was impressive, even if the request was absurd.

  Lorelei blinked. Seriously?

  “You have five minutes to decide.”

  Lorelei’s mind went into overdrive. What did she know about this sort of thing? Honestly, not much. Her brother had dabbled in the whole ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ thing, but the closest she’d got to that world was that funny little cartoon she’d watched as a kid. When they’d reenacted it outside, she’d always been the multi-headed dragon . . .

  “Choose your Class!”

  It seemed that if Lorelei concentrated on any of the pictures flying around her head, it made some more text tumble down. Picking one of the Classes at random, she had a read.

  Lorelei paused on this, then resolutely shook her head. “Nope, not for me. Not anymore. I’ve spent enough of my life clearing up after others. If this is some sort of psychotic break, I’m not going to spend it doing what I have always done. Let’s go loopy in style.” She flicked her eyes to the next image along. This one depicted a buff, oiled man with a giant . . . sword. Warrior. Sure. That would be hilarious.

  Lorelei found herself surreptitiously flexing her skinny arms. A part of her had always liked the idea of buffing up, but it had seemed like quite a lot of work. And, after all, there were books to read.

  But the moment passed, and she kept scrolling onward. As the seemingly endless options passed before her, she felt a sense of despair. All these options seemed so . . . scripted. She’d spent her whole life playing a limited role that others had sketched for her. Surely in . . . whatever the hell was going on here, she would be able to push the envelope a little . . .

  “Right. Well, that seems unnecessarily hurtful in the circumstances. And let’s remember, I was fucking my married boss. And, in any event, I reject your entire premise. I want to do something different! If I’m having a psychotic break, I’m going to do it in style.”

  A whole new host of archetypical images began flashing in her vision, and then an especially strange image caught her eye – a woman tossing a coin – seemingly appearing out of nowhere, shimmering with a mischievous glow. Compared to the dull backgrounds of the other cards, this one was pretty ornate. Without knowing why, she reached out and touched it.

  Lorelei paused for a moment, the insanity of the situation almost catching up with her. Almost, but not quite.

  With a mental nod, she selected the Class, and instantly, her perception of the world changed. She could feel her destiny was no longer shackled by the mundane. The threads of fate that had tied her to a job, an apartment, a Prick were suddenly cut loose to be replaced by . . . nothing.

  It wasn’t quite the most exhilarating experience she had ever had in her life, but it was damn close.

  And that lasted right the way up to when an ex-electrician—now a hulking Orc Axeman—called Steve punched her in the face.

  The arm behind the first that struck her had bloated into a grotesque mass of green muscle, sinew tearing visibly through his flesh. The sickening crunch of Lorelei’s nose breaking was the first, but certainly not the last, thing she heard as blood splattered in a wild arc across the steps of the underpass. She could swear she saw one of her teeth bounce down the steps ahead of her.

  The last thing she saw was Steve's massive orcish maw grinning, tusks dripping with saliva as he leaned in close. His breath reeked of rancid meat and electricity.

  "Welcome to the new world, bitch."