[Adelie]

i am so out of ideas i've resorted to writing isekai

To be honest, he wasn't surprised at all when the magic circle appeared under his feet.

Telltale signs had nagged at him all day - the softest tug of some unseen hand on his clothing, the phantom sensation of someone calling his name through distant fog. He'd confused one of his coworkers by responding What? to thin air this morning; now, the culprit yawned in front of him.

Intricate bands of glowing lavender light spun slowly at his feet, juxtaposed almost laughably against the grimy floor of the boba tea shop's bathroom. He stared at it for a long time, watching its inner glow fade and strengthen from one hue to another.

He thought about the tables in the foyer, yet to be wiped down; he thought about the sticky vat of leftover tapioca pearls, yet to be thrown out. He thought of his schedule for the next week and the hours his employer refused to give him, and of the remedial classes he needed to go back to school that he couldn't afford.

He thought of how the expectant pulse of the magic circle in front of him lined up perfectly with the drip of the bathroom faucet, and how ridiculous it - how ridiculous it all - was, and suddenly, as if the sun had emerged from behind a cloud, all these disparate ideas came together in sharp focus.

He stepped in. What else was there to do?

[The Front Gate - 1]

[Adelie]

There was a distinct ambience that demarcated the space between worlds. If he were a poet, he might've compared it to a longing for a home that never was; if he were a physicist, he might've likened it to the enormity of space between atomic nuclei.

Since he had the education of a middle school drop-out at best, he simply described it as a certain kind of nothing. No matter how many times he experienced it, it would always send a chill down his spine.

And then, with an unceremonious fwoop, the magic circle dumped him, hands and feet askew, onto bare and unyielding ground. As he scrambled to regain his balance, he caught the remnants of that lavender light fading into dull grass and freshly-fallen snow.

[The Front Gate - 2]

[Adelie]

A quick survey of his surroundings left him - well, a little disappointed, to be honest.

He'd landed in the one bare spot in a seemingly endless expanse of immaculate white snow - an unpaved dirt road, freshly shoveled up until the point where it came to an abrupt end in front of a half-open dilapidated iron gate. No footsteps nor traces on the snow - besides what he had made flailing for balance - provided clues as to who had made this road or what had pushed the snow off it.

He'd expected something - well, more inhabited.

He thought of what was normal, and then found himself laughing as he realized the prospect was ridiculous. It simply made no sense to couch traveling to another world in terms of normal. The very premise of being transported to another world once was absurd, and yet here he was, complaining to himself that his experience in this world didn't match his experiences in another.

[The Front Gate - 3]

[Adelie]

But it wasn't as though he were making things up for the fun of it, though. It was true - if he defined normally as every other time before it, then his experience here could be said to be well and truly abnormal.

There was a standard way these things were supposed to work. You get hit by a truck, you get pulled into a summoning circle, you are arbitrarily chosen by some divine entity - and you find yourself in another world. Perhaps you've been reincarnated in someone else's body; perhaps you find yourself face-to-face with the princess of a kingdom hailing you as the Chosen One and begging for your help; perhaps some goddess monologues at you for half an hour about how vital the quest she's about to bless you with is for the health and safety of the universe.

All the same, and yet so very, very different.

[The Front Gate - 4]

[Adelie]

The defining feature of all those scenarios was they all offered some kind of guidance.

Were you to be reincarnated in a new body and suddenly regain memories of your past life, you'd have a few years of operation in this new world to guide your movements. Were you to be greeted by a princess or a goddess, you'd have someone to ask questions of. Were you to land on your butt in a pristine snowy wasteland with not a single soul about you - well, that really didn't offer much to work with.

A thought floated to the top of his mind, something he'd read in a book what felt like eons ago - back when he still had time to read books - and he was reminded of the black swan. He'd never seen one with his own eyes, of course, but what was important was the concept they represented; they were a lesson to people not to assume that everything would always follow their expectations.

He'd learned a long while back that his instincts often had some merit to them. They weren't enough to blindly trust - he was well aware that he could be an absolute idiot at times - but with nothing else to go on, they presented a reasonable starting point.

[The Front Gate - 5]

[Adelie]

Right now, his instincts were telling him he should go through this gate.

It only made sense. What other purpose would a magic circle have for leaving him here, right in front of a gate - an already partially-open one, at that - if not for him to enter it?

Few other options presented themselves. The other end of the road vanished into indiscriminate pine forest, tall and imposing; from this distance, he could barely make out individual trees, let alone guess what might lay beneath their branches or how far the forest might extend. For all he knew, it might be forever.

On either side of the road lay snow and frankly, not much else - a few tufts of weather-beaten grass stubbornly poking their way through the thick blanket upon them, the occasional tiny shrub peeking waxy green leaves out of its white covering, but otherwise, strangely, almost unnaturally flat. On the horizon, he could make out the hazy grey shapes of some distant mountain range, but the ground here had an approximate elevation change of zero.

It reminded him almost of some low-budget JRPG, where there simply weren't the assets or the resolution to add such details. The road would lead to the end of the map and stop with a You can't go this way.; the code wasn't complex enough to allow a z-index.

[The Front Gate - 6]

[Adelie]

JRPG. That term instigated the memory of yet another standard part of the transported to another world experience - the inclusion of arbitrary game mechanics.

He'd never been able to figure out exactly why they existed; his best guess was they were some extension of some larger system that translated unfamiliar quirks and ideas from other worlds into something he could parse, in the same way that everyone in every world seemed to speak the same language. But that theory was hampered by the fact that each world had its own individual subset of relevant mechanics, its own interface or lack thereof, its own flavor - and not every world had them to begin with.

He wondered if this world did. Normally, someone would've explained things to him - the tutorial NPC, if you will - but since no one had presented themselves for the role, he was left to figure things out on his own.

Clearing his throat awkwardly, he croaked out, "Uh, items." Nothing happened - no semi-transparent placard of light, no sudden epiphany of knowledge, no bag of holding. He tried again, trying a few common commands that came to mind. "Status. Um, equipment."

God, he sounded ridiculous.

[The Front Gate - 7]

[Adelie]

Well, at least he could be thankful no one was around to hear him make a fool of himself.

"Help?" he tried one last time. The little puff of condensation from his breath made it seem as though his words hung in the air for a moment before disappearing, unanswered.

So that hadn't been it. Of course, his failure didn't entirely rule out the possibility that this world did work by game mechanics - maybe they were triggered some other way, or maybe he simply hadn't chosen the right words. In that respect, he hadn't learned anything from his embarrassing little experiment - but it had been worth a try, regardless.

With that option exhausted, the gate once again presented itself as the only remaining thing to investigate. Unless he wanted to go streaking wildly across the snow or walk into a dark forest that practically begged to be infested with monsters - that was it.

[The Front Gate - 8]

[Adelie]

He inspected the gate.

It was a gate. On one side, there was wall; on the other side, there was more wall. Like any other gate in any other world, it served to connect the two together and allow passage without permanently leaving a hole in the wall. In other words, it was a perfectly normal gate.

If there was anything noteworthy about the gate, it would be its apparent age and level of disuse - a thin layer of rust frosted over the iron bars and the hinges appeared frozen stiffly in place. A wooden sign hung on its center, but it was so worn that only thin flakes of paint and scratches revealed that it had ever been any more than a plank of wood.

Leaning in, he tried to decipher what it might have once said, but try as he might, he couldn't even make out whether those scratches belonged to words or not. His face was so close to the sign that his nose was almost touching it - and then suddenly, he startled backwards as a pale blue streak ballooned out of nothing in front of his eyes.

[The Front Gate - 9]

[Adelie]

You have gained a new skill! Examine lv1 unlocked.

"Wonderful," he told the notification. "Now you decide to show up."

Not that it wasn't any more verbally ridiculous for him to express his displeasure towards a game prompt - one that likely no one else could see - than for him to mumble commands into thin air, but he felt a twinge of vindication nonetheless. So he had been right. Just not the right kind of right, but his guess had been on the right track nonetheless.

Discussions of his investigative skills aside, this newly acquired skill only opened up more avenues of speculation. Examine. What an incredibly descriptive name. Clearly, it was some means for him to discover more about the world he'd been so helpfully placed in, but he had no idea what purpose it really served.

The world around him certainly looked the same - still the same snow-blanketed land, still the same distant mountains, still the same stiff iron gate. That discounted the theory it might be some perception modifier, which meant it was a skill he had to actively trigger.

[The Front Gate - 10]

[Adelie]

With a sigh, he pointed one finger at the sign and said, in an almost incredulous tone of voice, "Examine."

Nothing happened. He exhaled another sigh, but one of relief. If that had actually worked - if he would have to go around pointing at random objects just to know what they were - he would've had to take a moment to sit down and ponder the material value of his dignity.

But as it hadn't, it left him only pondering just what in the world Examine was supposed to do. Acquiring the skill probably meant he had met its conditions to begin with, so if he simply re-enacted the circumstances, it should trigger again. He peered up at the sign, drawing himself in closer and closer until he could feel the warmth of his breath as it hit the old wood, and waited to no avail.

Pulling back in annoyance, he stared at the sign intently as if he could coax it to give up its secrets by winning a staring contest. "Don't tell me," he grumbled. "This place thinks looking at things is a skill?"

[The Front Gate - 11]

[Adelie]

He gave the sign one more glare before moving away - and something must've clicked, some condition must've been met, because two more pale blue boxes popped into existence in front of him in rapid succession.

You've leveled up a skill! Examine lv1 -> Examine lv2

Front Gate
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

As he processed the notifications, the string of question marks on the second seemed to shiver before resolving into lines of text - presumably the effect of leveling up the Examine skill.

Front Gate
The front gate of a long-abandoned farm. Despite years of neglect, it's still in excellent working condition.

"Thanks," he told the gate. "That's only barely more useful than a pile of question marks." For anyone with a working pair of eyes, at least - and he certainly had one, considering how much staring he'd been doing to unlock this skill.

[The Front Gate - 12]

[Adelie]

Perhaps for completion's sake, perhaps because he'd already spent so much time standing here looking like a dumbstruck idiot that it seemed a shame not to, he spent the next few minutes carefully examining everything in sight.

Snow
An expanse of crystallized, frozen water. Mostly air.

After pulling weird face after weird face attempting to replicate the initial trigger conditions - and nearly bruising his nose on the gate in the process - he recognized that there was a trick to it. A certain kind of half-focus, as if he were looking beyond the object he wanted to see and yet within it.

He had no idea what he looked like trying to do that, but he was pretty sure it was a new level of cross-eyed.

Error! The target is out of range.

There were distinct limitations to what he could Examine, too, beyond the fact that the descriptions it provided were functionally useless. Try as he might, the road refused to register as an object; the pine forest in the distance did, but it was outside of whatever his effective range was.

He couldn't see too clearly past the gate, but there were a few shapes in the distance that also returned the same out-of-range message when he tried to focus on them. Clearly, something was there.

[The Front Gate - 13]

[Adelie]

He could keep standing out here, of course. He'd only been doing that for at least a good fifteen minutes or so; what was another few hours to that?

And he had plenty of things he could do in the meantime. His futile attempt to extract more information from this uncooperative world had already improved his Examine skill to level 3; if he went back to staring blankly at the ground for a while longer, he might be able to grind the skill up to a point where it provided useful information instead of literal descriptions of what he was looking at.

He could even start performing random actions in hopes they'd unlock new skills! After all, his attempt to verbally summon information boxes had worked so well.

[The Front Gate - 14]

[Adelie]

He couldn't pinpoint exactly why he felt so averse to that very simple concept - open the gate, go inside, look around. He understood intrinsically that nothing would happen until he did that, and yet he still found himself making excuses to dawdle.

It was like getting out of bed in the morning, he realized.

His boss had chided him a few times about it - that he was always just barely on time, always making it within a sliver of being considered late. He'd tried setting his alarm clock earlier, of course, but no matter when he woke, the result was always the same.

He simply didn't want to go to work. Spooning boba into a cup, pouring in pre-brewed tea, putting it into the lid-attaching machine to have the lid attached - there was a decided soullessness to the task that left him feeling like a husk. And so he stayed in bed as long as humanly possible, as if all his problems would go away if only he waited long enough.

[The Front Gate - 15]