The convenience store's fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a sterile glow across the empty aisles. It was 3:47 AM at Owl Convenience #78, and Zevian stood behind the counter, his mind operating on a completely different plane than his surroundings.
While his hands mechanically arranged the cash drawer with mathematical precision, his thoughts dissected the store's profit margins, calculating exactly how the owner was losing 4.3% in revenue due to inefficient product placement. A waste that Zevian had pointed out three months ago, only to be ignored.
Their loss, he thought, his face betraying nothing of the complex algorithms running through his mind.
At 23, Zevian possessed the kind of intelligence that made ordinary people uncomfortable. Not the showy, theatrical genius of tech billionaires or academic prodigies, but something colder, more precise—a mind that saw through the chaotic noise of existence and recognized the patterns beneath. Patterns that could be exploited.
He glanced at the security camera in the corner. The night manager would review the footage tomorrow, as he always did between 9:17 and 9:42 AM, and would see exactly what he expected: a bored cashier doing the minimum required work.
What the camera wouldn't capture was Zevian's silent analysis of the store's security vulnerabilities (seventeen in total), or how he'd already memorized the spending patterns of every regular customer down to the cent.
Information was power. And Zevian collected it like others collected trinkets.
The bell above the door chimed, and a man stumbled in—unshaven, disheveled, reeking of cheap whiskey and desperation. Zevian's eyes flicked over him once, cataloging details most would miss.
Mid-forties. Construction worker—calluses on the right hand, paint specks on the boots. Recently divorced—tan line on the ring finger, clothes unwashed for approximately three days. Seeking oblivion in a bottle, but ran out of funds. Current cash: likely under $10 based on the way he's checking his pocket depth.
"Evening," Zevian said, his voice neutral, revealing nothing of his assessment.
The man grunted, weaving between the aisles with the deliberate care of the thoroughly intoxicated. He grabbed a bag of chips and approached the counter, slapping down a handful of crumpled bills and coins.
"That all?" Zevian asked, already knowing the answer.
The man's bloodshot eyes narrowed. "You got a problem?"
Zevian's expression remained perfectly composed. "No problem. $4.85."
As the man counted out his money with clumsy fingers, Zevian noticed something odd. A slight tremor in the fluorescent lights. A barely perceptible shift in the air pressure. His senses—always hyper-attuned to his environment—registered the anomaly instantly.
Something was wrong.
The drunk customer didn't notice, focused on his coins. But Zevian felt it—a disturbance in the fabric of reality itself. For a fraction of a second, the edges of his vision seemed to blur, as if the world was a poorly rendered simulation glitching at its boundaries.
He blinked, and everything snapped back to normal. Almost.
The man finally pushed his money across the counter. Zevian counted it with mechanical efficiency—$4.83. Two cents short.
In another life, he might have pointed this out. Instead, he simply opened the register.
"Keep the change," the man slurred, though there was no change to keep.
Zevian nodded, watching as the customer shuffled toward the exit. The strange sensation persisted, a subtle wrongness that his analytical mind couldn't quite place.
As the door closed behind the drunk, Zevian's gaze fell to the floor. A small puddle had formed where the man had stood—not from spilled alcohol or melted snow, but from something that seemed to shimmer slightly under the harsh lighting.
Curious, he stepped around the counter to investigate. The liquid was clear but had an oily quality, refracting light in ways that water shouldn't. He crouched down, careful not to touch it.
That's when he noticed the reflection in the puddle wasn't his own. Instead of his face, he saw... something else. A swirling darkness, punctuated by what looked like lines of code or mathematical equations.
Zevian's heart rate remained steady. Where others might panic, he analyzed. This defied logical explanation, which meant either his perception was compromised, or something truly extraordinary was occurring.
He straightened up, decision made. He would document this phenomenon, analyze the variables, and determine—
The floor beneath him suddenly wasn't there.
Reality folded in on itself like a piece of paper crumpled by an invisible hand. Zevian felt himself falling, but not down—through. Through layers of existence, through the membrane separating worlds.
His last thought before darkness claimed him wasn't fear or confusion. It was pure, cold curiosity.
Interesting.
Pain. Filth. Darkness.
Zevian's consciousness returned in stages, his mind methodically cataloging sensory input before his eyes even opened.
Location: unknown. Surface: stone, uneven. Air quality: poor—high concentrations of organic decay, sulfur compounds, and... something unidentifiable. Ambient temperature: approximately 15°C. Physical status: intact, no major injuries detected.
He opened his eyes to near-darkness, broken only by faint, purplish light filtering down from above. He was lying in what appeared to be a narrow alleyway, wedged between buildings of unfamiliar architecture—stone structures with oddly angled walls and windows that seemed to avoid right angles entirely.
Zevian sat up, his movements precise despite the disorientation. His convenience store uniform was intact, though now stained with substances he chose not to identify. The watch on his wrist had stopped at 3:52 AM.
Hypothesis: interdimensional displacement. Alternative hypothesis: elaborate hallucination. Test required.
A scrabbling sound from the darkness deeper in the alley interrupted his thoughts. Something was moving toward him—something that dragged itself across the stone with an unnatural rhythm.
Most people would run. Zevian simply observed, gathering data.
The creature that emerged from the shadows defied conventional biology. Roughly the size of a large dog, it had too many limbs arranged in an asymmetrical pattern, and what might have been a head was just a cluster of sensory organs with no discernible eyes. It moved with a jerking, glitching motion, as if it existed partially out of phase with reality.
"Fascinating," Zevian murmured, his voice perfectly steady.
The creature froze at the sound, its limbs tensing. Then it lunged.
Zevian didn't flinch. His mind had already calculated trajectory, speed, and the narrow space of the alley. With a single, fluid step to the side, he positioned himself precisely where the creature couldn't reach without crashing into the wall.
The thing slammed into the stone exactly as he'd predicted, emitting a high-pitched keening sound.
That's when it happened.
A crystalline chime echoed directly in his mind, followed by a translucent blue interface that materialized in his field of vision.
[Congratulations, Host! You've unlocked the achievement: "First Blood Without Spilling Blood"!]
Zevian's expression remained neutral, but his mind raced with new possibilities.
[Reward: 1x Sock with a Hole (Common Item)]
A small icon appeared, showing a gray, worn sock with a ragged hole in the heel.
The creature was recovering, reorienting itself for another attack. Zevian ignored it, focusing instead on the floating interface.
"System," he said calmly, testing the word. "Analyze item properties."
Another text box appeared:
[Sock with a Hole] [Quality: Common] [Durability: 12/30]
[Effects: ???] [Description: It's literally just a sock with a hole in it. What were you expecting?]
The creature lunged again. This time, Zevian sidestepped and, in the same motion, reached out to the floating icon. The sock materialized in his hand—a physical, tangible object that by all logic shouldn't exist.
He examined it for exactly 1.7 seconds before making his decision.
As the creature charged a third time, Zevian flicked his wrist with perfect timing and precision. The sock sailed through the air and landed directly on the cluster of sensory organs that served as the creature's head.
The effect was immediate and unexpected. The creature froze, then began thrashing wildly, emitting a sound like static electricity. The sock didn't fall off—instead, it seemed to meld with the creature's form, glitching and distorting its already unstable shape.
Within seconds, the thing collapsed into a pile of twitching limbs, then dissolved into particles that faded from existence.
A new notification appeared:
[Congratulations! You've discovered a hidden property of the Sock with a Hole!] [New effect unlocked: Disrupts the sensory processing of phase-unstable entities] [Achievement unlocked: "Thinking Outside the Sock"] [Reward: 1x Slightly Bent Paperclip (Common Item)]
Zevian's lips curved into the faintest smile—not of amusement, but of pure intellectual satisfaction. Where others would see trash, he saw potential. Where others would panic, he saw patterns.
He picked up the newly materialized paperclip, turning it over in his fingers as he analyzed its properties. Already, his mind was formulating hypotheses, testing theories, calculating probabilities.
"A system that rewards unconventional solutions," he murmured. "Interesting."
He stepped deeper into the alley, moving with purpose now. This new reality, with its broken physics and strange creatures, was just another puzzle to solve. The "useless" rewards were variables in an equation he would master.
And Zevian had always been very, very good at equations.
The universe had made a critical error in bringing him here. It had given a calculator to a mathematician. A broken system to someone who specialized in exploiting flaws.
His eyes gleamed in the purple half-light as he walked forward, the paperclip held between his fingers like a key to a lock no one else could see.
"Let's see what else you have for me."