“John Williams was an average man. Well, average until you looked too closely. If anyone were to look in detail, they would notice he was *too* average. John spent much of his time growing up trying to figure out how to appear average to his peers. The truth is, John was always calculating. Whether it’s in work, love, or just a normal conversation, it’s all a calculation. The coming of the apocalypse only reinforced this.”

  

  
• Excerpt from an interview about John Williams, with his mother.


  

  John Williams woke up on the grass. This was a questionable outcome, considering he had went to bed in, well, *a bed*. John could never sleep unless in a bed or moments from losing all his energy, which made this even more confusing. The blue screen floating above him is not exactly helping the situation. Now that he realized it, John decided to read the screen, hoping it may explain his situation a bit.

  Well, that explained why he was laying in grass, as well as the splitting headache. John sat up, and this action was apparently enough for the system to realize he was now conscious.

  John was no fool. John knew what was going on here, as he’d read a number of books that seemed to prophesize this, so he steeled himself and thought ‘Status.’

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Nothing happened. He was therefore confused, until right when he stopped anticipating it, his status screen popped into view, startling him back into laying on the grass.

  ‘Okay, well that was rude’. John grumbles in his head. ‘I need to get these to ridiculous levels' John is a simple man, with simple desires. You give him, presumably, the ability to increase his capabilities with the simple application of numbers, he's going to try and get them as high as possible, as fast as possible. It's what anyone would do, right? 'Focus up, John. [Human?]? What’s with the question mark?’ John focused on the race section, but what he got was not incredibly helpful.

  'Well that’s good and all, but does not explain the question mark. It does confirm the existence of orcs though. I’ll try and get more on those later.' John sits back up and, this time, gets to his feet. Looking around, there’s really not much of note. As far as he can tell, he’s just in a regular forest. ‘Of course, your average forest doesn’t come with ominous tidings about tutorials, but I digress,’ he thinks at nobody in particular. John decides that standing in this random area is not going to get him any answers, so he starts walking in a direction he has now decided is north.