The blank white wasteland of Word was bad enough, but this… this was worse.
A new world unfolded before me. Rows and columns stretched endlessly, gray lines dividing the land into countless little boxes. Each cell pulsed faintly, waiting to be filled.
"God help me," I whispered. "I've been thrown into Excel."
At first, it was quiet. The human clicked me into a cell, and suddenly a number appeared. Then another. Then another.
1...2...4...5...3...8...9...
Before long, the grid was alive. Numbers swarmed everywhere, buzzing like insects. I tried to run, but each click dragged me to another cell. I blinked helplessly as formulas slithered across the sheet like snakes.
=SUM(A1:A99)
The ground trembled as the formula activated. Numbers from nearby cells rushed together, fusing into a giant creature of digits. A hideous monster made entirely of sums lumbered toward me.
"Oh no. Not the math monsters!" I screamed, ducking as it swung a giant equal sign at my head.
The human didn't care. They kept typing, filling more and more cells, summoning more abominations. Pie charts rose from the earth like portals to another dimension. A bar graph exploded upward, casting a shadow over the battlefield.
I darted from cell to cell, trapped in the endless labyrinth of columns.
"Why spreadsheets?! Why couldn't I have been reincarnated into a fantasy kingdom instead? At least slimes don't require formulas!"
The worst part wasn't even the numbers. It was the repetition. The human copied me, dragged me, pasted me again and again. I was multiplying, splitting into clones, each of us blinking in despair inside different cells.
"Kill me," one of my copies moaned from column D."End me," another wailed from row 52.
I thought I would go insane. But then—mercifully—the hand lifted. The screen blurred. The sheet faded away.
When my vision cleared, I was back in the browser.
I sighed in relief. "Finally. Back to civilization."
But my relief didn't last long.
Because the first thing I saw was a giant red play button in the middle of a video thumbnail.
And I knew.
YouTube.