One second, I was doom scrolling shorts in the middle of the night after a long day of work as a repairman.
Another second, I was sitting in a lecture hall full of students wearing stylized school uniforms with short, sage green capes on their backs, their hair colors and styles so varied I could mistake this place for a cosplay convention.
No signal. No warning. No reason.
I can't believe it myself. Maybe I'm currently sleeping, and this is all something I dreamed up as an afterimage of playing too many games and watching too much anime.
So I pinch myself on the cheek to wake myself up.
*Ouch!* I exclaim after feeling a sharp sense of pain, but I don't wake up from the dream.
So I just slap myself in the face.
*Slap!* The sound of me slapping myself echoes through the hall in a dramatic fashion.
Every pair of eyes turns toward me.
"Are you feeling okay?" A pale skinned, long black haired female professor in a black suit and a black cloak embroidered with gold thread asks in a monotone voice, as she fixes her eyes on me and adjusts a monocle on her right eye. Her body was that of a tall supermodel with a perfect hourglass figure.
I could recognize that face anywhere. Professor Chrona Schwarzhaffen, one of the first characters I met in the tutorial section when playing my all time favorite magical steampunk fantasy RPG called "Of Steam & Sorcery: Dark Reckoning."
She's a professor type character who's specialized in one of the fifteen magical domain called "Chronology" with a somewhat sad backstory, and an ability to trains player in said said magical domain too if you done her quest right.
And that could only mean one thing...
"May I go to the toilet, please?" I ask her.
She nods in reply as she turns back toward the blackboard, uses the chalk in her hand to draw some kind of arcane mathematical equation, and continues her teaching.
After getting her approval, I quickly walk out of the room amidst rows of chattering students staring at me for some reason.
In the gothic hallway lit by floating lanterns powered by bound spirits, I walk straight toward the nearest toilet while mumbling a simple question.
"Who am I?"
It's quite clear to me now that I've transmigrated into this damn game, but what kind of character did I end up as?
After I find the nearest toilet, I quickly slam open the door and look into the mirror.
"Who the hell is this?"
The tired eyes of an unassuming young man stare back at me from the mirror.
He's a pale skin young man wearing what is probably a second or third hand school uniform with an equally old short cape full of patches. His messy, unkempt hair is brown, the same color as his eyes, with deep eye bags under them.
This is really bad, If my more than two thousand hours of gameplay and lore videos can't make me recognize this character, that means only one thing.
"Oh hell nah, I'm a background mob," I exclaim as my already pale face somehow grows even paler.
Being a mob in this game drops my survival rate to less than fifty percent instantly.
This game spits out disaster events like a machine gun firing bullets, and as a consequence, fodder NPCs like me tend to die a lot throughout the story to raise the stakes.
But as I stare at myself in the mirror with a face pale, full of despair, a high pitched female voice shrieks from behind me like a banshee.
"Pervertttttt!!!!!!!" A short fair skin student girl with emerald green eyes and blonde drill hair screams as she waves a delicate green silk folding fan in my direction.
"Why the hell is she here?!" I think in confusion as a crushing wave of wind slams into my body and my head is thrown back, smashing straight into the mirror behind me.
And then everything goes blank as my consciousness slips away and my world fades to darkness.
----
After that violent turn of events, I woke up again, this time in an infirmary.
As I look at myself and my surroundings, I find myself lying on a silver framed bed surrounded on all sides by a light blue curtain.
The pain I received from being smashed against the toilet mirror and wall still hasn't disappeared. I try to get up but can't due to the sharp sensation of pain.
"You're awake, darling?" A mature woman with blonde flowy hair and fair skin in a Victorian era nurse uniform speaks in a voice that exudes maternal care, her blue eyes looking at me with a gentle smile on her face.
"Yes... Mrs. Honeycomb," I answer as I straighten my back against the bed.
Mrs. Angelica Honeycomb. She's the infirmary nurse that every player who gets knocked out during the tutorial arc ends up meeting. She heals players for free once per day as the academy's designated nurse.
Her character is that of a kind woman who loves to melt people's hearts with sweet words and gentle touches. But secretly, she's a black market drug dealer and a "Hemogency" magical domain practitioner who steals medicine from the school infirmary to use in her own research project behind everyone's back.
It's my new personal speedrun record meeting her this early in the story.
"Ufufu, you're quite a naughty boy, sneaking into the women's restroom in the middle of class, dear," she speaks in a kind tone, not trying to make me feel guilty about my obvious fault at all.
Now that I think about it, I forgot that the toilet nearest to the classroom was the women's one.
So in this case, it's my fault. Unintentionally.
"I'm truly sorry about it, Mrs. Honeycomb," I apologize, trying to let her know that I feel guilty.
"That's okay, darling. Anyone could go into the wrong toilet every now and then! The girl who struck you down with excessive violence, on the other hand, is at fault here!" Mrs. Honeycomb says as she turns her head toward the other side of the bed.
As I follow her gaze, I meet the short girl with emerald green eyes and blonde drill hair who is the reason I'm here.
She's currently sitting beside my bed, gazing down at me with a disgusted look, as if she's looking at some kind of human scum.
She's Lady Charlotte von Ventris, the only daughter of the Ventris family, holders of a marquis level title. A cold hearted ojou sama type noble, she's one of the NPCs you can recruit into your party as a mage of the "Aeromacy" domain. Somehow, she's also a popular love interest for many players.
I really didn't get her appeal though. She's a proud, cold hearted ojou sama who looks down on commoners and loves to punish those lower than her in status with physical and magical violence.
She also has an "I can fix her" type quest where you can romance her to change her views on commoners and turn her cold heartedness into that of a kind yet cool lady.
But that quest is so tedious, filled with quick time events and right or wrong dialogue choices, to the point that I ended up hating her character after repeatedly trying to get a perfect 100 percent achievement for her route.
"I-am-so-sorry-that-I-hurt-you," she haphazardly apologizes without any sincerity before getting up from her chair and walking away quickly, as if disgusted by my mere presence.
*What a bitch*, I quietly sneer after she leaves the room.
I then turn my head back toward Mrs. Honeycomb and ask, "Miss, how long was I unconscious?" I ask with a concerned look on my face.
"Around an hour," she answers with a warm smile.
"Could I go back to class now?" I ask for her permission with a concerned looks on my face.
"Sure. Drink the healing potion and then you can go," she replies while handing me a suspicious vial filled with blood red liquid.
Knowing her character, it's either that once per day free healing or some kind of experimental hemogenic potion. I decide to bet on the daily free heal, because she hasn't healed me yet since I was still in pain after waking up.
And it seems I chose correctly. After drinking the potion, my body feels reinvigorated and the pain quickly disappears as my injuries begin to heal.
I thank her, then quickly get up from the bed and run with all my might.
"Have a good day, darling!" Her warm blessing follows me as I hurry back to the classroom.
Not because I like studying or anything, but because if I don't participate in every pre-sessional class, I won't get the extra scores for the upcoming live combat test and could end up being expelled.
As a background mob character whom I don't even recognize, that means I was supposed to be expelled after a week, conveniently clearing the class of extras so only the main and side characters remain for the protagonist to focus on.
And for someone like me who knows the game's story, getting no starting gears from the tutorial section might as well be a death sentence.
So there I was, a background mob running for my literal life, amidst the bewilderment and confusion of the bystanders in the hallway.