Ethan Mercer jolted awake like someone had dumped ice water down his spine.
For a moment, he didn't know where he was. The fluorescent lights above him buzzed with a faint, clinical hum. The laminated desk surface was warm where his cheek had been pressed against it. Around him, the familiar chaos of Class Six hummed along — Tyler tapping away at his phone, a cluster of girls whispering near the window, someone's bag of chips crinkling three rows back.
Just another afternoon at Ashford Prep.
But the dream—
God, the dream.
It hadn't felt like a dream. It felt like a life. An entire life, compressed into twenty minutes of sleep, crammed into his skull like someone had taken a firehose of memories and aimed it directly between his eyes.
He'd been... someone else. Somewhere else. A different world — one called Earth, where the countries had names he'd never heard of, where people spoke dozens of languages, and where there were these movies...
Fragments flickered behind his eyes like a TV channel struggling to hold its signal. A man in a red and gold suit of armor, flying through a city skyline. A shield — round, red, white, and blue — spinning through the air. Giant robots that transformed into cars. A big green monster smashing through walls. A Norse god swinging a hammer.
Iron Man. Captain America. Transformers. The Hulk. Thor.
The names surfaced in his mind with the ease of things he'd known his entire life — except he hadn't. He'd never heard any of these names before today. None of it existed. Not in Valoria, not in Northvale Province, not anywhere in the world Ethan Mercer had grown up in.
And yet he could picture every frame. He could feel the theater seat beneath him, smell the popcorn, hear the audience gasp when the suit assembled itself piece by piece around Tony Stark's body. Memories so vivid and specific they couldn't possibly be invented.
What the hell was that?
He glanced at the clock on the wall. Six, maybe seven minutes before the next period.
Greer's class.
Great. Physics with Patricia Greer. The woman had hated him since day one, and the feeling was entirely mutual. If she caught him sleeping, she'd make a whole production out of it — haul him up in front of everyone, make some snide comment about county kids not being able to hack it at a real school.
Ethan was about to fold his arms back into sleeping position — might as well try to make sense of the dream later — when something on his left hand caught his eye.
He froze.
On the back of his hand, just below the knuckles, there was a mark. A tattoo, or something like one — pale blue lines forming a pattern he didn't recognize. Geometric, almost, but organic too. Like circuitry designed by something that wasn't quite human.
What the hell?
He stared at it. It was kind of cool, actually — the sort of design you'd see on an album cover or tattooed on some indie musician's forearm. But Ethan definitely didn't have the spare cash for something like this, and he sure as hell didn't remember getting one.
He rubbed his eyes with his right hand, hard enough to see stars, and looked again.
Still there. Pale blue. Faintly luminous, though that had to be a trick of the fluorescent lighting.
Some asshole drew on me while I was sleeping.
That was the obvious answer, and honestly? It wouldn't even crack his top ten list of worst things classmates had done to him. Since testing into Ashford Prep — the crown jewel of Northvale Province's education system, the school every parent in the Republic of Valoria would sell a kidney to get their kid into — Ethan had learned that being the poor kid from Millbrook County was basically the same thing as wearing a "kick me" sign.
Cockroaches in his lunch tray. Sneakers he'd saved up six months for, slashed to ribbons in his locker. Homework stolen and shredded. Compared to all that, a weird pattern drawn on his hand was practically a love letter.
But when he tried to rub it off, the mark didn't budge.
He scratched harder. Nothing. He licked his thumb and scrubbed at it like he was trying to remove a stain from a countertop.
The tattoo flickered.
Ethan yanked his hand back like he'd touched a hot stove. The pale blue lines had pulsed — actually pulsed — with a soft glow that faded almost instantly.
His heart hammered. He whipped around to Tyler Banks, his deskmate, who was horizontal in his chair binge-watching some drama on the latest phone model — a device that probably cost more than everything Ethan owned combined.
"Hey. Hey. Did you see that? This thing on my hand — it just lit up."
Tyler didn't even look away from his screen. "What tattoo? Mercer, you're hallucinating."
He turned away with visible disgust and muttered, just loud enough: "Orphan's finally losing it. No parents around to raise him right, so he freaks out over everything."
A year ago — hell, a month ago — Ethan would've grabbed Tyler by the collar for that. The orphan card was the one thing that could always get under his skin, the one wound that never quite scarred over.
But right now, between the impossible dream and the glowing tattoo, he didn't have the bandwidth for Tyler's garbage.
He asked three more classmates. Got called crazy twice and told to see a doctor once.
Nobody could see it.
Nobody could see the glow.
Only me.
Before Ethan could process what that meant, a voice cut through his thoughts — cold, digital, and coming from inside his own skull.
"The Multiverse Technology System is loading..."
"Ding! System loading complete!"
"Binding to Host confirmed. Memory integration from Source World: Earth-Prime — successful. The Host has been granted full experiential data from a parallel world. This world contains no existing information regarding the System's available technologies."
Ethan's brain stalled like an engine thrown into reverse at seventy miles an hour.
The dream. The impossible, impossibly vivid dream — it wasn't a dream at all. The System had downloaded an entire world's worth of memories into his head. Another version of himself, living on another version of reality, a place called Earth where Iron Man was a movie character and Captain America was a comic book hero and none of it was real.
But the System was offering to make it real. Here. In this world. Where none of it had ever existed.
"...System?" he whispered.
"I am here, Host!"
For three full seconds, Ethan didn't breathe. Then the reality — the insane, impossible, beautiful reality — slammed into him like a freight train, and he had to physically clamp both hands over his mouth to keep from screaming.
A system. A real, honest-to-God system.
He'd seen enough in those downloaded memories to know what this was. The golden ticket. The cheat code. The one-in-a-billion cosmic lottery that turned nobodies into legends.
And it had chosen him.
His parents had died when he was five — a car accident that had erased every shred of stability from his life in a single night. No family money. No connections. No safety net. Just a kid bouncing between relatives until Frank Holloway, his father's old army buddy, had taken him in. Since then, Ethan's existence had been a masterclass in keeping your head down and taking whatever life threw at you without flinching.
Until now.
Okay. Okay. Think.
He called up the System interface in his mind, and a massive translucent display blossomed before his eyes — visible only to him, hovering in the air like one of those heads-up displays from the memories. Like the inside of Tony Stark's helmet.
The layout was clean. Almost minimalist.
[Prestige] 84
(Note: Prestige increases based on the emotions of people in this world. Shock, admiration, hatred, being moved — any strong emotional response caused by the Host will generate Prestige Points.)
[Items] None
[Level 1 Mall]
Eighty-four points. Sixteen-plus years of being alive, and he'd generated eighty-four points of emotional impact on the world around him.
That's... actually kind of depressing.
But could he really blame anyone? From elementary school to now, Ethan Mercer had been a ghost. The quiet kid in the back row. The one teachers forgot to call on and classmates forgot existed. Losing his parents young had carved the confidence right out of him, leaving behind a kid who flinched first and asked questions never.
Sixteen years of invisibility, distilled into eighty-four points.
He opened the Mall.
The catalog was short. Painfully short.
Small Nuclear Reactor Technology(Iron Man — Source World: Earth-Prime) — 1,000 Prestige Battle Armor Mark I(First generation Iron Man suit) — 10,000 Prestige Battle Armor Mark II(Second gen; cannot fly at high altitudes) — 20,000 Prestige Battle Armor Mark III(Classic red & gold; infrared lasers, micro-missiles, extreme combat capability) — 50,000 Prestige Super Soldier Serum(Captain America) — 100,000 Prestige
Ethan stared at the list, then at his balance, and felt his soul leave his body.
Eighty-four points. The cheapest item cost a thousand. He was reading a menu at a five-star restaurant with nothing but pocket lint and good intentions.
Of course. Of course the universe gives me a cheat code and then makes me grind for it.
But the implications were staggering. Those memories from Earth-Prime — they weren't just entertainment trivia. They were blueprints. On Earth, Iron Man's arc reactor was fiction. Special effects and comic book panels. But here, the System was offering to make it real. Functional. Buildable.
And nobody in this world had ever seen or heard of any of it.
Still, he had to be sure. Ethan pulled out his phone — ancient, cracked screen, held together by willpower and a rubber case — and started searching. His thumbs moved quickly, punching in terms from the downloaded memories.
"Iron Man."
Nothing. No results.
"Marvel."
Nothing.
"Captain America." "Transformers." "The Avengers."
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Not a single hit. No movies, no comics, no merchandise, no fan wikis. The search engine stared back at him like he'd typed in gibberish.
He tried a few more — "Thor," "Hulk," "vibranium," "arc reactor." Zero across the board.
None of it exists here. Not a trace.
Which meant when he built this stuff — and he was going to build this stuff — there'd be no prior art. No patents. No skeptic in the audience who'd stand up and say "hey, that's just something from a movie." Because in this world, the movies had never been made. The comics had never been drawn. The characters had never been imagined.
He was sitting on the technological secrets of an entire fictional universe, and he was the only person alive who knew they existed.
The implications hit him in waves — each one bigger than the last — until the class bell cut through his spiraling thoughts like a knife.
Physics. Right. Patricia Greer.
The classroom door swung open, and Greer marched in with the energy of someone who'd already decided the day was going to be unpleasant and was determined to share the feeling. Ethan quickly pocketed his phone and pulled out his textbook.
Beside him, Tyler didn't even twitch. Still horizontal, still watching his show, the screen's glow reflecting off his chin like he was telling a ghost story at summer camp.
There were plenty of others like Tyler in Class Six — kids who treated lectures like background noise and teachers like furniture. Greer's eyes swept over every single one of them without a word.
That was how it worked at Ashford Prep. Tyler's father could buy and sell half the faculty. Other kids had parents on the school board, connections in the provincial Education Bureau, last names that opened doors. They could sleep, skip, or set the building on fire, and teachers like Greer would smile and look the other way.
Ashford Preparatory Academy — the highest-ranked school in all of Northvale Province. 98.9% college admission rate. Triple-digit students funneled into Grandfield and Hartwell Universities every single year. In a place like this, test scores were God, family money was the Holy Spirit, and connections were the entire congregation.
But a scholarship kid from Millbrook County with no parents and no money? That was fair game. Always had been.
Greer's gaze found Ethan, and her eyes went flat and hard.
What she didn't know — what nobody in this room knew — was that the boy sitting in that chair was not the same one who'd fallen asleep twenty minutes ago.
That boy now carried the memories of an entire world inside his head, had 84 Prestige Points burning a hole in his pocket, a System Mall full of technology that could reshape civilization, and absolutely nothing left to lose.
Ethan met her eyes and didn't look away.
Let's see how many points you're worth.