The Isekai Trap

NOTES: Real Name is the name of the fictional "you" in this story, as in what people in the "real" world outside of the game would call you, while Character Name is the name you decide to use in-game. Go ahead and change those if you don't like the defaults. This story makes certain assumptions, so please feel free to add your own chapters but keep in mind the following assumptions:

• The protagonist is a male in the real world.
• Only female PCs are available in the MMO that you're playing.
• Race/Class combinations are pre-set.

Also, if you do submit any chapters, please only submit chapters that would take place after the chapters that have *** in their titles (for example, don't submit any chapters that would come before the chapter titled ***Warrior***).

((NOTE: the story is set to Private for now, until I've gotten a few chapters out. Then I'll update the status so other people can add their own chapters))

***

It began with an email.

You don't know the sender of the email or why they contacted you--you just know that whoever it is goes by the name of Joshua119. You had assumed it was spam and was about to delete it like you would every other piece of junk email that made it past your filters.

But something made you pause. You actually started reading the email. It wasn't very long. It simply read:

Hello Ryan,
Shall we play a game?

And there was a link. Which you didn't click, obviously--you know better than that.

But then, the next day a package arrived for you. No return address. Inside, you found a note, and a webcam but not quite like any others you'd seen before. No branding on it, and it had three smaller lenses clustered off to one side of the main lens.

Weird.

The note simply instructed you to make sure the webcam was hooked up when you installed the FANTASY TRAP.

That's when your interest really got piqued.

FANTASY TRAP - an MMO with an insane budget, developed by a dream team of ex-developers from half a dozen AAA studios. From everything you've read about it, this game was set to blow every other MMO out of the water. Next-level graphics and immersion with highly customizable gameplay like you've never experienced before. Sure, you and every other gamer on the planet has heard that promise before. But you had faith. You've been following every bit of preview news ever since word of the game first leaked. You COULD. NOT. WAIT. to play this game!

The problem was that the game was still a full two-years away from release--at least.

But then there was that email with a download link, supposedly for FANTASY TRAP.

Gotta be a scam. Right?

For sure.

But if it was a scam, they went through a lot of trouble. You can't imagine some scammer was out there physically mailing a webcam to hundreds of potential marks.

So you plugged in the webcam and opened up that email. And you clicked that download link.

And now after nearly two hours of downloading, you sit and watch as the downloaded percentage slowly, agonizingly, creeps upward. 97%….98%…..99%…..then it stops moving. You wait.

And wait some more.

Still at 99% downloaded. You check to make sure your connection is stable. All green lights on that front. You give the side of your monitor a smack, knowing as soon as you do, how pointless a gesture it is. As if hitting your monitor would affect your download speed.

But it worked. 100% downloaded.

Hell yeah, baby!