Marcus groaned and slowly begins to gain consciousness.
He doesn't remember much about last night, but his entire body aches as he doubles over in pain. Eventually, he's able to open his eyes and full of disbelief, has to hesitantly blink a few times just to make sure that he isn't hallucinating.
His vision isn't blurry in the slightest, in fact he can see even better than he normally would be able to!
He looks at his computer which is surprisingly fine. He's able to start it up and everything seems to be going as expected except for one crucial problem. The game he was playing yesterday has disappeared. Any traces of it have been wiped away from his computer.
He sighs, turning it off thinking it must have been deleted when lightning struck his house and his computer's power was overloaded. While still grumbling about losing a full day's progress he heads downstairs to eat breakfast.
Once there he sits down at the table to eat leftovers and watch the news again. According to the main news channel of his area, the storm left as quickly as it had come, and hadn't caused any damage as expected.
When he finished eating Marcus decided to call Joey, a friend of his. They decided to meet up at Joey's house to hang out for a while.
After the phone call, Marcus noticed a small blinking light in the top right corner of his vision and decided to turn to look at it closer, but it moved with his vision and he couldn't center it. When he thought about how he wanted to know what it was, it revealed itself.
Suddenly in front of him a Menu appeared and had a message for him. The message read "Welcome, new player to the wonderous world of LevelUP! We hope you enjoy your experience and have decided to reward you with a starter package! Please click accept to close this message, the reward will be available in your inventory.".
Marcus was dumbfounded. This was unbelievable, but as he couldn't see anything without getting rid of the menu he decided to 'Accept' and watched the menu disappear. He wondered what it meant by putting the reward in his 'Inventory', but as soon as he thought the word another menu appeared with an unimaginable number of empty slots and one wrapped gift box sitting in the very first slot.
As he focused on the gift box a small window appeared listing information for it. "New Player Gift Box" – "A welcoming present for a new player, contains: 5 of any skill books, 5 of any potions, and 3 of any items inside."
This description excited Marcus because if he had this item in any game he'd played before it would mean he could potentially get the strongest items in the game at the very beginning of the game with enough luck.
He decided to open it and reached to touch the box in his Inventory. When his hand should have made contact with the menu, it instead reached further as he pulled out the box from some sort of sub-dimension. "That's so cool!" Marcus exclaimed as he set the box down on the table and began to look at it with excitement.
He could no longer hold himself back and took off the top of the box to notice that there was nothing inside. He stared at the empty space extremely confused, and decided to reach inside. Just like with the Inventory, his hand went inside and pulled something out.
He looked at what he got and saw it was one of the skill books. It was a red book with the title "Unarmed Combat" written on it. He decided to read the book, but as he opened it, the book disappeared with a bright flash. He saw text pop up at the top of his vision that informed him that he had achieved "Unarmed Combat LV.1". This message filled him with joy as he took out the rest of the items from the gift box.
Once the last item had been retrieved, the box began to shimmer with light and dissolved.
He looked at the assortment lined up in front of his eyes. There were 4 more books with assorted titles, 5 potions of varying colors, and most importantly there were 3 items laying on the table.
As he focused on the items one by one he was extremely happy with the results. The first item was a small pocket knife with a name and stats that didn't fit its appearance at all. It was named the "Achilles Point". It had a decently high attack compared to the knives in Marcus' kitchen, and had the ability to double damage when hitting a vital area.
The second item was a digital watch that would allow him to access all of his game menus without causing suspicion and did not require a power source.
The final item was consumable and was named "Charm Candy". It's description stated that it increased the charisma of the player permanently upon consumption.
Once he had looked over the items he turned to the potions and noticed a red one which was the common health potion from most games, but instead of saying an amount of health healed it's description simply said "Heals injuries upon consumption", which prompted Marcus to believe that the items from his new interface were of greater efficacy than their video game counterparts.
The other 4 potions were similar cases of being better than expected.
The remaining potions included an invisibility potion that lasted 5 minutes, a vitality potion that would allow Marcus to regenerate even a lost limb, an agility potion that could double Marcus' speed for 5 minutes, an intelligence potion to temporarily increase Marcus' INT stat, and finally the most extreme of all the potions Marcus gained.
This potion was a light yellow with the description that sounded unbelievable, even for a video game, the description read; "A holy liquid that can even bring the dead back to life". Looking at the name, Marcus realized that the description was accurate considering it was dubbed "Tears of the Goddess".
Finally turning back to the skill books Marcus noticed something strange.
The last 4 books had mostly new titles and colors. They consisted of a red book named "Unarmed Combat", a green book named "Healing", a blue book named "Running" and a golden tome titled "Endurance".
He decided to read all of the books, therefore raising his skill levels. After he had obtained the skills he looked at the watch he had obtained and noticed he was extremely late for the time that he and Joey had agreed upon.
He quickly gathered all of the potions, along with the pocket knife, and inserted them into his Inventory. He ate the charm candy on his way out of the house and noticed a notification that a new skill "Charm" had reached level 1.
Marcus left his house and finally drove to Joey's in a hurry as he was extremely late. "I guess time is still something I have to worry about" Marcus exclaimed as he hastily made his way across town.