—Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
The rhythmic tone roused him from the pleasant darkness. However, while he was conscious, he still did not quite feel entirely awake, remaining at the threshold of proper awareness. Every beep suspended him from falling off the cliff, making him barely teeter on the precarious edge; every pause was a risk of him plunging straight back into the blissful blackness. He struggled to retain his consciousness, his thoughts brief and elusive, like wisps of smoke, disappearing before he could grasp them. As if given a rope, he held onto the repeating sound.
His eyelids fluttered slightly; his long, dark lashes brushing against his cheeks. The beeping slowly began to become more distant. He attempted to take hold of it to stay awake. As wonderful as the void appeared to be, he didn’t want to sink back into it. He intuitively understood that way was not where he should go right now.
When his ears filled with a heavy silence — when there should have been yet another tone but was not — he startled back into complete awareness.
The twitch made him aware of the rough texture touching his palm.
The surface beneath his arms was hard, and he sat up, looking at it in bewilderment. Flat wood of about half a metre in both depth and width. When he looked around, more was in the room; about thirty to forty desks were placed in pairs in neat columns, with chairs neatly facing one way. There was an old-fashioned chalkboard on the wall at the front end of the classroom, its surface a slightly faded green due to the layer of chalk dust.
He blinked, trying to take in the unfamiliar location.
“What classroom is this?” he muttered.
He placed his hand on the desk, pressing down to get up. And yet, despite clearly being awake, his body felt strangely weak from sleep. It was sluggish almost to the extent it didn’t seem to actually be awake at all.
He gave up on standing to explore further entirely.
Instead, he leaned back in his chair and noticed the storage space beneath the wooden top. When he put his hand into it, he immediately felt something solid among what seemed to otherwise be nothing but text- and notebooks. He pulled it out to find a smartphone.
He tried to remember when he last was in a school where his things were stored at his desk instead of a locker, but the more he thought the worse a headache he got. He had to let it go, leaving it at it being several years.
Looking at the device, it was unfamiliar. The lock screen didn’t have the picture he was used to, but an abstract image with vibrant shades of pink, red, purple, and blue. When he turned it around to look for a manufacturer, he only saw the image of a spade, silver against the black case.
Looking at the lock screen again, he followed the instruction and swiped up to unlock it. He was greeted by what appeared to be a log, light pink against a deep navy background.
[Connected to User.]
[Searching for Location…]
[Found Server: Testing Area.]
[The User ⟨Player⟩ has entered Testing Area.]
[Begin login process.]
[Logging in…]
[Login process unsuccessful.]
[Retrying…]
[Login process unsuccessful.]
[Retrying…]
[Login process unsuccessful.]
[Retrying…]
[⟨Player⟩ has successfully logged into the ⟨System⟩.]
• • • • • • •
[Welcome ⟨Player⟩!]
[Congratulations! ⟨Player⟩ has been selected for The Seduction Game⟩!]
[The current location is: Classroom K]
[Classroom K is a typical classroom type location found in a common high school.]
Having received no useful information in this log, he tapped the home button and found that the home screen had a spade just like the one on the back of the phone, only it was colourful, shifting in colours from pink to blue. He tried to get to an app list, but he could only swipe between two screens.
One had a select few generic apps that were all unnamed; a typical messages symbol, one for calls, another for contacts, , and something that looked like a contact card. It also included an app with the now relatively familiar spade.
After a moment of thought, he determined he would likely get the least information from the first three generic apps, so he tapped the contact card to the far right.
The phone responded promptly with essentially no loading time, and what appeared was indeed a profile. Just not anything he would have thought.
He scanned the pages and found that on the lower left was something that looked suspiciously much like a menu button. Tapping it, he found there were five tabs: Profile, Statistics, Achievements, Missions, and Tasks. He was on Profile, which wasn’t particularly useful to him.
[Character: High School Student]
[Age: 17]
The rest of the tabs were greyed out and not tappable.
The log had said the location was “Testing Area”. With a little thought, “User” must refer to him specifically. He figured the limitation in what he could see must be because of this space not being the “full version”, similarly to using a trial of a software.
The thing was, even if he was selected for this supposed game, he had no recollection of how he ended up in this classroom. With the accompanied headache, he was suspicious of it all. He needed to consider his next move closely, but also try to determine how he was transported to here.
Last he remembered, he and his grandma had been in a cab, on their way to have lunch at his grandma’s favourite place. He had called in sick to go with her to the hospital for an appointment. She had been nervous so he worried about her, even if she told him she was fine.
Nonetheless, it made it even more confusing.
“Did I fall asleep? Is this a dream?” he muttered and shut the screen off. He put the phone down and made another attempt to stand up.
The headache hadn’t worsened in any way this time, and his body seemed more responsive than before.
He was still not fully recovered, but it wasn’t so bad he couldn’t walk. He simply felt a little weak in the knees.
While one side of the classroom had a door both at the front and a back, the opposite one was all windows. The door at the front had the familiar green and white sign, showing it was an emergency exit, while the door at the back must lead out into a hallway or the like.
He approached the window closest to him.
His pupils contracted as he saw the outside world.
When he went with his grandma to the hospital, it was January and snow everywhere. What he saw outside was clearly late spring, with some minimal snow left on the ground and green grass and budding trees everywhere.
Students were outside enjoying the weather, although some of them were on their way back inside.
“Is it lunch break?” he wondered to himself. He followed the group of girls, heading back inside, with his eyes.
Then another question reared its head. He asked it to the empty classroom: “Are all these people ‘Players’?”
Ding!
He was startled at the sudden sound and looked at the phone on the desk. Abandoning his observations of the outside, he went back to the seat where he woke up. He sat down on the desk checking the notification, where he saw the little spade icon.
[The Seduction Game
New Message from ⟨System⟩!]
That sure didn’t give him a lot of information so he tapped the message. It only made resulted in its disappearance, rather than opening the app. He figured he could just tap the spade app either way.
The icon opened up to an interface that was as barebones as the one with a profile.
The start page of the app only said, This feature is locked until requirements have been fulfilled. and when he looked at the menu, he couldn’t even see what the tabs were, just grey locks.
Only the System Log tab was available, so he tapped that.
The same screen, which he had originally found when he unlocked the phone the first time, appeared, but it now had new messages.
[⟨Player⟩ is the sole player character. Remaining characters are randomly generated non-player characters.]
[Congratulations! ⟨Player⟩ has fulfilled basic requirements. The character profile and scenario goal have been unlocked.]
Author’s Note
This is the beginning of “The Seduction Game”, which is my one and plausibly only unlimited flow novel.
If you’re unfamiliar with Unlimited Flow, or Infinitine Flow, the overall premise for it is that a character is transported to some kind of instance, and between each there is a break, either in a “break instance” or in reality. These are often thriller, suspence or horror stories.
The Seduction Game is planned to be quite long. Expect many arcs, some more silly, some very much not.