His body pressed flat against the earth, bare skin brushing against cool Grass. He was lying naked in the grass. That was not, by any stretch of imagination, how he had expected to wake up.
When he'd gone to sleep, he had been in the familiar comfort of his own bed, tucked beneath his worn blanket, sporting nothing more scandalous than his trusty Darth Vader boxer shorts. Yet here he was, completely stripped of both bed and shorts, and in their place was a carpet of green blades gently needling his unmentionables.
The last thing he remembered was his nightly ritual: losing track of time in front of the glow of a screen, controller in hand, until fatigue finally dragged him off. He must have stumbled half-blind into bed, as usual, and passed out. No memory of moving, no dream of wandering, and certainly nothing that explained a teleportation to… wherever this was.
Still, the grass beneath him felt bizarrely comfortable. It wasn't the scratchy, uneven kind that left welts on your ankles during soccer practice or stuck to your sweaty legs during picnics. This was lush, thick, almost unnaturally soft, as though someone had padded the ground with velvet and sprayed it the color of spring.
Jace knew grass. His father was a landscape architect—something Jace had spent his childhood resenting. While other kids escaped chores with video games or television, Jace had been stuck memorizing lawn varieties and soil pH levels, usually as his only escape from his mother's relentless Japanese lessons. For better or worse, he could tell rye from Bermuda, buffalo from Kentucky bluegrass. And this grass? This was unlike any he had ever seen.
He pushed himself over onto his back, then sat up slowly. Odd. That was the only word for how he felt. It wasn't unpleasant—more like the drowsy disorientation after sleeping too long on a Saturday morning. His body was loose, heavy with the remnants of slumber, but buzzing too with a strange vitality. He felt both sluggish and full of energy, a contradiction that left him swaying slightly where he sat.
Out of habit, he dragged a hand across his face and up through his hair—except there was no hair. His fingers skated across smooth skin, so smooth it startled him.
"Uh…" he muttered aloud.
Panic prickled his chest. He patted his scalp with both hands, searching desperately for the familiar resistance of hair, even stubble, but found nothing. His head was as bald and glossy as a balloon. Jerking his eyes downward, he made a quick inspection of the rest of himself, as though he might discover some other shocking change.
Both hands roamed frantically over his body, confirming the impossible. No hair. Not a single strand. His head was as smooth as polished glass, his skin bare from crown to heel. Even his eyebrows had vanished, leaving his face looking strangely blank. His chest, his arms, his legs—utterly hairless. And, as his panicked inspection crept lower, he confirmed that the situation extended to his most private regions as well.
"I thought trimming was supposed to make it look bigger," he muttered to himself, his attempt at humor falling flat in the eerie silence.
Trying to shake off the rising unease, Jace pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. His bare soles pressed into the springy turf, and for a moment he just stood there, squinting against the brightness above. The sun was already high in the sky, blazing with an intensity that made him blink and shade his eyes. There wasn't a single cloud to break the unrelenting sweep of blue, no bird in sight, no contrail, nothing. The warmth soaking into his skin was pleasant enough, but he knew from experience that standing around naked under direct sunlight was a fast track to lobster territory. He gave a grim glance downward—his "exposed extremities" were not in a position to win any battles against UV rays.
At last he turned his attention outward. His surroundings were… unnerving in their precision. He was enclosed on either side by towering hedges, their walls rising nearly twice his own height. The greenery was clipped to sharp, geometric neatness, not a twig out of place, the kind of flawless topiary work his father would have admired. The lane he stood on stretched forward in a perfect straight line, wide enough for three men to walk shoulder to shoulder, its floor carpeted with a grass that was too perfect, too uniform, to be natural. Off in the distance he could see other corridors branching off at strict right angles, like the aisles of some vast, leafy labyrinth.
Jace frowned down at himself again—pale, naked, and absurdly bald—before sighing and setting off at random. His bare feet whispered against the grassy floor as he walked, the air still and heavy with the smell of greenery. It didn't take long for him to piece it together. He was inside a hedge maze. A hedge maze with walls so high they swallowed the sky, leaving him with no clear sense of direction.
His first instinct was to climb, to scramble up and get a better view. But when he pressed a hand tentatively against the living wall, he recoiled instantly. This wasn't the smooth boxwood or privet he'd grown up weeding in his father's projects. The hedge was studded with thorns, long and cruel, a natural barbed wire woven into green. Climbing while naked would be less "helpful vantage point" and more "human pincushion."
Jace stepped back, scanning the path ahead and behind him. Neither direction looked promising. Each stretched on identically, swallowed by the same endless walls of green.
"What the bloody hell is going on?" he demanded, his voice bouncing hollowly off the hedges.
And that was when it appeared.
Something shimmered into being directly in front of him—a rectangle of glowing light, hanging impossibly in midair. A screen. Just floating, unanchored, no wires, no projector, nothing to hold it up. Jace blinked at it, rubbed his eyes, but it stayed stubbornly in place.
Heart thudding, he reached out with one cautious finger and tapped. His fingertip passed through as though the surface were smoke, sending ripples through the glow.
"Hologram?" he whispered, frowning.
Dropping his hand, he crouched down and scanned the ground, then glanced at the hedge walls, hunting for the hidden source of the projection. A drone? A speaker? Some trick of technology? But when he shifted a step to the side, the screen followed him, gliding effortlessly to remain squarely in his line of sight.
Text appeared across its surface, crisp and clear. Jace froze, then leaned in to read.
New Quest Unlocked: [Stranger in a Strange Land]
You awaken in an unfamiliar place. The air is sharp with scents you do not recognize, and the world feels subtly wrong. Explore your surroundings to learn more.
Objective: Navigate the hedge maze — 0/1 complete.
Reward: A pair of simple pants.
---
"Huh."
Jace blinked at the glowing text that hung in the air before him, the words crisp and unyielding, as if they were etched into reality itself. He glanced around warily, his unease growing with each second.
The walls of the hedge maze loomed tall and oppressive, their dense greenery packed so tightly the branches bristled like needles. He poked at the foliage with a tentative finger, half-expecting to find hidden cameras, microphones, or some kind of concealed machinery. Nothing. Just leaves and thorny twigs.
Tilting his head back, he scanned the sky. No buzzing drones, no surveillance balloons. For a moment he thought he was in the clear—until something caught his eye.
The moon.
It hovered pale and ghostly, faint against the daylight. Easy to miss, but undeniably there. Then his stomach dropped. Because next to it, faint but distinct, was another moon.
Jace's brow furrowed. "That… that can't be right."
He flicked his gaze from the floating screen back up to the heavens. Still there. Two moons, hanging side by side like silent witnesses.
"Am I… losing my mind?" he whispered.
His legs buckled, and he lowered himself onto the cool grass, trying to steady his breathing. The screen remained exactly where it had been, unbothered, hovering with mechanical patience as though it had all the time in the world. Jace, on the other hand, very much did not.
"This is insane," he muttered, running a hand through his hair. "A quest? Really? What am I supposed to be, some level one wizard straight out of an RPG?"
Before he could decide whether to laugh or panic, a second screen shimmered into existence beside the first. This one carried far more detail:
---
Jace Asano
Race: Outworlder
Current Rank: Normal
Progression to Iron Rank: 0% (0/4 Essences)
Attributes
[Power] (no essence): Normal
[Speed] (no essence): Normal
[Spirit] (no essence): Normal
[Recovery] (no essence): Normal
Racial Abilities — Outworlder
[Interface]
[Quest System]
[Inventory]
[Map]
[Astral Affinity]
[Mysterious Stranger]
Essences (0/4)
No Essence [No Attribute] (0/5)
No Essence [No Attribute] (0/5)
No Essence [No Attribute] (0/5)
No Essence [No Attribute] (0/5)
—