The first thing was the smell.
Garbage and wet cardboard and piss. A chemical sharpness that bit the inside of his nose. He was lying on his side on concrete, one arm under his head, the other stretched out in front of him with the fingers curled around nothing.
Troy opened his eyes.
An alley. Brick walls on either side, close enough to touch if he spread his arms. A dumpster to his left, green, overflowing, a black trash bag split open and leaking brown water down its side. Rain had come through recently. The asphalt was dark and the puddle near his elbow reflected a strip of gray sky between the buildings above him.
He sat up. His body moved wrong.
Different-wrong, not pain-wrong. The way his abs engaged was off. The weight of his arms pushing off the ground, off. He looked at his hands and they weren't his hands.
Longer fingers. No scar on the right thumb where he'd sliced it on a tin can lid at fourteen. Clean nails, trimmed, on hands that had never worked a register or gripped a Louisville Slugger in the dark. Young skin. He was looking at someone else's hands growing out of his wrists.
He touched his face. Jaw was sharper than his. Cheekbones higher. Hair past his ears when he'd kept his short for years. He ran his tongue along his teeth and they were straight and smooth. He'd had a chipped incisor since a basketball game sophomore year of college.
He stood up. Taller. He was taller by at least two inches, and his center of gravity had shifted, and his jeans fit like they belonged to him but they weren't his jeans. His shoes weren't his shoes. The t-shirt was clean and smelled like laundry detergent and not like him. Gray, no logo, soft from a few washes. Whoever this body belonged to had decent taste and took care of his clothes.
He patted his pockets. Empty. Front left, front right, back left, back right. No wallet, no phone, no keys, no ID, no loose change. Nothing but lint and a receipt so faded the ink had gone to ghost.
He remembered the knife.
The handle sticking out from under his ribs. The ceiling fan. Her voice from the doorway. The dark.
And before that, the kitchen counter and her face. The charger he never packed.
Troy Weston was dead. He'd died on the floor of his apartment in front of his girlfriend with a gas station folding knife in his gut.
So what the fuck was this.
He leaned against the alley wall. The brick was cold and damp through his shirt. He looked down at his body again and flexed his hands and rolled his shoulders and the body responded instantly, smoothly, like a car that had just come off the lot. Strong. Young. Early twenties, if he had to guess. Fit in a way he hadn't been, with actual definition in his forearms and a flat stomach and posture from a body that had never been wrecked by a laptop and a desk job.
He was in someone else's body. He was in someone else's body and he was alive and his old body was dead and he was standing in an alley that smelled like garbage and there were pigeons on the fire escape above him and this was, objectively, the worst day of his life. Or the second worst. Hard to rank them when one of them ended with a knife wound.
He walked to the mouth of the alley.
Manhattan hit him all at once. He knew it immediately. The density of it, the height of the buildings, the yellow cabs, the particular aggressive energy of New Yorkers on a crosswalk. He'd visited twice before. Once for a wedding, once for a job interview that went nowhere.
The street was loud. Horns, jackhammers somewhere to the north, a bus braking with a hiss, someone yelling in Spanish from an upper-floor window. People moved past the alley mouth without looking at him. A man in a suit, a woman pushing a stroller, two teenagers sharing earbuds, a delivery guy on an e-bike cutting through all of them. Nobody was looking at the guy who'd just woken up on the concrete with the wrong face.
He stepped onto the sidewalk. Tried to look like he had somewhere to be. He walked naturally in these shoes even though he'd never worn them.
Three blocks. He counted them because counting kept him grounded. At the end of the third block, a blue translucent screen appeared in the center of his vision and he walked face-first into a parking meter.
His forehead hit the metal pole. The screen stayed where it was, floating in front of him at reading distance, perfectly transparent except for the white text, and the woman behind him said "Jesus, watch where you're going" and kept walking.
He grabbed the parking meter. Steadied himself. Blinked. The screen was still there.
LUST SYSTEM v1.0
STATUS: INITIALIZING
He looked left. He looked right. Nobody else was reacting to the floating text in his face. A bike messenger shot past close enough to clip his elbow and didn't blink. An old woman with a grocery cart navigated around him without looking up.
The screen was in his head. Or in his eyes. He didn't know where system interfaces lived when you were apparently inside a video game.
The text flickered and changed.
HOST DETECTED
NAME: TROY WESTON
BODY: SYNCHRONIZED
That was his name. His name, not the body's. Whatever this thing was, it knew who he was before whatever happened to him happened.
The screen shifted again. A column of stats arranged themselves in clean rows.
STATS
STR: 3
SPD: 3
DUR: 2
STA: 4
CHA: 5
LEVEL: 1
LP: 0 / 100
PARTNERS: ---
He stared at the numbers. Three in strength. Three in speed. He didn't know what the scale was, but he had a feeling three wasn't impressive. Durability at two. Stamina at four. Charisma at five, which was apparently his highest stat, which was either flattering to his personality or depressing about his body.
LP. Lust Points.
It took him a second. He read the abbreviation and skipped right past it and then came back to it and read it again and stood on the sidewalk next to a parking meter in Manhattan processing the fact that he had died and woken up in a body that wasn't his with a floating screen in his vision that tracked something called Lust Points.
"So I died," he said, out loud, to nobody, "and woke up in a porn game."
A woman walking a dachshund gave him a wide berth.
He poked at the interface. Not literally. He looked at LP and thought "more information" and a tooltip expanded.
LUST POINTS (LP)
Primary resource. Earned through:
Sexual encounters (scales with partner power level)Sustained desire directed at HostRelationship milestones
LP fills the level bar. Each level grants 10 stat points.
Stat points. You earned them by having sex. The better the partner, the more points. You put them into your stats and got stronger.
He closed the tooltip by thinking "close." It closed.
He tried "help." Nothing. "Tutorial." Nothing. "FAQ." Nothing. "What the fuck is going on." Nothing.
The system had no voice, no mascot, no tutorial, no wise old mentor character. Just numbers and the implication of what those numbers meant.
Troy leaned against the parking meter. Watched pedestrians flow around him and thought about what he knew.
He was dead. Or his old body was. He was alive in a new body in a city that looked like New York with a system that turned sex into stat points. He had no money, no phone, no ID, and no idea what year it was or how he'd gotten here or why he had been chosen or if "chosen" was even the right word for whatever had happened.
He also hadn't eaten in however long he'd been lying in that alley and his stomach was a fist.
He started walking.
Four blocks later he found a diner. Chrome exterior, neon sign, one of those Greek diners that New York manufactures by the dozen. The name on the awning was Olympus, which wasn't winning any awards for creativity but the smell of bacon grease coming through the open door made his new body's stomach clench.
He had no money. He went in anyway.
The place was half full. Booths along the windows, counter with stools, a TV mounted in the corner above the register playing the news. He slid into a booth near the back and picked up the laminated menu and pretended to study it while he figured out his next move.
A waitress came over. Mid-forties, pen behind her ear. "What can I get you, hon."
"Just coffee for now."
She poured it without judgment and moved on. He wrapped his hands around the mug and held on.
The TV was showing the news. He watched it without interest for a minute and then the camera cut to aerial footage of a building he recognized and his hands tightened on the mug.
Stark Tower, the actual building, standing in midtown Manhattan, the enormous A on its facade glinting in the afternoon sun, and the news anchor was saying something about a Stark Industries press conference and the ticker at the bottom of the screen read AVENGERS RESPOND TO LATVERIAN BORDER INCIDENT.
Troy stared at the TV. The footage changed. A correspondent standing outside a building with DAILY BUGLE in block letters above the door, talking about Spider-Man sightings in Queens. Then a cutaway to stock footage of Captain America shaking hands with someone in a suit in front of the UN.
He was in the Marvel universe.
He was sitting in a diner in Manhattan in the Marvel universe, where the Avengers were real and Spider-Man swung through Queens and Stark Tower stood in midtown with its big stupid A, and he had a system that ran on sex and stats that started at three and no money and no identity and no idea what day it was.
The coffee was burning his tongue. He drank it anyway.
Marvel universe. Okay. He could work with that. He knew things. Broad strokes. Movies and Wikipedia at two in the morning. He knew about the Avengers. Thanos was coming at some point, probably. Mutants existed, the X-Men were a thing, Emma Frost could read minds, and Magneto could rip the iron out of your blood if you pissed him off.
He also knew a bad day here could mean a Chitauri dropping through your ceiling or the Hulk putting a fist through your apartment building.
He was a normal human. His highest stat was a five. In charisma. In a world where Thor existed.
The waitress refilled his coffee. He hadn't asked. She was already moving to the next table.
He needed a plan. Step one: don't die. Again. Step two: figure out the system. What it could actually do for him, how fast he could level, what the stat points translated to in real terms, whether there were limits. Step three: money, shelter, a name, papers. The basics of existing as a person who technically didn't exist.
Step four, apparently, was sex. Because that's how the system worked and the system was the only advantage he had in a world that could vaporize him on a Tuesday.
He was sitting in the booth thinking about this when a woman walked past the window.
She was on the sidewalk, moving with the crowd, nothing remarkable about her. Brunette, late twenties, sundress, shoulder bag. She wasn't looking at the diner. She wasn't looking at him. She was walking and talking on her phone and eating a pretzel from a street cart and doing three things at once.
But she glanced through the glass.
Her gaze caught on him for half a second and kept moving. A half-conscious thing she'd forget by the next block.
His LP bar pulsed.
The faintest shimmer, a soft glow at the bottom edge of the bar, and a number ticked over in the corner of his vision.
LP: 1 / 100
One point.
He'd gotten one lust point because a stranger walking past a diner window had thought he was cute for half a second.
Troy stared at the number. He looked at the window. The woman was gone, swallowed by the sidewalk crowd, already past the next storefront.
One point. Out of a hundred. He needed a hundred to level up. At this rate he'd reach level two sometime around the heat death of the universe.
Or he could stop sitting in a diner and actually do something about it.
He put his hands flat on the table. Looked at his new fingers. His new forearms. The body that wasn't his but responded to him like it had been waiting for him. Charisma five. His highest stat.
The coffee had gone cold. The waitress was at the register with her back to him. The door was six steps away.
He stood up and walked out of the diner without paying for his coffee.
He'd feel bad about it later. Probably. Assuming he lived long enough for it to matter.
The crowd closed around him. Manhattan in every direction, eight million people going about their day in a city where aliens had come through the sky and a guy in a metal suit lived in a tower with his name on it.
He turned left. Kept walking.