by Lucent Steele
The Corporation has a standard procedure for uplifting civilizations. Step One: Observe the culture.Step Two: Design a tailored System.Step Three: Deploy. The Skarn have done it millions of times. But they’ve never done it drunk. Earth’s alcohol culture is light-years ahead of anything the Skarn have encountered. Before long they are behind schedule and over budget as they spend all their time performing Cultural Immersion Research. But when Corporate sets a deadline, the Skarn are forced to rush the rollout of Earth’s brand-new RPG System while three sheets to the solar wind. Eight billion people are ripped from reality and dumped into a mandatory tutorial filled with hastily assembled modules and shifting rules. Rhett Graves puts every free point into Charisma. The System gives him a passive skill it has to rename for HR reasons, and makes him a Bard. Now he's leading his party through the raid dungeon they must conquer to return home. Meanwhile, every attempt the Skarn make to fix the System creates another problem, and they still have an entire planet to transform before Corporate discovers how badly the project has gone. Welcome to your tutorial.The entire thing is a fiasco.And the admins are still drunk.
