1. Strange Business

Jason Asano wakes naked, hairless, and disoriented on unusually soft grass within a tall, prickly hedge maze beneath a sky with two moons. A floating interface appears, issuing a quest to explore. He experiments with mental commands, opening a character sheet that labels him an Outworlder with abilities like Interface, Map, Inventory, and Mysterious Stranger.

Using the Map, Jason sees he is in the Vane Estate hedge maze and that the world map’s continents differ from Earth’s. He accesses his Inventory and retrieves a warm, red, engraved medallion labeled a transcendent World-Phoenix Token, then stows it again, realizing he can read unfamiliar writing—likely due to his Mysterious Stranger ability’s language adaptation.

Weighing implausible explanations, Jason opts to proceed cautiously, continuing to reveal the maze via the Map. A new quest announces a local infestation of lesser monsters, offering rewards for investigating and defeating them. Moments later, a large “Potent Hamster” bursts from the hedge and latches onto Jason’s head, wounding him.

Panicked, Jason tears the creature off and smashes it to death, earning quest progress and a prompt to loot the corpse. Bleeding and shaken, he recognizes the danger is tangible, and that the interface, quests, and altered world are not mere hallucinations.