And Bruce blacks out. He sees two great shining crystal behemoths as big as moons travelling in space circling each other...but in more than just this dimension slipping in and out of realities. shedding scales of light that fly towards a blue world, earth. The experience cannot be comprehended by the human mind and is understood only in metaphors. The great shining bodies flying towards earth in a great spiral shedding more and more scales of light, shrinking as those scales race ahead of them to the blue gem of a world.

When he wakes up there is a cape pulling him out of the rubble and the memory of the vision fades and all that is left is a feeling of having seen something profound. The cape drags him to where the rescue workers have set up tents. seems Behemoth has been driven off by Scion and everything is over now, but by the grim faces on the capes gathered by the tents and new ones coming in with rescued people it looks like it was another fight where they lost a lot of people.

Bruce lays where he's been put and takes stock of himself. Bruises everywhere, obviously. At least one cracked rib, very probably. Scrapes and cuts in various places. A sense of disconnected awe that doesn't match his situation, that's presumably shock. All in all, a pretty unpleasant condition to be in, but not one likely to get priority from any of the medical types. Best to just lie here and wait, trying not to sleep--he doesn't think he's concussed, but it's hard to be sure with no prior experience.

An overworked looking nurse comes over to him to check on him, gives him some painkillers if he wants them and a bottle of water and one of those thin terrible and not at all useful patients robes if he wants to change out of his clothes, and a blanket. there are a LOT of refugees so they hurry off quickly.

He does want painkillers. He does not want a stupid robe. He decides he's probably not concussed, so he hauls himself and his potentially-cracked rib the handful of blocks back to his hostel. Miraculously, enough of it is still standing that he can collapse into a bed and fall asleep; he'll dig through the rubble for his possessions in the morning.

When Bruce wakes up he feels a lot better, under his clothes all the cuts and bruises have disappeared and his rib no longer hurts. Even more strangely in the center of his vision there is floating white text.

| You have 3 notifications... |

Wow, maybe he did hit his head. Or, no, he must've triggered, that's what this is, he's a parahuman with a power that does healing and floating white messages. Which doesn't make any sense, even by cape standards, but maybe it will once he reads his notifications. He tries mentally intending to open them, poking the air where the "..." appears, and muttering "open".

As he taps the floating text more text appears. 

1/3

| Achievement unlocked! |
Trigger Event: you have become a Parahuman! the scientific name for those with extraordinary abilities, capes, supers. You get the idea.

 2/3

| Perk unlocked! |
I've got the power!: you now have the power of the Goal Reward Shard. Otherwise known as The Gamer Power.

3/3

| Status effect: Rested |
Resting for 8 hours has restored you to full health and removed negative status effects. Effects removed: Adrenaline Burnout, Drugged, Exhuastion-mild

Ooookay, so his life now works on video game rules. Heh. He's Gordon Freeman. 

He notices that he did not lose a status effect for "freaked out about having had a building collapse on him", and in fact what was a perfectly adequate bottom bunk two days ago is now feeling pretty cramped. He gets up, grabs a set of less wrecked clothes, and heads to the hostel bathroom.

The only other person in there says, "Good news, the hot water and the cold water both work! Bad news, only one at a time and you can't pick which." He doesn't comment on the floating text, or seem to notice it. 

Bruce's shower is accelerated both by the state of the water and by the fact that the shower stall is even more cramped than his bunk; soon he's in the deserted common area, staring at the messages again. If nobody else can see them, are they even real light? He turns the light off and tries to see by the light of the text.

To Bruce, the text is giving off enough light to see things by if they are close to his head. If he moves his head closer to something so the text in front of him moves closer to that object, they will appear more illuminated. It acts as a normal light source nothing strange about how the light reflects off things or anything. Apart from it being floating glowing text of course.

Okay, so it's less "he's hallucinating text" and more "text only he can see". He turns the light back on and considers what to try next. Maybe his power will helpfully explain itself if he says "main menu" or "info" or "help" at it? 

|GOAL REWARD SHARD OPERATING SYSTEM V1.0| Welcome to THE GAME |

Status
Perks
Skills
Inventory
Achievements
Options
Map
Notes

A window appears with the text in nice neat boxes perfect for tapping when Bruce says Menu.

But then it vanishes when he says Help and is replaced by just plain text instead of a fancy Menu UI with this list of commands.

HelpList...

Menu
Status
Perks
Skills
Inventory
Achievements
Options
Map
Notes

Oh, wow, so many things to investigate. He looks at the help screen and tries saying "Menu".

|GOAL REWARD SHARD OPERATING SYSTEM V1.0| Welcome to THE GAME |

Status
Perks
Skills
Inventory
Achievements
Options
Map
Notes

The menu reappears! All those options and all those buttons to press, sure looks inviting.

He's going to go through them in order to make sure he doesn't miss anything. But first he's going to find something to take notes on. He hunts around and ends up with a pen and a paper towel, then gets to it, starting with "status".

Health: In good health

Stamina: Well Rested

Stats:

Strength: 8
Dexterity: 9
Constitution: 8
Intelligence: 18
Wisdom: 14
Charisma: 11

Representative stats chosen based on predicted user preference (D&D 3rd ed.), to change representative Stats to those of another system use the interface panel in the options menu.

(Stats are purely representative of your current ability, they do not affect game mechanics.)

Status Effects: none

Character description:
Dr. Bruce Banner is a recent trigger having been caught up in the Behemoth attack on Vanderhoof and is still getting used to his Parahuman abilities. Recently got a Doctorate in Biology and was looking forward to doing his Post Doctorate work. Is a huge dork.

Apparently, the Interface can tell who is a dork. who'd have thunk.

Yeah, Bruce's dorkitude is practically visible from space. He has never denied this.

He writes down his stats; that seems important and he's not ready to trust that the interface will always be available yet. Now, what's in Perks? He hopes it's got a list of the perks he can get, as well as the one he has.

PERKS:

|I've got the power!: you now have the power of the Goal Reward Shard. Otherwise known as The Gamer Power.|

There's only the one perk...for now. no list of possible perks to be seen.

Such is life. What's in "Skills"? And is "Inventory" just a list of all the objects on his person, or something more interesting?

The Skills menu is empty, that's depressing.

Inventory menu opens up a little image of Bruce with little boxes describing his Equipped clothing. And a Window with a grid with empty boxes and some text over the box grids saying:

Weight Limit: 0.00/30.00 Kilograms

Of course, the superpowers display in metric. that isn't baffling at all.

He just passed his thesis defense; his impostor syndrome is on a brief hiatus. So his actual skills are different from his power's "Skills" category, whatever. 

The metric inventory is completely unsurprising; of course it would use sensible units. If he gets up and picks up the chair he's sitting in, does its weight show up in his inventory?

Nope!

This reminds him that he needs to go dig through the collapsed half of this hostel for his backpack. He puts the chair down, heads outside, and starts hauling bits of concrete out of the area that used to be the room he was staying in. It's slow going; while he works, he goes to the help menu and looks at "Inventory" from there to see if there are notes on what counts.

HelpList just contains a plain text list of words that so far have turned out to be voice commands, nothing is on it that he didn't see before when he used the Help command. While the actual Main Menu has all the same terms on it, it has buttons to actually poke at.

But while he is hauling concrete...

|For pushing your body, you have earned +1 strength!|

Bruce can't tell if he is stronger just by feeling it from only a single point of strength gain. 

The strength gain notice is pretty neat! And since muscles ordinarily don't get stronger until they repair themselves after a workout, it also has interesting implications that he's getting the notification now.

Since the help list doesn't have additional information, he'll go back to experimenting directly (his favorite thing!). Putting a rock in his pocket? Holding it up and saying "Add rock to inventory"? Holding it so it overlaps with the grid in his vision and letting it go?

Rock in his pocket does Nada. Voice command to add rock to inventory makes the rock disappear from his fingers and an icon of a rock appears in the inventory grid with text under it that says "small rock x1". When he holds another rock up to the grid and lets it go it drops as it should, but when it falls through the inventory window it disappears into it and now the text says "small rock x2".