She spots the truck the moment before it hits her, and has the time to begin the word, "Fu-" before she is struck, and swiftly thereafter unconscious. She doesn't even have the time to have regrets.

And thus another soul enters the cycle of death. Off to go to where dead earthlings go, probably nowhere nice, maybe just oblivion.

…Not this time! Yoink! 

The soul is now no longer wherever dead souls from earth should be, but is instead on a desk in what anyone would recognise as a wizards study, filled with magical gizmos and arcane books laying on every available surface. The dead girls soul is not at all behaving the way dead souls are supposed to, instead of being incorporeal and not an actual thing you can interact with, the girls soul is now a sparkly indistinct person shaped blob on a desk in that wizards study. The shiny blob is about the same size as the pencils on the desk.

“Hmmm…. Another one from Earth…”

A wizened old man with a powerful aura is examining the souls it just pilfered from neighbouring universes. A hand the size of a shipping container is holding up the dead girls soul while similarly giant eyes peer at her essence.

”Good potential… Courageous and Kind… Terrible liar though, not ideal.” The giant old man pokes at the shining figure with one bony finger, then recoils as if burned. “HAH! The righteous fury on this one! Hot enough to burn the heavens! Oh yes this one will do nicely.”

The old man gets up from his desk and brings the soul blob to the window. The window looks out onto a void so deep even a complete lack of light is blinding compared to the level of nothingness this window looks out over. The wizened old figure reveals a surprising amount of flexibility as he brings back the arm holding the soul like a baseball pitcher, and flings it into the void at blinding speeds.

”Let’s see if that bastard can still enjoy his precious tragedy when I introduce an actor without a script. Hee hee hee.” The old man cackles to himself as he heads back to his desk, to examine another shining soul.

Alex Morcant is now suddenly not dead! Back inside a body and everything. No more being a strange shiny soul blob person. Not that she would remember that, you do need a brain to form new memories, and shiny soul blobs don't have those.

But she has a brain now, along with all the other normal parts of her human body, and once roused to consciousness will find herself in an idyllic grassy hill surrounded by picturesque farm fields.

There will also be a UI box in the corner of her vision that says [2 notifications pending].

-she wakes with a gasp that turns into a coughing fit. A quick scramble brings her up from the ground, hands splayed in front of her, holding her up as she looks frantically around, searching for the truck, the street, the people- and seeing nothing of the sort. What-? How-?

Where is she?

Her attention turns to the box in the corner of her vision. Two... What?

It’s still there! In the lower right corner of her vision. [2 notifications pending]

As for where she is, she is on a lovely grassy hill with some very pretty flowers scattered around, and further away there’s some fields of crops. Recognisable crops like wheat and pumpkins and vines that might be for grapes or tomatoes or something. There’s a little dirt path by the farm plots leading away. The area is mostly flat with scattered farm plots and the odd gentle hill with shining green grass and flowers. Way far away on the horizon are some snow capped mountains.

This whole area could be the desktop background of someone really into cottage core, it’s a very pretty landscape.

...pretty, but not even kind of where she was before. You've gotta go a few hours west before you start to see a hint of the mountains. And hills like these... Not where she comes from.

And there's still that... Thing. In the corner of her eye.

"...notifications?" She asks herself more than anything, reading off the word.

The notification disappears and a new UI window appears in the middle of her vision!

1/1

|You have not been delivered to the correct afterlife. As recompense for any inconvenience this has caused, you have been given compensation. GAME INTERFACE UNLOCKED. Please use (or develop) a local form of interdimensional communication to contact the dev team with any complaints or feedback. - SysAdmin1

 

[this has been an automated message] |

Under that message is a smaller UI window.
2/2

| Status effect removed: Dead. |
You are no longer Dead. Full health restored.

And in the corner of her vision the notification box pops up again.

[1 new notification!]

Dead. She's no longer dead?!

This is. Not the form she'd been expecting insanity to take. Not that expecting insanity to be anything in particular makes sense, probably, but still.

With birdsong as her backdrop, she says, "Notifications?" Again, just... To see where this goes.

Here comes another UI window!

| Perks unlocked! |
I've got the power!: Your life can be lived like a game! You now have the power of the Game Interface. Allows you limited access to the settings.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger!: Your body is now your Avatar. You now have bars to track things like HP and other resources. You have Character Stats. Your Avatar functions on Game Logic. 

A red bar appears in the upper left of her vision!

It is accompanied by a green bar just underneath it!

Someone who has played or seen people play videogames since 1995 could probably guess red is for Health Points and green is for Stamina or Energy.

...Lex has never been a big gamer by any stretch of the term. There'd been no money in her budget for game systems, not since she was a little kid when her mom bought the family a Playstation. The old console died years ago. Most of the games she'd played had been at the houses of friends.

She can pretty much figure out what the box is saying, though.

"...settings," she tries, her eyes catching on that word.

A new UI window! What a surprise. 

Settings:

Graphics

Audio

Interface and UI

Accessibility

Difficulty and Balance

The window actually flickers for a second before it stabilises, now showing:

Settings:

Graphics

Audio

Interface and UI

Accessibility

She squints at the text. What was that-? Difficulty and-

Whatever this is doesn't want her to be able to put it on easy mode, then.

...she doesn't like that it changed. She's not sure what about that is so ominous, but something about it is.

"Difficulty?" She tries, seeing if she can still call up the vanished option.

No new UI windows.

A cute bunny rabbit is hopping around the pumpkin patch thats near the bottom of the hill shes on, the birds are singing, a big fat bumblebee is poking around one of the flowers, the air smells faintly of manure from the farms.

She was kind of trying to ignore the inexplicable environment for the other inexplicable thing, but the buzzing of the nearby bee draws her attention away.

There's fields, out in the distance. A clear sign of civilization. However she got here, and whatever insanity she's been infected with, she should really go find out where she is soonest.

She rises to her feet, looking around for any kind of path leading downwards.

The hill isn’t all that tall, or steep. Heading down is trivial. The bunny notices her as she heads down and runs off to hide.

There is little stream down by the farm plots, probably what was used to irrigate them. Theres also a dirt path. In one direction of the path the land slightly slopes upwards, and there seems to be slightly less farmed land and more picturesque grassy fields. In the other direction of the path there seems to be more farms, and the land slopes down in the direction the little stream is flowing.

Maybe there’s a little dirt house visible downstream? Or that might just be a dirt hill. From this distance what could be a doorway could also just be a bit of broken trunk or a rock.

Dirt houses aren't really a thing anymore, she's pretty sure? Not anywhere near where she lives. Sod houses were common like a hundred years ago but now?

Anyway, she wants to try for some kind of population center if possible, not just walk up to some strange person's door. Are there any signs of a town one way or the other at all?

Not easily visible from where she is! The trend in number of farms and plausible houses in one direction might be a hint. Little paths also tend to link up with bigger ones and not exist all on their lonesome.

All sorts of things could be hidden by the gently rolling hills or the rows of trees planted as windbreaks to protect the farms.

She'll... go in the direction of the farms, then.

Is there anyone else on the path? Or out in the fields?

After walking down the path a while, there is a really short person working on a wheat field that she can spot. The wheat stalks tower over them so she almost didn’t see them. They don't look like a person with dwarfism, the proportions are of a typical person, just really short, maybe just over 3 feet tall. Someone might think they were a child from a distance if not for the moustache. He seems to be checking the stalks for something.

...well.

She thinks there's other forms of dwarfism?? But this is the third unlikely thing to have happened since she woke up, it's probably not wrong to think something bigger is going on here.

Regardless of the person's height, she still needs to figure out where she is.

"Hello?" She calls out over the rippling wheat.

The short man turns to face the voice and looks where he thinks someones head height is supposed to be, and blinks surprised when he has to lift his head even further to meet her eyes. 

“Oh hello there, not often we get tallfolk round these parts. You seem to have ended up a fair bit off the main road to Bree, lass.”

He comes out of the wheat so he can have a proper conversation with this stranger. Sunburnt cheeks, expressive brown eyes and a well groomed moustache greet her. His overalls are definitely homespun and not machine made. He looks friendly enough, if a bit confused as to why anyone is so far out from the main road and in his farms. But this tallfolk lady doesn’t have any baskets or a cart or anything so it’s unlikely she is here to steal crops. 

"Um." Tallfolk? That suggests there's more people around here who are his height. Still not going to ask, yet. "I don't know this area." That's an understatement. "Is Bree the nearest town?"

Lex's clothes are decidedly machine-made. Dark jeans, a cotton t-shirt, and a black leather jacket on top, her sturdy work boots rounding out the outfit. Her hair is long - she'd been letting the length go for a little while - and a brown so dark it might as well be black, tied at the neck with a black elastic hair-tie, and while she has something of a tan, it's not the kind of tan that would suggest she's done much working in the sun. Her hands would corroborate the comparatively gentle life that suggests; she has calluses, but mostly ones caused by extensive pen use, playing a stringed instrument, and punching people. She has a few scars, but the little ones on her knuckles are the only ones visible.

Well if she didn’t come from Bree, where did she come from? That’s the closest place for a tallfolk to come from. The farmer suffers from visible confusion.

”Well the Shire is is where you are. Just Bree is where you tallfolk come from usually.”

He doesn’t have much opinion on her clothes, he hasn’t noticed them all that much, just that the leather jacket looks terribly expensive to make. She seems pretty healthy too, no missing teeth and well looked after skin. Probably wealthy, merchants daughter perhaps, not that he is the sort to pry overmuch into that sort of thing. Not really his business.

”Down the path the way you were going is the main road. Left is towards Bree wich is further away, right is towards the town of Hobbiton, which is not far away at all. But no Men there, it’s all Hobbits in the Shire. Not that tallfolk aren’t welcome to visit, just nobody has tallfolk sized things for you is all.” 

He wonders how she got almost all the way to Hobbiton without passing Bree. He doesn’t even know what is past Bree other than vaguely the kings lands from the old stories.

"I don't think I came from the Shire, either. I woke up on a hillside up the path, and I don't know how I ended up there, but it wasn't my idea."