One moment you are minding your own business in your own world. The next moment your vision turns white like an inverted fainting spell. Your stomach lurches as the ground drops from under you and a familiar sense of free fall hits your stomach. Except an overwhelming dizziness besets your mind as you fall straight back, like someone yanked you through space by your sternum.

Honestly, maybe they did.

Did you use any drugs recently?

Game Rules

- Anyone can join and leave this thread at any time.

- You can pick any human, creature, or item that has not been instantiated by another writer.

- If you want to write the next tag, then write the word "LOCK" in your post, and post this immediately. This signals to other writers that you are currently writing. Then edit this tag with the actual content you want to write.

- There should only be 1 LOCK placeholder at any one time in the thread. If you see two consecutive LOCK placeholders, then the writer who was last should delete their entry. Once the first LOCK has been instantiated with text, you can try again and put in your placeholder.

- Only write LOCK if you are actually sitting down to write. If a LOCK stays up unedited for more than 10 minutes, I might remove it to unlock the thread. The time limit will be arbitrarily enforced cause time zones and things.

- Try to write your posts so multiple people can plausibly respond to it. In practice - cause this is a free for all - there will likely not be much conversational flow, as the character you are trying to talk to is likely not controlled by the next writer who posts in the thread

As your vision clears, you find yourself standing on a rough hewn surface of marbled rock shot through with purple veins of slow-moving ichor. Around you lie three crumpled bodies, slowly moving and breathing, in a variety of clothing.

In front of you stands what looks like a man, dressed in red robes with a deep cowl. His hand is white knuckled from gripping a wood and iron-wrought staff, topped by a four-sided circle. Each of the four sides has a glowing creature next to it. The pattern matches the four-sided circular stone set at the base of the portal behind his back, except the creatures don't match.

He is arguing with his four compatriots, clearly younger and less experienced.

"Everything is FINE. We can stabilize the portal and prove our worth. We just need to capture these four ...", he cuts off as he notices you.

Story Premises

- You can pick any human, creature, or item that has not been instantiated by another writer. No one else will be able to control it throughout the story.

- You can pick any human, creature, or item in the environment that has been described so far, or you can arbitrarily have your character arrive in a portal that appears where ever you like. Your character then isekai's in to the setting from their home world, this will have happened randomly and unexpectedly to them, and they will have the same experience of teleporting in as the character described in above.

- All isekai characters can make any part of the portal world "more like their home world" in any way you like, provided that that part of Eshik hasn't been described yet by someone else. E.g., if you isekai from Earth, and your character is the first to walk in to a room in the temple, then that room might suddenly be an earth-like amusement park. (if you are wondering how the geometry works here, we are using Encanto-style spatial logic... buildings with closed off spaces are just graphs of connected rooms, with no plausible spatial relationships outside of that)

- If you character has native teleportation or portal magic or other displacement powers, these do not work in Eshik.

- There is no reason for the characters from different writers to be kind to each other. You can fight or form coalitions or ignore each other or do some other fourth or fifth thing.