You've died.

You can't quite remember how it happened, you remember screaming and the crunching noise of metal on metal. You remember feeling pain and scared for only a split second. The glitter of crushed glass beneath your collapsing body. And then... Then what?

<span class="mu-i">Then nothing.</span>

You die and then you wake up.

Cold silk. The soft drip of rain drops against large windows. The muffled, chaotic heartbeat of a grand estate in full movement, like a buzzing hive. People laughing all around you, you're surrounded by a crowd of men and women dressed in elegant clothes; talking to you, smiling to you, vying for your attention.

You flinch, and everything is wrong: the portrait on the wall, the candlelight, your dress... You know these details. You've seen them before... not in life, but in fiction.

So shocked, in fact, that you've dropped the glass of wine you'd been holding mere seconds before, and it breaks on impact, splashing the wide, long skirt of your dress with red like a blood stain. Everyone's attention is on you. And a handsome man with dark hair and dressed in an old-fashioned military uniform approaches, handkerchief in hand.

He talks, but your head's roaring, and can't really focus on what he says. You're panicking, you need to get out.

He tries to get you to stay still, and you pull away, choking, suffocating. You need to get out. You need to escape. Panic's got it's ice-cold grip around your throat, around your heart and you manage to pull away, but whoever this man is he seems to understand what's happening and instead of forcing you to stay he herds you out into a balcony overseeing a beautiful rose garden that surrounds the manor you're in.

There's no denying it anymore. You're in <span class="mu-s">Crimson Grace of the Rose Bride</span> a game you played back in... Back in the <span class="mu-i">before</span>.

is this true? europeans dont think they are white and would rather infight? are they retarded lol

Jail Quest: a text adventure occasionally illustrated.

A night of drinking and a failed attempt to cheat on cards had landed you the strangest job slash community service sentence you've ever had: ensuring Gongalla Gaol survives the reality storm called Singularity.

Now you travel around with your employer and a handpicked crew to survey the four Reality Anchors. Hey, beats being tarred and feathered, right?

Previous thread:
https://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/qstarchive/2025/6274911/

Gongallaverse:
https://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/qstarchive.html?tags=Gongalla%20Gaol

You suddenly jolt wide awake in an unfamiliar room, with no recollection of the past few hours. It even took you a few seconds to remember you are Rosa Montagni, and another few seconds to realize the other person in the room is your crewmate, Valencio. Slowly, hazy recollections piece together a loose narrative of previous events: you've reached Viridis, the first leg of your journey to the East's Reality Anchor, when you receive news that your go-to destination slash transport, the walking city Freeport, had problems with its engine. Then you were sidetracked into a casino, where you played cards and unwittingly aided a truant Hexbourne student against a haughty twin Hexbourne students sent to retrieve him. Then you got entangled in a complex emotional... something with the casino owner, Don Bosco. Something about your mentor, Sierra (no relation to Sierra, the deity of the South anchor) and copious amounts of drinking? That must be why your memory's so hazy.

<span class="mu-s">Our bittersweet farewell to youth.</span>

“The Southlands.” That’s what the races of the Northwest call them, as if they were one place—a realm unified under a single nation or people. In truth, the Southlands are a molten mosaic of humans, beastmen, and sundry others flowing over and through each other in coexistence and in conflict. The land itself is a tapestry of desert and jungle, of low savannah and high plateau, where even the Race of Man is far from uniform: the hides of the humans here range from a ruddy tan to a deep blue-black that nearly equals the Drow of Wevenore.

Not that you got to see much of it.

<span class="mu-s">You</span> are James Efron, Senior Initiate of the Hawksong Mages’ Tower. At your age—twenty-three—you really ought to be a Mage Apprentice. You should be studying in some stuffy laboratory back home in the big city like Izirina Henzler, or maybe taking a practicum under some smaller adjunct Associate Tower like your old pal Testa. But <span class="mu-i">nooo</span>, you craved a life of action, of adventure! ‘<Fireball> is meant for the field!’ you used to boast of your favourite spell. So you’d taken the field, first as a formal Field Researcher and then later as a freelance adventurer-for-hire.

And that had led you here. To the Southlands. To this dungeon.

It isn’t the cool kind of dungeon, full of monsters to kite and <Chain Lightning> for coin, alas. It’s the kind where Southrons store their prisoners-of-war, for that seems to be the size of your sad situation: a prisoner, at the beginnings of what is shaping up to be a full-scale intercivilizational conflict.

The Men of the South may be myriad, but tensions between their ilk and the fairer folk of the Northwest—your homeland, Hawksong’s aegis—have been a unifying cause as of late, and not only for the human races. Relations have been fraying since before you were born, when a sinister cabal of dark-skinned demon-worshippers staged a terrorist attack on the Mages’ Tower itself, assassinating the Archmage and destroying the much-beloved Eternal Fountain.

Test

"We should keep moving and catch up to the NPC. My transformation only lasts a minute and we should make the most of it." You say motioning to the next cave entrance. Ryuji nods and tears his glaive free from the zombie just as Irene finishes her trance. The three of you regroup and begin to run through the cave system once more, all pretense of stealth lost. Not helping was the fact that Ryuji was constantly gushing and asking questions about your abilities.

"What else can you do? How long is the cooldown? What buffs do you get? Did the coat come with the costume?" He asks, eagerness overtaking any sense of restraint on his curiosity. "I don't know anyone who's ever gotten this far!" He concludes. You suppress a small sigh building up. You had expected him to explode with excitement given his love of the game but you hadn't really expected to see him get this excited. Still, you couldn't help but share a bit of his enthusiasm. How long had it been since you had eagerly spoken about the game with someone just as passionate instead of trying to avoid the conversation with non-answers? You pull back your helm, allowing it to fold back behind your head and somehow vanish causing Ryuji to let out a noise that sounded like a mix between a squeal and roar of excitement.

"It folds back..." He manages to eek out.

"It's on a 5 minute cooldown. So it's really more of a boss fight kind of ability though right now I don't think we have the luxury to hold back big CDs. While I'm in this form, these are considered two handed weapons." You say raising your fists. Ryuji's jaw drops.

"Waitwaitwait. You're dealing two hander damage with your fists alone? I've seen how fast you can swing those things and you're telling me they can hit as hard as a warhammer?" He asks.

"Yup. Only while transformed though. Untransformed I have the Brawler's [Powerful Fist] skill but it seems to scale better because I can't really wield anything else." You continue. "Also, I'm considered to be wearing light armored outside of my transformation and medium while transformed. Stacks with the bit of damage reduction my class gives. Class seems to give me a handful of abilities from other classes to pick from on level up but it seems to lean towards fighter and brawler skills." You pause for a moment. "But I get this feeling that there's more to it. Almost like the game is keeping note of what I do and adjusting for it. I got a weird quest regarding another player on the tutorial island and now I'm expected to grow under strife, whatever that means. For the moment it seems my class progression is locked until I meet some kind of requirement. Nothing about this class is straight forward and the power seems to compensate for it." You say, drawing your helmet back on. "If I'm honest...that's the fun part."

You are a young woman, who one day wakes up invisible. You don’t know how, you don’t know why, and maybe you don’t want to know.

In this story, you play as the invisible girl. Maybe you want to know why this happened and find a way to turn back.

Or maybe you don’t want to visible just yet, and take full advantage of your status.

But first, who is the woman?

Name: _____
Age: : _____
Appearance: : _____
Location (where does she find out she’s invisible?: _____
Background (who is she?) : _____

Hey, hey people. Yog here.

Recently, I have been consuming works of the highest form of literature, which is to say: isekai light novels. Now, you might ask me: "Yog, how can you consider this low brow weeaboo garbage literature, let alone its highest form?" and aside from all literary works being the ramblings of people half as clever as they think they are, I would answer you this: There is something beautifully self-indulgent how the genre is delightfully unapologetic in serving up what the readers desire.

The readers want a protagonist they can reflect their personalities onto? Well, this guy's personality has been polished away to a mirror sheen.

They want a loving harem of 10/10 beauties with chests that come in all shapes and sizes? A new girl will be produced to specifications with each passing volume.

They want to uplift the ignorant savages into the modern era? Don't you worry, no one has ever conceived of crop rotation, let alone the four fields system pioneered by Charles Townshend in the 18th century.

Every minute detail catered to the whims and fetishes of the readers, with the most popular garbage rising up to the top of trash heap and receiving the honor of an official publication. We do in fact love to see it. We love to see it so much, in fact, that today I have decided to engage in a little bit of isekai nonsense myself.

Just a little, though. Mrs. Yog-Sothoth doesn't like it when I poke too many holes in the fabric of the space time continuum. She says "Yog, my dear, you keep doing that and the whole universe will unravel", and who am I - a humble streamer of the 21st Dimension - to argue?

After all, my dear wife is many things: tallow skinned, silver haired, the sole heiress of some simply huge tracts of land in the state of Massachusetts, a loving sugar-mama with a very generous trust fund (thank you Old Whateley for your wise investments), possessing of an adorable horn growing from her brow, with bags under her eyes from the countless sleepless nights from... let's call it "knowing the unknowable" and move on.

But, most importantly, she's right.

Which is why I'm not going to pluck some poor salaryman from his cushy office job, or open a portal for some everyman college student to walk through on his way to class. No, my dear readers, it is you who will get to be the anime girl in this story. Our protagonist will be created, whole cloth, with no backstory other than your poor decisions.

Now, where do you want to start?
>Kick things off right from birth, changeling style.
>You got summoned by the King to be his political paw- I mean, the hero, of course.
>You got summoned by the Demon King to be his bride, because he has a human woman fetish.
>You seemingly came into being in an alley. There are no suspicious circumstances involved here, trust me.
>You got "reincarnated" as some sort of monster. Don't worry, you'll get a cute anime girl form later.
>Don't like any of those? Write it in.

You're Tupolev, the Merchant. All your peers warned you to stay away from the Misty Mountains for strange things happen there.

But you saw a profit opportunity during war time by going through the mountains to avoid the worst of the fight.

However, by the time you left the mist, the land was unrecognizable.

None of your old maps made any sense anymore.

You sent some scouts out and they confirmed - you're in uncharted territory somehow.

The question that remains is: what did you bring to these strange lands?