I awoke in a flying airship.
This does not make any sense under any guided principle. The last thing I remember, I was in my room, loading up to speedrun the biggest RPG game ever produced. To go from start to end by speedrunning it in and of itself takes forty-something hours, requiring breaks. My weekend was essentially ruined by the fact I had somehow been transported into the game itself.
Nevertheless, I was stuck. In a game. One I knew every little bit, every nook and cranny. This was good. What was bad was the fact that most likely - actually incredibly likely - was that if I died in game, I was a goner too in the real world.
Enough of that though. Now it was time to figure out whether or not the laws of a game engine applied in my new reality.
See, the airship was quite massive, as it was transporting thousands of the most intelligent, gifted, and quite frankly filthy rich teenagers the world had to offer. It was adorned with emblems of the academy, along with food stations everywhere, though the price was exorbitant. And obviously, even if I was hungry, I could never even pay those prices, especially with the amount of money you start out with. Every dollar counts.
I walked to the back, where there was a long staircase leading to the second floor of the airship. See, in game, whenever you tried to go up you were blocked by an invisible barrier, as well as a message that reads: You cannot enter here at this moment...
That message appears at every out of bounds location in the game, even if you couldn't access the area in the future.
Once I reached the staircase, I began to walk up it, step by step, bracing for an invisible barrier that inevitably sends me flying downward. And yet, to my little bit of surprise, I made it to the second floor. This was big because it meant two things:
1. There is no out of bonds locations that will stop me.
2. There is no out of bonds locations that will stop me from breaking everything.
Emphasis on number 2 here. This is big. See, sometimes when you play literally any game, you get held back by out of bounds. This means for example, if you want to press a lever, but you can't usually because you haven't talked to an NPC, this logic simply doesn't apply now. I can just press down the lever.
I decided to walk back downstairs. I knew that most likely the airship was going to land sometime soon. But I had one last thing to check. Which character I was put in as. If I was a random extra (random character with zero application to the story) it would be easy to get through the academy portion, but a pain in the ass once the academy portion was over. However, if I got a character with even a sliver of relevance, it meant that I wouldn't struggle as much.
I walked over to one of the long mirrors on the airship walls, and what I saw astounded me.
I was a girl.
I was probably given one of the best hands I could've been dealt.
I was not an extra - but I also was not one of the main characters. I was a side character, someone who almost acts out of the shadows. And lucky for me, with my game knowledge, this would be a piece of cake.
Or so I thought.