"Oh my GOD! Can you please keep this thing out of our ass?!" I shouted at the overpowered idiot of our party while keeping my own ass away from the flames.
"Not MY fault that SOMEONE thought poking a dragon was a good idea!" They shouted back, staring dagger at the last idiot.
"And not MY fault that it woke up!" the last idiot argued back, "Blame the clairvoyant they didn't warn me!"
The flame grazed my fleeing back, "Just- Just do something before it burns us alive!"
===================
Yep, that was me. You probably wonder how I got into that situation.
Geez, now I feel like I'm in one of those cheap superhero movies.
Anyway, my life's been going down the drain for the past few years, and at this point I would argue it was better than whatever mess I was in right now.
Lost a friend here, failed a subject there, got a maniac on a powertrip on my ass somewhere else… It wasn't *terrible*, but it definitely wasn't the best.
Then came the illness. Long story short it's something terminal, called Moritum es- something, I don't really care. I just hope the doctors know what they are doing.
Since then my life was basically school, part-time job, hospital, home.
The routine was… calming. The death was getting nearer and the only variance in it was with whom in the school I chatted that day.
One day though, it changed.
Drastically.
===================
"Huh? What?"
Before me stood a screen. Slight blue tint, mostly transparent, neat white frames.
The name instantly came to my head.
'A System'
But there was no way, right?
'A system?'
'Is it getting worse with me? '
'Is my illness making me hallucinate now?'
Those were the thoughts running through my head.
I tapped it, it responded, a slight tick as if I was hitting an acrylic panel or something similar.
"Great. Just amazing. Visual, auditory, and sensory hallucinations. Couldn't be better." My eyes stared at the thing, "At least I'm sane enough to know it's getting bad with me."
Without another word I turned around from it and walked away.
.
.
.
The screen stayed. It never vanished, it just floated in place where I found it for the last few days.
People have walked through it, no one seemed to be able to see it.
I even went to get a brain scan just to confirm nothing bad was happening, and it wasn't.
The system screen seemed to be genuine.
I have tried to get closer to it multiple times for the last week, but it also didn't seem to be sentient, and if it was, it wasn't the parasite yandere kind of sentient.
But you know what they say: "Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back."
With that in mind I began to interact with the thing.
Just like I explained before, it was a simple window. The white lines marking the borders gave it a slick and futuristic look, while the slight transparency made it look like a hologram.
The more important thing was its side, 5 tabs named "Chatroom, Shop, Trade, Mission, Settings", they all expanded a little bit more after clicking them but it wasn't the strangest of things.
The most important tab was "New Members - Invite New Members".
Yes, it was a chatroom system. Straight out of a crappy fanfic.
With nothing else really important in my life, I grabbed the screen and dragged it back to my home.
===================
The Invite New Members tab was a fun read. It seems that the system itself has already chosen people I could invite, gave them stupid nicknames, and decided to give the causative power to me.
The caveat? I need to decipher who those people are, assuming of course that they are all fictional characters from popular works.
Some I clocked instantly, [50% Poliester] was probably Ryūko Matoi, [Mongrel] was King Gilgamesh, while [Faker] was EMIYA.
But there were more problematic ones.
[The Chosen Undead] while most probably the protagonist of Dark Souls, could be multiple other characters, same went for the [Skeleton], I don't want to invite Sans Undertale into something like the Chat Group.
[Black Sheep] could also be multiple characters, from an exemplary thief to… literal sheeps.
With nothing better to do I scrolled the list, trying to clock the most sane people I could get to join, slowly getting rid of the nicknames one by one until I was left with only five.
[Slime's Chosen] was 90% Shizue Izawa from the isekai series Tensura. I chose her mostly because of the valuable resources from that world that I could maybe trade?
Honestly, I'm actually thinking I'm insane. Am I really starting a multiversal chatroom with fictional characters?
After shaking my head I went back to the invites.
[Black Sheep], while it could be literally any character who didn't fit in their group, I placed my bet on the on-the-nose naming and hoped for an expert thief instead. Fingers crossed.
[MyTwinIsBetterThanMe] I admit was… a gamble. There are multiple characters with this exact dynamic out there, and I just hoped for a good result.
[50% Poliester] ... I think we will just skirt out of this one, okay?
And last but not least was [Lover of Sword Lover], and while it could be multiple girls or women, all of them should be useful in whatever happens in the future. Also, magecraft is cool, fight me on that.
With that out of the way, I hit send and watched the beautiful flock of "Welcome new member [insert the members username]" messages.