Finch the Hero

Date: 9/27/2020

The main thing I remember is a boy with fluffy, fawn-colored hair named Finch. He lived in a mostly normal world, I think. He didn't have a fully normal life, something was always off. Things didn't get really weird until he developed gamer-like powers. I think he found a backpack that bound itself to him, & that's how he unlocked his powers or whatever. At that point, he started receiving quests. He physically couldn't turn down the quests without some kind of consequence. I think he maybe lost important things if he took too long or outright refused, like key items from his backpack. The quests were always defeating monsters that the world wasn't supposed to know existed. He had to hunt & fight & destroy them without being caught. If someone found out, it seemed like the consequence was them becoming targeted by monsters or losing things when Finch was too slow. I remember him going on a hike with a girl who loved him and a few of their mutual friends. She might have been his wife? Or. Finch, at least, knew of a timeline where she would become his wife? Something like that. They hiked along a canyon, where Finch was positive something would appear. Sure enough, he got a quest to defeat a giant crab monster &, like, a squid or something. He meant to make an excuse to go fight, but the cliff they were walking on fell into the canyon anyway. It conveniently separated everyone, so he was free to do his thing. A lot of his fighting relied on items provided by this same system, drops from previous fights. So there were game-like things with game-like names mixed in among real objects in Finch's bag. He made use of these & his gamer skills to take down monsters. He knew that the friends had started searching for him, but he had no idea where his potential wife had gone. He had a feeling she had disappeared entirely, when he was too slow to start his work. She'd been taken. He got angry at that point, which made him sloppy. The friends saw him fighting the crab. They found out about monsters & the game system & Finch himself. He angrily explained that they shouldn't have watched since they were caught up in things, now, too. They insisted that it was a good thing. It sucked that they'd be in danger, but now he wouldn't be alone. They could help him figure things out. Find monsters faster, find the potential wife at some point, figure out where all this sketchy game stuff was coming from in the first place & why it existed at all. He thanked them, & they went together to beat the squid thing. Then my memories get a bit choppier. There was a bar. Some people at the bar already knew about the game system. They warned the party that all wasn't as it seemed. Some kind of fight happened when a monster appeared in the bar. The people in the bar grumbled about being caught up in things, but didn't hassle Finch's party. The bar owner gave them some kind of hint about the system. Told them... to look for suspicious places, I think. Something along those lines. They followed that advice & went to some other places. There were more fights. More hints. I'm losing specific memories of items & clues, but they were figuring out that some places were connected to the game from the start. They were staging areas for the fights themselves. Fake. My memory gets clearer at the point where they investigated a fake school, which is where yet another person got involved in game-related things. He was a boy taller than Finch with darker brown hair that was very nearly as fluffy as Finch's. I'll call him Fido for now, bc he gave off the impression of a large & loving & loyal golden retriever. He latched into Finch as the object of his love & loyalty very soon after they began posing as students for the investigation. It was obvious that Finch loved him back. They were boyfriends who just hadn't officially started calling each other that yet, & both the game party & their school friends knew it perfectly well. The game party only suspected that maybe Fido himself was part of the game set, but they didn't want to tell Finch that until they were sure. What if it meant the same for the potential wife who still couldn't be found? What if it meant that Finch could only have fake things in his life? One day, Finch had to fight a monster at school after hours. The party suggested they do some more in-depth investigation of the school building itself while he fought. Finch reluctantly agreed. As I mentioned earlier, Fido had become involved in game things at some point. He had, in his pursuit of the boy he loved, learned about Finch's situation & immediately asked to be a member of their party. He was a bit clumsy & not especially observant, but he had a sense for when things were off. He wouldn't know why, but he'd get a feeling & it would tip off the rest of the party to take a closer look at whatever set off his sensor. This happened, specifically, in the empty art classroom while Finch was fighting elsewhere on campus. During their search, the party found a case of colored pencils neatly labeled with the names of their respective colors. The pencils rolled from where they'd been stacked on top of each other, & a party member noticed a suspicious color. It was labeled "Finch's Hair" & they swore it was the exact same color as their own Finch's actual real life hair. They all turned to Fido to confirm, since they'd seen the boys absently play with each other's hair while hanging out plenty of times. Fido barely even had to look. It was Finch's hair, beyond a shadow of a doubt. The pencil also set off his sensor like nothing else in the room. It was game-related, for sure. With the sounds of Finch's battle (against a giant, house-sized sparrow, I think) as background noise, they tried to figure out what this meant. The only titled items they knew of were drops in monster fights & level-up gifts from the game system itself. If there was a game item here, was it one of those things? Or was it just a part of the set, displaying how the system itself was conscious of Finch as its hero? Or was it a trap, set for the party to find? I never did find out. I woke up just as Fido was starting to worry that he would disappear in the same way as Finch's last love interest. I didn't get any answers, & can't fall back asleep to search for them. All I know is that if I write this as a proper story at any point, Finch will get both his love interests at the end bc love triangles suck & polycules are (generally) great. Also, I'll have to figure out the system's motives before I start the story, or else things could get way too haphazard. Until next I wander.