Testing My Luck in the New World

When I woke, I felt relieved to see the blue sky returned to me. That woman's, that Goddess' warmth was gone, but it was replaced by the gentle embrace of the sunlight shining above me.

I was immediately sure that everything up until now was just a dream, that I simply blacked out after being hit by that truck. But when my hands moved to my temples to soothe my throbbing headache, I felt blades of grass still wet with morning dew lap at my fingertips. I turned my hand over to confirm the dampness with my eyes and realized there had been some truth to the dream after all.

I knew there had to be something to it. There was no grass anywhere near where I was hit.

I sprang up into a sitting position and saw that I was in an unfamiliar forest, surrounded by trees and bushes similar enough to those from my home world to not feel out of place, but just different enough to notice. But that wasn't what cemented the fact that I had moved on from my old life.

A rustling that came from one of the nearby bushes stole my attention away from my thoughts. Scooting back a little, I waited with baited breath to see what it was. I was already hoping for something fantastical. Something that would not only confirm the Goddess' truth, but that would allow me to accept my new fate.

Before long, an animal I had never seen before popped out from between the leaves. A small ball of white fur trampled the grass with a couple half jumps into the sunlight. It looked mostly like a rabbit, but only mostly. The large antlers on its head pegged it as something that did not exist in my old world.

It hopped around innocently, its nose twitching as it sniffed around for food, prodding the occasional leaf or fallen branch or patch of grass, likely smell-testing which would taste best, until it spotted me and froze. It just looked at me.

When I focused on it, curious as to why a snow-white rabbit would be found in a lush, green forest, a small box that looked like a window prompt on a computer screen appeared above its head with the words "Jack Rabbit" in its center and a long red bar running across its bottom. I recognized it immediately as the name of the species and the red bar as a symbol of its current health.

"Amazing..."

The Goddess was telling the truth.

While it could have been possible that I was in an exceedingly realistic virtual reality game, I had my doubts. The grass beneath me felt too much like how I knew it to feel. The cool, gentle breeze that swept through my hair also brought the refreshing scent of the forest to my nose. I could hear the almost relaxing sounds of the forest, birds chirping and flying away, the light strain of branches where the wind caught the leaves of one of the many tall trees and rustled them, a far cry from the autumn world I left, and of the rabbit's rapid sniffing of the air. When it tilted its head curiously at me, the thick fur coating its body swayed in the wind.

I had no knowledge of any sort of virtual reality game that could be this detailed. Not that I ever really tried any out. To me, they were just a bunch of sub-par games wrapped up in promises of a virtual world that alone would be worth your hard-earned money. They weren't worth the time, so I had no experience with them that could truly allow me to compare to the sensations greeting me now.

Unable to tell if this was a game, dream or reality, I pinched my cheek just to make sure and ...

"Ouch!"

The rabbit froze stiff at my cry and bolted back into the bush where it came from.

"Amazing."