Isekaiiiiii
“Alright, Gwen.” She repeated to herself, bracing her hands on the sink as she leaned forward, “You got this. Today you’re going to walk out that door and Get. A. Job.”
The scales were not in her favor. She had no resume. No portfolio. No practical skills or education to speak of. She didn’t even have a diploma or a GED.
But if childhood movies had taught her anything, it was possible to succeed at anything if she just put her mind to it.
And she’d tried to do that. She’d tried to focus and commit to it. But it simply wasn’t working. Gwen just wasn’t built for constant work. It made her feel wrung out and exhausted to even spend more than an hour thinking about this. Let alone getting anything done about it.
Not this time, though. Today she was getting shit done.
“Gwen, if you aren’t out of the house in five minutes, I’m going to need help with the dishes!” Her mother called out from downstairs.
“I’m out, I’m out!” She called, slinging a backpack over her shoulders, and taking the stairs two at a time and running past Teddy, who was blearily shoveling a bowl of cereal into his mouth, “Wish me luck, Teddy!”
“Is a squid bag really the best thing you want to take to a possible job application?” He asked.
“I don’t have any other bags, and now you’re making me freak out anymore, so thanks!” She said in a rush, slamming the front door behind her.
One day of pounding the pavement, and she had visited every local store in a three-block radius. Bodegas, bookstores, comic stores, video game stores, crafts, clothes, and coffee and tiny restaurants willing to overlook her utter lack of culinary experience.
Not a single one seemed promising. Most weren’t looking for employees. Some were sympathetic but couldn’t take her on. Others let her fill out applications. One had told her point blank that ‘she didn’t fit the vibe’. So that still stung.
Now she was on her last option. Her most desperate one.
“Come on, dude, please tell me you’re hiring!” She begged the guy who ran the comic book store that lay on her way from school, “I can tell how much any comic is worth on sight!”
He rolled his eyes, used to Gwen’s mannerisms, but he still looked interested, “Okay then, someone brought this in recently. How much would you give for it?” He put a slim comic in front of her.
She picked it up gingerly, flipping it open, “It’s a Deadpool, recent, too, so it’s not going to be worth much. The Secret Secret Wars, huh? Looks like a variant cover, but no one’s on it-”
Where Deadpool should have been on the cover was an empty beach floaty. Not the regular thing for variant covers.
“It’s strange-” She began, taking care not to crumple anything as she tapped the empty chair.
Big mistake.
It started glowing.
The comic book guy’s jaw dropped in confusion as light expanded outwards, wrapping around her and pulling her inside the comic.
It dropped to the floor.
The chair on the cover was no longer empty.
Gwen was writing a fanfiction for the ages. It was going to be really high concept. The best thing to grace the hallowed halls of AO3’s Marvel Page, really.
She’d been quietly obsessing for the past five years, and now it was time for all that pent up nerdiness to condense into a work of literary fiction!
“That’s very nice, Gwen. But you gotta tell me what the story’s about.” Teddy reminded her.
“Right, right.” She laughed, trying to regain her train of thought, “So, the plan is that it’s about Ms. Marvel and Spider-Man – the Miles Morales one – and they’re going to going up against these constructs popping out from computers, based on the type of fanfiction that is being written about them, in-universe.”
“Mhm, keep going.” He encouraged, but his eyebrows were creasing in that way he only did when he didn’t see any potential in a project moving forward.
Gwen had begun writing fanfiction when she was thirteen. And after that first click of the button, she’d never really stopped. That was, between playing games and hanging out with friends and reading comic books and yes studying sometimes, too.
Through it all, Teddy had been the de facto beta reader. But now, she thought she was kind of wearing out his patience. Had to proceed with caution. They were walking home from school right now, so that meant she at least had a set limit of ten minutes to make her case. She had to make it worth it.
“It’s actually got a lot of thematic and character-based tension, you see, because we’re going to be exploring the general public’s opinion about superheroes, and what they represent to them.” She began to ramble, the excitement of the concept making her forget entirely about her promise to ease him into it, “And I’m hoping to show how that conflicts with their own internal image of themselves, plus you they want people to see them, because identity has always been a major part of both Miles and Kamala’s storylines and-”
Mid-rant, she looked up, not at anything in particular, just some movement that had caught her attention as they crossed the street like they had a hundred times before.
She froze, staring at the giant, articulated truck barreling down this narrow street at speed way too high to be legal. It showed no signs of stopping. The world seemed to slow as she stared at Teddy. And then tackled him out of the way.
Or at least she tried to do that.
The next thing she felt was a heavy, blisteringly hot piece of metal slamming into her body, the horn of the truck blaring in her ears.
The impact threw her away, sending her slamming into a… wall?
Gwen peeled herself off the cement surface she had been embedded into and- yup. This was a wall. In an alleyway. And there was no conceivable way for that truck to have gotten her in here.
There was also no conceivable way for there to be a superhero fight going on outside.
How hard had that fucking truck hit her?!
“Ms. Poole, would you call yourself a creative?”
“It’s my only defining feature, really, so I’d be in trouble if I wasn’t one.”
“Is that a yes or no?” The interviewer was dry and clinical.
Gwen gulped and nodded, “That’s a yes. That’s very much a yes.”
The interviewer peered over their glasses and wrote Gwen’s answer down on the paper before moving over to the next subject, leaving Gwen to settle down into the narrow cot she had been assigned to. She had electrodes attached to her scalp with gel and it was going to make her hair so greasy that she almost regretted signing up for this.
“Say, how much are you paying me for this?” She asked, just to remind herself why she was here.
“Forty dollars per two-hour session.” They told her off-handedly, “Twelve dollars extra if we call you in at night.”
Which happened a lot. Because this was a sleep study. Reading their brainwaves for… psychic and multidimensional activity. Whatever that meant. It was impressive sounding, at least. And was the closest she was ever going to get to major scientific progress.
But that was making her too excited. She had to lay her head back and relax.
“Take a breath.” One of the people who were holding the experiment called out, “Focus on your favorite stories. The characters and the world that seems to come alive in your mind. We need you to take us there.”
Gwen took a breath and settled in there. Marvel Universe. Tens of thousands of characters each with their own styles and themes and battles and rogues. A vivid tapestry built by hundreds of creatives with a passion that she could only hope to replicate.
Yeah, she could take them there. A smile spread over her face.
Something cracked above her. The people taking readings screamed. There was a gushing sound, and wind currents sucked her upwards.
That was when she thought to open her eyes.
There was a pink energy portal above her head. And she was being sucked into it.
Gwen tried to jump out of the way, reaching out to the people around her, but no one moved to help her. They stared at her, watching her be sucked inside the portal and spat into…
Something wet. Water everywhere. Was she in a… pool?
Gwen flailed, trying to figure out which way was up, until she pulled herself up onto a rubbery inflatable chair.