Chapter 1: The Contestants
Welcome! This is the seventy-seventh season of the popular System Marathon Competition. We're ready to bring you our twenty contestants today. All of which have no experience with a system or knowledge of other worlds. Also, again, none of the contestants are from any of the worlds watching this show.
Each contestant is from varied backgrounds and skills. No system for each of our contestants is a duplicate and all of our contestants very willingly joined when we took them from wherever they happened to be at the time the show was about to start. We received no complaints from the contestants, so we take this to mean they're all happy to be participating.
Now let us meet who the participants are...
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Elmo groaned as he moved. His head hurt, but couldn't remember a reason why. Last he could remember was that he was getting a ram memory card for his computer. He had made the purchase at the Best Buy he lived almost next to, then on the way to the parking lot, he didn't know what happened after that. All he knew was he was waking up wherever this was.
It was just his luck that this would happen during one of the rare times he ever went outside. While he didn't have a 'phobia' or anxiety-disorder that kept him from going outside and interacting with others, he had heard others in his family describe him as painfully shy. Which he didn't care to complain about, since it wasn't really anything bad, though he sometimes did wonder about that.
He sat up slowly, trying to keep his aching head from hurting more. Though, as he did, he noticed something that caught him off guard. He wasn't wearing a stitch of clothing. Not only that, but there wasn't any sign of where his clothes were at all.
He did a quick mental check to make sure he didn't have any holes in his memory or anything that would indicate a serious problem. He was Elmo Garcia, the third child in the third generation of his family after they'd moved to the US. He had black hair, stood about five foot eight, brown eyes, and a perpetual tan,. He was 20 years old and a self-taught coder that ran his own web business of managing websites. He ran over his phone number, social security number, and even his lists of passwords for his various accounts. Everything checked out for him.
He looked around the room and sighed when all he could find was a scrap of cloth that he might be able to use to make a rudimentary loincloth. While he found the idea distasteful, he didn't exactly have a better idea.
He moved over to it and began figuring out the best way to do that. Once he had it tied around his waist, covering pretty much just his groin and backside, he heard a voice echoing around him as well as inside his head.
The voice welcomed viewers to some weird sounding reality kind of show. He wasn't sure what a system was, but he got the feeling that he was one of the participants. Though, it was clear that whoever or whatever was announcing this, they were very liberal on the usage of 'willingly' and 'no complaints' in addition to 'happy to be participating.' No one asked him if he wanted to participate, no one asked if he had any complaints, and he certainly wasn't happy about it, and suspected the other participants weren't likely to be happy about this either.