Vape Shop Isekai: A Retail Manager’s Guide to a Stolen World

“I’m really excited to get to the Letsgit Highlands!”

Cody had decided to walk on all fours for the last hour, and it was really starting to make Simone uncomfortable.

“Your butthole is doing that thing again,” Simone said, averting her eyes. Again.

“It likes you!” Cody laughed, unbothered. “Look!” He stopped, doing a mock bird-dog point with his wet nose and lifting a front paw toward a single line of smoke trailing up over the distant highland hills. “Let’s go!”

“That’s a dog thing.” Simone sighed, shaking her head, thoroughly exhausted as he bounded ahead. “Why did Mark give Cody, of all people, the Catfolk race?”

As she crested the rise, the landscape opened up into a beautiful, sprawling green highland dotted with patches of brown earth, white snow, and stone cairns marking the game trail. Sitting bizarrely on the side of the dirt path was a highly modern-looking building. It was just a stark, white, square box with a flat roof and a single, featureless door.

Cody stood up on two legs and looked all around the empty plains. “He doesn’t look busy.”

“Roblethan Marcdonavis is a purveyor of all things,” Simone offered, pulling her cloak tighter against the highland chill. “If we need security, THC, or even… I don’t know… dildos—not that we would need those—he can get it. Of course he’s busy. It’s a pocket dimension, remember?”

“Oh yeah,” Cody said, finally stepping through the door.

Simone followed him inside. She stepped into what she could best guess to be a waiting room. It was entirely white, with one single, uncomfortable-looking chair against the far wall and a set of concrete stairs leading down further than she could see.

But it was the walls that caught her off guard. They were fully decorated with memorabilia from Japanese hip-hop and metal bands. Posters, like the glossy pull-outs from Earth magazines, hung everywhere. Simone recognized every single one of them. They had all been introduced to her by Mark back on Earth, and they had been the absolute keys to her own freedom.

There was a central, glowing shrine to Awich—a rapper whom Mark casually passed off as “pretty decent,” but whose music and story of survival had fueled the fire of Simone’s own personal revolution. There was Chanmina, whose lyrics had helped her finally accept herself as a woman, and Maximum the Hormone, whose chaotic energy had challenged her to push through her physical limitations in the real world.

But what were they doing here? This wasn't Mark's standard pop-culture detritus. This was hers.

“Cody?” Simone looked around.

Cody was gone. She watched in horror as the stark white door behind her shrank into nothingness, completely sealing over, trapping her inside the room with herself.

Panic flared hot in her chest, causing her to hyperventilate. The same, all-too-familiar sense of suffocating dread set in, jarring her brain. How does this feel exactly the same as it did back home? The sheer shock of the trauma response dulled her senses, but her new Elven resilience fought back, pulling her together.

Scanning the room, she understood. The only way forward was exactly the same as it had been at home. Down. Taking a deep breath, the coppery tang of adrenaline sharp in her mouth, she took the first step into the stairwell. Instantly, the waiting room melted away. It was replaced with an endless corridor of cinderblock walls: stairs leading infinitely up, and stairs leading infinitely down.

She panicked, turning and sprinting back up the first two steps before she forced herself to stop. No. This was familiar. She’d been here before. It was an illusion. I just started. There is no way I can go back up yet. She turned and bounded down the stairs, taking two and three at a time with her Elven agility. The texture of the cinderblocks never changed, but she pushed through it, descending for what felt like hours until her calves burned like fire and her breath turned ragged. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. She knew she would get there eventually.

Then, she stopped.

It was a wall. No fanfare. Not even a landing or a room. Just a solid brick wall dropped right in the middle of the stairs.

She plopped down hard on the concrete steps, gasping for air. Even with this high of a Dex stat? After she finally caught her breath, she reached up and pressed her palms against the wall. She ran her sensitive Ranger fingers over the bricks and mortar, but felt absolutely nothing distinct from any other section of the corridor. Up was a brick ceiling, down were cinderblock stairs. What was she missing?

She racked her brain, going through every game scenario, every little thought, until she isolated the truth. Of course. She stood up. She squared her shoulders to the wall, placed her palms flat against the rough brick, and heaved. She pushed as hard as she could. Nothing happened. She pushed harder, digging her boots into the stairs, exerting every ounce of physical and emotional strength she possessed until the structure groaned. The mortar cracked. Dust sloughed off the ceiling and into her nose as she snorted and pushed.

Not harder. Just pushed.

The first brick finally gave way. The entire obstacle toppled forward into the stairwell below, dissolving instantly into the ether before it even hit the ground.

She walked down the remaining steps for another two minutes until she reached it. A heavy wooden door. Painted dead center on the wood was a large, yellow smiley face wearing a crude, brown leather wrestling mask.

Password? A mysterious, echoing voice resonated from everywhere and nowhere.

The shame hit her the moment she recognized the Attitude Era wrestling gimmick. She knew the answer.

“…have a nice day…” she whispered.

The door swung open instantly, revealing an inky, impenetrable blackness.

Enter!

She pushed through the dark and walked into what appeared to be a massive, dingy cinderblock basement illuminated by cheap neon beer signs. In the center of the room, a large Grung—a humanoid frog—sat on a much-too-narrow La-Z-Boy recliner acting as a throne, his damp fat rolls hanging over the armrests.

On a side table to his left was a stack of greasy cheeseburgers at least ten high. On his right was a commercial fountain soda dispenser and a massive, grimy plastic cup filled to the brim with purple grape soda. His webbed feet were propped up comfortably on a towering stack of core rulebooks. Flanking him on either side stood two massive, heavily muscled Orcs, both wearing impeccably maintained, but much-too-small, formal tuxedos.

She had made it to Mark’s ultimate cheat code.

“Simone,” the Grung croaked, beckoning her over with a wet, sticky hand. “You’ve come a long way. I am so proud to see how you’ve grown, both inside and out.”

“Thank you, Roblethan.” Simone approached the recliner, a wave of profound relief washing over her.

Roblethan Marcdonavis was the one NPC that had been persistent through every single one of Mark's campaigns, but rarely used.

“How can I help you?” the frog asked.

“Can I ask you something first?” Simone asked, looking back at the door. “Why Mankind? Why all of that imagery for Mankind?”

“How often is the result of pushing through the pain expected?” Roblethan posited wisely, taking a bite of a burger.

“Once,” Simone said firmly.

“Coming into the game.” Roblethan already knew the answer. “But what was it that you actually left behind?”

Simone thought about the stairwell, the panic, the music posters. The pain and outrage built in her chest. “Everything! The pain, the sleepless nights, the endless worrying about the stupidest shit that I shouldn’t have had to worry about! Mankind. I left mankind behind. Everything that I was over there is dead!”

Roblethan took a deep, slurping drink of his grape soda, let out a thunderous burp, and looked at her with large, unblinking amphibian eyes. “But did you? How did you know the password?”

This was how it always was with Roblethan. A massive, deeply personal psychological test to get what you want. The difference now was that it wasn’t Mark sitting behind a DM screen making shallow guesses about her psyche; it was a cosmic entity who had seen every version of every character of every game.

The agony of thinking about her past was suddenly overshadowed by a moment of real, piercing introspection. She knew the password because the wrestling Attitude Era was such a huge part of her early life, even if she had only watched it because society expected a boy to watch it. Despite the controversies, despite the pain of that era, it was still a part of her past. She couldn’t change that. It formed her.

“Meat,” she said quietly, the realization settling into her bones. “I left behind meat. I’m still the exact same person inside. I know that. I mean… in this body, it’s… different. It's better. But I think… thank you, Roblethan. I think I can finally accept all of me. Even if parts of my past are just problematic male-on-male contact set to poorly recycled scripts.”

“Very good,” Roblethan croaked approvingly. He chomped the rest of the burger down and motioned a webbed finger to the Orc on his right. “Go fetch Cody, Sir Cumference.”

The Orc butler bowed crisply, walked to the cinderblock wall between two neon signs, and pressed an invisible switch. The bricks slid silently to the side, and Cody strolled in.

“Hey, dude!” Cody waved happily.

Simone stared at him, shaking her head at his completely unbothered, casual attitude. “Did you… have a psychological test, too?”

Cody laughed. “Yeah. I was locked in a room and I had to not touch a ball of yarn for about a minute. Took me a couple tries, honestly, but I got it.”

Simone died inside, then immediately resurrected with one health point. She looked back at the frog. “We need bodyguards, Roblethan.”

“And weed,” Cody added, folding his furry arms over his chest with utmost seriousness. “Tons of it.”

“Very well,” Roblethan agreed. “Sir Cumference and Sir Cumstance will gather a cadre of the finest Orcish Butlerguards to send your way, and they will bring tons of the halfling leaf. You may not see me again until you re-roll.”

A deep, purple fog suddenly filled her vision, smelling faintly of grape soda, and the basement faded away entirely.

When the fog cleared, they were standing perfectly still in the snowy Letsgit Highlands again. The modern white building was completely gone.

Cody patted her back gently with a heavy paw. “You good?”

Simone took a deep breath of the freezing highland air and stared into the distance, looking toward the sea on the distant horizon. She smiled, feeling lighter than she had in thirty years.

“I think I’m going to be.”

[SYSTEM ALERT: Encounter Cleared.]

[SYSTEM ALERT: Quest begun.]

[XP Awarded: 2,000]

[Level Up Available! Unspent Attribute Points: 4]

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