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

Cody’s head throbbed with the residual, electric hum of a fifty-thousand-volt Taser strike. Bright, tavern-style candlelight shone… THROUGH… his pupils, searing his retinas. Why was he sitting on a chair? He threw a hand up to cover his eyes and instantly snapped his gaze to it.

Fur. He looked down at his arms. Thick, bright orange fur.

He inhaled, tasting stale beer and the distinct, unmistakable scent of synthetic strawberry vape juice. A quick look at his surroundings confirmed he was, indeed, fucked. But Cody’s greatest real-world asset was his ability to completely compartmentalize a panic attack. His heart rate spiked, but his face remained a mask of bored indifference as he analyzed the room.

“I know the DM said the chandelier falls on the boss, but Mage Hand has a strict ten-pound limit, and a wrought iron chandelier is 150 pounds, at least.” An owlbear wearing a necktie pushed his glasses up his beak. “The spell simply fails.”

“Ugh!” A somehow familiar elf wearing a 90’s goth girl outfit rolled her eyes. “A rules lawyer…No one wants to play with a rules lawyer.”

The owlbear recoiled as if he had been struck in the chest, his feathery face aghast with dumbfounded rage. “They’re the rules, elf! They are there for a reason!”

“Dude.” The elf looked around, stopping for an extra beat on Cody, before continuing. “DM has final say, and the DM said it’s fine. People need to appreciate DMs more.”

The mashup of six random races that had no business in the same room as one another broke into a frenzied argument about the mechanics of a spell and a DM's right to modify it at their discretion. None of them noticed him, though he was sitting right there at the same heavy wooden table. The door, to his surprise, was right behind him. Cody's mind raced, processing the easiest, most universally accepted way to leave a gaming table without raising a single alarm. He was going to Occam’s razor this bitch right from the start.

“Gonna piss,” Cody said, throwing up a thumb at the door. He pushed out his chair and walked out without more than a wave and a nod from the group.

“Who’s that guy?” A voice asked as he walked through the doorway. It was only another second before the lawyering continued.

As he got into the hallway, he puzzled over the layout. This looked like any other vape store, but it wasn’t his. Stockroom to the left, office to the right, and sales floor through the double doors. This was Craig's layout. They were in Vape Much, My Friend? from across town. That left the one room Cody needed being the last one on the left before the exit. The bathroom. He reached for the knob and turned, but the door was locked. He jiggled the handle to see if he had just done it wrong, but it held firm.

“Anyone in here?” He shoved his ear to the wood and knocked with the back of his middle knuckle.

There was no answer. Cody took a step to the side of the door, making sure to clear a path for anyone to get by, leaned his back against the wall, and finally let himself look at his hands. Cat hands. Claws. Sharp, retracting claws. He could feel his whiskers twitching against the air currents in the hallway, his body covered in orange fur. Catfolk? Was there a catfolk? Mark was the one with the obsessive list of new races. Cody folded his arms over his chest, eager to see what his eyes looked like, and his teeth. He ran his tongue over the point of a fang and pulled it back, wincing. Ouch. Who was in here? Why the fuck were they taking so long? This could wait.

He pushed open the back exit and slipped his way out, immediately finding himself in a location he knew only because of the sheer absurdity of it. Everywhere around, thick, heavy snow was falling. Blinding, blizzard-like billows whipped through the air. Everywhere, except the walkways, that is. The brick building exited to the side of one of Mark’s most idiotic towns, Alwayswinter. The hamlet was about twenty homes, a few businesses, and a great mechanical lift at the bottom of a massive wall of sheer stone that cut the continent in half.

Cody walked into the perfectly kept streets and noticed how warm he actually felt. Was that his new fur, or the magical town, though? He needed to take a moment to figure things out, but first, he needed to figure out why he was on the back side of Craig's strip mall—a shop currently full of creatures playing a tabletop game—sitting right inside Mark’s 'snow without consequences' town.

Everyone here was friendly, he knew, but that didn’t account for a commercial real estate building from Earth being dropped onto their cobblestones. There seemed to be a commotion going on in front of the building. As he rounded the corner, his padded feet crunching silently in the snow, he saw the first of the shops in the strip, and he knew exactly what fresh hell he had just escaped. If Pizza Hut was the corner store, then that meant he really had just walked out of the breakroom of Vape Much, My Friend?. But… how? And how the fuck were there owlbears and elves in there?

Rounding the next corner, the sound of cheering let him know the commotion wasn’t a bad one.

The first thing he saw when he turned the corner was the windows. The Pizza Hut had… a pixie working the register and a Githyanki tossing dough. The people on the street were gathered around the front of Vape Much, My Friend? with a big spinning prize wheel, carnival games, and food. All kinds of races and their kids were running and playing and vaping. A very large minotaur was chucking massive clouds from an old-school Squid Industries Detonator. A little girl, who was about six, had a Konnichiwa Cat branded bubble-gum vape, and a towering thri-kreen held one in each of its four hands.

A large, professionally printed banner draped over the store read: Vape Much, My Friend? Anniversary Celebration! Come Play Vaults and Wyverns with us! He looked at the melted snow around the strip mall's foundation, then looked out at the city. This didn’t just fall here. This building had been here. Vaults and Wyverns? What the hell was going on?

Cody walked through the crowd, letting his natural feline grace keep him from bumping into anyone, trying to make sense of it all. To see so many races mingling and having fun with each other was jarring, but not quite as jarring as the bottom lift station. Two heavily armored guards stood in front of the massive wooden gates with a large sign saying: Closed: Official Use Only. Mark would never cut Alwayswinter off from Kristen Stewart’s Bluff. That was a vital trade route and holiday destination. Turning back to look at the building, the middle shop of the three caught his attention. Molten Motif. That was a very clever legal dodge, but—

“Hey.” a soft but slightly familiar voice startled him.

As he turned, he saw the elf girl from the breakroom. “Oh… hey…”

“You come here often?” She looked up at him, and he finally saw her face in the light. There were piercings—Earth-style mall kiosk piercings—in her ears, nose, and eyebrow. “I haven’t seen you before.”

Cody’s adrenaline spiked, but he forced a smooth, easy smile. Did this elf just make small talk? “Umm, no. It’s my first time. How about you?”

“Uh,” she chuckled. “I own Molten Motif. Next week is my opening week.”

“Oh, you must be so excited!” Cody nodded and looked at the modest-looking storefront. “It’s very stylish!”

“Thanks.” She blushed and shrugged. “I can’t believe I got to go this time. How did you get picked?”

Cody was confused. “Picked?”

“Yeah.” Her smile slightly faltered. “To come into Tawagoto?”

The gears in his head spun a million miles a second. He kept his tone incredibly light. “Oh, I’m a friend of the creator. I got a special access invite.”

“Oooh, that’s so lucky!” she marveled, her eyes widening. “So, you didn’t have to have something special to bring through, then?”

The confusion did not cease, but he would employ Gather Information. “Nope. Just here to enjoy. How about you?”

The air died. The girl looked slightly uncomfortable, shifting her weight, but she gave a slight giggle. “The store.” She nodded toward her shop.

Cody slapped his forehead lightly, playing the fool perfectly. “Ugh! I would just forget to breathe sometimes. Of course.” He straightened and sighed. “Excuse me. I need to go find Mar—”

“Don’t!” Her hand flew up, pressing a sweaty finger firmly against his lips. “Don’t say that name.”

Cody cocked his head, highly aware of the stranger's hand on his mouth. “Mmfan mmfew mtake mmfhyour mfmfinger offfmf lipmmf?”

The woman froze, pulled her slobbery finger off his mouth, and nearly convulsed. She shook it off with a violent shudder. “Just follow me.”

Cody wiped his mouth, shrugged, and followed her through the throngs of people up to the front door of Molten Motif. She slid a particularly interesting glowing key into a slot, then tucked it back in her leather jacket. “Come in.”

Cody walked inside, and to his surprise, the interior was very reminiscent of the actual store at the mall. There was a wall of black band shirts, a glass case of spiked jewelry, and an entire section for Konnichiwa Cat and her Amigos. The music was just far enough away that all he could make out was that it was dark and brooding. “How did you get all this stuff… here?”

The elf paused, her posture suddenly going rigid. She puzzled at him. “Who are you?”

He paused, calculating the interaction. “Garfield.”

The elf pulled a curved dagger from her boot, lunged forward, and slammed his back flat against the rack full of shirts, pressing the cold steel tight against his throat. “One last chance.”

Cody didn’t tell her what his back had just figured out—that the rack wasn't fully solid. “Odie.”

The elf raged, pulling the dagger back slightly for a thrust, which was just long enough for Cody to sidestep where the illusory clothing rack wasn’t. The knife slipped right past his neck and buried itself into the wall, puncturing the magical pocket dimension.

PFBLTTTTTT!

They both stopped dead as the air started sputtering out of the space, the entire store sounding like a massive, wet whoopee cushion as it started to deflate like a balloon.

Cody cracked first. A hefty guffaw left his lips at the absurdity of the real-life result of their stupid inside joke about pocket dimensions deflating. Then she cracked. It was odd. They both laughed as the whole Hot Topic illusion crumbled around them, fading away and leaving the reality—an empty, depressing office building that looked like it used to be a seasonal tax specialist’s office.

“Cody?” She stepped back and lowered the knife, her voice shifting.

“Mark?” Cody wondered.

“Noooooooo,” she said very deliberately and slowly as she shook her head up and down.

Cody understood immediately that they couldn’t talk about it right now… she? “What’s going on?”

“Holy shit, dude,” she said, aggressively knocking a stack of blank papers off a cheap desk. “Craig has been here for a fucking year! A fucking YEAR!”

“How?” Cody was completely lost. “How has Craig been… in your world? Didn’t we kick… oh shit. He didn’t just steal your world, he made you the ultimate villain here, didn’t he?”

She just sighed, her shoulders slumping. “Yes.”

“But you’re an elf here,” Cody noted, gesturing to her outfit. “And a girl.”

She looked around nervously and shook her head. “No. I’m a changeling, I think. A wizard maybe. It’s a disguise.”

“Where are Simon and Sara?” Cody peeked out the dusty blinds at the dwindling crowd in the snow. “We got to find them and figure out what the fuck to do now. What works here?”

“Well,” she posited, pacing the ugly carpet. “We’re in Alwayswinter, so we are clearly in Tawagoto, but what version are we in?”

Cody thought for a minute. “You said you tried to make it user-friendly, right? Like dumbing it down?”

“Yeah,” she responded, and held out her hand. “Like Sheet!”

A piece of parchment materialized in her hand.

Character Name: Mark

Class: Wizard 5

Race: Changeling

Stats:

Strength: 4

Dexterity: 10

Constitution: 10

Intelligence: 22

Wisdom: 8

Charisma: 22

“Cody.” The skin rippled like an old man’s ball sack as the elf… squished… into Mark. He looked exhausted. “I am… the definition of a glass cannon.”

Cody took a chance and reached forward. “Sheet!”

Character Name: Cody

Class: Jester 5

Race: Orange Catfolk

Stats:

Strength: 10

Dexterity: 20

Constitution: 16

Intelligence: 14

Wisdom: 8

Charisma: 22

“What the actual fuck?” Cody shook his head, staring at the paper. “I’m a fucking… Jester?”

Mark’s eyes shot open. “Ok, good. At least we have a tank.”

“A dex tank?” Cody shook his head in disbelief. “This looks like I’m a rogue. Maybe a bard.”

“Bard variant,” Mark shrugged, a faint smirk returning to his face. “Kind of. You piss people off so they want to hit you.”

Cody thought for a moment, then nodded slowly. “Fuck yeah. Now, about a plan. The plan was to meet in the capital if we got separated on entry, so… head there? If we can get up the lift to Kristen Stewart’s Bluff, it should only be a day’s ride for us.”

“That’s the problem.” Mark nervously peeked out the shades again. “You saw the lift. People still go up, but more people get turned away. Not politely.”

“And, there’s no other way up,” Cody said, scratching a sudden itch on his furry arm. “Not until the borderlands, right?”

“Yeah,” Mark said. “But that would take days or weeks. We have to get up there today.”

Cody looked over at the heavily armed guards. He looked over the absurd skills on his character sheet again, and decided. “Let’s try this out. Get dressed. I assume you can’t go running around as the BBEG.”

Mark morphed back into the elf girl. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to get us up there.” Cody pushed out the door, and followed by Mark, made his way purposefully toward the gates. “Do we know how skill checks work yet? Like, do I just do it, and in the background it calculates?”

“That’s what I assume,” Mark whispered, following a step behind. “Just do what you want, and assume the checks are happening.”

“Ok.” They came to a stop directly in front of the towering guards. Cody puffed out his chest, placed his paws on his hips, and smirked. “You better let us up there, or I’m gonna spank your little butts!”

The guards' faces instantly soured, their hands dropping to the pommels of their swords, and suddenly, Cody knew something very bad had just happened.

He had just critically failed his persuasion roll.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!