Disco Rice - [Worm OC Insert/Chaos Gacha]

[dasstan]

Hey everyone,

Long time listener reader, first time caller writer. I recently found @Radiant Knight's Star Trek/Gacha fic, and I caught the bug.

The basic premise is... A Worm fan gets isekai'd. In the process he losses just about every last bit of personal knowledge he once had. All he was allowed to keep was his knowledge of Worm as he remembers it.

But don't lose hope! He gets the Chaos Gacha out of it! High risk, high reward, baby.

I'll be playing fast and loose with the Gacha rules, since writing prompt rules are only to be followed when they serve the story. I reserve the right to reroll when an outlier roll would wreck the story. Or when I roll something from a franchise I either don't know enough about, or don't care to learn more about.

Tickets will be earned based on an achievement system. I'm mostly making those up as they come along. If you have suggestions for achievements, feel free to share them. I might even adopt them.

Posting schedule will be erratic. I currently have 8 chapters written and will be releasing them once a day.

Why SFW instead of NSFW? I've never written smut before. If we get to the point where I do feel confident in writing it, I'll happily ask the mods to move the thread.

Without further ado, I present...

 

[dasstan]

Chapter 1: Piss, Paperwork, and a Place to Haunt

---

The world came back online to the smell of piss.

Not fresh piss, mind you, but the old, baked-in vintage you get in alleys that have been serving as a public urinal since the Reagan administration. It's an ammonia-and-regret perfume that sticks to the back of your throat. A real five-star welcome. I was on my back, staring up at a sky the color of a dirty dishcloth, and my first coherent thought wasn't who am I? or where am I?, but a far more practical, well, this could be worse.

My head didn't hurt, which was a good sign. Headaches in alleys usually mean someone used your skull to practice their golf swing. I did a quick mental inventory, the kind you do after a bad fall, checking the limbs for that tell-tale electric scream of a compound fracture. Arms, check. Legs, check. Nothing seemed to be pointing in a direction nature didn't intend, and none of my insides were threatening to become outsides. I pushed myself up, my palms scraping against asphalt that felt like it was studded with tiny glass teeth. The cheap fabric of my t-shirt was damp, but it was just the alley's clammy handshake, not blood. A small mercy. A dull, grinding ache was already setting up shop in my lower back, a souvenir from my concrete bed.

My clothes were the uniform of a man who had given up on making an impression: plain grey t-shirt, worn-in jeans, and a black jacket that felt a hell of a lot more durable than it had any right to be. A hand patted my back pocket and, miracle of miracles, found a wallet. For about three seconds, I felt the kind of soaring relief that makes a man believe in a benevolent universe.

Then I opened it. The universe, it turned out, was still a son of a bitch.

The thing wasn't just empty. It was sterile. It was as if it had just come from the factory, untouched by human hands. The leather wasn't worn, the plastic sleeves for cards held no ghostly imprints of their former occupants. It was a prop wallet, and its emptiness was a perfect mirror for the inside of my head.

The memories weren't just gone; the space they'd occupied felt scoured clean. It was like walking into a house you used to live in only to find it stripped to the studs, with no pictures, no scuff marks on the floor, nothing to prove anyone had ever been there at all.

But the house wasn't entirely empty. Two pieces of furniture had been left behind. Or maybe they'd been nailed to the floor of my skull after the fact. They weren't memories; they didn't feel like they belonged to me at all. They felt like graffiti spray-painted on the inside of my eyelids.

First: My name is John Doe.

Second: I have the Chaos Gacha.

One sounded like a lie and the other sounded like a diagnosis for a disease you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. John Doe. Christ. The name they give a stiff on a slab before they slide him into a refrigerated drawer. It felt as real on me as a three-dollar bill. The Gacha was even worse; an idea so profoundly stupid it had to be true. The knowledge of it was just… there. A cosmic slot machine that dispensed powers, tools, and probably a whole host of new ways to get killed, and it was rattling around in my brain like a loose bearing.

A lie and a diagnosis. My new resume. I didn't waste time arguing with them. When you wake up in Piss Alley, you take the facts as they're presented.

I took another look around and spotted a sodden newspaper clinging to the wet pavement like a cast-off skin. Brockton Bay Bulletin.

You know how in the movies, when the bad news hits, the camera does that dramatic zoom-in on the character's face? I felt that. My stomach did a slow, greasy roll, because I knew that name. In the empty house of my head, that name was a big, bloody handprint on the wall. Brockton Bay. It wasn't just a place. It was the setting for a story I'd read in some other life, a story about a sad girl with power over bugs and the cavalcade of psychopaths, heroes, and god-damned monsters that turned her city into a rolling disaster zone.

The sheer, pants-shitting terror of it was a physical thing, a wave of ice water flooding my chest. Panic is a predator, and I smelled like fresh meat.

"Okay, John," I muttered, my voice a rusty croak. "You're in the shark tank. Time to find a pointy stick."

The only stick I had was the diagnosis. The Gacha.

I closed my eyes and focused on the concept. This time, I didn't find a single, flimsy ticket. I found three. And they didn't feel like cheap cardboard. They had weight in my soul, the conceptual heft of small, heavy bars of solid gold. They radiated a quiet promise of power that felt completely out of place in a world of piss-alleys and bad news. Turns out that my pointy stick was more like an entire phalanx.

A grim sort of calm settled over me. Okay. Let's spin the wheel. I focused on the first golden ticket and mentally tore it in half.

Paper Trail
| Common Trait |
For some reason, you are always carrying the relevant paper or information with you. Just reach into your pocket, and you can find whatever legal identification you need.

Click to shrink...

I opened my eyes and stared at the grinning graffiti wolf. My first pull from the jackpot machine, my first taste of cosmic power, was the ability to conjure a library card on demand. For a long moment, I just stood there, suspended between terror and the sheer, idiotic absurdity of it all. Then a laugh bubbled up, a harsh, ugly sound that was half-hiccup, half-sob. The universe wasn't just a son of a bitch; it had a poet's sense of irony.

"Alright, you bastard," I grunted at the sky. "Two more."

Still, a tool is a tool. My hand, now steady, slid into my jeans pocket and pulled out the freshly minted Massachusetts driver's license. The kid in the photo stared back, sullen and handsome. I now had a face and a name, even if they both felt like a lie. I shoved it back in, my resolve hardening. Another spin. I grabbed the second golden ticket. Rip.

Boundless Stamina
| Elite Trait |
Your stamina is boundless, even a regular person with this trait would be able to run a marathon with ease and only need a minute's rest afterward. Your stamina recovers incredibly and exhaustion fades from your body much faster.

Click to shrink...

The information was followed by a sensation. It was like a warm current spreading through my veins, a quiet, energetic hum that started in my chest and radiated out to every corner of my body. The grinding ache in my lower back didn't fade; it vanished. Poof. Gone. The weariness in my bones, the phantom exhaustion of a man who'd been sleeping on asphalt—it all just evaporated. I took a deep breath, and it felt like I was drinking pure, clean energy. I felt… light. I felt like I could run from here to Boston and barely break a sweat.

A real, genuine grin split my face. Now that was a pointy stick.

The giddiness was a dangerous thing, so I tamped it down. One more ticket. Don't get greedy, don't get cocky. Just see what the last card is. I focused, grabbed the final golden weight, and used it.

Omni Phone
| Rare Item |
A mobile phone that has everything you need, being able to connect to a network regardless of distance, more storage space than you can count in numbers, a firewall that would take a machine god an aeon to crack and enough processing power to make a supercomputer blush.

Click to shrink...

My right hand felt suddenly heavy. I looked down. Lying in my palm was a phone. It was a simple, featureless slab of matte black material that seemed to drink the grey light of the alley. It was cool to the touch, utterly seamless. I brushed my thumb over the screen and it silently bloomed to life. The display was clean, minimalist.

Up in the corner, a pair of symbols sat where the signal and battery life should be. The first was the familiar, tiered arc of a full-strength Wi-Fi signal. Except, the dot at its base wasn't a dot. It was a neat, sharp-angled symbol, like a capital A that had done a somersault:∀. For all. The name for it surfaced from the same strange void as everything else. For all signals. For all networks. Beside it was the battery icon, and inside, instead of a number, was an infinity symbol, sitting there smugly as if the very idea of losing its charge was a concept too vulgar to entertain.

I stood there for a long moment, the phone in one hand, a wallet full of instant identity in my pocket, and a body that felt like a perfectly tuned engine. The piss smell was still there, but it seemed less threatening now.

The driver's license had an address, and with my new, inexhaustible legs, the walk wasn't a chore; it was a survey. I moved through the city, my pace brisk and even, my eyes taking everything in. The invisible borders marked by Empire runes and ABB dragons weren't just threats anymore; they were data points on a map I was building in my head. I wasn't a victim trudging toward a squalid hideout. I was a scout on reconnaissance.

It took less than an hour to find the tenement building. The hallway still smelled of boiled cabbage and despair, a scent that no amount of stamina could make pleasant. My hand went to my pocket and produced the key for Apartment 3B, just as I knew it would.

The room was just as pathetic as I'd pictured it: a sad little bed, a table, a chair. A monk's cell without the spiritual upside. I walked to the center of the room and stood there, the super-phone feeling heavy in my hand. The contrast was almost funny. Here I was, a man who didn't get tired, with a wallet that could prove I was anyone, holding a piece of technology that probably wasn't supposed to exist for another hundred years. And my home was a ten-by-ten box in a slum that looked like it had been built from condemned materials.

I sat on the edge of the mattress, the springs groaning their sad song. But I wasn't hopeless. I wasn't even tired. I was a ghost in a machine I didn't recognize, sure, but the machine had just gotten a hell of an upgrade.

I looked at the phone in my hand, its screen glowing with quiet promise.

Time to find out just how bad the news really was.

 

[dasstan]

Chapter 2: The Phone, The Clock, and The Bombmaker

---

I was sitting on the edge of the sad little mattress, the springs groaning under my weight like a dying man, when the feeling came. It wasn't a thought of my own, but a clean, sharp message that planted itself in my awareness, clear as a bell in a silent room.

[Achievement Unlocked: Four Walls and a Smell.]
You've secured a place to call your own. We're using the term 'secured' loosely. Try not to touch anything sticky.
[Reward: 1x Bronze Ticket.]

Click to shrink...

A dry chuckle escaped me. So, the cosmic slot machine was a wise-ass. Good to know. It was somehow less terrifying than if it had been some silent, unknowable entity. A smart-aleck god is at least a god with a personality, even if it's a shitty one. A bronze ticket, feeling flimsy and unimportant compared to the gold ones, appeared in my mental inventory. I decided to leave it there for now. You don't blow all your ammunition before you've even seen the enemy.

My attention settled on the slab of impossible technology in my hand. The Omni Phone. Paper Trail was a bureaucratic party trick and Boundless Stamina was a great get-out-of-jail-free card if I ever needed to run to the next state over, but this thing… this felt different. This was the key.

My thumb brushed the dark screen, and the phone woke up without a sound. Up in the corner, the impossible symbols still held steady: a Wi-Fi arc promising connection to everything (∀), and a battery that would never die (∞). It was a quiet confirmation that the magic hadn't worn off, that I hadn't just hallucinated the whole thing in that piss-scented alley.

The phone didn't ask me to sign in, create an account, or sell my soul to an advertising company. It just… worked. It was waiting for a command. My meta-knowledge, the ghost of the story I'd read, was a map of a train track heading off a cliff. I needed to know how close we were to the edge.

Every story has a beginning. A patient zero. I had to find the starting point. My thumbs felt clumsy and alien on the smooth glass as I typed in the ugliest string of words I could remember from the story's prologue.

'Winslow High School locker incident girl'.

The search was instantaneous. No progress bar, no spinning circle. The phone just knew. The top hit wasn't a headline; it was a footnote. A short, sterile article from the Bulletin buried so deep on their website you'd need a shovel to find it. 'Winslow High Addresses Bullying Concerns.'

It was a masterpiece of corporate non-speak. It mentioned an 'unfortunate incident' and a student who was 'hospitalized'. It was a perfect, tidy lie. But at the bottom, there was a timestamp.

Dated for early January. Months ago.

A cold stone of dread settled in my non-existent gut. It was real. It had happened. That was the spark, thrown months ago. A spark in a vacuum does nothing. I needed to find the first real fire. I needed to know when she'd made her debut.

My thumbs moved again, my search more specific. 'Lung captured Brockton Bay.'

The result was a headline that screamed from the digital page, complete with a triumphant picture of Armsmaster standing over the subdued form of the ABB leader. PRT Hero Armsmaster Single-Handedly Defeats Lung! My cynical side snorted. Right. Single-handedly. The story praised his efficiency, his technology, his bravery. It was a PR masterpiece.

And at the bottom of the article was the date. Published: Five days ago.

A fresh wave of ice-water dread washed over me, colder and sharper than the first. The timeline wasn't a slow crawl; it was a freight train, and I had woken up on the tracks. Five days. That meant she'd been out. She'd fought. And I knew what came next. After the fight, came the recruitment. After the recruitment, came the test.

My hands were trembling now, the phone feeling slick in my grip. I already knew what I would find, but I had to see it. I had to be sure. I typed in the final query.

'Brockton Bay Central Bank robbery Undersiders'.

The results were again instantaneous. Downtown Traffic Snarled by Minor Cape Altercation. The story was the same dry, unassuming police blotter entry. But this time, I wasn't just reading it. I was feeling it. I was watching the last domino topple in slow motion. I scrolled to the bottom, my heart hammering against my ribs, and stared at the two words that sealed my fate.

Published: Yesterday.

That was it. That was the starting pistol. The two words hit me harder than a physical blow. Yesterday. The word echoed in the silent, cabbage-scented room. It meant the story wasn't just in motion; it was accelerating into its first true disaster. It meant Taylor Hebert had made her choice. It meant the first domino had struck the second.

And I knew, with the kind of gut-deep, absolute certainty that comes before a fatal diagnosis, what the third domino was. It was a name that my story-memory spat out like a piece of shrapnel.

Bakuda.

The name landed, and my stomach simply dropped. It was the kind of cold, heavy plunge you feel right before a car crash, a silent, internal lurch that announces the world is about to end. The name wasn't a memory; it was a promise, and it dragged a whole host of horrors along with it.

My mind, my very human and very fragile mind, became a movie screen for atrocities I hadn't witnessed but knew were coming. I saw a coffee shop through a window, the people inside trapped behind a shimmering wall, caught like flies in amber, their faces locked in the last emotion they'd ever feel. I felt the phantom rumble of a bus stop being twisted into a knot of screaming metal by a force that had no business existing. I could almost taste the coppery tang of the air after a bomb turned a crowd of shoppers into a fine red mist.

There's a difference between knowing, and knowing. And the truth was just now settling into my bones: I was in a horror story. Yes, I'd been granted the potential to change my story, but what did I actually have? A phone, magic identification, and the ability to do a credible impression of the Energizer Bunny?

A raw, animal panic seized me. My heart started kicking like a mule against my ribs, and the air in the small room suddenly felt thick and suffocating. The sour taste of fear rose in my throat. I lurched off the bed, a strangled noise escaping my lips, my body screaming a single, primal command: GET OUT.

I started pacing, a caged rat in a shoebox. Three steps one way, my worn sneakers scuffing frantically on the dusty floorboards, spin, three steps back. The air sawed in and out of my lungs. My hands were clenched so tight my knuckles were white, and a tremor started in my arms, a pure, uncut jolt of adrenaline looking for a way out. I had to run. I had to put this city, this room, this entire godforsaken reality in a rearview mirror and just drive until the world ran out of road.

And then the thought surfaced, a cold, clear fact floating in the hot chaos of my panic: I could do it. With [Boundless Stamina], I could literally run all night. I could be in the next state by sunrise. The idea was a lifeline, a real, tangible escape plan.

But the cynical side of me, the bastard who'd been quiet while I was still riding the good vibes from when I thought I had more time, chose that moment to speak up.

And run where, you idiot?

The question hit me with the force of a slap. Where would I run? Down a highway that Bakuda might decide to turn into a gravity well for a laugh? Through a suburb she might decide to test a time-stop bomb on? The story wasn't just about the big events; it was about the sheer, sadistic randomness of her terror. There was no 'away from it'. The entire city was the bullseye, and outside its limits lay a whole body of horrors that I didn't know about.

Running wasn't an escape plan. It was just choosing a different, more athletic, way to die.

I stopped dead in the center of the room, my ragged breathing loud in the silence. The adrenaline was still pumping, a frantic, thrumming energy that vibrated right down to my bones. But the panic was gone. You can only be terrified for so long before your brain, as a simple matter of self-preservation, decides to get angry instead.

The frantic energy didn't vanish. It curdled. It compressed from a hot, messy explosion of fear into a cold, dense ball of pure, pragmatic fury. My breathing evened out. My hands unclenched.

The name wasn't a monster anymore. It wasn't an act of God I had to flee from.

It was a math problem. A variable in an equation that currently had me, and a whole lot of innocent people, penciled in for a very messy end. And the only way to solve the equation was to get a pencil with a damn good eraser and remove the variable. Permanently.

And the story-memory, my curse and my only guide, reminded me of one more thing. My deadline for solving the problem.

Was tonight.

 

[Howldawg]

Pretty sure Taylor took 1 week to recover from the locker followed by 3 months to make the spider silk costume

 

[dasstan]

Pretty sure Taylor took 1 week to recover from the locker followed by 3 months to make the spider silk costume

Click to shrink...

Fucking whoops, lmao.

This is absolutely what I get for making a last minute edit before posting. Thanks.

Corrected.