That day started out just like you expect. Wake up, eat, go to work. Roge’s routine during work was a bit different than the average, though, working as a programmer for a somewhat small company. After a couple of years though, it felt like nothing special, with the only noteworthy thing that happened was his thoughts on going to the gym. The elevator had broken for a few hours, and his slightly overweight body couldn’t keep up very well with the stairs. He even looked up a few places close to his apartment to possibly join as well.

  Of course, the noteworthy thing that day was something only he remembered. Working at his desk, browsing reddit as he waited for his code to compile, he started noticing multiple… concerning posts. One or two before his feed started being flooded by nearly the same topic, more or less. “You all hear about the explosion at Carmix?” “My friend lives near where that lab exploded and won’t respond.” “Some dark storm coming from the Carmix Lab?” “What’s this strange dark cloud on the horizon?” The last one especially made Roge nervous, as the shaky video showed what looked to be a black sandstorm coming over the horizon. Flashes of lightning quickly lit the otherwise dark scene, the video cutting out and most likely being uploaded before the storm hit.

  Knowing he was only an hour or two away from the infamous lab, known for it’s shotty work on microscopic machines, Roge decided to head to the balcony of his office’s floor, having to psych himself up for a moment about the 20 floor drop before heading out. Sure enough, what looked like a giant black sandstorm hung on the horizon in the direction of the lab, the flashes of lightning letting him see more than the crummy camera.

  ‘Wait…’ he thought to himself, rubbing his eyes before looking back at the rapidly encroaching phenomenon. ‘Wasn’t there a city over there?’ Sure enough, the city, which he double checked the maps on his phone to make sure was supposed to be there, couldn’t be seen with the lightning lighting up the interior. Some lighting bolts he could see from very far away, far enough away for him to have been able to see the city’s silhouette.

  “What’s up computer man?” a voice behind him asked, Roge not turning away from the strange sight. “Saw you running off from your…” The voice trailed off as his coworker most likely noticed the same thing Roge did.

  “Maybe we should… get inside…” Roge mumbled, suddenly noticing the cloud getting taller at a rapid pace. ‘Don’t they say if a tornado doesn’t look like it’s moving…’ was all he had time to think before loud booms reached their ears, Roge and the coworker he couldn’t remember the name of fleeing back into the office.

  Even inside the floor was practically vibrating with the loud noises coming from the storm, the shaking getting worse and worse as it got closer.

  ‘Welp I’m dead,’ was Roge’s last thought, right before his world turned black as night, the sounds of screaming and windows shattering accompanying him into unconsciousness.

  ~~~

  ‘Rather wish I was dead,’ Roge thought glumly, waking up slowly and reluctantly. It had been a few days since he woke up from the ‘Nanite Storm’ as he called it, unsure how long he’d been out during it, but knowing it had to have been a while. A few hours couldn’t make the changes he saw in the mirror as he got up from his bed.

  A bipedal dragon greeted him in the mirror every morning now, looking mostly humanoid minus the face, wings, and tail. Even his hands and feet had only shifted slightly, keeping the dexterous human shape while mostly everything had changed. Strangely enough, the first thing that always caught his eyes was his waist, his new body having apparently taken some inspiration from eastern dragons in how lean and long his torso was. His legs shortened to compensate of course, but it still seemed strange after being an overweight computer nerd for almost all of his life.

  The next thing that caught his eye was how… *blue* he now looked. Most of his scale color was somewhere in the range of a bright sapphire color, almost shining in the light from his shower the previous night. The only things that weren’t blue were his palms, stomach, and the underside of his tail, which shimmered an almost midnight black.

  ‘The tail…’ he sighed to himself, looking at the classic tube shape with spines coming out the top. His first day had been a quick introduction into how to not run into things with it. Even then he could still feel some small bruises still healing underneath the scales. His wings weren’t any better, looking like classic bat wings with the light blue on the ‘arm’ portions and a solid black on the membranes between. If he was honest with himself, Roge still hadn’t gotten used to the things, mainly because he was expected to keep them tucked up against his back.

  His face he always looked at last, feeling a small flinch at the unfamiliar features. Long, white horns framed a completely reptilian head, his brain coming up with a mixture of a pet lizard and dog to match the overall shape of it. Thankfully, he still had hair, though the darker sapphire color wasn’t his first choice for appearance. ‘Still don’t have enough for hair dye,’ he complained to himself, taking a brush and trying to style it in something other than a spiky look. He did not succeed.

  After successfully getting into his clothes in under ten minutes, a new personal record for him, he couldn’t help but sigh at the plain black boots, brown slacks, tan shirt outfit. ‘Right. Clothes are on that list too…’ he mused to himself, glad at least that the slightly chill weather outside allowed him to put on his black, knee length jacket. It made the outfit look a bit *less* plain and boring than it did before, in Roge’s opinion at least.

  Before heading down to the main room of the inn, Roge feeling a hit to his pride when he thought of the apartment he used to live in, he checked his [Status], reminding himself that this was his new reality, at least for now. A rectangular sheet appeared in front of his face at the thought, having the texture of old parchment paper and the color of dark grey slate. The words on it were all written in a looping, white script, Roge grumbling that cursive had come back to bite him in the ass once again.

  ‘New’ being a relative term of course, Roge having played quite a number of video games to recognize the layout of his [Status]. He now lived in a world with ‘magic’, ‘skills’, and ‘classes’, Roge even vaguely aware of what [Dragonkin] was from how he looked and some of the classic RPGs he’d played. It, of course, wasn’t real magic, etc. in Roge’s mind. No, the Nanite Storm couldn’t change the laws of physics like that. He was either in some sort of simulated reality, though he really hoped he wasn’t in a Matrix pod, or the nanites had mimicked magic using the vast energy and matter they had access to by changing the entirety of the world. The idea that he was now entirely *made* of the things or they somehow swam through his body made him shiver and move on, closing the little screen for now.

  Coming down to the main room of the inn, Roge looked around for his ‘new’ friend, quickly spotting the [Wolfkin] sitting at one of the tables. Fred, whom he’d known in high school and lost touch with, was apparently his best friend in this new version of events. No more programming career or interest in eventually *making* a game in the future. The world had some reason decided to reverse the clock on all those things. Taking a page from the medieval settings straight out of a DND book, everything looked just the slightest bit *old* to the dragonkin. Even the chair he sat on was some design that had been tossed out a few hundred years back.

  “Hey Roge!” Fred cheered, the ‘wolf head stuck on a man’s furry body’ look thankfully looking a bit more normal to Roge after staring at it every day for the last few days. “Still feeling a bit…” he trailed off, not-so-subtly signaling to his head.

  “Yup. Seems everything’s gone for good,” Roge grumbled, having decided fairly quickly to feign memory loss to explain his lack of knowledge on the new world. Everyone else had their previous lives erased and replaced with the new one. All except him.

  At the very least he got a decent perk out of the exchange, not wanting to find out what mind magic even felt like.

  “Aw man!” Fred whined, his ears turning backwards on his head. “Well, Madam Madrid didn’t give you too hard of a time yesterday, did she?”

  Roge grimaced at the reminder, as his new job didn’t seem too fun at first. Going from working on new projects every week as a programmer to a tender of plants for a tobacco shop sucked hard in his opinion. The only saving grace was the new idea he’d thought up at the end of the day yesterday, the dragon looking at his effects screen and dismissing the usual [Caffeine Dependency] debuff to find he finally got the [Well Rested] buff. “Nothing much to figure out. She seemed really understanding of my memory loss and the task she had set for me wasn’t too hard to figure out.”

  “That’s good to hear man,” the wolf huffed, taking a long sip of his morning beer. “Just remember you have that probation meeting today. Wouldn’t want old Paul waiting too long on you.” Fred’s grin, which had made Roge flinch the first time he saw it, was a bit on the mean spirited side, though from what he saw and knew of his friend in the alternate ‘past’, he knew Fred was mostly a good guy. Just really bad at making jokes.

  “Like your girlfriend had to wait on you?” Roge shot back, making the wolf nearly spit out his drink. “What? Was I not a good verbal sparring partner before?” he asked, cocking his head.

  “You were not,” Fred coughed, giving the dragon an odd look. “Not sure if I like that yet…”

  “Can’t take it?” Roge asked with a cheeky grin.

  “Oh I can take anything mother fucker!”

  ~~~

  Roge spent about another half hour with his friend, making conversation and jokes that they hadn’t been able to get into while Fred had been cramming as much information into the dragon’s head the past few days. Checking his [Status] for the time, Roge told Fred he’d had to leave for work, getting up out of the table and leaving the wolf to his drinking.

  As soon as he left the inn, Roge still couldn’t help but marvel at how different the city looked. Instead of the towering skyscrapers of steel, there were now buildings made of stone and wood. Most were only two stories tall at that, though some were a mix of one and three story buildings, or even higher! At first, he thought there was some sort of manufacturing for the various materials, as everything looked so uniform and clean when he looked at it up close. That assumption had been dashed on the second day when he’d found a group of workers working to make one of the one story buildings into a two story.

  He’d almost been late for work that day as he saw the various magics at work, what he assumed was mana creating ribbons of color. Most of it was the dark brown of [Earth Magic] on what looked to be big boulders, harvesting a specific amount of the materials and compressing that into bricks. Some more magic was used to adhere the bricks together, leading to a somewhat faster, but much easier process to make the building’s second story. He even suspected the cobblestone streets were made using a similar process, as the stones seemed too smooth on the top.

  The hundreds of people using the streets in one given moment, still giving Roge a creepy vibe at how many differences people had in this new world. Anything from other animal people to the classic orcs and elves roamed the streets. He even occasionally saw what looked to be a demon, though they quickly went out of view, so he couldn’t be sure. One thing the crowds did not have were humans. He wasn’t sure if that was a regional thing or not, as it was one of the questions he hadn’t gotten the courage to ask Fred yet.

  Most people wore similar tan shirts and brown pants as he did, only some using accessories like scarves, gloves, etc. to add a bit more style. The only exceptions were what he assumed to be the ‘nobility’ and ‘clergy’. People in fancy colors riding in elaborate carriages gave way to the former assumption, while pure white cloaks and white metal armor gave way to the latter.

  As he people watched on his way to work, he was glad that his increased [Intelligence] had allowed him to instantly memorize the route Fred had shown him on his first day. There weren't any detailed explanations on the various Attributes, but Fred was able to give him the lowdown on them, for the most part. [Intelligence] was the one he was most interested in, considering it was his highest stat and it determined how easily information could be memorized, as well as influenced how well someone was able to utilize magical power. Hopefully his high Attribute would allow for the experiments he wanted to do that day. ‘Otherwise I’m stuck at a dead end job for the rest of eternity…’

  ~~~

  This is the more advanced [Status] for Roge that he doesn’t have access to yet, in case people are interested in how the skills and stats align.