Consciousness returns with the rhythmic pounding of salt water against rough timber. You blink sleep away blearily, dazed.

You wiggle your toes and tense your arms. Proprioception returns, and your vestibular system rights itself. You lie across a crude three-by-three meter raft of lashed drift logs. The waves bob you and your small, personal slice of solid ground up and down, up and down.

You look right, you look left, the bright daylight piercingly intense as it reflects against the water. You see nothing but colossal, murky indigo ocean under a bright azure sky.

Beside your hands lie two 500mL plastic bottles of water and a crude fiber rope tipped with a bent iron hook. For fishing, perhaps?

Where in the world were you?

A chime rings directly inside your mind as a semi-translucent heads-up display (HUD) flickers into view. A server-wide system announcement from... from the Alien Proctors? blares across the screen:

"ATTENTION CONTESTANTS: Server 04 initialized. Population: 200,000,000. You have been selected for galactic survival trials. Seven-day Grace Period active: all lethal damage and environmental hazards are temporarily nullified to allow calibration and basic preparation. Retrieve floating flotsam to survive."

Okay. Floating, translucent mental status panels. Aliens that entered two hundred million people into a survival game of some sort. A grace period. This was the weirdest dream you'd ever had.

You click a random button on your HUD. A "World Chat" feed is screaming in real-time chaos and panic—millions of messages from everyday people asking where they are, weeping for families, wondering if it's a dream.

"To calibrate your contestant profile, roll four d20s for your base stats (STR, CON, INT, CHA) and state your pre-abduction Earth profession and one realistic hobby."

...This was as dream, right? Right?