Sleep and I have a bit of an odd relationship.

Or, at least we might have. Before this point in my life, I'd never really asked other people about the concept of sleep, or heard them discuss it outside of a scientific context. Besides stuff like dreams and nightmares and complaints about sleep schedules that you'd hear around the water cooler or something, of course.

Anyway, my sleeping quirks probably aren't what most people would consider entirely normal. I almost never remember my dreams, the ones I do remember are never lucid, and once I open my eyes in the morning, they're not shutting until midnight, at the earliest. Unless I pull an all-nighter beforehand, then I'm much more liable to have myself a power-nap on the couch. But even then, it takes me at least a good fifteen minutes before my consciousness shuts off.

Actually, now that I think about it, I doubt the first two of those would really make anyone raise an eyebrow. The third, maybe, but not so much the first two.

...I was going somewhere with this. What did- oh, right!

See, the thing about these quirks is that they had always been constants in my relationship with sleep. Since the day I was born, those three factors of my daily 5-to-12 hour rest periods had been influencing my life.

So you can probably understand the idea that when all three of them were nullified one fateful day, I took it as a glaring red flag that some weird, crazy, and quite possibly insane shit was about to go down.

By all accounts, that day should've been normal. I'd woken up, eaten breakfast (two toaster waffles doused in chocolate syrup, exactly like the past… however many hundreds of days I'd had them in the morning), washed up, and gone about my usual business.

Then, when I'd lied down on the couch and held up my iPad to see if I had any new Discord messages, I suddenly fell asleep in about five seconds.

An indeterminate amount of time later, I felt like I heard a voice.

"…ey!"

I should probably mention here that while I don't think I'm as bad as some people, I am not much of a morning person. Or maybe a better way to put it would be that I wake up slowly. Either way, it took a bit more time before my brain was alert enough to correctly parse what I was hearing.

"Hey!"

Just because it could parse it though, doesn't mean that it was warmed up enough to react to it. That took a bit longer.

And by 'a bit longer,' I mean 'long enough for the other person to get fed up with my unresponsiveness.'

"HEY, FLESHLING! Quit acting like a lazy dragon and open your stupid eyes already!"

The sudden increase in volume managed to do the trick, providing my mind the jolt it needed to jump-start my engines. Once that was done, it immediately set about getting offended at the jab and firing off a snappy retort.

"Piss off," I heard myself mumble while I felt my hand go up to rub my eyes. "'S racist against dragons."

Not my best work, but I had just woken up and had no idea who I was talking to.

"How dare you!" Whoever they were, they'd just jumped up to a solid 2 on the 10.0 scale of Karen. "If I wasn't stuck in this dumb thing, I'd smack you silly!"

My lids cracked open, revealing a blurry image of my retreating limb, a mess of blue, and a whole lot of black. "Try me, bitch. You wanna throw hands? Let's throw some hands."

"Ooh, you-!" They - or rather she, going by the distinctly feminine timbre of the voice - went about producing the most petulantly frustrated groan I'd ever heard. "Blasted lousy rotten sack of idiot bones! Why do you have to be such a jerk, huh?!"

The image solidified, the blue blob sharpening into a mass of blue flames centered around an old-looking medallion surrounded by an endless void. "I dunno, maybe because you decided to insult and yell at me instead of trying to wake me up in any other way?" Some part of me definitely recognized that something was wrong here, but I was a bit too preoccupied with the verbal slap fight to care. "And you're one to talk. You're just a tiny hunk of metal. I could pick you up in one hand and chuck you off into the distance if I wanted to."

I have no idea why I attributed the voice to the medallion. For all I knew (which was more than enough to justify the connection), the voice could be disembodied, and the medallion could've been totally unrelated. Luckily for my dignity, that wasn't the case.

"How else was I going to get you to open your eyes?! I'm a tiny little medallion!" She did have a point there. "And I'll have you know that it's really hard being inside one! It's all cramped, I can't move at all, and I can hardly see or hear or feel anything! I can't even talk!"

...wait a second. There was something fishy about that statement. "Hang on, run that by me again. You can't talk?"

"No, of course I can't! Do medallions talk where you're from?"

"No, but… you just told me that you can't talk."

"Yes, I did! What about it?"

Did she not recognize the glaring contradiction in her testimony? "You told me that you can't tell me anything."

"Yes?" It sounded like she was getting a little confused now. "What's the problem with that?"

I felt like face-palming. Then I realized that there was nothing stopping me and actually went ahead and did it. "You said that you can't talk. But you're talking to me right now."

For a moment, she was silent. Then… "Oh. Ohhh. Right, that must've sounded pretty confusing."

"Understatemeeent~," I muttered under my breath. "So, would you care to explain that?"

She hummed in an unsure tone, before agreeing to do so. "Okay, I suppose you deserve at least that much. I'm going to have to tell you about a few other things so that it makes sense, though."

Oh, boy. I knew what statements of that nature entailed. "This is going to be an exposition dump, isn't it?"

"A what?"

I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. "Nothing, just… never mind. Forget about it." (I knew all about her story, anyway.) Waving it away, I directed my attention towards the little piece of finery. "I would ask that you please keep it as brief as possible, though. I love history as much as the next guy, but if it means getting to the important stuff faster, then I'd much rather have the CliffsNotes version."

I don't know how the thing could convey the image of blinking, but it did. "The what version?"

"Say 'what' again," I reflexively grumbled out when the girl's cluelessness got the better of my bad mood.

"What?"

There was a moment when I focused the most dead-inside glare I'd ever given on that medallion. This moment lasted for about five seconds. "...just go ahead and explain."

I tried to let the negativity simmer out while she prepared to do so. Honestly, looking back on my conduct thus far, I'd made a terrible first impression. Whatever this thing was (I knew exactly who she was), I couldn't assume that she already knew to take my barbs as merely a spot of ribbing made in good fun. It certainly wouldn't be the first time my conversation habits had landed me in hot water, and while this probably wouldn't be the last time, I still needed to at least try and rein in my sniping tendencies.

'I'm not usually this irritable, though…' Maybe it was her tone, or the repeated negative reactions causing a feedback loop. Or maybe I was just trying to pin the blame on something other than myself, and I'd simply gotten off on the wrong side of the bed today.

Or it could've been the widening abyss in my gut that was the culprit, which was growing larger by the second the more my subconscious recognized the situation I was in. How did it do that, you ask? Well...

"Okay, so, first things first," the voice emanating from the medallion began, "I should probably introduce myself properly."

You see, I was, and still am a reader. A very avid reader. Books, articles, story-focused video games in particular - I ate all those up like nobody's business.

"I'm Yune. I'm the embodiment of the spirit of chaos itself."

I also happened to be a huge fan of… uh, fanfiction (heh). The desire to see more of the characters I'd grow to love over hours and hours of interaction was a strong one. But I also had a bit of a particular preference towards the 'Insert' genre. The idea of taking a regular person from the modern world and plunking them into a certain fictional one to see how they would adapt and grow within its confines had a kind of irresistible allure to me.

"I am freedom, anarchy, lawlessness, and choice incarnate."

I read a lot of insert-fics, and as a result, my sense of genre-savviness towards them grew. Not to the point where I could accurately anticipate the plot points of a given insert story, but I could quickly recognize a lot of the commonalities that many of them shared.

"To put it in the words of your kind..."

Why is this important? Because a lot of those insert stories (or at least the poorly written ones, but that's irrelevant) started off with the protagonist finding themselves in a void of empty space, to be inevitably greeted by some form of omnipotent being, like a god or goddess. And what was happening to me right now?

"I'm basically the 'goddess' of chaos."

Yeah. I was floating in a black expanse, with nothing but an omnipotent being to keep me company. Which would naturally mean that somehow, someway, I'd become an insert protagonist. And going by the identity of the god talking to me, I was gonna have to strap in for a long, bumpy ride, filled with more potholes than I could shake a cement mixer at.

Predictably, my reaction was to put my head in my hands and whine out an "ohh, nooooooo…"

"What's with that reaction?" At last, the being showed her first signs of actual concern for me. "Did I say something wrong?"

"No, no, you- no," I assured her. "You didn't say anything wrong. I just… I think I already know the general idea of what's going to happen here."

I got the notion that she'd glanced off in a different direction for a moment before looking back. "And… what do you think that might be?"

One my hands came up to run through my hair while the other cocked itself on my hip, simply to have something to do as my gaze went up in thought. "Uh, let's see… to start off with the big idea, the next time I wake up, I'm going to be somewhere on the continent of Tellius. I may or may not be wearing the clothes I went to sleep in when I wake up, and I may or may not wake up next to some tools I'll be expected to wield for the rest of my time there." My focus went back to the medallion. "Am I on the right track so far?"

"...yes, actually," Yune answered with what felt like a blank stare. "That's about as correct as it can get. However did you figure that out?"

A sigh of relief left me. 'Okay, so my savviness hasn't led me astray yet.' Out loud, I responded with something different. "Let's just say I've done my research and leave it at that."

She seemed to accept that without further issue, which worked just fine for me. This point was where things started getting more complicated, though - many different stories had varying spins on the part I was about to cover next.

"Now…" I closed my eyes and thought. "You pulled me from Earth because you need me in some kind of weird, convoluted way typical of a god. Say… something strange has happened in the world you inhabit, something that jeopardizes its inhabitants and could possibly end up causing its destruction. Whatever the cause, something's wrong in your world, and you pulled me here to do something about it." My lids opened up again. "Is that it?"

This time, however, Yune's tone indicated that she was shaking her head. "Mmm, not really."

I stopped. "Wait, so… I got the cause wrong, or you don't actually need me?"

"The second one."

Okaaaaaay… "So if you don't need me, then… why am I here?"

"Did you not hear me earlier?" It felt like she had raised an eyebrow. "I'm the incarnation of chaos. Why would the embodiment of things like impulse and randomness need a reason for doing anything?"

My subconscious recognized that she had a point. My conscious mind, on the other hand, was more concerned with something else. "You're telling me that you forcibly pulled me away from my old life, and all the comforts that come with it, without my consent, to throw me in a world where a single unlucky roll of the bloody dice could end up with me going to hell… on a god damn whim?"

"Yes," she stated. "Yes, I did."

Neither of us spoke for a few moments.

Until I glared. "I hope you know that the next time I see you, I'm going to knock your fucking teeth out."

"How? I don't have any teeth. I'm a medallion, remember?"

I glared harder, already formulating plans detailing exactly how I would eventually get my glorious revenge on the little shitstain. Eventually. "Oh, you will. Believe me, you will."

The next inkling I got from her was definitely that of a shrug. "If you say so."

While my brain continued to go off scheming and plotting various methods of enacting vengeance, Yune went about covering more important topics. "Anyway… I also came across this little thing right before you got here." A stream of her trademark azure flame flared upwards, coalescing and emitting a bright flash before fading away to reveal what looked like… a flash drive? "I'm not sure what it does, or why someone decided to leave it lying around this place, but I don't think I can use it, since… well, you know. So… here you go."

The tiny digital file cabinet drifted over for me to take, which I did. Just because I hated someone's guts didn't mean I would refuse their help if they offered it, even if that help didn't really appear to be able to do much.

Plucking the drive out of the air, I held it up for inspection, turning it over to see it from all angles. At a glance, it seemed no different from the hundreds of other flash drives I'd seen before it - the device was about the size of my thumb, and coated in a factory-issue dark gray finish. The only thing that stood out about it was the lettering branded on one side, reading "ANNA & SISTERS", which I couldn't help but snort at.

'Of course they'd be the ones marketing stuff like this. They'd do it for anything they could get their hands on.'

As I was fiddling with it, I incidentally ended up sticking my thumb over the connector. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn't mean anything, but as I had already discovered and would continue to discover in the near future, these circumstances were anything but normal. This was proven when the drive refused to let go of my thumb.

"Eh?" I grabbed it in my other hand and gave it a tug. It didn't budge, taking my thumb with it instead. "What in the-?"

My sudden occupation with the case of the mysterious flash drive caused me to miss the progress bar that popped into existence in the upper-left corner of my vision, which rapidly began to fill up. Heedless of the new addition, I kept trying to pull the stubborn little thing off my thumb.

I was met with failure on all counts. Nothing worked - neither pulling it off nor flicking my hand around in hopes of dislodging it. Huffing out a noise of frustration, I took a peek at Yune, who had stayed silent since giving me the offending piece of tech.

"...what?"

I flicked my eyes towards the drive attached to my phalange, then raised my eyebrows in a silent question.

She responded in kind with the feeling of a flat look. "And how exactly do you expect a medallion to help here?"

Two good points in about as many minutes. This girl was on a roll. "Bleh." Lifting my hand up, I dangled the hardware in front of my face. "Well, that's gonna be inconve-" The drive fell off. "-nient…?"

The idea that gravity had just decided out of nowhere to suddenly get off its ass and start working inside the void for only one object in particular ended up not getting the chance to cross my mind, as it was then that I finally took notice of the now-full and flashing progress bar. Mainly because of the text that was typing itself across my vision.

FILE TRANSFER COMPLETE

INSTALL? (y/n)

I stared at the prompt, before going back to Yune. "You have any idea why I-"

And that "why" was apparently good enough for the text.

INSTALLING…

That was when the pain started.

But it didn't start right away. No, that would've been too easy. After all, why rip the band-aid off when you could slowly peel it away instead? Why wouldn't you experience every last individual prick of agony one after another instead of just getting all of them over with at once?

Because it seems easier at the time, that's why. It always seems easier, even when it isn't. Which is every time. Including this one.

It started in my chest. A warm itch, just below the skin, impossible to scratch without the employment of a worrying degree of self-harm. For every second that passed, it became that much more irritating, growing in heat and covering a little more of my body.

By the time it covered my torso, it was already well past hot tub temperature, and showed no signs of cooling down. When it got to my elbows, it felt like I was being cremated. Once it finally managed to reach the tips of my toes, well… I'm sure you get the idea.

I don't remember much of the specifics outside that. From how my voice was left hoarse but not quite dead by the end of it, the point where I started screaming was probably around the time where it was making its way across my biceps. Yune might have also tried to say something at one point, but she may as well have stayed quiet for all the good it did.

All things must end, however, and after what felt like hours upon hours of suffering through what could've passed for a trip to the inner core of the sun, the burning sensation simply up and left. Just like that, without any sense of decline. Really, if it hadn't been responsible for what ranked among the top of the worst experiences I'd ever had in my life, I would've called it disappointing.

Either way, it didn't change what I had gone through, and what it had done to me. Outwardly, I looked no worse for wear, which was at least a tiny bit of silver lining. My insides, on the other hand, felt like utter shit. There was still a lingering sense of phantom heat, weighing on my limbs and back as a reminder that I hadn't simply imagined what had happened. Or maybe that was just every single muscle in my body crying out for relief after they'd all been forced to convulse over and over again, no doubt thanks to how my nervous system had gone haywire from all the pressure the installation process had piled on it.

And if all that wasn't enough, the cherry on top of this super-sized sundae of misery and torment came in the form of two entirely too cheery words typed across my vision.

INSTALLATION COMPLETE.

For a while, I was silent, contenting myself with staring at the text that was almost certainly mocking me in some way, wordlessly laughing at the expense of the torture session I'd endured. Then I closed my eyes, breathed in, breathed out, and opened them again.

"...well," I rasped. "That sucked."

"I'll say." Par for the course, Chaos Incarnate was no help whatsoever. "Are you okay?"

I gave her the stare you give a person when you both know that they just said something idiotic, and they should feel idiotic for doing so. "What do you think?"

At long last, I got the barest hint of shame from her. "...right, that was a stupid question. Er… do you know what just happened?"

"A system update," I sardonically replied. "Of course not. Do you?"

"Not a clue." Exactly as I'd suspected.

I groaned, covering my face with a hand. 'Of course I had to get stuck with the Chaotic Neutral dumbass. Just my fucking luck.' The text was gone now. But whatever my body had gone through as a result of its machinations remained - I could feel it in my bones. 'I seriously hope whatever you did was worth it. There's gonna be hell to pay if it wasn't.'

"Well, then." I eventually ground out. "Is that it? Are we done here?"

"Uh…" A thonk was performed by Yune. "I… think we are, actually. You already know what's going to happen, I gave you the thing, and that's pretty much it. All that's left is for you to get going."

A simple thing to do. Not so much so at the moment, however. "How am I supposed to do that?"

"Like this."

And within another five seconds, I blacked out.

A/N: Here we go again.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the rewrite of "Mercenaries, Scrubs, and a Whole Lot of Level-Grinding", newly christened as "Gamer, Grinder, Stranger, Scrub". It's been quite a long time since I've actually written anything for this, but the ideas never stopped coming between the time I drifted away from the original and now. Thanks to the environment of the Fanfiction Treehouse discord server, however, I was motivated to get off my ass and go back to this story so my Fire Emblem portfolio wouldn't look like a total embarrassment against the likes of RedxEagl3 and Narwhal Lord. Well, that, and to give the rest of the peeps on the server who aren't fans of Madoka Magica or RWBY (which is almost all of them) a more familiar setting to digest my style in.

Oh, for anyone who feels like popping into said server to check out what's what with the hottest FE fic authors in town, here's a code - 9XG3U7a. Don't worry, we don't bite. I think. I don't, at least.

Either way, old fans can expect to see some notable changes from my first go at this, even within the mere 8 chapters of content the original story had. I won't spoil anything, though - you'll have to find that stuff out for yourself. The old system I used has also been thrown out the window in favor of something more flexible and less invasive towards the reader experience. With any luck, those old bold-text notifications with paragraphs of their own will hopefully stay nothing more than a distant memory.

With that said, though, I can't in good conscience tell you that you can expect anything resembling a proper update schedule for this. Not only am I in college right now, but I also have two other stories that I'm working on at the moment, one of which I'm also in the process of refurbishing. Believe me, I know it's a terrible idea to try and juggle all this shit at once. I blame my instant gratification monkey; he's a dick, and he never lets me do anything healthy of my own volition. But there's nothing I can do about that now. Enough about me, though - you're here for the story, which at the time of writing this, is unfortunately still unwritten. So you'll just have to wait until it's not unwritten. Sorry about that.

See y'all next time.