"Yeah?"
"I take it back."
Clink.
Daria blinked. "What the hell?" she said aloud.
She was in a formless void, black as far as the eye could see. She could still clearly see herself, which was strange (where was the source of the light?), and she was standing on SOMEthing. She tried kneeling down and poking it, but whatever it was, it was inflexible, and room temperature.
She turned around. "No. Fucking. Way."
Floating in the air were the words "Lawndale High: The Game". Beneath it floated more words - New Game, New Game Plus, Achievements, Options, Quit.
"Well, New Game implies I want to plunge back into hell, so..." She approached Quit, but as she did so, weakness suddenly overcame her. She didn't quite collapse, but her muscles were slow to move her, and intense chills were running up and down her body. When she actually reached her hand up to touch the floating words, great shooting pains began to wrack her body, and at once she threw herself away from the word, scrambling away until her body returned to normal. "Okay, I guess hell has some benefits," she murmured to herself. She craned her neck around, wondering if Jane had somehow ended up here. "Yeah, I guess it does," she said with resignation, finding the void truly empty of anyone else.
She stood back up and evaluated the other menu items. She tried Options next, and to her relief touching it evoked no adverse physical reactions. The menu itself was pretty barebones - sound options (muting sound made her voice go away - creepy), video options (everything was already maxed out, and her experiments with lowering the settings just made her eyes worse, it seemed), language settings, and so forth. The only intriguing item of note was Violence Settings, which was set at minimal. Increasing it to Ultra produced no obvious effects, so Daria left it on that setting.
Her next foray was the Achievements menu. To her annoyance, she saw that most of the cheevos were still locked. Of the handful she'd unlocked, she saw that one of them was the Diane Fossey Award for Beating the Game, making her roll her eyes. Another cheevo, Good Times, signified her discovery of the...secret level...Holiday Island High. "Well, that explains a lot," she remarked. She'd also gotten cheevos for beating the game without leveling up and for beating the game without killing anybody (WHAT), but that was it.
She closed the Achievements menu and wandered over to the first two items on the main menu. After speculatively eyeing both options, she elected for New Game Plus. She may still only be a level one character, but she had to have improved some areas of her person in the two-ish years she'd attended Lawndale High. She placed her hand on the New Game Plus, and...
"Girls, I just want you to know your mother and I realize it's not easy moving to a whole new town - especially for you, Daria, right?"
Daria blinked away confusion as her father waited for a response. "Uh, yeah," she said, too caught off-guard by the sudden transition to remember what she'd initially said.
Her father laughed as if what she'd said was funny. "I'm just saying you don't make friends as easily as...uh, some people."
"You mean like Quinn?" Daria pointed out bluntly.
Jake frowned as he reached to turn off the radio (after it had been turned up seconds earlier by Daria's sister). "That's not what I meant...necessarily."
Daria vaguely remembered he had some more words of wisdom to offer, but decided to switch things up. After all, what was the point of playing again if she was going to do the same thing twice? "Well, if I don't make friends as easily as Quinn, doesn't that mean the move was easy on me, since I didn't have any friends to leave behind?" The look on her father's face as his mouth moved without any words coming out was gold.
The car had pulled up to good ol' Lawndale High, prompting Quinn to hop out and begin mingling with the natives. Daria decided to follow suit, skipping anything else her father might have said.
"Quinn Morgendorffer," Quinn said to the future Fashion Club, introducing herself.
Daria decided to switch things up a little more and gave Quinn a hard shove.
The words *CRITICAL HIT* appeared in flashing red above her sister's head. The look of shock on her face was priceless as she fell in front of her father's car. The car hadn't been moving very fast, which made what happened next all the crazier.
Quinn's body exploded. Her head sprayed bits of bone and blood and brain matter all over the windshield, the eyes flying out like escape pods. Her arms and legs tumbled off as if they'd only held onto her torso with magnetic force, albeit magnets didn't spray out more blood as they landed on the asphalt and sidewalk. And the torso itself somehow got launched and smacked Sandi Griffin square in the face, covering her in blood and a horrified look.
Everybody turned to Daria. "I guess that's what the Ultra setting does," she said aloud.
That's when the screaming started.
Daria quickly found herself under arrest. The trial was swift: she was tried as an adult and sentenced to the rest of her life in prison. As she was led away from the courthouse, everything once again faded to black.
*ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: MY SISTER'S KEEPER*
-Kill your sister.
*ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: FIRST BLOOD*
-Make your first kill.
*ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: GAME OVER*
-Lose the game.
XXXXXXXXXX
Every now and then while browsing through Harry Potter fanfic (or, if I'm feeling nostalgic, Buffy fanfic), I'll come across a tale that sets the series' frameworks within a videogame, as well as making the protagonist fully cognizant that they are a video game character (and therefore able to exploit the game's mechanics to hilarious, overpowered effect). The concept is an intriguing one, especially since I typically indulge myself with as much min-maxing in video games as I can get away with.
There is something of the DNA of my old unfinished tale Daria Unscripted in this, I think. DU had some interesting ideas, but I never really had more in mind than "Daria gets stuck in some crazy time loop for some reason and tries (and fails) to make the best of it". This way, I think, is more structured and there's an actual reason for the time loop.
If you're interested in other fics along these lines, I suggest Harry Potter and the Natural 20. It's not quite "Harry Potter is suddenly a video game", more along the lines of "A powergamed PC from Dungeons and Dragons ends up in Hogwarts and turns the status quo on its ear", and is immensely enjoyable.