The power in the apartment died. In the sudden, suffocating dark, Elias heard the distinct sound of a heavy, iron-shod wheel creaking across his living room floor.
He reached for his phone to use the flashlight, but a notification popped up first. It was an automated system message from his desktop, which shouldn't have had power:
It wasn't the narrator. It was his roommates' voices, muffled and distorted, coming through his headphones. They weren't reciting lines; they were arguing about things that had happened in the kitchen just ten minutes ago. Elias tried to Alt-F4. The screen stayed.
The game world looked wrong. The landscapes weren't just gothic; they were glitching into hyper-realistic gore that made his stomach churn. As his party traveled the road, the stress bars didn't just fill with yellow—they bled red pixels onto the bottom of his monitor. Then the whispers started.