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The house is empty. This is obvious. Silence and cold air only ever mean one thing. The spot next to you on the bed is as cold as ice. (Which is to say, pretty damn cold.) Your fingers splay out against the wrinkled Spiderman sheets, trying to find any trace of warmth to no avail.
Slowly, you drag yourself out of bed. It takes all the willpower you have and more to not collapse back into it’s reach. A trip to the kitchen proves reckless as you trip and land flat on your face. A sickening crunch still doesn’t wake you up. You’re beginning to believe that today is going to be a long day.
You push yourself up as the severity of the situation hits you: the house is empty. Why the fuck is the house empty?
Jake and Jane don’t respond to your calls, and neither does Roxy. Your voice is hoarse from yelling for them. AR whirls to life on your face and checks their pesterchum status while you rub your throat. You feel so old, suddenly.
"Dirk," AR whines for a second. "It seems that-"
And AR is no longer. You pull your shades off and stare at them in fear. They’re nothing more than two black triangles. Nothing more than plastic. Something fucked up is going on now. This is a Saw-tier of fucked up.
You crawl over to where your computer should be to find a TV. What the fuck? Okay, so some asshole drugs you and drags your three best friends away, kills AR and somehow fucks with his memory, and then goes out of his way to rearrange your furniture? What the fuck is going on here?
You crack your neck in the process of looking for a computer. There are a shit ton of puppets everywhere, some sharp things, and explosives. No computer. There’s a cafe down the street, you think, just have to borrow someone’s laptop. You have no idea how you know that, but you ignore that to try and figure out how the fuck there’s a road in the middle of the ocean if you’re back home.
Without bothering to change out of the T-shirt and jeans you think you fell asleep in, you rush down the stairs and out to the street. Fuck, fuck, fuck, there are stairs.
You feel drugged and drained. The rushing you’d like to think you’re doing is more like stumbling and straight up falling. You can’t think straight, but the few thoughts that manage to pierce the veil strike fear deep in your heart. What if they’re all dead? What if you’re dead? Is this a dream?
The word dream set off a shit ton of strings to play a chord that leaves you collapsing into a shivering heap, holding your head. There’s something about a dream that connects to all of this, but it’s too much.
After a minute or ten of trembling, you bring yourself to stand and complete your decent. The doorman waves at you, saying his hello. You wave back mindlessly.
The view outside paralyzes you. So many people bustle about, and it’s so loud. It’s almost too much. Your persevere, though, and shuffle to the cafe. The Page Cafe, mostly known for it’s Fountain of Hope, looks like hell. It looks…dead.
The word dead strikes another chord, this one causing you to scream. Everything is splintering, and it hurts. The Page looks dead. Jake.
Jake is dead, you decide after an hour of lying on the pavement. If Jake is dead, does this mean that this is a dream? Maybe you went into shock when the news hit you. Maybe he’s always been dead and you’ve just now realized it. How would you know he was dead? The last thing you remember was breaking up with him, when everyone was fucking crazy with some candy-shit. God, Trickster Mode scarred you.
Then you all died and went God Tier. The next part is a little bit blurry, but you remember seeing a blue troll and uttering some shitty one-liner about kissing and death.
God, what the fuck happened?
After a few more hours of silence, it dawns on you that 1) it’s silent 2) this no longer feels like concrete. It feels like solid stone. You pull your head up to look around and see a dead Jake English falling through the sky.
You spring into action, or at least try to, but you can’t even sit up. It’s all you can do not to cry out.
That’s right, you think as he hits the ground, tears streaming, I don’t exist.