Chapter Text
Vanessa really didn’t know what had happened. She didn’t!
She’d beta tested dozens of games already, and this one wasn’t even difficult to play; it was just some silly high school simulator with a bunch of random characters to make friends with. All the sprites were weird! How was she supposed to have known that nobody else could see the ballerina girl?
The ballerina girl had been Vanessa’s favorite, actually. The character had been named Clara Ballora (she knew how stupid the name was, but one of them was named Monsieur Violin, so she didn’t really push it), and her code had seemed less childish than the others’, plus she had almost no bugs. Which Vanessa supposed should have been a red flag since her job was to find and point out bugs so they’d be fixed.
But she never thought twice about it, just kept playing the game and growing closer to the character, and started actually kind of liking her. She would have been friends with Clara Ballora if they’d met in high school. Vanessa didn’t really have many friends herself thanks to a messy court case her family name was mildly famous for. She was actually kind of lonely.
She almost found herself wishing Clara Ballora was real.
If she was being honest, she still wasn’t sure what had happened. She’d progressed through the game like normal, helping Clara Ballora prepare for a big recital at the end of the year, but when she got there, all she saw was a big empty theater and a dark stage. It didn’t make sense; the game’s story implied the whole school would be there.
But then the lights lifted on the stage, and Clara Ballora was there alone, performing an almost sad sort of solo dance, and the music from it filled Vanessa’s ears and her brain, and all she could feel was a bittersweet melancholy that flooded her entire body, filling her head like candy floss, sprouting in her heart an aching desire to protect -
And then she woke up on the testing room floor with Jeremy and Luis hovering over her with alarmed expressions.
She tried to explain what had happened, but neither of them had ever heard of a character named Clara Ballora, which Vanessa couldn’t understand. Maybe she’d get it if it was just Luis, but Jeremy had been playing the game for longer than she had; there was no way he didn’t notice a major character!
But it wasn’t just that. Something felt…different inside her. It was almost as if she could still hear Clara Ballora’s music box.
She began to wonder if she was losing her mind.
She decided to completely shift environments. She found a new job as a low level security officer, hired a therapist, and tried to forget how her head never quite felt completely clear again.
She attributed the entire experience to a nervous breakdown and tried to move on. She’d personally never had a nervous breakdown, but she guessed that was what it felt like. Not like she would know any different, right?
Eventually she just tried to forget the weird encounter altogether, and that wasn’t terribly difficult.
Well, on most days, at least.
Today, unfortunately, was not going to be one of those days.