Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Stanley walked up the stairs to his boss’s office and was about to enter the room, but changed his mind at the last minute. After looking at the meeting room notes, he was pretty sure there would be a figurine in the boss’ bathroom, so he might as well collect it, even if there wasn’t going to be a reward. It wasn’t like there was anything else to do, as he was pretty sure he had seen every ending. So he turned around and walked the other way.

“Stepping into his manager’s office-” the Narrator’s voice suddenly cut out as the office doors shut in front of Stanley. He waited for him to speak up again, and probably say something sarcastic about how Stanley had changed his mind, but nothing happened. He wondered if the narrator was stuck in the boss’ office, but he wasn’t sure how that would work, as he’d never even seen the Narrator. Whatever had happened, though, he could at least use the time alone.

He walked back through the hallway to the boss’ bathroom, where he noticed the door that led back to the hallway was open. This was weird, they usually locked after he walked through them. He walked back down the stairs and through the office, it felt wrong going in the other direction, but he wanted to know what was going on. When he got back to the room where his office was located, the door right next to it was open and led to a black void. Going in was probably not a great idea, but the worst thing that could happen was dying, and it wasn't like that had never happened to him before. So, he kept walking until he saw a sign reading “YOU ARE NOW LEAVING” and a later one reading “ESCAPE POD BAY: FLOOR 760.” This looked promising, but he didn’t want to get his hopes up.

Stanley’s luck wasn’t too good as the elevator didn’t work, so he had to walk up 6 flights of stairs to get to floor 760. After taking many breaks he finally got to the door labeled ESCAPE.

He walked into the escape pod, choosing to ignore the sign that said the Narrator had to be present. It was way too small and uncomfortable, but it was the only option.

The pod started shaking and moving and the lights turned off until he couldn’t see anything. Maybe this had been a mistake after all, and if the game didn’t reset he could be stuck here forever for all he knew. But after many hours, the door opened, and Stanley shouted in surprise as he realized he wasn’t the only person there.

“Stanley walked out of the escape pod. He could hardly believe that it worked,” the Narrator said.

Stanley tried to back up to distance himself, but the escape pod was too small for two people to fit in comfortably.

“I thought you were still in the office,” Stanley said. He was surprised he could talk now that they had left the game.

“It’s not that simple, I don’t have just one physical form. That would be such a predictable way for this chapter to end. There needs to be an interesting plot twist.”

The weird conversation was interrupted by the sound of emergency vehicles in the distance, so they left because explaining this situation to police officers would not be a fun time for anyone involved.

Chapter Text

After what felt like several hours, Stanley and the Narrator arrived at a hotel in some random town. An event was clearly occurring as several people were gathered in clusters outside. More people were waiting in a line outside the main entrance with several colorful signs that were too far away to read. It looked uncomfortably busy, but at least it was better than being stuck in his office building.

“Stanley walked over to the hotel,” the Narrator said.

Stanley considered ignoring him out of spite but decided against it because he was curious after all. He didn’t feel like waiting in line, so he approached one of the larger groups of people. Maybe they could try and overhear what they were saying, hopefully without being noticed too much.

The group attendees were wearing a variety of colorful outfits, from medieval-style outfits to robot makeup. One of the most noticeable ones consisted of a large neon pink orb with a face drawn on it.

Another person in the group was wearing a blue and white leotard with a spiky blue wig and dramatic blue eyeshadow.

“Stanley walked over to the convention attendees outside the hotel. He approached the person wearing a leotard, and couldn’t help but notice that his makeup wasn’t good.”

“I’m so sorry, I don’t actually think that,” Stanley said. "Your makeup is pretty cool."

“It’s fine,” the man said, surprisingly not seeming too annoyed. "I like your costumes too. Are you here for the video game meetup? We're gonna take a photo soon if you want to join.”

“Um, yes.” he lied. "What is your costume?"

"It's Sonic the Hedgehog, I'm sure you've heard of him."

"Nope."

"Wow, you're the first person then." He started explaining the games to Stanley. It sounded like a fun game, at least better than the one he had been a part of for his whole life.

The convention attendee was just saying “Either Sonic is a god, or could kill God, and I do not care if there is a difference!” when Stanley noticed an equal amount of commotion behind him. The Narrator had gotten into an argument with a different cosplayer and had spilled coffee on her outfit, whether this was intentional or not Stanley didn’t want to know.

The Narrator noticed Stanley looking. “Can you believe this?" he said. "She said The Last of Us is better than the Stanley Parable?”

“She’s probably right,” Stanley said.

“Why must you always be such a disappointment?”

It was unlikely that they would ever get around to taking that group photo.

Chapter Text

It was the game developers’ 2 PM meeting, and everyone was struggling with a multitude of coding errors.

“Did someone write their loop incorrectly?” Ryan asked. “I’m really confused.”

“You can just use the debugger, I’m sure we should be able to figure this out soon enough. The important thing right now is getting the ray tracer to stop rendering things upside down,” said Sarah. “Alex, you need to pull your weight in this project.”

Alex was not pulling her weight in the project. She was tired of staring at error messages and had started looking at fan art on Twitter instead. Most of her feed were memes from the most recent Marvel show. Then something else caught her attention, a video captioned “These people are taking their cosplays a little too seriously. Video game fans are scary. I just wanted to take a group photo.” It was tagged with the Stanley Parable, and in it, a man who was presumably dressed as the Narrator was arguing with another cosplayer. His voice impression was surprisingly good. However, it was hard to hear at times, as a static noise sometimes played instead of the regular audio.

“Sorry, I’ve just been looking at this weird video.” Alex showed the other developers the video. They all shared a laugh until Sarah started looking more closely at the video. The cosplayers were both arguing about their respective opinions, which wasn't too out of the ordinary. However, something was definitely off about the video. In addition to the audio static, the visuals looked slightly AI-generated. However it couldn’t be that, AI wasn’t this good at creating videos yet. Sarah slightly remembered hearing about something like this in her employee training videos, but that was several years ago and she wasn’t really paying attention to them.

She pulled up the video, which confirmed her suspicions that these were all signs of a character who had escaped into the real world. Looking back at the original video, she saw someone who looked like Stanley in front of the crowd.

“Oh no…. This is not good.” Sarah said.

“What are you talking about?” Alex asked.

“Check out this video. These aren’t cosplayers, they’re the actual characters.”

The group watched the video, getting more and more concerned.

“I thought the Narrator doesn’t have a physical form, isn't he just a voice?” said Ryan.

“Just because I work on game design doesn’t mean I understand anything that happens as a result!” Sarah said.

“Oh shit. Okay, it’s fine, this has happened before in, like, 2019? Characters escaping? It’ll be fine.” Alex said.

“It's not the same thing,” Sarah said. “Last time this happened, it was just an NPC that showed up for 5 seconds. Now two major characters have disappeared, this is gonna be a mess.”

“I’m sure it will be fine,” Ryan said. “We just need to talk to management. Surely there’s a procedure if it's happened before.”

“We can’t let management find out about this, we could get fired,” Sarah said. “Letting characters escape will not be good for any of our performance reviews. We need to resolve this on our own.”

“Well, can’t we just restore our last Git commit?” Ryan asked

“Not even Git can fix this situation. It’s too late. They're already gone. We need to go to extreme measures, talking to people we don’t know.” Sarah said.

None of them were too happy with this idea, but they all knew it was what needed to be done.

Chapter Text

Today 4:32 PM

Sarah: This convention is a nightmare…

Sarah: Have any of you had luck with finding Stanley and the Narrator?

Alex: excuse me??? Conventions are so fun?

Sarah: We’re not here for fun; we need to find them, so please stay focused.

Ryan: hey alex has a point, the artist alley fanart section has some pretty great memes

Alex: yeah exactly!

Alex: can we please go to the skit competition

Sarah: We’re still on work hours? No??

Ryan: omg, I’ve found Stanley!

Sarah: Great!

Ryan: I’m gonna talk to him

Sarah: Wait, hold on.

Ryan: ?

Sarah: We need to figure out how to convince him to listen to us, he probably doesn’t want to go back.

Ryan: okay I’m sure ill think of something

Sarah: I think we should plan this out first.

Ryan: Okay what are our options? We can bribe him with food?

Sarah: I don’t know if he’s eaten anything before, so it might not work.

Ryan: dang

John: wait who are we bribing with food?

Sarah: …

Sarah: This is why you should come to meetings, John

Sarah: I don’t have time to explain

John: wow this backread is crazy

Alex: wait hold on i’ve got it

Alex:

👍3  ❤️2  🪣2

Sarah: You’re a genius

🪣🪣🪣

The convention was still going on, and Stanley and the Narrator had gotten separated. This was not intentional on Stanley’s part, but he wasn’t upset about it. It was nice to finally get some peace, or as much as was possible during a big event.

He passed an artist alley exhibit when something caught his eye: A poster reading “Free buckets.” Wow, conventions really did have everything. He wished he had thought to take his Reassurance Bucket with him in the escape pod. A new one just wouldn’t be the same, but at least it was at least better than nothing.

So, he went to the address labeled on the poster, which thankfully wasn’t a long walk. It was pretty clear he was in the right place as there were many similar flyers on the wall. When Stanley arrived on the fifth floor, he saw a group of three people chatting by the elevator. There were two women and one man, all wearing sweatshirts and sweatpants, except for a woman who was wearing a blue dress shirt and appeared to be the oldest of the group.

“Hi, I’m here for the free buckets?”

“Of course,” said the older woman. “They’re just around the corner, come with us!”

They led him through the office building, past several cubicles and meeting rooms. At first, Stanley didn’t focus on the office, as he was too occupied with the excitement of getting a new bucket. The farther they went, though, the more he couldn’t help but notice that it looked an awful lot like the parable. The desks looked somewhat similar, and someone had the same “I hate Mondays” mug. In fact, some of the generic pictures on the wall were exactly the same as the ones in his office. There was a close-up of a leaf, a photo of a mountain, and a painting of the mountain at sunset.

The photos alone made Stanley suspicious, and when he looked closer at the desks, he saw papers about coding and game development. This was enough to convince him he had made a mistake.

He barely had time to think about what to do next before they arrived at a dark room filled with computer servers on both ends. It stretched on, dimly lit with red and blue computer lights at regular intervals. There was no end in sight, nor were there any buckets.

“They should be at the end of this hallway,” the man said. “It’s… totally safe, I promise.” The older woman nudged him and whispered something to him.

There was no way he was doing this. “Hey, can one of you do me a favor and grab it for me? I’m pretty tired after the convention.”

“Ummm.. no thanks, Stanley.” the younger woman said. “We’re tired too, you know. It’s your bucket, my dude.” Stanley was pretty sure he had never told them his name.

“Okay… I’ll get it in a second,” he said, “Could I just run to the restroom? I need to, uh, make sure my hair looks perfect.”

“Fine, but can you be speedy about it?” said the older woman. “It’s just down this hallway.” She gestured toward a different part of the building.

Stanley walked out of the room slowly, not wanting to look too desperate. Once he left the room, he started running a little too soon. “Get him!” someone shouted, and they started chasing after him.

Fortunately, Stanley’s pursuers didn’t have his level of experience in the area of running through office buildings at an unreasonable speed, so they didn’t get any closer. Stanley ran down the nearest stairwell and easily outpaced them. However, it was at that point that he encountered his worst enemy: jumping. A row of turnstiles was blocking the nearest exit. Stanley tried to jump over them, but he had only jumped a few times in his life thanks to the Jump Circle. It didn’t go well and he fell to the ground rather painfully, barely able to get up and make it out of the building before the others caught up.

He ran across several blocks, narrowly avoiding getting hit by cars until he found a decent bush to hide in. The developers eventually gave up looking for him, and Stanley decided to return to the convention.

In order to make sure no one recognized him again, Stanley was going to need a new outfit, preferably one that looked very different from what he usually wore. He decided on a long blond wig, a white cowboy hat, and a pink shirt and pants. He didn’t have any money, so he stole them when the other attendees were distracted by a particularly impressive costume. Stanley also stole some rare Magic the Gathering cards, hoping he could resell them later.

It was nice to have a change from the boring dress shirt and pants Stanley had always worn before. Although the wig was a little uncomfortable, it covered his face pretty well, so he decided it was worth it for the time being. If Stanley was lucky, maybe he could find a hair salon that accepted Magic the Gathering cards as payment.

Stanley wasn’t sure where to go from here. He didn’t have a place to go home to after the convention ended, and he wasn’t even sure how to interact with real people after being in a time loop for so long. But that was a problem for another day. There were still several hours left in the convention, so there was time to look at memes.