Chris stood in the upstairs bathroom, gripping the edges of the porcelain sink, his knuckles white. He stared intently into the mirror, but he wasn't looking at his own pale, disheveled reflection. He was looking at the box.
It floated there, a perfect, translucent blue rectangle, suspended in his direct line of sight. And in the mirror, its reflection hung in the exact same spot, a ghost within a ghost. The simple, elegant white text was burned into his retinas, a constant, unwavering message:
[Welcome, User.]
He had fled the crater in a daze, leaving Pete standing there with his mouth agape. He'd stumbled back into the house, up the stairs, and straight into the bathroom, a primal need for cold, hard reality driving him. He had turned on the tap and plunged his hands into the stream of water, the shock of the cold a welcome anchor. But it wasn't enough.
He bent over and splashed handfuls of cold water onto his face. The shock was immediate, a jolt that made him gasp. Water streamed down his cheeks, dripping from his chin onto his muddy t-shirt shirt. He squeezed his eyes shut, then snapped them open, praying the image would be gone.
It wasn't. The box remained, unwavering. It didn't ripple with the water on his face. It didn't flicker. It was a fixed point in his perception of the universe.
He tried blinking hard, a rapid-fire succession of blinks, as if he could physically dislodge the image from his eyeballs. Nothing. He groaned, a low sound of pure despair, and pressed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets, rubbing his temples in a circular motion. He held them there for a full ten seconds, seeing only the swirling phosphenes of pressure-induced light, before slowly lowering his hands.
The box was still there.
[Welcome, User.]
Panic, a cold, creeping vine, began to twist its way around his heart. This wasn't right. This wasn't a trick of the light or a momentary dizzy spell. This was persistent. This was real. His mind, scrambling for a rational explanation, did the only thing it knew how to do in a crisis: it turned to the internet.
He fumbled in his pajama pocket for his phone. His hands were shaking, making it difficult to unlock the screen. He finally managed it and quickly opened a browser window. The Wi-Fi signal was strong and steady. At least that part was real. He had fixed that. Or, the box had fixed that. He didn't want to think about it.
His thumbs hovered over the search bar, a million terrifying possibilities swirling in his head. What do you even search for? He typed, deleted, and retyped several times before settling on the most direct, most terrifying query he could think of:
symptoms of seeing floating boxes
He hit 'enter,' his heart hammering against his ribs. The search results populated almost instantly, a list of horrors dressed in the calm, blue hyperlinks of medical websites.
"Seeing Spots or Floaters? It Could Be a Detached Retina."
"Visual Disturbances and Migraines with Aura: What You Need to Know."
"Scotomas: Blind Spots and Their Causes, from Glaucoma to Stroke."
And then, one that sent a wave of dread through him.
"Can a Brain Tumor Cause Visual Hallucinations?"
He felt a wave of nausea. He clicked the link, his morbid curiosity overriding his self-preservation. He scrolled through diagrams of the occipital lobe, read clinical descriptions of photopsia, and saw lists of symptoms that included "seeing geometric shapes" and "seeing flashing lights." It was all horribly, terrifyingly plausible. The lightning strike. The concussive blast of thunder. Maybe it had done something to his brain.
From the hallway, his mother's voice called out, laced with a worry that only amplified his own.
"Chris, are you feeling alright? You seemed a little out of it."
He flinched, snapping his head toward the closed bathroom door. The blue box didn't move. It stayed perfectly centered in his vision, now overlaying the white wood of the door. He had to say something. He had to sound normal.
He forced his voice to be steady, pitching it to a register of casual tiredness that he hoped sounded convincing.
"Fine, Mom! Just tired. Long night, you know?"
"Okay, sweetie," her voice replied, though it still held a note of uncertainty. "Well, I poured you a cup of coffee. It's on the counter when you're ready."
"Thanks, Mom."
He listened until he heard her footsteps recede down the hall. He was alone again. Alone with the box. He leaned his forehead against the cool wood of the door, his phone screen still glowing with ominous medical possibilities. The persistent blue rectangle, however, suggested he was anything but fine. It felt like a pop-up ad for his own mortality.
Defeated, Chris pushed himself off the door and trudged back to his bedroom. His sanctuary. He closed the door behind him and the familiar gloom of his room enveloped him. The computer was on, the three monitors glowing with his desktop background—a stunning, high-resolution shot of his Riftwarden, x_CyrisWarden_x, standing triumphantly over a slain dragon. The image, usually a source of pride and comfort, now seemed to mock him.
He slumped into his gaming chair, the worn leather groaning under his weight. The chair had always been his throne, the command center from which he controlled worlds. Now, it just felt like a seat in a waiting room, and he was waiting for a diagnosis.
He stared at the floating box, his fear slowly curdling into a dull, throbbing frustration. He willed it to disappear. He focused all his mental energy on it, thinking go away, go away, go away with the intensity of a prayer.
And then, something changed.
[Welcome, User.]
The white text wavered, as if it were a heat haze on a summer road. It dissolved into a fine, shimmering dust of light, which then swirled and coalesced, forming a new message. The font was the same. The box was the same. But the words... the words made his blood run cold with a completely different kind of terror. A terror born not of medicine, but of mechanics.
[New User Tutorial Quest Activated: Observe Your Environment.]
[Reward: 10 XP]
Chris stared. He read the words once. Twice. A third time. His mind stalled, the gears locking up as they tried to process the new information. He wasn't looking at the symptoms of a stroke anymore.
Quest.
Reward.
XP.
These were not the words of a medical condition. These were not the terms a neurologist would use. These were the words of a video game. These were the foundational pillars of the language he was most fluent in. A deep, primal part of his brain, a section of his psyche sculpted and trained by tens of thousands of hours of grinding, raiding, and exploring, recognized the structure instantly.
The bolded quest title. The clear, concise objective. The explicit, quantifiable reward.
This wasn't a hallucination. This was a user interface. This wasn't a tumor.
This was a tutorial.
The realization didn't banish his fear, but it transmuted it. The cold, clammy dread of a medical emergency was replaced by a sharp, electric jolt of bewilderment. He was either having the most specific, most elaborate, most oddly structured mental breakdown in human history, or something else was happening. Something that shouldn't be. He looked from the quest box in his vision to the triumphant image of his Riftwarden on the monitor. The line between game and reality had just been obliterated.
A morbid curiosity, powerful and insistent, began to push through his fear. If this was a hallucination, it was a hallucination with rules. If it was a game, it had to be played. He had to know what would happen. He had to see if it was real.
He decided, with a sense of profound and giddy insanity, to cautiously play along.
He pushed himself out of the chair and walked out of his room, the quest notification floating patiently in front of him. He went downstairs, his bare feet padding softly on the carpeted steps. The house was quiet again, save for the hum of the refrigerator.
He entered the kitchen. Pete was seated at the small wooden table, a mug of coffee in one hand and the local paper, the Record Delta, spread out before him. He was squinting at the crossword puzzle, the tip of his tongue sticking out in concentration. He glanced up as Chris entered.
"Feeling human yet?" Pete asked, his tone back to its usual gruff neutrality. The strange events in the backyard seemed to have been filed away in the "just ignore it" section of his brain for the time being.
"Getting there," Chris mumbled.
The quest objective floated in his vision:
[Observe Your Environment.]
What did that even mean? How did you complete a quest that vague? Did he have to look at something specific? Did he have to describe it? His gamer brain sifted through possibilities. It was probably a trigger quest, designed to teach the basic interaction mechanics. He had to focus on an object to "select" it.
His eyes scanned the room. The cluttered counter, still bearing the propane camping stove from their brief return to the dark ages. The wooden bowl on the counter filled with a few apples and a browning banana. The magnetic rack on the side of the fridge holding a collection of mismatched spice jars. He needed a single, prominent object to focus on. A target.
And then he saw it.
Sitting on the counter, right next to the sink, was the cup of coffee Misty had poured for him. And it wasn't in just any mug. It was in Pete's prized fish-shaped coffee mug. It was a monstrosity of a thing, an oversized ceramic largemouth bass, its tail curled around to form the handle, its wide-open mouth forming the rim from which one drank. Pete had bought it on a family vacation to Myrtle Beach several years ago, and despite Misty's constant threats to "accidentally" drop it, it remained his favorite.
It was perfect. It was unique.
Chris walked over to the counter and just stood there, staring intently at the ceramic fish. He leaned in, observing the cheap, slightly sloppy paint job, the googly, vacant eyes, the chipped paint on one of the fins.
Pete lowered his newspaper, a frown creasing his brow. "Everything okay, Chris? You're staring at my mug like it owes you money."
Chris flinched, caught in the act of... well, he wasn't sure what. He couldn't exactly say, "My brain is giving me a tutorial quest, and this fish seems like the objective."
He mumbled the first thing that came to mind. "Just thinking. The paint job is interesting."
Pete gave him a strange look and grunted, retreating behind the wall of his newspaper. Chris continued to stare at the mug, focusing on the coffee inside. It was a dark, still pool of liquid. There were no wisps of steam. Misty had poured it for him at least ten minutes ago, while he was upstairs having his existential crisis. It was undoubtedly, disappointingly lukewarm.
An idle, frustrated thought drifted through his mind, a simple, internal complaint born of a lifetime of his mother's well-intentioned but often poorly-timed offerings.
It's already cold. I wish the coffee was hot.
The moment the thought took solid form in his consciousness, a new, smaller prompt box appeared in his vision. It materialized directly below the quest notification, its sharp, clear lines a shocking intrusion. It was terrifyingly specific.
[Execute Command: modify_thermal_state(object: coffee_mug_fish_01)?]
[Requires: 0.01 EP]
Below the text were two glowing buttons. One contained a stylized, elegant checkmark glyph. The other, a bold, imposing 'X' glyph.
Chris felt a jolt of pure adrenaline, so strong it made his knees feel weak. He sucked in a sharp breath. His eyes widened, his gaze locked on the new prompt.
object: coffee_mug_fish_01
It hadn't just seen the mug. It had identified it. It had cataloged it. It had assigned it a specific variable name, just like an asset in a game engine. And the command... modify_thermal_state. It hadn't just seen where he was looking.
It had read his thoughts.
His heart hammered in his chest, a frantic, wild drumbeat against his ribs. This was it. This was the moment of truth. The point of no return. Was he really, truly, profoundly insane? Or was this real? Pete was still sitting at the table, oblivious, scratching at his crossword puzzle with a pen. The world was normal. The laws of physics were, presumably, still in effect.
But the prompt hovered in his vision, waiting for a decision. His mind was a jumble of thoughts. A lifetime of understanding that you can't just wish coffee to be hot was at war with a lifetime of instinctively pressing buttons in games to make things happen. It was a Yes/No choice box, the most fundamental interaction in all of gaming.
He had to know.
With a surge of what felt like reckless, glorious insanity, he focused all of his mental energy, all of his will, on the glowing checkmark button. He didn't say "yes" out loud. He didn't nod. He imagined his finger reaching out and pressing the button. He willed the "yes."
He mentally clicked the button.
The effect was instantaneous and undeniable.
The still, dark surface of the coffee in the fish mug erupted. A thick, rolling plume of fresh, white steam billowed upwards, unfurling like a ghostly flower. The rich, powerful aroma of hot, freshly brewed coffee suddenly flooded the air around the counter, a scent so potent it was almost shocking.
Pete, who had been lifting his own mug for a drink, stopped mid-sip. He sniffed the air, his brow furrowing. His eyes darted to the counter, to his fish mug, which was now steaming like a miniature volcano.
"What in the world...?" he muttered, setting his own mug down. He leaned closer, peering at the steaming ceramic fish as if it had just sprouted wings.
At the exact same time, a quiet, satisfying ding resonated in Chris's mind, a sound only he could hear. The quest box in his vision flashed with a bright, celebratory light.
[Quest Completed! 10 XP Awarded!]
The box vanished. It was immediately replaced by a new, more impressive notification that materialized with a flash of brilliant gold light and a triumphant new message.
[Congratulations! You have reached LVL 2!]
Chris stood staring at Pete's utterly bewildered face. He stared at wisps of steam rising from a mug of once-cold coffee. And he stared at the undeniable truth of the glowing, glorious level-up notification burned into his vision.
This was not a hallucination. This was not a brain tumor.
This was real.