You are now John Egbert and you really hate nights like these.

These are the nights where you just sit in the front of a blank computer screen because of the nightmares. Well, you want to keep on believing they're nightmares to try and contend against the growing awareness that these visions were fragmented memories from a game that you and the friends you never had didn't play.

Except you did play it, you can feel it in your bones. You spent years inside the game that doesn't exist; you got older, taller, stronger; you made friends and killed monster; you lived then died, lived then died, then rose up a god; you even kissed a girl and then fell in love with her.

You just don't remember what happened, why the game ended and why the earth was reset like nothing ever happened. Maybe you managed to actually win and claim and that GRAND PRIZE.

If that reward was normality, you wish you would have turned it down.

You don't know why you keep expecting something to pop up on the screen, you chum handle has been empty ever since the dreams began months ago. You sometimes type in names you see in the anasomnias and subject yourself to agonizing waiting as your computer whirrs away uselessly, looking for people that more likely than not don't remember your existence.

You vaguely remember your friends; there were four of you at first, the insufferable prick of a best bro, your pumpkin planting sister-friend, and the flighty broad you kinda sorta fell in love with. Then there were three that used to be twelve, a crabby grump, a glowing fashionista, and a blind lawyer-dragon. Four more after, your age but older at the same time, a Crocker baker, double pistols and a wink, a flash-stepping robot-builder, and a tipsy cat lady; then two came along, part of the original twelve, ghost speakers who were intent on staying alive. Twelve soldiers showed up later, twelve afraid of dying and not getting back up again. And she last, the key to the whole shabang, the strongest player but the weakest too.

Too bad you can't remember their names, even though something tells you that you knew them all once. On nights like these, you stare at your computer and wonder who they all were and if they were all as lonely as you are.

You almost always fall asleep at the keyboard, it was strangely more comfortable than you bed sometimes, though you've managed to drag your half-asleep self back under the covers the past few times—that worried look your dad gives you when he finds you slumped over the desk troubles you.

The little clock in the corner of the screen read two a.m., though that meant absolutely nothing, that thing was more broken than your Nana's urn—which has been shattered since forever and a half. You don't know why your dad leaves it like that—you're lucky you even get Pesterchum up and running on your old dinosaur of a desktop; if the clock worked too, then the world just might end.

At any rate, it's late, too late for any sensible person to be awake, and you heft yourself out of your seat and leave Pesterchum running; nothing's going to happen anyway.

You think you're a bit crazy at first, tried to convince yourself that the bed just squeaked oddly under your weight, but it almost sounded like a 'ping' of a computer receiving a message.

You really have gone bonkers, you've gone totally insane because that chum handle didn't exist before.

tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering ectoBiologist [EB] at 4:13

There was no message, but your heart skips a beat or two. It just couldn't be.

EB: hello?

Everything is silent for a long time, or it seems like a long time, so long, in fact, that you believe you're dreaming. You almost pinch yourself to wake up when the computer 'ping'ed again.

TT: …

TT John?