Silent.

The three children waited patiently in the kitchen. The mysterious threat was supposed to arrive sometime soon. Roy had left them behind. He was probably too scared to make sure they were safe, or he wouldn't have agreed to this in the first place. The room seemed much more decorated than any of them remembered it being. Had it always been like this?

With no warning at all, a strange object crawled out from under the table and hopped on top of it.

"What's your favorite idea? Mine is being creative!" A strange reverb sounded off of that last word.

Yellow quickly followed up with the next line, eager to not mess anything up. "How do you get the idea?"

"I just try to think creatively!" Where was that music coming from? "Now when you look at this orange," they produced the produce out of thin air, "tell me please, what do you see?"

"It's just a boring old orange."

"Maybe to you, but not to me."

The object tossed the orange in the air, legs sprouting from it as it hopped across the table. The object's face was unwaveringly cheery, but in a disingenuous way. Like they were smiling for a school photograph.

"I see a silly face! Walking along and smiling at me!"

"I don't see what you mean." Duck thought it strange that his lines were so contrarian. It was pretty obvious what the object was referring to.

"Cuz you're not thinking creatively!" The object hopped off the table and ran their hands through their papery hair excitedly. "So take a look at my hair!"

"Cool!"

"I use my hair to express myself!"

Wait, what was the next line? Uh... crap, think of something- "That sounds really boring."

The object didn't seem too taken aback, and they simply repeated the line more forcefully.

The four suddenly found themselves looking out the window, when they had certainly been sitting down before. "Now, when you look at the clouds in the sky, don't you find it exciting?"

"No."

"Come on, take another look!"

"Oh, I can see a hat, I can see a cat, I can see a man with a baseball bat!" Red didn't join the rhymes. Something felt off, but he couldn't put his finger on it. This wasn't as bad as he was expecting though, so that was one good thing at least. He found himself subconsciously nodding his head to the music, even though he wasn't singing. "I can see a dog, I can see a frog, I can see a ladder leaning on a log!"

Back at the table. "I think you're getting the hang of it now! Using your minds to have a good time!"

"I might paint a picture of a clown!"

"Woah there friend, you might need to slow down!"

Yellow didn't even realize he'd painted the picture until the object slammed their hand against the canvas, ink dripping onto it as they slid down. He felt a strange pang through his heart in the following silence, though. He shouldn't have felt that bad about the picture, seeing as he didn't remember making it. Perhaps it was more the look everyone else was giving him.

The music jump started again. "Here's another good tip, on how to be a creative wiz kid. Go and collect some leaves and sticks, and arrange them into your favorite color!"

The kids found that the task took less than a second, even though they could feel themselves getting up and painstakingly collecting each branch. Red's head hurt.

"Blue." "Red." "Green!"

"Green is not a creative color."

Yellow's face dropped and Duck looked half close to decking this weird object.

"There's one more thing that you need to know, before you let your creativity flow! Listen to your heart, listen to the rain, listen to the voices in your brain."

The object's face distorted into a freakish smile and the words they said didn't seem to be coming from their mouth.

"Come on guys, let's get creative!"

They couldn't really feel their bodies. When they moved their arms to use the art supplies, it didn't really feel right. It was as if someone was reaching through their body to make them move, like stepping into a mascot suit. But it was still them, right? No one else was around to make Red grab that human heart that had always been laying on the ground but there wasn't any blood was there, no there never was. And it has always been raining up until a few seconds ago when it just started pouring down a hailstorm and it wasn't dark and scary it was at all. Something was spinning. Their heads hurt.

Their bodies felt very heavy. Like an extra 100 kilos had been added but it didn't hurt right, of course it didn't nothing hurt because nothing felt at all and there was nothing but spinning spirals and sharp objects that were dull and empty and lifeless like their eyes but when they looked in each other's eyes they didn't see eyes they saw someone else someone else was there instead of them and it hurt and it was quiet and there was so much fun to be had around this tiny little world of theirs where there was glitter and magnetic letters flying around the sky and they were gone but THEY were still here and the human heart wasn't a human heart it was an eyeball falling into a pit into a cake into the mouth of a bird that didn't exist and something was crawling around inside the walls and the cake tasted delicious it was just like how mom used to make it and his head really hurt it felt as if his neck was snapping but they were fine.

And they were back at the table, clean and pristine as it was before.

Yellow swung his head around, taking in the scenery. It was... normal? It was almost as if nothing had happened before. But if that was true then he wouldn't be hyperventilating and his brothers wouldn't be shaking.

The three looked at the object. They still wore a smile. A horrendous, disgusting, filthy smile. And their whole body shook.

"Now let's all agree, to never be creative again."

The object collapsed and their head cracked against the ground, ink spilling across the tiled floor. Red jumped out of his chair and backed away, quickly grabbing his brothers' hands and sprinting out the door.

...

"I take it you survived the encounter with the hostile object?"

Red hasn't even noticed where he was going until he slammed right into Roy and fell backwards towards the ground, the other two just barely holding him up. He couldn't put into words what he wanted to say to Roy; his head was still swimming from whatever the hell THAT was. Which was lucky because Roy didn't seem interested in hearing what they had to say anyways.

"I'm sure I'll figure out how to prevent this kind of thing from happening again, but I'm sure whatever they had to say was very enlightening. Perhaps you should think on it." With that, Roy left the room.

Red groaned and pressed his hands to his head. "He's not even trying to be subtle," he growled.

"What do you mean?" asked Yellow.

Well of course he wouldn't get it.

"That... that wasn't real right? We're all collectively agreeing that whatever just happened wasn't real?" Duck's voice wavered as he gestured towards the hall they'd just ran in from.

"What? No we're not! How could that not be real?" Red sputtered back.

"I- it could be... uh... a hallucination! Yes, a hallucination that can't actually hurt us! Or- or a dream! YES, it was a collective dream that all three of us had together."

"Is that even possible?"

Yellow chimed in. "N- no I think Duck's right. It was probably just a dream. There's no way that actually happened. I'm sure we'll wake up tomorrow morning and completely forget all about it."

Red rolled his eyes. They were obviously deflecting, but it's not like he was gonna stop them. Besides, on the off chance they were right, that'd still be a good thing.

"Well in that case, we should probably go to sleep so we CAN wake up tomorrow morning. I don't know about you, but I feel a bit too stuffed to eat dinner."

"Mhm," Yellow nodded.

Duck trailed after the two but about halfway down the hall he stopped.

"Uh- about that feeling stuffed thing. I-"

Duck keeled over and retched onto the carpet, but instead of a clear goo spilling out, a red sludge splattered against the floor. Yellow jumped behind Red, who had taken a few steps back in horror. Duck coughed and hacked for a moment, expunging all of the blood and and organs from that earlier cake that was definitely real.

The ten year old boy fell backwards against the floor and scrambled away from the stain, his hands shooting to his mouth to muffle a scream. This had the unintended consequences of tainting his hands with the cake filling.

Well, it was a bit harder to pass that little episode off as a dream now.

...

Weeks passed with the quiet agreement between the three to not talk about the incident. After all, they were all there, it was still completely unexplainable. There wasn't really anything to say.

There was the occasional nightmare about it, but that wasn't anything new. They all had grown accustomed to nightmares at this point. Besides, the content of these dreams never compared to the horror of the reality. Their brains simply couldn't comprehend the reality.

The object didn't show up again, although Roy had SO graciously informed them about their strange attacker. Apparently, before he'd expunged them from the world, he'd conducted a small interview with them. While Yellow visualized Roy beating up the object to get information, Red had a feeling Roy was weird enough to interview this psychopath like a normal person. Regardless, they now knew that it was a corrupted object named Paige the Sketchbook that had managed to use their corruption to bypass some of the safety measures of the virtual world, which for some suspiciously convenient reason didn't have any measure to counteract corruption.

Sometimes, when they were out playing in the woods, one of the kids would think they'd caught a glimpse of Paige again. But surely that was just their paranoia talking.

They never went back in that kitchen. But they probably didn't need to put thought into it. The room seemed to disappear the day after the incident, and they weren't even sure it had existed before the incident either.

...

Roy was extremely disappointed with the fact that he'd lost his first test subject to poor planning. He'd make sure that next time he wanted to kill an employee, he'd choose a more secure room.

However, he'd also remedy his other mistake. He'd picked someone too soft. Sure, Paige was desperate, but they clearly weren't too keen on following his orders when push came to shove, even if they did what he said regardless. No, he needed someone much worse. And frankly, he needed someone more powerful. He'd pulled a lot of the warping weight in that last lesson, so he'd need a very old object with much control over their powers.

His eyes turned to the history books, and the ancient myths. There was someone he had in mind. Someone ancient, cruel, and powerful. Someone who he knew wouldn't turn down this opportunity for cruelty, and would be able to wreak havoc upon his annoying children.

Roy began to write the script on time.