Yellow's head felt like it was splitting open as he sat quietly in the bedroom. The last thing he remembered was walking into a weird, dark room with Roy and... falling asleep. He woke up in a locked bedroom that looked perfect for him and his brothers...

His brothers...

Yellow had tried not to think about it, but it was rather impossible. They were gone. Forever and ever. He'd never see them again and it was his fault for making his dad angry. Now he could do nothing but wait and wait and wait. Trying to read the books in the room proved fruitless. They were all just filled with songs very similar to what the teachers had been performing, just with different themes. There were no drawing supplies, or instruments, or computers, just the books, the clothes, and the beds.

Yellow still felt nauseous, even though it had been two weeks since he ate Duck. His stomach still churned at the thought of food, and he'd been growing thinner everyday. So he didn't really have the energy to find a way out. Resigning himself to his prison, he changed into a pair of pristine pajamas and crawled into bed. When he pulled back the blanket, he was greeted by a wide, untouched scrapbook.

Roy was just doing this to taunt him, wasn't he?

...

Roy easily dragged the two bodies of his ex-kids into the house. He had to admit, at this point he was kinda riding by the seat of his pants and any semblance of his originally perfect structure was starting to fall apart, but that was perfectly fine. He still hadn't really messed up! Well, except for that time with Page. And that time with Colin. And Pete. And Shrignold. And R- OKAY he hadn't messed up fatally. And he wasn't about to.

Roy had decided to drag Red and Duck into the machine at the last minute, just because he could. Who knows, maybe they'd still be salvageable as digitally reanimated corpses. He did have all the time in the world to figure it out.

Dropping Red's unconscious body off at the entrance to the machine room, he hauled Duck's corpse over to his perfect little project. The boy was surprisingly light, but maybe not TOO surprisingly. He HAD been scooped of a lot of his vital organs after all. It was easier to load in Duck first anyways. Corpses always load faster. While he was waiting, he might as well start Yellow's first ever perfect lesson. Roy typed out some last minute bits of code before pulling up the first file in a list of hundreds. Larry the Lamp was a lucky bastard. He got to be the guinea pig.

Roy's eager anticipation to watch his plan finally unfold was cut short with the sound of shattering glass echoing through the house. Tearing his eyes away from the screen right before Larry could show up, he burst out the door in panic. He should be the only one in the house right now! Unless that stupid coward of an object had finally decided to show their face.

No matter, he'd been preparing for that exact situation for a long time. Roy materialized a baseball bat full of nails and went on a hunt. He'd make sure that brat suffered for their inconveniences.

...

Yellow drily sobbed as he flipped through the scrapbook. It was packed brim with photos that he recognized from days he remembered, photos from places he was sure he'd never been to, and photos from what could only be in the future. This wasn't just to taunt him with how things were before, it was making fun of things he would never have. And he was too sad to hate it.

The little boy turned his head to look at the others' beds. "Good night guys..." He flipped the book shut and took in a shuddering breath. "I miss you."

Yellow flicked the lamp off and nestled under the thick covers, letting the cold darkness envelope his eyes.

...

"Oh! Someone's sleepy!"

He jolted upright and turned to see the lamp replaced with a drunk looking object. His heart thudded out of his chest.

"Ehehehuhueh! But that's silly!"

"No!" He slammed his fist on the light switch again. He wasn't going to take this anymore. He should've been more like Red and Duck from the beginning.

...

"How can you be sleepy if you don't know how to have dreams?" the object's high pitched voice reverberated through the room.

"N- no, I don't want to know!" Yellow stood up on his bed to face the object. "I don't want to know- how to have dreams! NO!"

And just like that, the screaming 7 year old was dragged into a flat world of distorted animation yet again. But honestly, that was the part he cared the least about as the object sang in a warbling trill about dreams and GOD it was even more nonsensical and inane than the last one!

"No!" he shrieked as his body was sucked into a pit of thick oil. "No! No more songs!"

He gasped awake back in his bed. Ah- it was just a dream! Wait-

"Oh! Looks like someone's havin M!"

The last words echoed over and over and over again in Yellow's head. He moved to get out of his bed but found his arms heavier than normal. The boy looked down to see himself slowly sinking into the sludgy, dark liquid from his nightmare. He gripped the sides of his bed and tried to keep his head above the surface, gasping for breath in a panic, but the object hopped off the nightstand and practically hovered over to him. He grabbed Yellow and gently shoved him under the oil, the words still echoing through the whole room. The suffocating liquid burned and stung his throat and coated his whole body like a cocoon of death and Yellow knew this was how he was going to die but-

...

"Can you file these files please?"

Red shook himself out of the darkness and found himself in an office, just like he was always in. Yes, this made sense. What was he doing earlier?

"Hm?"

"Can you file these files please?"

"Uh... yeah. Sure."

It didn't really feel like he was holding the files but that's what it always felt like. Although, it did feel like something very integral to his experience was missing.

"Hey, wouldn't it be funny if one of these files came alive?"

The man stared back at him. Man. Was he a man? He must be, just a man that was wearing a very strange mask. One that covered his whole head and had lots of red string covering it. But Red was certain that under that mask, he looked just like him. It just felt so.

"I am a file... and you put documents in me," he sang to the man. Surely he understood but the look... or lack of a look the man in the suit gave him put a strange pit in his stomach, like he was embarrassing himself. "Doot da doo a file... funny... silly file-"

"No."

Red dropped the file and tilted his head. He noticed the same string that the man had falling in front of his eyes.

"That sounds really boring."

There were some stairs. And then there was a restaurant. And he was sitting in the back like he always did. And everyone else was talking like they always did but he couldn't hear them like he always couldn't and... wait a minute.

Someone was missing. Two someone's. Where were his little brothers? He was on the stage singing a song that he knew very well, but he didn't remember learning it. It was the song Page taught him. And his brothers were there too.

And everyone else didn't like it very much.

"It's not very good at all."

He was certain this was what things were like. And he was certain that he hated it all. And that's why they hated it.

And Red was certain that Roy was watching him-

..

The teenager gasped as he woke up, jolting into a sitting position. His skull ached from where Roy had bashed him with the bat, but that wasn't important right now. Fuck, what an unusual dream that was. It had been so vivid and he could actually remember it, unlike almost every other time.

As he waited for his head to clear a bit, he stood up and took in his surroundings. Red was in a near pitch black room, with only a few lights smattered on the ceiling and a strangely familiar checkered floor. The boombox and microphone he thought he'd seen were gone, and a rhythmic tune echoed through the room.

Red felt his way through the darkness, listening as the song grew louder. A faint glow appeared as he drew ever closer. Then the light flared up and flickered into a normal size. Red found himself in front of a strange three-pronged(?) machine with a screen and keyboard in the middle, and buttons that he had no idea the function of on the sides. He looked up to the screen and a pit grew in his stomach.

Yellow was suffering through yet another lesson, curled up on the bed and begging for it to stop. The object was rambling on and on, unhindered by the laws of grammar or nature.

"And you can have a dream about losing your friends!"

"NO!"

"And you can have a dream about BURNING YOUR FRIENDS-"

Red slammed his hands against the keyboard, trying to decipher how to stop it. At the same time, the object was replaced with Tony the Talking Clock, singing his same old song. Red and Yellow both reeled back in surprise as he fell into the rhythm.

"Time is a tool you can put on the wall, or wear it on your rizd. The past is far behind us. The future doesn't exist."

No, no he couldn't let this happen! Red scanned the buttons speckling the machine, but they were all blank or labeled in a manner he didn't understand.

"Time went new, got old like history. Stuff from the past went into a mystery."

"You made me die!"

"But look a com-PUTER!"

Tony spasmed into a glitchy mess that twisted and warped itself into Colin's form.

"I'm a computery guy!"

"You?!"

"Everything made out of buttons wires! I'd like to show you-"

No, keep going. He had to figure it out.

"What's it all about you've no idea!"

Yellow shrieked and froze up in fear of the freakish butterfly man. It didn't help that his glitching wasn't fully gone.

"And all you see his hatred. And DARKNESS, death and-"

"-ICE CREAM BEEF! Ice cream beef! Ice cream beef makes your teeth go gr- gray!" stuttered Pete, followed by a soon-appearing Sally. "Doesn't matter, just throw it away!"

Yellow couldn't even find it in himself to get out of the bed, he was so paralyzed with terror. Somehow, the teachers were even more lifeless and scary than they seemed before, as they recited their songs in a hauntingly perfect monotone.

"Why not try some-"

"F- FISH ON MY TRAY!"

Yellow's heart skipped a beat when Duck glitched into existence. He didn't even look hurt! His older brother glanced around with a sickeningly terrified look on his face, screaming, "What?! Where am Iiiii-"

Red desperately clicked and slammed each button, only to watch new teachers he'd never seen before flicker about the screen, drowning out his brother's increasingly disturbed sobs. His heart was pounding out of his chest, faster than he'd ever felt before and a growing sense of cold dread crawled up his spine. He HAD to fix this; it was HIS fault. He had to do something.

He didn't even notice when the teachers started looping back around. He'd gone through so many of them that they'd started to show up twice, spazzing across the virtual room. Their clashing and interrupted songs started to sound like a cruel laugh that played over Yellow crying louder and louder. Red felt as if he was going to run out of air and just as he was about to break one of the buttons in panic, he felt a bony hand on his shoulder.

The boy slowly turned around, although it felt more as if the hand was pulling him to look at its owner. But he already knew who it was. His rapidly pounding heart quickly dropped into almost nothingness as Roy painstakingly stepped into the light. Red jolted backwards with a relatively subdued gasp, as if he was trying to choke his fear down. The man that had put them through all of this stared at him with that same empty, uncaring expression as he approached Red. And Red knew he was going to die, once and for all unless he did something. But what could he do?

He backed against the machine as he looked around for some kind of clue, or deus ex machina, or SOMETHING that could save him. There's no way the universe would be so cruel as to put him so close to freedom and safety, only to prove that there was no hope. The world was horrible, but it couldn't be that...

And then he spotted the cable. A long, white, barely noticeable cable popping out of the side of the machine. Red inched away from Roy's outstretched arm, making sure to keep an eye on the wretched man. He trailed the cord into the darkness until he backed against the wall. Turning around, his hands rested on a large outlet into an even larger socket. It would almost be comical how unsubtle it was if it weren't for the imminent death approaching.

And so, Red squeezed his eyes shut, forced his voice into a calm quiet, and said, "I wonder what will happen."

...

The trio sat in the discolored kitchen, absolutely nothing amiss. Their normal colors seemed twisted around and for a moment, they all considered the possibility that it had all been nothing but a very extended, very horrid nightmare.

"What's your favorite idea?" sang Page.

And then the world powered down.