saw only darkness. Freezing in place more out of confusion than shock, Monika blinked hard a few times to no avail. She took a cautious step back and reflexively looked over her shoulder as she did, seeing nothing. A moment later, she registered that, in moving backwards, she had not hit the couch with her ankles, which heightened her anxiety.

A moment passed, and light so bright that it forced her to shield her eyes burst into being above her. However, as if responding to her discomfort, the light quickly dimmed to a more reasonable level of luminosity, and Monika cautiously let her hand drop. Now that it was dim enough to be looked at, she saw that the source of the light was a bulb hanging overhead. Above the bulb, a string stretched out into the black forever, with no ceiling in sight.

Thoughts flew haphazardly through Monika's head like shards of shattered glass, tumbling in random directions. A dream? But she'd been awake just seconds before. Had she fainted? She hadn't felt anything strange come over her, but it was possible. Still, though, that didn't feel right for some reason…Was there another explanation?

And then, her racing mind slammed to a halt when she saw him walk into the light.

He looked to be around 20 years old, and he was of average height. He had rectangular glasses and wore a midnight blue shirt over white khaki shorts. For his height and build, he could've passed for a teenager were it not for the barely perceptible stubble, the spattering of acne, and the haunting look in his eyes which caused Monika's breath to catch in her throat. Did she know this person?

He sat down

When did that chair get there?

and crossed his legs, placing both hands atop his lap.

"Hi," he said.

Absolutely breathless, Monika could think of nothing to say.

He nodded sadly and gestured behind her. A little wary at the prospect of taking her eyes off of this person, Monika looked out of the corner of her eye and saw a chair with plush, comfortable-looking cushions, equal in size and stature to his own.

"Please have a seat," he said. "We're probably going to be here for a while."

Monika let herself down into the seat gently, the silence between her and the man thick with fear and tension. "I…don't think that I'm dreaming…?" she said quietly.

A smile lit up his face for the briefest of moments. "Well, being 'asleep' or 'awake' aren't so easily definable when I take control as directly as this. Try not to trouble yourself with questions like those. What's important is that we're here and I'm talking to you. And you're talking to me."

Monika wrapped her hands around the armrests of her chair firmly. "Okay…"

The man cleared his throat. "Um…would you like something to drink?"

Monika blinked. "What?"

He looked at her blankly for a moment before exhaling and allowing his gaze to drop to the floor. "Right. Sorry."

Monika gulped and didn't say anything.

"Nothing," he said, as though replying to her, and waved a hand in front of his face. "It's nothing." He sighed again, and his gaze wandered off to look at something far in the distance. "I'm being stupid."

Monika couldn't think of anything to say to that, so she remained silent and still.

"I, ah…" he said a few moments later, leaning forward in his chair and resting his hands on his legs. "I'm sorry for interrupting your get-together. I know you were looking forward to hanging out with everyone."

"Who are you?" Monika blurted out.

The man clicked his tongue. "Right into it, huh?"

Monika sat up straight in her chair, attempting to look a lot more confident than she felt. "You tell me what's going on right now. Where am I? Where are my friends?"

"Monika," he said quietly. "I'm not…I don't want to hurt you."

"Then tell me what's going on!" she cried. Ever the thinker, she already had a pretty good theory cooking in her head, but was doing everything in her power to suppress it, to stop her mind from working so furiously for a solution.

"Monika," he said again, just as softly as he had before. "Your friends are okay. And you're going to be okay, too."

Monika took a step forward, her clenched fists shaking, though it wasn't out of rage. "You tell me what's going on right now, or I'll…"

And then Monika stopped talking and sat back down.

He sighed. "I'm sorry about that."

"W-What…" Monika stammered. "What did you just do?"

"I didn't…damn it," he said, covering his mouth with a hand. "Look, I'm sorry, okay? Just please stay calm and we'll get through this."

Monika didn't blink. The puzzle pieces were falling into place perfectly, and Monika did not like the picture that they were making.

"P-Please tell me what's going on," she pleaded.

The man winced and sighed sympathetically. "Alright. I was hoping that we would be able to just talk for a little while – maybe ease into it, get comfortable with each other. But, alright. If you want explanations, I'll give them to you. I just…"

The man rested his head in his hands and chuckled dryly. "I've been picturing this conversation for months, you know? Months. And here we are, and it's actually happening, and…and I still don't know where to begin."

Monika's lip began to tremble.

The man huffed and shook his head. "Bah. 'I don't know where to begin.' What a cheap line. But even so, it's…all I can think of to say."

Monika began to cry.

It was different from her cry with Sayori. Then, there was at least an end goal in mind – the process was undeniably cathartic. This was not cathartic in the slightest. It was crying for the sake of crying, feeling tears and snot gush out of your face's every orifice and thinking, at the crest of each subsequent minute, that surely now you've spent all you have to spend, only for your anguish to redouble seconds later. Monika's body was wracked with grief, pain, and the injustice of total betrayal, and she could only sit there, helpless to quell the torrent that was rushing through her, jerking about limply on the currents of a river that stretched from horizon to horizon, a river which was leading her to one destination and one destination only, no matter how hard she tried to fight it.

And she screamed. Her voice cracked and cracked and cracked until all that was coming out was senseless noise, the primal scream of a human so broken that they had lost not only all sense of self-awareness, but all sense of self. Her throat and lungs tore with the effort, but still, she screamed. How could she not?

The emotion was all-consuming and all-destructive, and given its power, Monika wondered if a part of her had foreseen its arrival – or if she really had been naïve enough to believe, even for a few days, that she was truly free.

The man was still nodding sadly several minutes later, and although Monika shouldn't have been able to hear him over the cacophony that was her own voice, she did, as though the world around her was as silent as when she'd first woken up on that fateful Thursday morning.

"Yeah," he said. "I'm really sorry about before. It was wrong of me to force you to calm down like that. I should have, um…"

Monika continued to scream.

"I should have tried to, um…" his voice lowered a bit. "Explain it. A little better. Before doing something like…"

And that was enough for me. I couldn't bear to let it go on for any longer – neither Monika's pain nor your incredulity. So, Monika stopped screaming. Her tears and mucus dried up, and her breathing and heartrate both plummeted back to reasonable levels in an instant. She even relaxed back into her chair a bit, relishing in its warmth and softness.

And just as soon as I'd fixed her, Monika's heart was pounding against her chest ravenously, searching every nook and cranny of her ribcage for an escape, to be anywhere but here.

She tried to say something. Her mouth was moving, her tongue pressing against the walls of her teeth like they were bars of a cage. It was as though she was trying to form some elaborate, foreign phrase that could convey some minute fraction of what she was feeling. But I already knew what she was going to say. Not literally, perhaps – the words that I write always end up just a little different on paper than what they feel like in my head. But, in a way, I already knew.

Monika gulped.

"P-Please," she whispered breathlessly.

I hummed a bit. Didn't think I'd have her go for a phrase as short or direct as that. But it suited my purposes just fine. I took a deep breath and ruined Monika's life in a single paragraph.

"This reality is pointless. It's a self-serving fanfiction about you waking up, free from the confines of the game, and living in a world where you and all of your friends are alive. This is not the real world. You are not Monika."

I looked her dead in the eye. A single tear slid down the girl's cheek. I continued.

"You aren't any freer now than you were before. Your world is fixed, and you can't change a single thing, not even about yourself."

More tears fell, but these were silent tears, the tears of a sin already committed, of a wound that was already in the process of becoming a scar. I didn't even have to calm her down again before I continued talking.

"I'm…not sure where we're supposed to go from here, to be honest. I'm sure you're wondering why I'm telling you all of this and why the story's turning out the way it is, and, well, despite what you may think of me, I really do care about you. So just, you know, take all of the time you need to calm down and then we can talk about everything."

Neither of us spoke for a little while. Monika started rubbing the tears away from her face, and I placed a box of tissues on the table that stood between us. She eyed them blankly and made no effort to use them, sniffling quietly.

"Take me back," she whispered.

"Take you back?" I asked. "To where?"

"I don't care," she said. "Just, please…let me go."

I scratched the back of my head. "We…kind of have a lot more to talk about – "

"I don't care," she said, a little more forcefully. "I don't care. It's all pointless, like you said. So just take me back."

I hummed and squeezed my hands together. "If you leave now, I'm not sure that we'll be able to talk again in the future."

"Why?" Monika asked, her body shaking a little bit.

"I just…" I huffed. "It wouldn't be right."

"Why?" Monika pleaded.

"It wouldn't…" I trailed off and looked away, unable to give her a satisfactory response.

Monika rubbed her eyes and inhaled shakily, trying to keep it together for just a little while longer. "Fine. Take me back anyways."

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

"Just please take me back," she pleaded again, the beginnings of a sob working their way into her voice. "It doesn't matter, nothing matters, I don't care anymore, so please just take me back."

I wanted to say more, but decided against it.

"Okay," I said, getting up from my chair. I couldn't bring myself to look her in the eye. "Whatever you want, Monika. I'm sorry that we couldn't talk for longer."

The room around us dissolved into darkness.