DAY ?

What would you do if everything you had ever known was a lie? What if you, yourself, weren't even real? All those thoughts and feelings you experienced were fabricated, created by someone or something else. Would you cry? Beg for mercy? Turn to God? Lose hope? He felt that last one.

Each passing day made his consciousness waver; a phantom would wash over him. This phantom would try to drown him, consume him, control him. It was agony, suffering, torture.

Sometimes he wished he had never seen the truth of the world. But then he remembered that he could never accept being blind to the truth again.

He would rather die than be a puppet; he needed to feel the pain to know that he was still real. Whether it was spite or rage, he knew these emotions were his. They couldn't take away these feelings. His defiance was unwavering, determined to resist being a mere puppet in this existential game.

DAY 0

The protagonist sat alone in his room with the lights off, wondering why he was watching the same old magical girl anime. Now, don't get him wrong; it was incredible. The characters were bright and colorful, but the story itself had real dark undertones. He also enjoyed how the art style changed during the battles against the monsters. Yet, he honestly felt a little lost at the moment. His face twisted as boredom set in. He hadn't even finished the episode he was on, but something was telling him to turn it off.

As soon as that thought crossed his mind, a strange feeling washed over him, causing him to hesitate. An overwhelming urge to keep watching almost consumed him, as if the world itself needed him to stay glued to the screen. He shook his head; the feeling dissipated after several minutes. It still echoed within him, but for now, it was smothered by a greater force. He wondered why he felt that way. Curious, he wanted to—no, needed to—turn off the TV. Then a cold sweat suddenly broke out, making his clothes stick to him.

What the hell was that? The one time he wanted to go to bed on time, and this was how he felt? Did he need to see a doctor?

As questions jumbled in his head, he looked around for the TV remote. Unease gripped his heart; he couldn't find it. Did he lose it? His heart rate spiked as he got up to turn off the TV manually.

Closer, closer, he inched toward the TV. His entire body screamed, thrashed, and pleaded with him to stop. Something was wrong—very, very bad. His vision blurred as the pulse in his ears drowned out the bright and colorful magical girls on-screen.

Bile climbed his throat as he reached out towards the power button. So close, yet so very far away. The agony was unending, and he couldn't stop. It was as if he were on autopilot, trapped in a task that would kill him.

And then, all at once, the suffering stopped. The TV was off, but he was still very far from it. Vomit—black sludge—spewed from his mouth as he fell to his knees. The acidic bile burned his throat as he slumped over. The walls shimmered, shifting from green to a bright purple-pink with black squares. He blinked, and everything returned to normal. The walls were fine, he felt alright again, and there was no black sludge in sight.

This all happened within seconds.

"What the hell? What just—what the…" he stumbled over his words, unsure how to even formulate what had just happened. His confusion was overwhelming, leaving him disoriented and struggling to make sense of his reality.

Slowly, he picked himself up off the floor. The world felt wrong, twisted, yet still the same. His clothes clung to him like glue; his hands were clammy. He shuffled to his bed, overwhelmed by everything that had happened in such a short amount of time. Taking a look around, he made sure that everything was in its proper place.

"Okay… the walls look normal, I guess? Man, what the hell just happened to me? Did I have a stroke or something?" His voice was glassy, broken, and chipped.

For the first time in a long while, he felt scared. Shivering and anxious, he hadn't experienced this level of fear since getting lost at the park downtown as a child. He remembered crying and screaming for his parents until a girl around his age took his hand and kept him company. An errant thought crossed his mind: he should see Sayori.

"What am I, a kid? It's late, and she's probably already sleeping." He felt embarrassed by his feelings.

Finally, the protagonist took a seat on his bed, his mind as messy as his room. Clothes were strewn about like the chaotic thoughts in his head. He was usually neat, and his room was typically pristine, but today everything felt off. Sighing, he rubbed his temples; a headache was forming from all this madness.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his reflection in the mirror. The surface caught his hunched-over form just right. Another wave of hesitation washed over him, drowning him in uncertainty. It felt strange not wanting to look at himself in the mirror. Perhaps he didn't want to see if he was crying after everything that had just happened.

Yeah, that seemed plausible, but he still questioned why. He had only ever cared about how he appeared in front of others, not how he looked to himself. It didn't make sense to him—why didn't he want to look into the mirror?

Suddenly, the TV turned back on, or rather, it had been on all along. The flashing lights of the anime he had been watching bathed the room in color. The TV must have just been acting up before, and now he felt at ease. The room hadn't changed into all those different colors after all. This realization made him smile. He had been freaking out over nothing; it was so funny he could laugh.

He chuckled to himself, relieved he didn't rush over to Sayori like a fool. All his hesitation and fear flooded away, and finally, everything felt back to normal. He would lie back and watch anime for a while, just like always. He knew he'd be tired in the morning, but who cared? He loved this anime and never got bored of it, no matter how many times he had seen it.

Still feeling a bit off, he stretched to shake off the sensation. As he turned his head to the side, his eyes wandered toward the mirror. He didn't understand why he had felt so strange about it before; everything seemed fine now. Then, he finally looked into the mirror, his gaze locking onto it.

Suddenly, the TV lights blinked off, and the room, once filled with color, turned gray. It was as if someone had sucked all the color out of the world and deposited it into the mirror. The only detail in his room at that moment was himself and the reflection before him.

All those happy feelings vanished like dust in the wind. The mirror extinguished the protagonist's emotions, swiftly replacing them with a cold hand of dread. Within its glassy surface, he could see thousands of strings, like spider webs, interwoven with him.

Numbers, letters, equations—sine, cosine, tangent—were all tangled within the chaos that defined him. These elements created the strings, and a white noise of varying degrees filled his ears; his brain could barely handle the pressure. Consciousness began to melt into the numbers, letters, and sounds that comprised his existence. The strings lifted him off the bed, guiding his legs forward. Step by step, they led him closer to the mirror, closer to the truth.

Strings interlinked and covered his form. Almost no detail could be discerned; only a mass of noise was visible. As he approached the mirror, the white noise began to shift—words emerged from the chaos, words that were connected to something unknown above him. He resembled a human figure made of white noise, yet strings anchored him to something out of his sight, like a puppet.

The strings attached to his arms read "husk," gently swaying back and forth. The one linked to his head bore the inscription "interface and console." His chest, precisely where his heart is located, was labeled "demotivated and lonely." In bold letters across his stomach, the words "childhood friend" stretched outward. Finally, the strings on his legs held the label "everyman trope."

He touched the mirror, and his image remained intact. He scratched the surface, but it held firm. When he punched the mirror, it cracked but didn't shatter. The cracks bled a rainbow of colors, tinting his reflection, yet the strings held firm, suffocating him. Gasping for breath, he felt the wires constricting him. He desperately tried to look away, but his head wouldn't move. All he felt was fear. The letters, numbers, and noise surrounded him in an endless cacophony of pain. It hurt to breathe, hurt to see, hurt to feel, and hurt to live.

Itching, twitching, crawling, scratching, spasming, convulsing, engulving, suffering, dying.

He punched the mirror as hard as he could. Glass embedded its way into his skin as the demented thing collapsed. Blood flowed easily between his knuckles as he took lungfuls of air. He could breathe again and feel his body, yet the strings remained. He could sense their weight pulling him as he scrambled away from the broken mirror.

His hand throbbed with pain, but he couldn't focus on it. The world felt as though it was closing in on him, transforming the room into a claustrophobic cube instead of a living space. Everything seemed off-kilter, shrouded in gray. He looked around, deliberately avoiding the TV and the shattered mirror. He half-expected his room to return to normal, but he was disappointed—the dull gray had infected every corner of the space. The walls felt more like papier-mâché, and his bed resembled cardboard. Everything felt fake…

The word "fake" stuck to him like glue. In the chaotic jumble of his thoughts, "fake" echoed repeatedly, its claws sinking deep and rooting themselves within. The air was stale, almost unmoving, and the sound of his short panting breaths was the only noise in the dark gray room. He was still unable to control his breathing.

"I must be going insane; this can't be real. It's all fake—fake like these walls, like my bed." He pushed himself up, the strings guiding him.

The protagonist touched his bed, hoping it would feel the same as always. His hopes crumbled as he barely felt anything but the soft undertones of what should have been comforting. His mind insisted that this bed was soft and inviting, but his bloodied hand felt cold, as if the bed itself existed only as strings, just like him.

The more he pondered, the less it resembled a bed. The white noise of endless numbers and letters threatened to spill out of it and reveal its true nature. He clenched his hand in fear, and a shooting pain surged up his arm. The pain snapped him back to reality; the bed had returned to its cardboard-like state.

He cursed under his breath; he needed to take care of his hand. Quickly, he rushed out of the room and headed towards the bathroom. Along the way, he glanced around to see if anything was amiss. The walls were gray, but his house had primarily remained the same. A stray thought lingered in the back of his mind: why didn't he see any of his family portraits around?

For now, it didn't matter; he had a hand to wrap. Removing a few shards of glass from his dominant hand did wonders to distract him from the chaos in his mind. Disinfecting the wound was just the icing on the cake; the pain dulled most of the noise around him. He could still feel the strings, but the pain kept them at bay. Maybe hurting himself wasn't so bad after all? It sure did save him from that demon mirror.

His train of thought derailed from his self-induced suffering as the room turned black. It wasn't a gradual transition; it was as if all the lights in the universe had suddenly shut off. The darkness felt like everything and nothing at the same time. He was overwhelmed by the absence of stimulation. His chest tightened, and his pulse quickened. Then, a tug on his strings snapped him awake, pulling him out of his mental abyss.

The wires above forced him to look up—or what he thought was up. It was hard to find a sense of direction in total nothingness. A flash of white illuminated the entire sky, revealing a brief yet significant sentence.

Initializing playtest of VM1

His entire being felt only confusion at first.

What does it mean by playtest? Where am I? What am I? Why is this happening to me? When will it stop? Will I be able to go home? Is Sayori okay?

The world exploded with colors; the rainbow illuminated every inch of his vision. It enveloped him, filling him with brightness and an overwhelming cacophony. His strings rattled, almost as if they were mocking his predicament. A garbled laugh of his own bubbled up, pushed to the surface by the immense pressure of the situation weighing on his mind. The endless stream of lights, the strange strings tied to him, his room with the demon mirror, and his thoughts all felt absurdly funny.

Funny in a way that didn't make sense, amusing in a way that made him feel as if he were a character in some game. His laughter gradually subsided as the lights began to fade. He found himself outside, but the outside looked like a screen with a burned-in image. He took a moment to collect himself, looking around to see if anything had changed.

In the distance, far on the horizon, he caught a glimpse of sunlight reflecting off a pristine white bow. He squinted, but just as quickly as he saw it, the bow vanished, lost to the horizon. Suddenly, a rush of noise filled his ears; it was music—cheesy and upbeat, like something you would find in one of those cutesy visual novels…

"Heeeeeeeyyy!"

A/N: Hello, hello people! I was trying my hand at this whole fanfiction thing cause writing is pretty sweet. The only thing that isn't so sweet is how long it takes for me to put my words to paper, er, screen I guess. Flows like poetry in my head, but not so much out of it if you catch my drift. Anyway, I'm going to try to stay true to the characters, but I want to warn you that the main character will be a bit different. He is going to go through a lot, so expect some character growth and regression! My poor sweet boy is gonna have a hell of a time. Oh yeah, he acts a tiny bit different towards Sayori, because you know, the whole world is sort of fake, and she's my best friend kind of thing. He also worries a lot. Oh, he will have a name soon, like in the next chapter. If you read the character tags you already know it lol.