#capslock

SHE BETTER BE GRIZZLED AS FUCK. OLD, GRUMPY WOMAN PLEASSSSE

Look at herrr

You were out in semi- nature, somewhere on the many edges of town where suburbia intersects with a small pocket of wilderness, and your phone was dying.

You were doing something that took up a lot of battery, and got so caught up in your task (either a fun hobby, or for work) that you didn't realize how late it was, or how far your battery had run down, until with an ominous crackle and *boom*, all of the street lamps in your vicinity went out in sync.

You look up from your phone, startled at the sudden and almost overwhelming darkness around you. When you glance back down at your phone a moment later, wondering who you should call to report the power outage, you realize your phone is at 2% battery.

Mentally berating yourself for not noticing all of the low battery notifications and what time it was, you're about to pocket your phone and start walking home in the dark, a little nervous about somehow getting lost on the way without the street lamps to light your way, but not thinking too much about what was happening... when your phone lets out an unholy screech and an emergency alert, louder and flashier than you've ever heard from any amber alert or tornado warning blasts from your phone screen at full brightness, and full volume as a synthesized voice began to read out the text written across the screen in blinding red text in all caps:

EMERGENCY EVACUATION ORDER IS IN EFFECT / THIS IS NOT A DRILL / MOVE TO THE NEAREST AIR RESCUE VEHICLE FOR EVACUATION / LEAVE ALL ELECTRONICS BEHIND / THIS IS NOT A DRILL / EVACUATE TO THE NEAREST AIR RESCUE VEHICLE / THIS IS NOT A DRILL / CATASTROPHIC FAILURE HAS OCCURED AT THE FORT X TESTING BASE / IF YOU CANNOT REACH AN AIR RESCUE VEHICLE--

And before the message could complete, your phone screen flashed white, showed the logo of the brand, and died in your hands.

this is not a drill , You repeat, trying to grasp everything the message had said, then you're off, running, sprinting through the pitch black of the night, down the road and towards home, towards your neighborhood. The whole city has gone dark, and the only lights you can see are blinding beams that cut through the night to illuminate buildings in their gaze, search lights from what sounds like an entire army's worth of helicopters descending on the city, shadowy silhouettes piling in with the sound of indistinct shouting, and then taking off again and vanishing into the night. You've walked this road a million times, ran it occasionally when you got caught in a rain shower, but never has it seemed so long even as you're running the fastest you ever have in your life.

Your lungs are burning too much to shout, and there's a stitch in your side, but even if you could get the breath in to call out to the helicopter two blocks to the left, you know you still have to turn right-- your family is at home, and your mother always turned her phone off to sleep, and your brother had been grounded and lost his for a week. The TV had broken last week and was still waiting to be replaced, and there were no emergency radios in the house. As you ran through the dark streets, there came the distant and hair-raising wailing of the tornado sirens, but they had never truely been audible on your side of town during a storm, too distant and quiet to be heard under the pounding of the rain and the roar of the wind unless you specifically listened for them, and recognized them for what they were and not the sound of a sixteen wheeler rolling down a distant and rain-soaked road.

Maybe your brother had his window open, maybe he would be awake and notice the power going out, maybe he would hear the sirens and know something was wrong--

You reach your house and stumble up the steps, flinging the door open with a bang you hope is loud enough to wake your mother.

Thundering up the stairs, screaming out a hoarse "Mom!" at the top of your lungs, you burst into the closest room, your little brother's room, but there are no startled exclamations from within, no complaints about the power being out, and you know it's empty. Still, you trip over the toys on the floor to get to the small bed and fling the covers off, just to be sure. Turning, you make your way back out into the hall, a million possibilities racing through your mind at the continued silence in the house.

Outside the windows, flashes of light cut through the night, and the roaring of the helicopter blades slicing through the air is enough to rattle the glass in the panes. There are closer sirens now, loud wailing tones from the helicopters themselves, and they all seem to be taking off at once, and you can hear people screaming in the streets as they're left behind.

And still, there is no sound of life in the house, save your own pounding heart and hurried footsteps on the creaky floorboards. A rumbling has started, and you think your knees are going shakey, and then you realize with cold horror it wasn't the helicopter's blades rattling the windows as the whole building sways under your feet, nearly knocking you to the floor as nicknacks start falling off the shelves around you in the dark. Earthquake! We're not supposed to get those here!

You know you should be crouching down, hiding under a table, or a doorway, or running down the stairs to get out, but your mother's door is *right there* ! Knocked by a violent tremor against the wall, you use it for balance, reaching out desperately for the handle that is so close but so far away --

There's a window at the head of the hall, overlooking the street, and the window curtains have been knocked down by the tremors, so you have the perfect view as a pulse of golden light races across the town in a solid wave of fire. In less than the blink of an eye, it starts, and then it reaches you-- and everything dissolves.

---

You think you have died, that the experiment had set off some kind of nuclear chain reaction and wiped your town from the map, and probably the surrounding areas, too.

You are not completely wrong.

You are still alive, after all.

But when you open your eyes again, everything has changed, and everything is familiar, but it makes absolutely no sense.

Because when you awake again, you are in your house, but it is different. The whole town is there, but different. And the worst part is you recognize what is different even as you try to deny it.

You've seen all the propaganda posters. The recruitment posters. The marketing. The commercials, the beta testing footage from paid influencers who use their content to influence kids into signing up for the military.

The whole world has changed, and been replaced with the fantasy RPG simulator the local Fort X had been making, marketing it as a stunning and captivating emotional game about family and loyalty, and at its core was US-Military Industrial Complex propaganda with a quick coating of high-fantasy colored paint, to make it appealing to the unwary masses.

Something happened at that military base, something more than just making a video game -- something that had gone wrong, and changed the whole world, and now, you were stuck in it, and have to learn the rules, all while on an actual literal Quest to find your family.

... but just because you're going to have to learn the rules, doesn't mean you have to play by them.

Fuck the US military, you spit as you start equipping all of the starter gear in the house and pick up a level one staff of fire from the boarded up old fireplace, All my homies hate the US Military.

There's at least six glitches you know of, and you know exactly which one you're going to test first: the one that lets you join the local freedom fighters's Faction instead of being railroaded into choosing the three different flavors of aesthetically distinct but ideologically identical US Military forces intent on taking over and bringing "peace" to the region by any means necessary... and the second glitch is a bit harder to get to, but almost game-breaking if you can manage it: some vibecoding given the form of a pencil, l buried deep in secret invisible dev rooms in the mid-level areas that are about 30 levels above your current player level, that allows the player character to craft custom main story quests.

The game-breaking coding and resultant Key Item had been buried in the dev rooms instead of deleted, because so much of the game's code had been built by the vibecoding, that to get rid of it would destroy the whole thing.