Ember Wind: Online

Christmas Bug

Tangurple woke up to bright white lights. He heard the sounds of beeping and muffled voices. Then came the recognizable sound of a defibrillator.

Tangurple sat up in force, nearly making himself puke. His vision cleared up and fine-tuned the resolution. He saw the forest again coated in its thick layers of glistening white snow. He turned his head to the left. Next to him was Falcher who was also seemingly trying to piece together what happened. He then looked to his right. The mouth of the cave suddenly had a purple and black checkered pattern acting a texture glitched door. There was static echoing from the broken texture as it began to fidget, showing random textures flickering all about in place of the purple and black checkerboard.

Tangurple slowly walked up to it in curiosity. He watched the textures teleport all over and nervously reached out to touch it.

"NO!" yelled Falcher who scrambled to his feet.

Tangurple quickly retracted his hand and turned around to look at Falcher. "Why? It's just a broken texture."

"It's a glitch, something that isn't supposed to be there. God knows what that could do to you. In here, you're a program, not human. If good code contacts bad code, you could become completely dysfunctional."

"What do you suppose caused this break?" Tangurple asked.

Creoft, startled awake by Falcher's yell, sluggishly pushed himself to his feet and trudged over. "It could be any number of things. My guess would be someone's tampering with the game and either deleted code or the images themselves." Creoft sighed heavily. "Someone keeps breaking my things... must they always touch my goods?"

Falcher cocked his head questioningly. "Who are you referring to?"

"Either my developers are probing the system and trying to fix it or some third party has broken the firewall and invaded the system. I'm leaning more towards the latter." Creoft told him. "My devs are competent and something of this nature would stick out like a sore thumb when the code is test run. There should be error messages but whether they actually acknowledge it is a whole other story."

Tangurple glanced between Creoft and the glitch and then pointed to it as he spoke. "What if I touched it? What would happen?"

Creoft shrugged his shoulders. "I honestly don't know. I wouldn't advise it but considering it seems to only be a texture glitch, I doubt it'll do much harm."

Falcher firmly grasped Tangurple's shoulder. "Hold on one second." He turned to Creoft. "It's more than just a texture glitch. Everything went dark, all noise was drowned by static and I saw something rather odd."

Creoft tilted his head questioningly. "What do you mean?"

"I saw what I think is a hospital. It was mostly bright lights but the noises, the noises were unforgettable." Falcher explained that blip in reality's puncture into the digital realm. "Murmuring, people dressed in white. I think I saw the real world."

"Okay? So what are you saying, that this glitch is a doorway home?"

"It very well could be. I think I saw the real world. It sure as hell felt real."

Tangurple rolled his shoulder and shook off Falcher's hand. He took a few steps forward towards the large glitch which was still flashing random chunks of textures all throughout. He gulped air and took one last look at everyone. He nodded timidly and approached the glitch. His hands shook from fear and panic as his heart and mind raced. Thousands of outcomes, both positive and negative flooded his mind overwhelming him with the sensation of nausea. In a single moment, with one bold move, he reached out to touch the glitch.