The Stanley Parable

Serious Room Ending

Stanley woke up in his office and at first didn't move. What now? What else is there to do? Stanley looked around his office until he noticed a blank envelope. Curious, Stanley slowly open it and started reading the letter that was inside. 

"Dear Stanley, 

You have completed all the endings except for two. To achieve one of these endings, go to your own computer and type in "sv_cheats 1" then press enter. It will take you to a special place. There are also more secrets then you think. There are things called achievements that can be obtained by preforming certain tasks."

The rest of the letter was a bunch of different names of these 'achievements'. Stanley decided to start with the first things. He sat down at his desk and typed in 'sv_cheats 1' on his keyboard. Suddenly, he was teleported to a room. It was a small room with one large wooden table. 

"Stanley. This is me being serious. In fact this is my serious room. It's where I come to be serious. That table is the most serious table I could find. I looked at many, many tables. Hundreds of tables. It's possible I looked at over a thousand tables, I honestly don't know, the specific number isn't as important as the understanding that of all the tables that I looked at, this one is the most serious."

Stanley was confused as to why the Narrator was talking so much about tables. 

"I relate this story to impress upon you the extent to which this is the most serious room I have, which is why I've brought you here. You just tried to activate server cheats, which or course runs the risk of breaking the entire game. You've got no respect for the strict order of scripted narrative events and I just can't that."

Stanley let out an inaudible groan. He was in for a lecture. 

"It's time to get serious Stanley, no jokes, no games. Outside of this room I might be more tolerant of those things, but now we're in the room. Which is why to I'm subjecting you to the most serious punishment I can think of: One hundred, billion, trillion years standing here in the serious room."

Stanley knew he could just reset the game, so he dramatically sat on the ground, just to mess with the Narrator. But if they were annoyed, they didn't let it show. 

"Perhaps after that we can talk about the severity of your actions and whether you've learned anything, but until then, serious room. GO."

The Narrator stopped speaking. Stanley sat there for a little bit, messing around with his hands before reseting the game. Then, just to spite the Narrator, he wrote 'sv_cheats 1' again, and was taken back to the serious room. 

"WOAH. Did we not have the talk? Are we not in the serious room THIS VERY MOMENT? Did I not tell you how many tables I looked through? I'm going to be conservative an say it was somewhere in the tens of thousands of tables, any reasonable person would say I spent an ABSURD amount of time doing nothing but looking at tables. And I genuinely considered each one too! I took a hell of a lot of notes! I keep the notes in a different room, that room is less serious than this one. It's more of a... notes room."  

Stanley wondered when the Narrator managed to find the time to look at all those tables. To Stanley's knowledge, the Narrator is always there when Stanley is. 

"Again, the point of this story is to convey how serious I fell this cheating issue is. And I'm sure you'll agree with me once you've fulfilled your new punishment: INFINITY YEARS IN THE SERIOUS ROOM!!"

Infinity is a concept, not a number. 

"I generally have trouble reading human emotions but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you're devastated by this crippling new punishment. As well you should be, it's the most serious I could think of."

Not at all, Stanley was just standing there with a blank expression. 

"Can you get more serious than that? No. You can't. Don't try."

Stanley simply reset the game and didn't press the code into his computer again.