A World Beyond Code [Hiatus]

Ch 1 - The Corruption of a World

***** Your POV *****

It was a rainy Friday evening and you had just gotten home from work. It had been another trying week, but the project had been successfully completed on time and your boss gave your team the following Monday and Tuesday off in return for working overtime the past three weeks. You wandered into your room and turned on your computer. As it booted up, you swapped out your semi-damp clothes in favor of a comfy (f/c) t-shirt and lounge pants. What was a bored and lonely -or rather- bonely programmer to do on a Friday evening? Order your favorite pizza and play video games of course!

Your current obsession was a game called Undertale. You had gotten into the fandom a bit late considering how busy work kept you, but that didn't prevent you from looking up information while waiting for code to compile or test scripts to process. You watched play-throughs of many possible endings and read through some good fanfiction stories, including a couple AUs. When you had the chance to play, you made your way through both the True Neutral and True Pacifist routes.

At the moment, you were considering starting your own Genocide run. You had watched a friend play a couple weeks ago and it seemed like a decent challenge. It took them a few days to beat Unydne, and nearly a week to beat Sans. The two of you had tried to tag-team the Undyne fight, handing off the controls after each death in a mini-competition to see who could finally beat her. Ultimately your friend was able to beat both of them while you were working overtime, so they told you what had happened.

The other alternative for the evening was to check out the effects of file editing first-hand. You had read some interesting facts about a character named Gaster who, while not in the final version of the game, had bits and pieces left in the code which could only be accessed through particular edits.

Curiosity getting the better of you, you opened up the files and made the changes described online. Being the good programmer you are, you left comments in the code to indicate what you had changed so that you could easily change it back later. Since it was your own copy of the game and no one else was going to see the code, you had some fun with the messages you left for your future self. After saving the edits, you started the game up. As expected, it ran fine and that's when the doorbell rang, signaling the pizza had arrived.

You quickly got up and got the pizza, grabbing a few drinks from the fridge on the way back to your room. You set up your gaming space with the food and drink at the ready and then wrapped a blanket around yourself in-case you fell asleep, as had been known to happen before with gaming marathons. In fact, you expected yourself to fall asleep fairly quickly given how tired you were, but you wanted to do something fun before going to bed. You then plugged your gaming headset in and let the music drown out the rain pounding on your window.

You made short work of the beginning of the game and then you started encountering the changes described online, most notably in the Waterfall area of the game. You came across the "Goner Kid" and had just entered the mysterious door where the supposed scientist himself was said to linger. You walked up to him and a little sound played as he started to fade....

Then the power went out followed by a loud crack of thunder.

After tossing your headset down from the startling screech that assaulted your ears, you sat there in silence staring at the now blank screen. Shock and frustration ran through you simultaneously. As the power flickered back on nearly immediately, you yelled at the storm outside. While you knew yelling at the storm did nothing, you felt better. There was no one else in your tiny apartment to hear you yelling, so you weren't going to bother anyone anyway. You ate a slice of pizza as you calmed, the ringing in your ears slowly dying down. Then you turned your computer back on. Seeing the computer begin to start a recovery process, you stuffed another slice of pizza in your mouth and checked your phone for any interesting news. It was going to take a while.