A room with so little space to walk that many would consider the trash-littered floor to be more difficult to navigate than a minefield, even with the ability to see (most of) the trash. On a bed only marginally cleaner than the rest of the room lies a girl whose eyes are obstructed by an almost excessively bulky headset. Alice stirs before sitting up on the bed and taking off the headset.
Better get something to eat before I can log back on.
Alice traverses the abyss of junk with practiced ease, with a route that most would consider far too dangerous given the risk of stepping somewhere one shouldn't. Alice cracks opens the door, accidentally allowing some trash to spill out into the adjacent room, and enters the kitchen of her 3-room apartment, which looks pristine by comparison to Alice's bedroom, though it isn't exactly clean either.
She opens the cupboard and pulls out the go-to "homemade" meal of all shitty cooks: cup noodles. After a 5-minute microwave-watching session, Alice retrieves the noodles, grabs a plastic fork, and returns to her bedroom to add another new permanent resident to "The Only Room As Trashy As Social Media," completely free of rent.
Alice finishes her noodles within 10 minutes, tosses the cup and fork in a random direction, and picks up the headset.
Alright, back to business
She lies down on her bed before pressing the headset's power button and quickly slipping it on. Her body goes still as her consciousness awakes in an empty void, Steelfire Prophecy's login. Upon entering her login info, Alice takes a step back to wait while she's logged in by the system.
5 seconds go by, then 10, then 20, 30, 40. Soon, a whole minute has passed and yet the progress bar has not moved from the starting position.
That's strange. This is the first time it's taken so long.
Alice begins to grow impatient, tapping her foot with a scowl on her face. Another minute goes by.
The hell is taking so much time? It'd normally be done within a couple seconds yet it's already taken minutes.
Another 3 minutes pass before another new occurrence: an error message in oversized red text.
ERROR: Cannot link to destination. Retrying...
Error? And what does it mean destination?
Alice subconsciously creases her eyebrows.
ERROR: Cannot link to destination. Attempting to link to new destination...
Alice's expression continues to become more concerned.
Failed again huh? New destination? Is it trying to send me somewhere? Maybe this will just put me at an arbitrary point on the map.
Successful: Destination set.
Relief washes over Alice's face in an instant and she lets out a long sigh.
Well, good to know it worked at least. Though I wonder where I might end up. Hope I don't need to walk too far to get back.
Navigating...
Successful
Transporting to destination...
Successful
Welcome
The void begins to fade away and is replaced by a dry and empty valley.
Instantly, Alice was struck by a blinding light, something that shouldn't have been possible given the time of day that she had logged off. After her eyes had adjusted, she looked up to see the sun in a cloudless sky, which only served to further her confusion.
It was the middle of the night when I logged off, so how is it noon already? Also, why are there 2 moons!?
Normally, whenever the words "Alice Roselynn has left" were present in the logs of Steelfire Prophecy, the sentence: "Alice Roselynn has joined" would appear at most 20 minutes later. Yet even after 48 hours, she had yet to log back on. That alone wouldn't have raised many questions, but Alice's account and all records of it had disappeared entirely, as if it had never existed.
Although players were never able to properly grasp Alice's intentions and motives, they could tell that this likely wasn't something she would do, as she did seem to enjoy the game too much to drop it so suddenly. This only left players more puzzled. To even go so far as to delete all data pertaining to her account, what could have possibly happened to cause such a strange occurrence?
