' Cloudy '

It was the only thought that was going through Felix's empty head as he was walking home from work in the middle of the night. If a normal person was looking at him they would believe they were walking through a haunted street.

His skinny and ghastly figure with dead fish eyes limping along the sidewalk through sheer willpower does make him look like some kind of old folklore ghost.

The name of the not undead ghost is Felix Balch, a 35-year-old who had many dreams that were crushed under the weight of responsibility and reality as he worked his life away in a construction company as a lower rank assistant. Felix just has finished his assignments in a new building after 36 hours of pure ' Military class torture against Traitors ' or so he thought.

Felix himself never really aimed at anything too high. He was a modest man with only 1 real objective, live a cushy life, play games read novels, and maybe do some work from time to time. His dream life was taken away from him from the start of his life by the simple fact that he was born without too much passion to do things.

He lacked the will to do ' troublesome stuff '.

His life was always led to the path of least resistance, and yet here he was wasting his life way through some troublesome company that doesn't even know he exist until he made a mistake. His bottled-up anger was rising to astonishing levels never seen before but his simple morals denied him from making a fuss since it would be inconvenient, so he did what a normal person would let off some steam through gaming.

 

 "YOU FUCKING IDIOT MOVE TO THE LEFT WHEN I PUSH THE 'LEFT BUTTON'  YOU TOE-EYED CABBAGE CHARACTER"

Felix screamed in his ' naturally ' semi-soundproof room as his character fell to the floor. The classic, mocking, and clearly grammatically wrong ' you dead ' appeared on the screen as it faded to black. Felix stopped cursing the whole lineage of people who developed the game after a minute and put his hands on his keyboard again.

' How the fuck are you supposed to dodge that specific combo with a Greatsword? '

He was playing once again his favorite game ' Left Rain ', an old game that was considered a cult classic since it invented a new way to see gaming as a whole a decade ago. Before the game, the market was flooded with casual games that simply offered a way for people to enjoy games casually, not very surprising. Felix thought this was a good thing since more market means more games which was a win in his book.

However, people like Felix don't get a lot of satisfaction from repeating monotonous low-risk high rewarded digital tasks, he instead prefers to use his brain to simply get his thoughts out of the gloomy thought processes that tend to go off in his brain. initially, he remedied this through simulation/survival games but 'Left Rain' made the difference.

"GODDAMMIT I FORGOT TO RESET MY ETHER ON THE FOUNTAIN"

This is what made the difference.

 

The challenge of the game was good at posing a challenge that seems undoable at first glance but once it is done one could look back at their accomplishments and rejoice. That was an extremely good way to make the game quite fun for him. He finally had a reason to get his own problem out of his system.

Felix is not an angry man by any stretch of the imagination, maybe impatient and impulsive but angry would not describe him, but even people like him become bitter after the world basically lied to him his entire life. 

He's actually a pretty chill person that hated being angry for no reason, and since his bottled-up anger could not be discharged at his coworker or his boss without some prior reason that was accepted by society, he simply could not get angry. But the game was a good enough excuse and challenge to actually get him to open his mouth.

 

"I'M ACTUALLY GOING TO COMMIT MURDER IF HE KEEPS DOING THAT ATTACK OVER AND OVER"

But how can someone get to this point?

 

He dutifully fill everything that was expected of him and nothing more, yet his life was on a path to stagnation. After he got his title he tried to go obtain the work of supervisor since it was a normal thing for people with the degree he had, and he was laughed at.

Apparently, he needed to work to earn the right to work.

' Madness I tell you '

So he started to work from the lowest position to where he is now, a not-so-low but definitely not-so-high position. He expected that he would continue to rise through the ranks and that maybe it would be more difficult. He wasn't very worried, after all, he had grinded for items for weeks on end so grinding in real life would not be so difficult.

But life is more than a game.

He was stagnated, generally, you needed to get ' experience ' and learn from your superiors so that you can do their jobs when they just go away or get promoted. But when all superiors simply won't move from their positions for decades, then it becomes a big problem. He became stuck in a position that he neither hated nor loved. Not was able to move to other jobs since he needed the experience of at least another year to finally get out of his dumbass job.

And so his current predicament.

 

"I hate my job, making my daily EXP be reset at 1:00 AM instead of my beloved 11:00 AM, unforgivable monsters really!"

Felix grumbled under his breath, He decided that he had enough games for today and that he finally could have some decent sleep since his stress left his body. He fell into the bed and melted into it, he hugged a pillow to maximize his comfiness to a new level and fell asleep.

In his dreams, he was back at school and fell in love with a person he never met and with her went on a school trip to the jungle and arrived at a desert with some weird structures.

Some famous actor that he remembered was there giving a singing show, although he was pretty sure he never singed in real life, and somehow the scenery changed into a building even though there weren't any, to begin with, he was actually getting something interested with his dream girlfriend before the actor got into a high note and suddenly.

He woke up from the sound of the alarm.

*yawn* "I'm dying out here please be gentle Mr alarm~"

Felix complained to his alarm clock and shut it off before getting some more shut-eye and maybe continuing the storyline of the dream, of course already forgotten about the school trip to the jungle and only remembered the singing and having a girlfriend.

"He he he~"

He giggles as he dozed off for another half hour of delusions.

---

 

Felix has finally decided to wake up, he slept for a long 6 hours! 2 more than last time. With a new victory in his book, he decided to try and cook some breakfast consisting of some scrambled eggs with cut sausages in them with a side of bread and mayonnaise. He has actually taken a liking to the dressing but his coworkers keep telling him that it is weird to take it with eggs and mayonnaise.

' Idiots, even when I told them that Mayonaise was already made from eggs they kept being disgusted with my God level cooking genius '

This was the first ' normal ' food he has cooked in a week. Felix knew what ingredients went well with others, so he generally just throws random stuff and cooks it, the problem with this method is that sometimes he makes some extremely good food that only God knew how it was made because he knew damn well he forgot what he used.

Anyways Felix tried to grab the bread but noticed something.

' Were my bread at? '

Felix was out of bread, normally scrambled eggs with no bread were meh a most, but scrambled eggs with mayonnaise without bread was just the height of insanity. How does having bread make this not insane but a genius food one may ask? Felix's answer is that ' The line between insanity and genius is a thin one' or something in a similar vein.

Felix understood that in his delusions he forgot that he didn't have any bread, so he simply got dressed enough so that he was not arrested and got off to the grocery store to buy bread and maybe some pasta since he was feeling trying to mix a bit of spaghetti with cut up ham, some corn kernels and some half cream, a masterpiece was forming in his mind while walking.

"What a nice Sunday"

As much as he was overworked, Sunday was still his day off, he would kill anyone who denied him of it so the company actually relented in persuing him when it was Sunday, this was the only thing that he was allowed to do in there and he was actually quite proud of it. Felix got off the grocery store after staring at the cute cashier that he somehow got acquainted with and got back home and ate.

He subsequently did 'nothing', as he was required on Sunday, for a good 8 hours before getting up and making his desired spaghetti that was a decent meal, but he was still hungry so he decided to go buy a snack instead of preparing more food.

While pondering on what he would do about his hobbies, he started to get a sense of dread filling his senses, making him stop for a few seconds.

' The fuck? what the hell did I do today for this to happen? '

He knew the feeling well, an immense amount of pressure hitting him indiscriminately because of his thoughts, making his stomach drop to the sudden feeling of helplessness, nausea invading his mouth, and his mind getting cloudy. The familiar feeling of the world's reality crushing you without consideration of your own well-being.

'whywhwyhwywhywhyhwywhywhywhywhywhwyhwyhywhwyhwyhwywhy'

He questioned with his being why he was feeling like that, he didn't do anything wrong today, he did was he was supposed to and yet the feeling of being completely being exposed, of being judged by his faults and shown to him as a grim reminder that he was indeed not special, and that he was being forgotten by time itself.

He knew that this was just how he felt. HE knew that it wasn't true at all, he gave his best and still lost in the game of life, but he thought that he at least would not feel this way again today since he got his day off.

' NOT another Panic Attack'

His hands immediately begin moving erratically, lightheaded, the feeling as if he was crumbling underwater, drawing on air, his breath became erratic as he tries his best to simply not collapse, he had already given up on controlling his arms that are hugging him and pulling on his hair, trying to grasp anything to hold.

' I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-II-I-I WHY??????????????????????'

Felix was used to dealing with these feelings thanks to his mind, he could rationalize things and therefore get some comfort in his made-up plans in order to gain some control over his life, even if they were false, they felt real enough at the moment to put him at some ease. But this one was weird, nothing was the trigger for his panic attack, which made this method backfire.

Generally, it would be brought up by glimpsing too much into the future, trying to get the meaning of his life, or being talked to ' be a productive member ' of society by his brother, the sense of being swept up by time was what made him throw up in the worst case, but this was different since it just didn't make sense to him.

It was too sudden.

Right there and then, while he was leaning onto a light pole, around him, engraved into the ground a circle glows up, faint white light with runes written on its circumference.

' That seems familiar '

The hallucination that he never experienced before took priority in Felix's brain, as he made up what was going... he fell.

He really didn't feel like it, it would be more appropriate that the floor simply ' disappeared ' from under his feet, it was clearly still there as he fazed through it as if he was in some glitchy mess of a game, as soon as his lungs were inside the floor, he drowned, the air was forcibly expulsed out his system.

' It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts'

He lost his vision, smell, and hearing not long after, his feeling of touch was stimulated with a variety of textures, temperatures, and even consistencies making him shiver and have goosebumps all over his skin, almost losing consciousness, he simply fell.

...

...

...

*thud*

He finally landed, in the middle of the plains.