Coulson had finally completed the tutorial of the game and was being lead by an oldish man to a supposed safe place. Coulson saw many sights and was warned against putting his flashlight on as it would attract the Twisted faster. He had also just encountered Betsey the towering monstrosity with a knife as big as he was.

The safe space was the Grand Central Station and he saw they had made it into a fortress. He was let in and he quickly asked a lot of questions mostly about the fog. He learned the fog emerged out of nowhere one day. Most of the people at first thought it was just strange weather at first but then they learned the truth. Monsters known as the Twisted emerged and began killing people. He learned that the people were resurrected by the fog so it could continue to feed on their fear. The stores and certain locations also got restocked because the fog so its victims couldn’t starve. 

Coulson asked if they had tried to leave and a man named Justin answered him. Some people did try but they found that much deadlier creatures resided in the thickest band of fog surrounding New York. Those who did try to leave were just resurrected to tell the others about the monsters that lurked in the borders. They thought the military would come but as the days turned to months they lost all hope and focused on survival. Coulson also found that those who fell asleep were transported to another plane of existence to protect themselves from the Twisted and other humans. 

“So those human creatures with the crystal growths?”

“So you’ve come across the Hopeless huh, those poor bastards were once just like us but their sanity was destroyed. The fog didn’t need them anymore and turned them into hallow husks that just wander around and look to make our lives miserable.” Coulson nodded slightly and remembered the face of the Hopeless in the holding cell. “Don’t beat yourself up over killing them, you did them and us a favour” Jason patted him on the shoulder. “Go get yourself some grub, some rest and report back to me, you’ll have to pull your weight if you want to stay here.”

Coulson nodded and decided to try the sleep thing. He found a vacant sleeping mat and closed his eyes a prompt to leave appeared before him. It asked him if he wanted to leave and he thought yes and he soon found himself back in the Hellicarrier. His boss Nick Fury and several others glared at him, he looked around and saw his suits shirt and jacket just lying on the desk next to him. He was now wearing the top he had received from the game. 

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David watched the players die over and over again. The most caused death were to the Hopeless and the Watcher’s. David decided to check on how James had faired against the Hunter. David was both surprised and annoyed, the Hunter laid dead at James’s feet. The player seemed happy about something and David saw he had three chocolate bars in his hand. “Seriously has this guy got cheats getting three of those is like winning the lottery three times in a row.” David calmed down there was no way anyone could get cheats for the game.

David got back to writing the code and more backstory for the game. An update was coming and it would include several new things including a new enemy. The new enemy was essentially a murder of crows, they were approximately twice the size of a normal crow. They also could break bones and strip a human to the bone in under a minute. They were meant to be a weak fleshy monster that would gain the attention of anyone with guns. David noticed that a lot of people with strange user names had bought his game. Most if not all of them had the username Agent and then a name. But two of them had slightly normal names the first was the username Widow and the second was named Hawkeye.

The player named Hawkeye had picked one of the new starting loadout’s David had made. Hawkeye had picked the Bow Huntsmen whilst the player named Widow had picked the Hired Killer. The Hired Killer was the first starting loadout to come with a silenced weapon. 

Widow had picked the Shopping Centre as a starting location and Hawkeye had picked the High School starting location. David watched the player named Hawkeye silently traverse the halls of the high school with the bow drawn. He had made the Bow Huntsman to add some more primitive weapons to the game. The  loadout came with a compound bow, a quiver of twenty small game arrows. It came with a hatchet as well as a survival knife and a medkit. The Hired Killer came with a silenced M1911, four magazines of ammunition for it, a wire garrotte, a suit and a ski mask.

The ski mask could hide a user's name as well as their face. David watched the player Hawkeye dome a Hopeless that had the form of a teenage girl. He hadn’t died just yet but something a lot more sinister lurked in the lower floors. The players name was Clinton Barton, David scratched his chin as he had heard that name before as well. David wasn’t a massive Marvel fan but he knew some like Iron Man, The Hulk and Captain America but that was about it. David left the game and finally decided to have dinner. The apartment he lived in was fairly furnished nothing luxurious but it wasn’t like he lived in a hole. He had a thirty inch TV on a stand with a PS2 hooked up with two controllers and a bunch of games.

He only had one room so his couch was his bed and he only had a mini fridge and a small cooking station. His computer wasn’t much better either it looked like it came from the nineties. The shower and toilet were basically in the same room but boxed off by a thin paper thin wall and an oak door. The walls were covered in a god awful green with white flower wallpaper. David wanted to leave the apartment but his appearance wouldn’t allow it without someone wanting to purge him. David was basically a giant dark blue veiny eyeball on a lanky built body. He had to admit the dark grey suit was nice but he would much rather have an actual head. He looked at himself in the mirror to adjust the tie of the suit.

David

He did have a multitude of purple crystal like tentacles that helped him code much quicker. He still needed to eat and that wasn’t something pleasant as he had two mouths. The mouth’s could appear on the palm of his hands and if someone wanted to talk to him they would quite literally have to speak to the hand. One of the few benefits of having a giant eye for a head was that he had a full 360 degrees of vision as only the iris moved around the giant orb that was his head. His eye also seemed to have some kind of protection as it wasn’t painful or irritable to sleep on. The chin he gad been scratching for so long was actually the part of the eye where the chin should’ve been.

He started to cook a burger for his dinner and got a can of Coke as he waited. A small line began to rip open on his right hand as a long black ropey like instrument slithered out. The line got bigger and bigger revealing a small open smile of white shiny teeth. The black instrument was his tongue that could double as a straw. David thought it was weird at first drinking with his new hand tongues but after a week he had gotten used to the sensation. 

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(Hours later)

“So what do we know about this game?” asked Nick Fury to two figures in his office. One figure was a woman with short reddish hair and a man with short blonde brown hair. 

She he woman spoke “all we know of the game is that you can feel some of the actual pain and that we have no idea how Colson got a teeshirt materialised onto him.”

“Well I was able to find out from some of the NPC’s that the year in the game is twenty fourteen and that they are closed off from the rest of the world by something called the fog. And the monsters are called the Twisted, from what I found out there are two unique monsters. They are named Betsey that tries to murder new players at the end of a supposed tutorial and Annabelle I don’t know much on the latter” said the man whilst adjusting his shades. 

“So we don’t know if this game is dangerous or not, a teeshirt materialises on Coulson and we don’t know if these monster can materialise as well” Nick Fury pinched the bridge of his nose. “We have a small army of agents playing this game and not one of them has had anything materialise on them.” Nick Fury sighed they couldn’t remove the VR headsets of anyone playing the game and they couldn’t pull the plug on the computers as the game would still run regardless.

“Have we at least tried to contain the spread of the game for now” Fury had ordered the S.H.I.E.L.D IT team trying to get the game of Steam and any other store page. He also trued to stop people streaming it as well but that was slow going. Both figures shook their heads and Fury ordered them to leave. He looked at a nearby headset and decided to investigate the game personally.