Darkness.
A never-ending stretch of black so deep it swallowed every trace of light, every whisper of existence. It wasn't just the absence of light—it was a void. Suffocating. Infinite. Mikey floated in it, or maybe he was lying down—he couldn't even tell. There was no up, no down. No sound. No smell. No taste. Just black.
It wasn't peaceful.
It was terrifying.
His body didn't feel like it existed. He couldn't move, couldn't twitch a muscle. There was no pressure, no sense of skin. Only the terrifying notion that perhaps he had ceased to be. That this was the end. And the longer he lingered there, the more that thought began to creep into his mind like a whisper clawing at the edges of sanity.
'Where am I?' he thought, or at least he tried to.
He didn't hear his own voice. Just a thought, reverberating in the black.
'Did I enter a game?'
No. That was wrong. There was no login screen. No HUD. No system prompts.
'Am I in the game menu?'
No, not even that.
