On a quiet Saturday afternoon, Hannah Clarkson sat at a table at a small teriyaki restaurant in the city’s Chinatown and awaited her order. The interior of the restaurant was understated, not too dingy nor spotlessly clean, with scattering of other patrons likewise there for their own lunches.
“So how’s the graduate life?”
“Uuuuuugh…” Hannah groaned at the question. As a recent college grad, her full-time job had thus far consisted of submitting applications to tech companies offering entry level positions impossibly requiring a decade of prior experience. Dressed in jeans and a college hoodie, part of her wished that she was still in college, if only to avoid the prospects of a fruitless job hunt for another year. Or two. Or seven. She lifted a hand to adjust her glasses, and then brushed her fingers through her messy brown hair. “I’d rather not think about it.”
“That good, huh? Sorry.” Seated across the table from Hannah, her friend from high school, Penelope Jensen, looked far more put together. Part of that was due to the fact that she wore her army dress uniform that day, had her blonde hair cut to military standard, was undoubtedly far more fit than Hannah ever hoped to be, and, regardless of what one thought of military life, she at least had a paying job.
“Eh, I’ll survive.” Hannah sighed. “I might need to start looking at retail work, but I’m not out of options. Well, yet.”
Penelope nodded, seeming to understand. The job market was rough out there, and she’d have to face it too, once she left the military. “So, anything fun happen lately?”
“Yeah, remember that game mod I mentioned before? I started working on it this week.” Hannah smirked. “I figure it’d be something fun to do between shots to my self-esteem.”
“Oh, yeah. For that RTS game?” Penelope had never been as into computer games as Hannah was, but she was at least familiar with the things that Hannah liked. “What kind of mod is it?”
“If I have the time, and I figure that I might, maybe a total conversion,” Hannah said. “So pretty much an entirely new game on top of the old one.”
“Maybe you can charge money for it?” Penelope asked.
“I guess I could try a Patreon or something, not that many people would pay me.” Hannah glanced out the window at the quiet early-afternoon day—
The world outside flickered, shifting from a sunny, quiet, and peaceful urban scene into a rain-soaked night lit with flickering streetlights and hazy, tawdry neon signage. A local cafe directly across the street, Mariko’s had swapped out for a sleazy, smokey building with a half-functioning sign advertising Mariko’s Magikal Massage. What should have been an image of a woman’s silhouette enjoying a cup of coffee had swapped out for a silhouette of a woman wrapping her lips around—
“Hey!”
Hannah snapped to attention, the “massage” parlor once again the cafe it was supposed to be as time of day and weather returned to the serene, sunny mid-day. “Uh…sorry?”
Penelope gave her a concerned look. “You feeling all right? You were kind of zoning out there.”
“Oh, just…mind wandering.” Hannah wasn’t sure what she had just seen, but it sure wasn’t anything she was about to tell anyone.
A portly, middle-aged woman, one of the employees of the teriyaki shop, stepped up to the table holding plates of food. “Hello. Which of you had the chicken katsu?”
Hannah raised her hand. “Oh that’s…”
An odd, glowing blur faded in the corner of her vision, and she paused. What was that? She glanced around for the source.
“Oh, that’s her,” Penelope said.
Realizing she was distracted again, Hannah shrugged. “Yeah. Me.” She looked across the table to Penelope, and…
…saw a strange, pixelated arrow hovering above her friend’s head.
“W-What the…?” Hannah blinked, and then froze. The weird…cursor was still there. It was difficult to think of it as anything else.
Maybe she was more stressed out than she realized. Or at least, that’s what she thought as the restaurant employee set the plates on the table, and the cursor suddenly moved. As if drag-clicking to select, a green box stretched outward as it moved along its path, expanding to encompass Penelope, the server, the other restaurant employees, and the few other diners present. Hannah pushed back, away from the table, as everyone else was “selected”. Penelope, the server, and everyone else froze, as if suddenly made idle like a unit out of…
…well, out of an RTS game.
What…what the fuck was going on? She hadn’t been that sleep-deprived.
The cursor seemed to animate, as though a click had been made, and a menu appeared.
UNIT UPGRADES
What. The. Hell?
The list of “upgrades’ resembled those out of an RTS faction focused around…
Sun Aug 10 18:48:37 2025
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