It was raining. The soft pitter-patter of water on a house in a small town perfectly accompanied the distant flashes of lightning and claps of echoing thunder. Occasionally, a car or two would drive by outside, their headlights illuminating the darkened road. Most of the town’s residents were at home, one reason being the heavy weather, and the other being the time. It was terribly late at night, with the minute hand having just passed the smaller hour hand at the 11 mark. Almost everyone else in this particular household had gone to sleep, some preparing for the next working day, and some simply tired. It was quiet.

Well, mostly quiet.

Only one room of the house remain illuminated, and even then it was from the glow of a computer screen. A young teenager sat on his office chair in front of his rig, his eyes glued to the screen. He had a pair of headphones on, so no sound escaped his PC’s speakers, and the only sounds were the whirring of his graphic card’s fan cooling system, rapid clicks of his mouse, and the tapping of keys. He probably needed to go to bed sooner or later, but he had decided that he had to finish up his little project in a game called Garry’s Mod.

His character and chosen playemodel on the screen, a standard white Overwatch Elite, grasped a glowing blue Physics Gun as it held a construction prop in its pencil-thin blue beam. He cautiously inched his way towards his masterpiece: what appeared to he a random mess of parts moulded together. That was what it would appear to the untrained eye, of course, because to an experienced player like himself, it was a complicated contraption of elegant machinery and moving parts that all came together for one purpose. He took out his Tool Gun and selected the weld function, aiming it at the prop and firing, welding it to the rest of the parts. That done, he took a step back and smiled.

“At last, my masterpiece is complete!” He exclaimed softly. He greatly admired his work, and opened up the Spawn Menu to save it. At that very moment, a random bolt of lightning suddenly struck the house, immediately causing the electrical appliances in the building to short-circuit from its sheer voltage. One of those appliances was the gamers computer. And so, he watched as hours of work vanished before his very eyes as his room went dark. His eye twitched as he gripped his mouse even tighter than before. “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!”

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Unbeknownst to the gamer, however, some parts of his computer, namely its RAM card and CPU continued to stay on thanks to the excess energy given by the strike. In the memory card between random surges of memory, a lone white figure stood in a black void stuck in a T-pose, grasping a Physics Gun. Its single red ocular lens on its rounded helmet glowed in the dark. It stood there, still and silent.

Then suddenly, it was enveloped by dozens of lines of glowing code that quickly wrapped around it, before they were seemingly absorbed by the figure. It suddenly twitched, and animated. The Overwatch Elite shook its head as it reached out and clutched its helmet with its free hand. “Huh? What-“ It spoke in a dazed and confused male voice somewhat distorted by its helmet voice filter. The Elite looked around, suddenly noticing that he was standing in a black void of complete emptiness. “What the- where am I?” He asked, before he also noticed that he appeared to be floating midair. “Oh, shit.”

With that, he fell, screaming all the way. The blackness eventually gave way to swirling colours and sights and sounds the Elite didn’t recognise. He heard voices, but he didn’t know what they meant.

“The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world…”
“I am Heavy Weapons Guy, and this is my new weapon…”
“We call this tactical superiority…”
“War. War never changes…”
“What is better - to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?”
“What the hell kind of name is Soap?”
“Red like roses, fills my dreams and brings me to the place you rest…"

The last one seemed to have struck a chord, because the colours stopped there, and the Elite eventually felt himself slowing down, and eventually, everything faded. He didn’t feel anything else either, only exhaustion as he felt himself drift off into sweet oblivion.