A young lady stands in her room. It just so happens that today, the twelfth of June, is the day that everyone dies. You’ve been looking forward to it for a while actually, and while those two statements are not mutually exclusive, they are not correlated. What is this young girl’s name?

> GIRTHY JERKASS X

Try again, smartass.

> BELL WOLFE O



Had today been this girl’s birthday, perhaps one might have been able to name her, but such an event occurred three years ago. Her HONORARY PLACRONYM is already filled out!

Your name is Bell, and you have a wide variety of INTERESTS, evident with just a cursory glance around your room. As seen by your bat, glove and worn balls by your desk, you have an affinity for BASEBALL. Your shelves are packed more with GAMES than they are with books. An old filing cabinet holds the records of your CASES, as you enjoy SOLVING CRIMES. Even if those crimes tend to be lost items, or playground squabbles.

What will you do?

> Bell: Retrieve arms.

No sir, you’re not interested in rehashing old memes so worn that they were ignored even in the source material. Maybe you should try again with something less pointless.

> Bell: Squawk like a imbecile and shit on your desk.

You have no inclination of doing something so stupid and useless.

> Bell: Do something less stupid and useless.

Gladly. You head over to your dresser to retrieve your arms. Opening it up, a bunch of shitty handcuffs fall out. Of course that was going to happen, you knew those were in there. You don’t even know why you bothered looking. Besides, if you wanted to arm yourself, your trusty baseball bat is right over there. You take the pile of cuffs, and store them in your sylladex. Your current modus attributes it to one space on a wheel. If you want retrieve your pile of shitty cuffs, you’re going to have to spin for it, and hope for the best.

> Bell: Examine the rest of your room.

Sure thing. The one corner of the room you currently stand in doesn’t have much to it. Other than your CLOSET OF CUFFS you have a few posters pasted up on the walls. Most of them being from recently released video game titles, or of art bought at conventions. Beside the closet is your filing cabinet, littered with candles and various junk on top. Opposite of this is where your computer desk sits. Your laptop is closed atop it, with your notebooks piled up beside it. Next to that is your TV and your game consoles. The controllers are somewhere around here. Other then that you have your shelves above the desk, lined with different game titles. Moving on to another corner you have your bed and night stand. Not much to talk about there. It has blue sheets. Across from the foot of your bed is the last described corner of your room is. There you have a trunk filled with a bunch of old kids toys you haven’t tossed out yet. And your board game collection. Of which is quite vast. A few stuffed animals, a magnifying glass, and a plastic badge sit blocking the way into the old box. A plastic fan is unplugged, pushed beside the trunk and out of the way. As well as a few cardboard boxes, holding the parts for the computer tower you want to put together. Saving up the money for all the parts is taking some time though.

> Bell: This is boring. Answer the one with maroon text.

It looks like one of your chums is pestering you. You wonder what they could want? You sit down at your laptop and try to find out.



> Bell: Exit room.

Not before you store your baseball bat in your strife deck. If you plan on running into her, then you’d better be ready to throw down. With that settled you open the door and-

> [ S ] STRIFE!



Woah! Mom’s going on the offense today. Good thing you have your bat at the ready. You attempt to AGGRIEVE with little effect. As per usual your bat swings don’t seem to do much. She counters easily and uses her GUARDIAN RUBRIC to forcefully give you a gift. You fail to ABJURE and end up with an armful of maroon colored package, and your butt on the floor. You captchalogue it, but with your sylladex so stuffed full of crap it ejects your pile of shitty cuffs. The mess draws upon her GUARDIAN IRE. With a flash they were scooped up and deposited on your bed, with one pair now around your wrists. In a second you’re free. Even if they were real, you have a knack for getting out them. Equipping your bat again you take another AGGRIEVE chance. You’re attacks are easily AVANT-GUARDED and countered with a puff of glitter to the face. In your shiny and dazed state you hear the sound of a closing door, and a loud THUMP. She’s blocked the door with another of her cast statues you bet. You sit up and start to clean the shiny pink flecks from yourself. You win this round mom. You win this round.

> Bell: Message Ryan.

> Bell: Be the kid full of conspiracies.

The kid full of conspiracies is too busy furiously mashing his keyboard trying to coordinate all of his friends and simultaneously win a game of Touhou Unreal Mahjong.

Instead you get to be this guy. What is his name?

> NUTJOB MCSTUPIDHAIR X

Come on, who would believe that that’s an actual name?

> RYAN TARBOSAURUS

One stupid name is enough, thank you very much.

Oh wait, you’re serious.

> RYAN TARBOSAURUS O



This is Ryan Tarbosaurus, I guess.

> Wow, his hair just gets stupider the more I look at it.

That’s not a command, you asshat.

> Ryan: Examine room.

Ryan ignores the words of an actual living creature in favor of talking, out loud, to a stuffed animal. Stuffed animals make positively riveting conversational partners, and they’re bound to be less rude than SOME PEOPLE.



> Ryan: Stop being crazy and examine room!

Great, TD’s gone silent again. You return him to his lair (your closet) since he has the uncanny effect of making your guardian uncomfortable and ponder what to do next.

> Ryan: Examine room! ==>

Ah, that’s right. One of your friends is messaging you. You should answer them.



> Ryan: Examine room!!! ==>==>==>

You’re such a terrible liar, not that being good at lying is something to take pride in, you think. As you ponder the value of a skill used almost exclusively for treachery, the doorbell rings, bringing you out of your thoughts. Well, looks like your package really did arrive!

> aaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!! ==>==>==>==>==>

Jesus fuck, fine! Your room is empty okay?

> ...

...Mostly empty.

Where did you leave off? Your name? Alright, your name is RYAN. Normally the things scattered about one’s room would indicate their INTERESTS, but you keep your room very clean. You don’t think yourself a neat freak, but the open space is invaluable for your proclivity for STRIFES. You might not carry out much actual strifing in your bedroom, but you pride yourself on your ACTIVE IMAGINATION, fueled in turn by your ACTIVE LIFESTYLE. Or, as active as you can make it when you’re not allowed to leave the house. Most of your things are stored in your closet, primarily a VAST COLLECTION OF OUTDATED VIDEO GAMES, which forms a throne upon which your best friend sits. You have quite a collection of video game consoles in there too, but every last one of them is INCREDIBLY ANCIENT. There’s also a pair of WOODEN TONFA, your ideal strife weapon.

> Ryan: Equip Tonfa.

Sure, why not. You put the wooden tonfa in the strife deck of your tonfakind specibus.

> Ryan: Examine bamboo.

What? oh, yeah.

You keep a stick of bamboo in your room for whenever you want to play around. You aren’t nearly as skilled with it as you are with Tonfa, since there’s never enough room to practice with it in your apartment, but it quite closely approximates an effective bō Staff

> Ryan: Equip Bamboo.

You can’t! You lost your staffkind specibus a while ago. Instead you captchalogue the BAMBOO STAFF, wherein your PokeModus assigns it three pokemon.

> Ryan: Continue examining room.

Do you have to? You have stuff to do you know.

> Ryan: Eeexxxaaammmiiinnneee!!!

Why do you even need to listen to these commands? They're probably not even real, even in your imagination.

> Ryan: Finish examining the room or I will become very upset.

...That’s a weird threat.

In your hands is a gameboy advanced which is usually loaded up with your copy of Pokemon FireRed. Oh, how you love Pokemon. If there was only one game you could play for the rest of your life, it would be Pokemon. While chatting with Tigers and friends alike, you’ve been slowly leveling up the last member of your party, since you don’t think you’ll have much time to do so once you start playing CT’s game. A little ping goes off to indicate that Nidoking hits level 99 and you’re reassured that you’ll be able to get it done with time to spare.

Your closet with sliding mirror doors makes up the west side of your room, with a TV unrepentantly standing in front of it, facing your bed. Said bed is on the south end of your room, right beneath your room’s only window and adorned in only the finest of abstract tiger patterns. The bed takes up the entire length of the wall that your dresser, on the south-east part of the room, doesn’t. It’s a pretty standard dresser, though atop it and on the shelf above it sits your martial arts trophies.

> Ryan: Examine trophies.

On a shelf over your dresser as well as on the dresser itself is a small collection of trophies from your various martial arts exploits. You're quite proud of them, every last one of them gold, but the tournaments were local, and for the young, so you doubt you are any sort of intermediary substance approaching "HOT SHIT" just yet.

In the middle of the north wall is a desk upon which one of your brother’s many laptops sits, this one being his absolute shittiest, incapable of doing much more than playing ancient video games and operating Pesterchum like it’s the only thing it was built for. Its complete and totallack of any web browser is baffling.

At the east end of the north wall, is the door out of your room.

> Ryan: Finally answer door.

You’re glad you agree on this, because you’re already at your apartment’s front door.

Evidently however, this door isn’t going to be opened by your hands. Your Dad keeps his impressive lock collection on the door at all times, both to keep intruders out and keep you in. Why, it’d be easier to break down the door than to try and get it open. Fortunately, you can just barely see a speck of something on your doorstep. Something… reddish...

> Ryan: Examine apartment.

No way, you’re through appeasing these ethereal commands, you are going to get down to business!

And by get down to business you mean return to your room and mope. It’ll probably be hours before your Bro is home, and you won’t be able to pick up the package waiting right outside your door until then.

> Ryan: Do something productive.

Absolutely!

If by productive you mean chat with one of your friends, ultimately accomplishing nothing. You go ahead and carry out this conversation before resolving yourself to jumping out of your window.

Which just so happens to be on the top floor of your apartment building.

What could go wrong?

> Ryan: Cease these self-destructive delusions of flight.

What are you going on about now?

You pocket your Gameboy, since you can’t exactly captchalogue it without triggering some sort of absurd metaphysical paradox and gather up some of the many dubious trinkets littering your apartment, doing your absolute best to put the nature of their intended use out of your mind as you fasten them together one by one.

> Ryan: Explain yourself.

Well aren’t you a bossy one. You’re making a rope to climb down of course! You give each knot and convoluted binding a tug to ensure that they don’t come undone at the worst possible time as you drag it around your apartment like you’re playing the world’s worst game of centipede.

> Ryan: Examine living room.

For the love of all that is holy, why would you feel the need to re-examine your own place of dwelling?

> Ryan: Examine living room, please.

You know what, you'll take what you can get.

The living room has all the makings of a functional and fashionable living space. It has a flat-screen TV on one end, a large and comfortable leather sofa at the other, and a glass coffee table in the center. The thing is, your Dad's "projects" litter the place. Everywhere. 90% of the time there’s not a single place on your carpeted floor that you could actually lay down on without touching the stuff, and frankly, you refuse to describe any of these objects other than that they are sexual in nature and you need them to make a rope. Hiding behind the sofa is a Papier-mâché Raptor. A Herrerasaurus, as your bro constantly reminds you. As if supposed to simulate an environment, there's even a couple of house plants on either side of it, both of which for some reason haven't died even though you are almost positive your Bro never waters them. You ignore the kitchen because you are not a god damn tour guide and begin the arduous task of picking up these items, finding solace in the fact that their presence in your apartment means they have never been in use.

God you hope they've never been used.

As you inadvertently clean up the place you notice something your Dad left sitting on the table...

...It's a book.



Okay, you know what, you think this rope is long enough. It’s about time you drag it back to your room.

> Don’t you need to captchalogue that?

You consider yourself an expert on sylladex management. Sylladex battles do not grant your pokemon exp, so you try to avoid them unless you’re really bored.

In other words, not now.

> Ryan: This still seems like a bad idea.

You’re sure it is! Still, you don’t have time to sit around waiting for your Bro to come home. Well, maybe you do, but you don’t want to okay? Besides, it’s not like this is the first time you’ve done this.

After tying it to your bed, you open your window and toss out the pile of makeshift rope. You smile to yourself in satisfaction that it reaches the ground without too much excess.

> Ryan: Break legs.

Fuck no.

You were really careful when you made this rope, and now you’re sure you’ll be fine climbing down its length. After an extra confirmatory tug, you gingerly step out onto the windowsill backwards and, rope in hand, step off of it.

It only now occurs to you that you really should have tied the other end around your waist. Oh well. You have ample upper-body strength for this anyway. Little by little you slide down the rope, your shoes making a scraping sort of sound against the building until the first window comes up where you rely solely on letting your hands slip to control your descent. Wow, you live really high up.

A ways down the side of the building, you look up to see what else but part of the rope ripping right through one of the “leather” straps. You should have known it was made out of some sort of shitty substitute, though you aren’t actually certain of leather’s tensile strength to begin with. You start to panic a little and speed up your descent, letting the rope slip through your hands as much as you can without losing control of your speed. The rip is too close to the window to attempt climbing back up. Not long after you begin to hurry however, the rope snaps and you experience complete and utter weightlessness.

> Ryan: Die horribly.

Don't be so melodramatic. That was leg-breaking height at best. Fortunately for you however, the pile of cloth, leather and metal chains that accumulated on the ground broke your fall. You think you might have a bruise or two, but otherwise you’re no worse for wear.

Looking back up towards the window, it seems that almost your entire rope has broken. While it’s nice that it’s not too conspicuous, you lament the fact that you're going to have to wait outside of the apartment for your Dad to come home to get back in the apartment. Fucking great, you’re back where you started. The circle of stupidity is complete. You are the idiot. It is you.

Nonetheless, you captchalogue the BDSM ROPE and head out of the alleyway you've fallen into. You turn the corner and enter the building's lobby, a vision of velvety red. You normally take the stairs because of how it gets you exercise in the one area you can't work on comfortably in your apartment, (cardio) but fuck that. You just want to sit down outside of your apartment for now and finish off your Nidoking. When the elevator dings for your floor and you step outside, you can’t help but stare in unbelieving horror at the empty space outside of your apartment door. You internally groan as your march your way to your apartment as you realize that this entire ordeal has been a fool’s errand all along. That is, until you notice that the door to your apartment has been left unlocked and slightly ajar.

Bro knows.

You enter the apartment slowly, more cautious than the most timid of Cats.

It's empty.

The remaining BDSM shit has been swept to the side and bro's book put away. A single scrap of paper adorns the coffee table.

> Ryan: Continue towards your inevitable demise.

Ryan can’t continue towards his inevitable demise because he’s too busy being Tigerdeath.



This is your life now.

> Tigerdeath: Enough of this nonsense, go back to being the Nutjob McStupidhair

Tigerdeath can’t be Nutjob McStupidhair because he’s too busy being Bell.

That is to say, you’re too busy being Bell.

What do you do?

> Bell: Install those disks!

While that would be a very wise and prudent thing to do, instead of wasting time doing nothing forever; it looks like that won’t be possible. Your mother only gave you one maroon package! The parcel only contained one disk, when you were clearly told by your friend there would be two of them. Not only that, but you have the sneaking suspicion that you have here a server disk instead of a client one. And while that’s all well and good, you want to have a more tangible hands on experience. You’ve planned to have someone else be your server player since the beginning.

You don’t want to mess up by installing this first and accidentally locking yourself into the wrong position.

> Bell: Look inside notebook.

While you might be inclined to do that at another time your mom locked you up, today’s not that kind of day. You have bigger fish to fry. You don’t have time to sit around writing lengthy stories about crime-fighting vigilante and their countless romantic going-ons. Also, you’re not sure why you said that, because you don’t like showing anyone those stories. In fact, forget you said that.

Okay, you forgot what you said. Everyone is very proud of themselves.

> Bell: Fry the bigger fish.

That’s sort of an abstract command but alright, you’ll make it work.

Heading to your filing cabinet you flip through all your cases. In the “L” section lost items take up a large portion of space, but one particular folder catches your eye. You pick it up, making sure not to captchalogue it. Inside you have your trusty lock-picks. Of course your mother knows you have these. Keeping them “hidden” in here is just a formality. Because you know she knows. And as she knows you know she knows, it’s now a game of authority. You tuck the file back where it belongs and-

Oh god damnit.

You captchalogue the lock-picks. Now hidden in your packed Sylladex, you’re going to have to spin to get them out. You don’t even know why you have so much junk in there, you only have like 10 slots. Another notebook occupies one, while a pencil does another. The third is taken up but some peppermints, and another by a few baseballs. After that you have some computer parts taking up a slot. An outfit fills another and some dirty laundry one more after it. There’s a portable generator with some cord taking up one of the last few cards, and to finish it off are your lock-picks, and phone.

Oh well. Only one thing to do.

> Bell: Spin the wheel.

With a good turn of the wheel it goes flying. You’ve learned from experience that nudging it slowly to the desired item doesn’t work. The blur of colors goes by annnnnd…
You are the proud new owner of a brand new car!

Car meaning pencil. Brand new meaning old. Gross, looks like you chewed the end of it.

> Bell: Try again.

Here goes nothing!

Off it goes. Getting slower. Slower…

Slower...

Sloooooooooower...

…

..

.

And your phone drops to the floor.

Thank goodness you bought that phone case. You’ve lost more than one device to this pesky wheel.

> Bell: Spin better this time!

Third time’s the charm!

Using your good pitching arm you send the wheel turning.

Turning to a stop the slot with your lock-picks is one off of the arrow! The little peg is holding it there buuuuut…

The last bit of inertia drops it over the line! The picks fall into your hands and you’re good to go! You pick up your pencil and phone. No need to leave em lying around you figure.

> Bell: Unlock the door.

It’s not locked dummy. It just has a heavy as shit suit of armor or something blocking it. You head to the window instead.

Mom changes the locks on this one often, but she never buys anything too heavy duty. If she did then you wouldn’t be able to get out unless you broke some glass. Of course she wouldn’t care about replacing it, but that has no style. It doesn’t conform to her rules. And it doesn't sit well with your pride. No, instead she just changes it. This way she knows you can get out if you work hard enough. Hard enough to go against her wishes. It’s just a question if you will do it. Of course that answer is yes.

With a good amount of effort the lock drops to the floor. You put the picks back in your sylladex and slip out the window. The perfect crime.

Stepping carefully onto the ledge underneath the window, you shimming carefully, with your back to the wall. Thankfully it’s not a very windy day. You look down to the grassy patch below you. Between the fence and your house is a bit of property that belongs to you (your mom) and while it looks nice and poofy it isn’t going to catch your fall. Luckily you’re pretty good with sticking the landing. You’ve messed up before and broke your leg, but that just made you want to do better. It also got the whole class to eventually come over and sign your cast, which was pretty cool. You continue on around the perimeter of the house, and while the corner is always the worst part, you successfully turn around it to face the backyard. A little more nudging along and you can drop safely down to the balcony. This is how you almost always get out of the house. You suppose you should check the mailbox now? Maybe mom left it there just to spite you. Of course she could have it hidden away somewhere in the house. Worse yet, she could have it on her person. You don’t know you have another round of STRIFE in you today…

What to do?

> Bell: Notice your phone alert.

Oh! It looks like another of your friends is messaging you. You hardly have any time to get to buisness with all these people hounding you. You wonder what this guy could want?



After that short exchange you decide to head into the house. No point in waiting around outside. Making your way into the hallway which leads to the living room, you see some odd fixtures on the wall. Odd but not alien, you’ve grown up with stuff like this all over the place. Your room is easily the most normal one in the house.

Along the walls you can see a mounted deer head with glowing red eyes, affixed to a recreation of the mona lisa. Her head is also a deer head. Next to that is a large framed print of a photo. It depicts a very well crafted robot doing The Thinker pose. It’s sitting on an exercise ball. While this is actually one of your mom’s friend’s work, you think it fits in decently well with the other stuff around here.

You head into the living room, to do your important task of finding that disk!

What do you do?