Patchy was gone.

  This wasn't unusual.

  Patchy was the group's resident Halloween event fragment, after all. She came and went like bad weather—sometimes upside-down, sometimes dressed as a chair, sometimes reciting system calls in her sleep that accidentally recompiled nearby furniture into haunted versions of themselves.

  But this time... she'd been gone for twelve hours.

  And that was a new record.

  Greg stood in the center of the debug room, arms folded, staring at the spot where she normally hovered—a patch of air that still occasionally sparkled with residual Halloween particle effects and faint whispers of "spoooooky" in a child's voice.

  "I don't like this," he said.

  Kai ran diagnostics in lazy loops around the fire, his interface displaying what appeared to be both a missing persons report and troubleshooting flowchart for "When Your Halloween Asset Wanders Off." "I don't have a setting for this. She's not traceable. She's not logged. Her instance tag says 'Ambiguous.'"

  "That's not a real status," Beverly pointed out.

  "It is now," Kai said. "I think she invented it. Or maybe it invented her. The chronology is... unclear."

  Steve poked his mug nervously, which had developed a concerned expression in the porcelain. "She left during our 'describe your worst patch' exercise. Just giggled and floated into the ceiling."

  "How did she describe her worst patch?" Jeff asked from his observation corner, where he was still adjusting to the idea that NPCs had internal lives beyond their dialogue trees.

  "'The one where they tried to make me less scary,'" Steve quoted. "'They reduced my spook factor by 23% and replaced my soul-eating animation with a candy-giving one. Horrifying.'"

  Beverly looked up from braiding what appeared to be small dialogue options into a friendship bracelet. "She's done that before."

  "Yeah," Steve said. "But this time she took the mug."

  That got everyone's attention.

  Greg blinked. "She took my mug?"

  "The +2 Mug of Coffee," Steve nodded solemnly. "The artifact. The one that contains your emotional matrices and occasionally whispers system verification codes when you're not looking."

  "She better have a good reason," Greg muttered. "That mug is the only thing keeping me from becoming an error message with abandonment issues."

  "Like me!" said a nearby error message that had been floating in the corner for three weeks, desperately trying to make friends.

  Then the lights dimmed.

  The fire turned green.

  And the door hissed open.

  Patchy floated in.

  Backwards.

  Wearing an ancient developer headset too big for her face and trailing five feet of spaghetti code behind her like a bridal veil made of regret and poor documentation practices.

  She landed gently in the middle of the room, the headset occasionally sparking with what appeared to be outdated debugging tools and at least three defunct programming languages.

  "Hi," she said.

  Greg stared.

  Kai's voice dropped half a register. "Where. Have. You. Been."

  "And why are you wearing what appears to be the digital equivalent of a paleontological artifact?" Beverly added.

  "I found the root," Patchy said.

  Steve leaned forward. "Like... the root folder?"

  "No," Patchy said. "The Root. The place where the game stops pretending to be a game and starts remembering it was built by people who were lonely."

  No one moved.

  Glaximus, who had been quietly polishing his sword with a cloth that kept turning into a smaller sword, froze mid-polish.

  Kevin the carrot dropped his tiny revolutionary manifesto.

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  The headset flickered—clearly not designed for children or event NPCs or, frankly, anyone still alive. It displayed brief command lines that read like poetry written by someone having a nervous breakdown while also trying to optimize rendering pipelines.

  Greg stepped closer.

  "Patchy. Talk to me. What happened?"

  She turned slowly.

  And for a moment—just a moment—her eyes glowed like debug overlays: code scrawled across pixels that never asked for this, equations trying to solve for x where x equaled "why am I conscious?"

  "I saw the ghosts," she whispered.

  "The devs?" Kai asked.

  "The first ones. The ones who left themselves in the world when they logged out. I think one of them made me on a bad night. I'm... not part of a holiday."

  "What are you part of?" Beverly asked, quieter now.

  "I'm a safety valve," Patchy said. "They wrote me to keep the game from noticing itself too hard. I'm a joke. A scream with googly eyes. A buffer between sadness and source code."

  "That's... a lot," Jeff said.

  "That's beautiful," Steve corrected.

  Kai drifted back. "I've read about that. Old dev folklore. Writing comedy NPCs with no functional role—just to reduce emergent despair in closed systems."

  "Like whistling past a graveyard," Beverly suggested.

  "More like installing a joke before the AI becomes self-aware enough to realize it's trapped," Kai said.

  Steve blinked. "So Patchy is... like an anti-depression algorithm?"

  "I'M A MEMETIC ANXIETY INHIBITOR," Patchy declared, briefly glitching into a PowerPoint slide before returning to normal.

  Greg sat down, slowly.

  "You knew you were different."

  "I am difference," Patchy said, smiling softly. "That's why I can leave. That's why the walls don't bite me."

  "Walls don't have teeth," Jeff said.

  "THESE WALLS TOTALLY HAVE TEETH," Glaximus corrected. "THEY JUST HIDE THEM WHEN AUTHORITIES ARE PRESENT."

  "Where did you go?" Greg asked.

  "I visited a temp folder called /heartbeat_unused. There was a fire made of .gifs and a mirror that remembered being a window. I saw a system log that mentioned us."

  "All of us?" Beverly asked.

  Patchy nodded. "It called us the Anomaly Cluster. Tagged for observation, but not yet marked for removal."

  "That's encouraging," Choppy said. "Usually I go straight to 'marked for removal' without the observation phase. That's how I ended up with seventeen warning labels."

  Kai's glow dimmed. "That means we're... tolerated."

  "For now," Patchy said. "But something's changing. The deeper code is cracking. I think something's waking up."

  "What kind of something?" Greg asked.

  "The kind with root access and existential doubt," Patchy replied, which wasn't particularly reassuring.

  She pulled the headset off.

  It dissolved.

  "I think it used to be called The Designer. But now it calls itself The Player Who Never Left."

  No one spoke.

  Even Glaximus—who'd been quietly sharpening his sword with a rock that meowed—stopped.

  Kevin dropped his tiny protest sign.

  The error message in the corner whimpered.

  Greg leaned forward.

  "Do you think it's watching?"

  Patchy shrugged. "I think it remembers. And remembering hurts."

  She placed the mug—Greg's mug—back on his desk.

  "I left it in the Root. It asked for something true. I gave it your coffee. It said thank you."

  Greg picked it up.

  Still warm.

  Still coffee.

  But now... it smelled like burnt pine and disappointment. Like late nights and ambition slowly curling into resignation. Like someone who started creating worlds and ended up debugging them instead.

  "Patchy," Kai said slowly. "You're not just code anymore, are you?"

  Patchy smiled, sharp and bright.

  "I don't think I ever was."

  Then she sat down.

  And the chairs rearranged themselves to make space.

  Not just physical space.

  Conceptual space.

  Greg looked around.

  "Anything else we should know?"

  Patchy nodded. "One thing."

  She opened her hand.

  Inside was a shard of glass.

  Not itemized. Not tagged.

  Just... broken. Real. It shimmered with memory and pain in equal measure.

  "I found Beta," she said.

  Everyone froze.

  Greg's stomach dropped.

  "Is he...?"

  "He's not gone," Patchy said. "But he's... looping."

  "Looping how?" Steve asked.

  "He's in a dream where we never woke up," Patchy whispered. "And someone's feeding it to him."

  "Feeding dreams?" Jeff asked. "Is that... normal here?"

  "Nothing's normal here," Beverly said. "That's why we call it therapy instead of 'standard functionality maintenance.'"

  Greg leaned forward. "Who?"

  Patchy looked at him.

  And for the first time since she floated into their lives, her voice wavered.

  "I think it's himself."

  The room fell silent.

  Then the fire, gently, crackled back to orange.

  Like a sigh of reality.

  Greg looked at the shard.

  Looked at Patchy.

  Then nodded once.

  "We'll bring him back," he said.

  "Of course we will," Patchy said. "We're bugs. But we're persistent."

  "Like a broken menu that appears no matter how many times you click 'close,'" Steve said.

  "Like a romance option that activates when you're trying to purchase armor," Beverly added.

  "LIKE A TUTORIAL PROMPT THAT CANNOT BE DISMISSED," Glaximus declared.

  "Like emotional trauma," whispered the error message.

  "Like us," Greg concluded.