Yamete Kimochi spun through the fractal vortex in a storm of loose USB ports and half-rendered memes, landing ass-first on a carpet that smelled like overheating processors and existential despair. The so-called "backrooms of reality" stretched before them—an endless maze of beige corridors lit by flickering fluorescent lights that occasionally buzzed the Windows shutdown chime. The wallpaper cycled through every default OS background since 1995, and the air hummed with the distant sound of a dial-up modem trying (and failing) to connect.
GLich-chan popped into existence mid-air, her wings now glitching between angel feathers and those flying toaster screensavers from the '90s. "Welp. We've officially jailbroken the backend of existence."
Yamete spat out a pixel that tasted suspiciously like Blue Screen of Death. "Where's Gary?"
CRASH.
The ceiling tiles above them buckled inward as Gary the Trash Can came crashing down, his vacuum-mecha hybrid now adorned with a bumper sticker that read "My Other Ride Is A Corrupted Save File." He triumphantly held up a bag of chips labeled "Error Flavor: Now With 200% More Null Values!"
"I FOUND THE BREAK ROOM SNACKS!" he bellowed, shaking the bag so hard it started rendering in lowercase letters.
Their exploration of the backrooms revealed several unsettling truths:
1. The vending machines only accepted tokens labeled "Sanity" and dispensed .zip files of forgotten memes
2. The motivational posters updated in real-time to show increasingly desperate messages:
- "Teamwork Makes the Dream Work (Unless the Dream is Stable Reality)"
- "404: Productivity Not Found"
3. The walls occasionally licked them with tongues made of cached browser data
Gary, being part trash can and now part cosmic horror, took great delight in vacuuming up the rogue cache monsters that slithered from the walls—particularly the screaming coffee mug that kept yelling "Exception in thread java.lang.NullPointerException" between sips of what looked like liquid syntax errors.
Yamete's Cheat Engine Portable had developed some... quirks in this environment. The interface now included:
[CURRENT REALITY: 99.9% CORRUPTED]
[SUGGESTED ACTION: ALT+F4 YOUR LIFE]
[F1 FOR HELP (JUST KIDDING, NO HELP)]
Their only lead came from a terminal GLich-chan hacked into using Gary as an impromptu USB hub. The screen displayed:
[LAST STABLE BACKUP: 1999-12-31 23:59:59]
[STATUS: Y2K COMPLIANT (WE LIED)]
[LOCATE: /lost_assets/reality_core]
The journey deeper into the backrooms took them past office cubicles filled with skeletons still typing away at broken keyboards (likely the original beta testers), through a server room where the machines wept tears of molten silicon, and finally to the Sacred Altar of Floppy Disks where "TIME.ZIP" floated above a pedestal like some kind of digital holy grail.
GLich-chan vibrated with excitement. "Ooooh, unauthorized timeline compression!"
Yamete eyed the glowing folder warily. "Didn't Omega specifically say—"
Gary smashed the 'Extract All' button with his mecha fist before anyone could finish that thought.
The universe stuttered like a bad YouTube connection.
One moment they were standing in the beige nightmare, the next they were:
- In a 1920s speakeasy where the jazz band played exclusively in MIDI format and the bartender was a progress bar that kept getting stuck at 99%
- On the set of a 90s sitcom where the laugh track glitched into screams whenever someone told a joke
- Back in Glitchval* except everyone communicated in error code haikus: "Blue screen of sorrow / Have you tried turning it off? / No? Then perish, friend."
After what felt like both an eternity and three seconds simultaneously (time compression was weird like that), they found themselves staring at the Reality Core—a floating cube of pure chaos that hummed the AOL dial-up tone and occasionally belched out random bits of lost data (Gary caught and ate what looked like the missing ending to 'Sopranos').
The core was protected by:
1. A firewall dragon that demanded they "update Adobe Reader" before proceeding
2. Two-factor authentication requiring a physical key (which Gary happily regurgitated—apparently he'd swallowed a whole keyring at some point)
3. The core itself, which kept muttering "I didn't sign up for this shit" in machine code
GLich-chan cracked her knuckles. "Alright kids, time to reboot reality!"
Yamete eyed the giant 'FORMAT' button nervously. "Will this... delete us?"
"Nah," GLich-chan said, already elbow-deep in the core's wiring. "Probably just our search histories and any evidence of that one weird fanfic Gary definitely didn't write."
Gary, who had somehow plugged himself directly into the core's mainframe, gave a thumbs up that accidentally triggered seven different system alerts. "JUST PUSH THE BUTTON ALREADY! I WANNA SEE WHAT HAPPENS!"
With a deep breath and absolutely no reasonable expectation this would work, Yamete pressed the button.
The world dissolved into:
1. A progress bar that immediately jumped to 99% and stayed there
2. A EULA longer than the Bible that included a clause about "voiding your warranty on space-time"
3. One final, ominous message:
[REBOOT INITIATED]
[THANK YOU FOR USING REALITY™]
[PLEASE DON'T TELL OMEGA WE DID THIS]