CTRL+ALT+DELETE - peter parker.

≈﹕ 🆃🆄🆃🅾🆁🅸🅰🅻 ✸ᴗ˂ ﹐.

🔓! HIDDEN ROUTE UNLOCKED

So, there was a slight problem. Remember that plan to lounge back and have lasagna while playing Quest for Love as a giant octopus destroyed Suhani's city? Yeah, that was no longer happening. In fact, the scenario she was going through currently was so bizarre, that she couldn't tell whether she'd accidentally fallen asleep, been poisoned by the octopus aliens with some alien poison, or if she'd someone lost her memories and that was why she was running through the forest with a random person she didn't know, in a body that looked like it was drawn by an anime artist.

No matter how much she'd tried to deny it, she was definitely, really in a forest, and ahead of her, frolicking in the grass was a dude in a bright orange tee, and fur for pants. Or were his pants made of fur? Suhani hoped that was what it was, but she doubted it, because there was also a set of tiny little horns sprouting from the guy's curls.

"Wait, wait, wait, wait!" she yelled, "Hold up. Can you explain what's going on? Why are we running?"

"I already told you, we don't have time to waste. Just... Come to Camp with me, and I'll explain the rest later, okay?" the boy yelled, trying to grab her by the arm to resume with their escape.

A strange roar echoed through the trees, so loud and terrifying that Suhani jumped to action without another word of protest. She tried to recall how she got into this mess in the first place. Octopus, lasagna, blah blah blah, what happened after that? She launched herself onto the safety of her mattress, curled up into bed, clicked start new game, and...? And...? Nothing! That was it, there was a huge black empty spot in her memory. Next thing she knew, there was a voice in her head, booming, 'HIDDEN ROUTE UNLOCKED', before she found herself in the woods with a young, curly haired man with a wispy little beard and a Camp Half Blood T-Shirt.

The shirt wasn't a huge deal, loads of people had merch, she herself owned one of those ugly little things. It was the urgency he was dragging her along with, and the horns and hooves that threw her off. She could smell the earthy forest, and feel dew on her exposed calf, and even her scrape wound was stinging. And there was no way Suhani wouldn't recognize the opening sequence of the very game she'd played fourteen times before.

"Grover?" she tried, gasping for breath as they staggered across a steep hill.

"Don't talk, just run!"

Okay then. If this really was one of those situations where she ended up travelling dimensions, right now, Suhani was in the tutorial of Quest for Love, being chased by a cyclops. In which case, she needed to listen to Grover and shut up and run for it. There were a lot of ways the tutorial went down, depending on what option you selected on how to deal with the cyclops, but most of them ended up with you in the infirmary unless you made it to camp without even encountering the cyclops. Naturally, Suhani would opt for the option <run away> rather than <yell at the cyclops> or <attack it>.

But even though she ran until she crossed the apple tree, the home of the dryad, and the checkpoint of the Prologue, Part One, there was no status window appearing before her eyes. No annoying System suddenly showing up. There was only Grover, who kept getting frustrated every time she slowed down to do a quick spin to see if maybe there was a screen hiding somewhere behind her, under some bush, or some other place she couldn't see it.