Father of Beelzebub (Choose Your Own Adventure)

Path 1

The air is stuffy in your cramped, dust infested, mildew laden, abode. You live in your borderline senile grandmother's home. Not that she agreed to allow your freeloading ass to stay. You're a squatter of sorts, a parasite in the walls. You occupy the space in between the bathroom and the utility room. Your roommates are a foundational support beam, a damp drip from the ceiling, and the occasional scavenging mouse.

Life all in and all is pretty nice, or at least that's what you tell yourself. You've managed to assemble a  computer with Wi-Fi to occupy your time. Everything you need is plugged into a power strip that's connected to the socket next to the dryer. Sometimes you worry your grandma will notice the mysterious black cable that snakes through a hole in the wall. At night, while your grandma is knocked unconscious from copious medications, you pry a board loose and exit your domain, off to raid the fridge for anything edible. After engorging your belly with ill-gotten gains you empty out your piss bottles and occasionally your emergency bucket into the toilet.

This lifestyle has become the norm for you. When once the concept of peeing into a plastic bottle would give you pause, now it's as natural as breathing air, stagnant air. It's safe in here. There's no one that can hurt you anymore. Those bastards in high school that ruined your faith in humanity, that shattered your trust in your fellow man and forced you to drop out? They're not here. Your dad that told you to get a job or he'd kick you out? Not here. Those interviewers that judged your every word and then never gave you a call back? Gone. How are you supposed to get a job without any damn experience anyways?

Your computer is everything to you. It's your best friend when you're bored, your mother when you're scared, and your girlfriend when you're lonely. It's what's kept you sane. Or at least mostly sane, as sane as a person who has had no direct human contact for 7 years can be. You love your computer so much that it scares you. You've become so reliant on that window into the outer world that the very idea you might one day lose it fills you with terror. There is only one thing you fear more than the death of your PC, change. You're a pupa that will never break from its cocoon. Change is bad, change is scary.

Unfortunately for you, change is what's coming.

It was a lovely cool night, you were enjoying your time watching cartoons intended for 12 year-olds. When a loud crash echoing throughout the house interrupts your viewing. You removed your ear buds and listened in the darkness. Did something fall and break? You hear a scream. A thud. Silence. Your heart begins to race. Burglars? Your grandma is in danger. But what can you do? If you leave you'll just be attacked as well. Still, she's family, you've been mooching off of her for years, you owe it to her to help her.

*Stay still and wait Proceed to Path 3

*Leave the room Proceed to Path 4