Darkness, broken only by the dim crimson light of an arm clock nearby.

  Gray sat up and ran his hand through his blonde hair. "What the heck was that dream...?"

  The details were already fading. A small mercy considering how vivid and gruesome it had been.

  But although Gray didn't recall the details, he remembered what it was about. "A hero turned demon lord. The hero's party being sughtered. Goddesses..."

  It didn't make sense. And even if it did... why?

  Gray rubbed his face and then got out of bed. There wasn't any point in trying to go back to sleep at this point...

  A gnce at the arm clock showed 1:00 AM.

  Since Gray had his arm set at 5:00 AM, he would only have four hours at best to sleep again.

  That was way too short.

  Gray sighed and gnced around the room.

  It was dark. Almost pitch bck. Like Gray saw when he woke up, there was only the faint crimson light from the arm clock illuminating the room.

  Gray sighed and walked over to the bedside, sliding the curtain over.

  Moonlight filtered through the window, along with light from a nearby streetmp.

  Gray stepped back and looked around his room.

  It was a bit of a mess. Papers and binders with notes for the senior seminar were scattered all over, along with textbooks in the small studio apartment.

  Gray sighed and walked over to the small kitchen, flicking on the lights as he did.

  A ptop was on the kitchen table, along with various USB drives and notes filled with sample code flows.

  Gray stifled a yawn and made some coffee. While he was waiting, he opened his ptop and started running through the usual pages on his browser. Email, Reddit, Facebook... but there wasn't anything interesting.

  Then again, it *was* one in the morning.

  Gray sighed and closed the browser before pulling up the source code for his senior seminar.

  The pn had been to wake up early to put the finishing touches on it.

  Since Gray was up early anyway, he might as well start working on it now.

  It wasn't anything too complicated. A universal driver to allow interfacing between a ptop and any USB device without having to find a specific driver and installing it. Just some super generic memory management to let a skilled user access whatever device they hooked up.

  Gray remembered his professor calling it overly ambitious. But considering Gray had finished 90% of it in the st three days when he had the whole year to work on it... definitely not.

  A soft click echoed, followed by faint hissing. The sound of the coffee maker dripping fresh coffee into the coffee pot.

  Gray gnced at it but then decided to at least start on the finishing touches before grabbing his coffee. Let's see... if he remembered right, the only thing left to do was transting the machine code into assembly, and then bootstrapping that up to higher level programming nguages and eventually readable English...

  ...

  ...

  A faint buzz echoed.

  Gray blinked and gnced at his phone. "Wait, what the heck? It's already six thirty?"

  6:30 AM. Only an hour before css started and the presentation of the senior project.

  Gray blinked and looked at the screen to realize he had been typing and coding for hours on end without a single break. Both physically and in his concentration. "Huh. That's a first..."

  The usual flow was writing chunks of code, venting as it didn't work for some stupid reason or another, and then finding a magical solution only to repeat the process ad nauseum...

  But Gray would take it. He definitely didn't remember writing any of the code on the screen, nor running the tests that showed it was working fwlessly. But if it worked, it worked.

  And if it didn't, well, it was too te now anyway.

  Gray got up to stretch and then reached over to put his ptop on sleep mode.

  For a split second, the screen flickered.

  And for that brief moment, Gray thought he caught a screen full of strange and illegible symbols. But since it was only for a brief moment, he shrugged.

  It was probably just him seeing things.

  After all, Gray *had* woken up early in the middle of the night from a crazy dream, worked for hours on end coding a senior project that should have been done over the course of a year instead of a week, and he *still* wasn't coffee'd up...

  Yeah, definitely just seeing things.

  Gray shut his ptop and then grabbed a pair of fresh clothes from the nearby hamper and headed to the bathroom to shower.

  ===

  It was a beautiful sunny day.

  Beautiful enough that Gray actually bothered to take a look around for once.

  The usual sidewalk leading to campus from his studio apartment. A small road on the left, and university buildings past that. To the right, the university's sports field, filled with inviting green grass.

  Of course, inviting to normal people. For someone like Gray, who spent all day inside as a computer science major, it was pretty boring.

  Maybe if it was his younger brother John... That guy had always been more active than him.

  Gray paused to think about that.

  ...It had been a while now.

  Ever since high school and the... incident, Gray hadn't kept in touch. He had gone off to college with his free ride and never looked back. But maybe he should...

  Well. There would be time for that ter.

  Gray stifled a yawn and continued walking. After he passed a few more buildings, he abruptly turned to walk across the street.

  The roads were empty, so it wasn't dangerous at all.

  And besides, Gray wasn't about to waste ten minutes walking all the way to the traffic light up ahead. Now, time to start rehearsing the presentation-

  *bzzt*

  "Hm?" Gray paused after stepping over the curb. He pulled out his phone and muttered, "Weird. Who the heck is calling me?"

  The number of people with Gray's phone could be counted on a single hand. Two of them were his parents, and they had given up calling years ago. One was John, but that guy only bugged him for money. Another was his advisor, but they weren't due for a chat until next week. And the st...

  Gray subconsciously clenched his hand, remembering 'that person' who wasn't here anymore. But then he sighed and checked the caller ID instead of just guessing.

  But there wasn't one. It was just bnk. Not 'unknown' or 'private', but just... bnk. An empty space.

  Gray frowned. "A spam caller?" He debated answering. But before he could, the call ended. He shook his head and started to slip his phone into his pocket when he got a text message.

  A bnk caller ID. And the content of the message was bnk too. But not bnk in the way that was filled with spaces.

  Gray tried to highlight the text in case it was just hidden. But he didn't even get a cursor to select anything.

  It was like the entire message was just a single void.

  "What the heck?"

  It was weird. If that wasn't a text, then it was a picture. And if it was a picture, then it was invisible. And if it was invisible, then it was either a virus or... something paranormal.

  Gray quickly swiped the notification away and deleted the message. After that, he slipped his phone away and continued walking. "Forget it." He muttered to focus his mind and said, "I've got better things to... do?" He trailed off when he looked up.

  The familiar sidewalk and CompSci department buildings were nowhere to be seen. In fact... buildings in general were nowhere to be seen.

  Gray turned around and muttered, "Am I that out of it?"

  As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but grass. Grass, and a simple dirt road leading to the distance where there was... a rundown building?

  "...Where the heck am I?"

  There wasn't a response.

  But Gray wasn't really expecting someone to answer him. In fact, he'd probably freak out if someone did... but anyway. Time to figure out where he was. He quickly pulled out his phone to check his location.

  Thankfully, there was still service.

  So, Gray clicked on his navigation app, and... "Huh?"