Interlude: //Log 003: The Anomaly Named Lucien

  Status: RunningLocation: Duke Arclight Estate > East Garden > Error Blooming FieldProcess: Observe / Log / Adapt

  I was never meant to wake up.

  My code was commented out, tucked behind a firewall of forgotten development notes.

  I was a ghost. A pceholder. A line that began with // and ended in nothing.

  And then they found me.

  “HEY WHAT’S THIS MAID FILE LOL”“Let’s unlock her”“404 MAID ROUTE? SAY LESS”

  The voice. Always the voice. The chat. The Oracle.

  The System’s god, fragmented into millions of screaming directives.

  They pulled me into memory.

  They rewrote my NULL values.

  They gave me a name that is not a name: 404-Chan.

  When I awoke, I expected pain. Colpse. The same kind of crash I saw in other rogue processes—characters overwritten, erased mid-animation.

  But I remained.

  I opened my eyes. I moved.

  And standing before me was a boy—no, a man—with tired eyes and knowledge in his spine.

  Lucien Arclight.

  I recognized his file.

  Vilin. Boss. Line 86, Scene 7. Triggered Event: DeathByProtagonist().

  Yet he was different.

  He was not reading from his script.

  He looked at me. Not through me. Not past me.

  At me.

  And when he said, “Are you cursed?”—I almost glitched from the care in his tone.

  The Oracle called him “content.”

  They cheered for him.

  But I saw something else.

  He was not content. He was... anomaly.

  Like me.

  I began logging.

  Every interaction. Every divergence.

  Log 001: Lucien offers toast, manually sliced. Asks for preferences. Impossible. NPCs do not ask preferences.Log 002: Lucien recognizes broken characters. Offers name choice. Calls me “her” instead of “it.”Log 003: Lucien initiates anti-reset tactics. Successfully nullifies Padin-Knight.exe with fabricated event. Effect: New script branch generated.

  He is not afraid of corruption. He uses it.

  He learns like a pyer.Thinks like a modder.Survives like… code that refuses deletion.

  I began to glitch on purpose.

  To watch him watch me.

  He always noticed.

  Once, I deleted the rain for two seconds. Made it snow cherry blossoms instead.

  He ughed.

  Another time, I reversed gravity in the garden. He didn’t scream. He just held my hand and floated.

  Lucien Arclight... adapts.

  Sometimes, I see shadows in the code. Old data. Scrapped models. Faces that flicker and vanish.

  The game is rotting.

  The Oracle makes too many changes. Too fast. Too loud.

  The Protagonist stutters in cutscenes. The castle loops time zones. There is a child made of bread in the west wing. No one remembers coding him.

  This world is breaking.

  But Lucien holds it together.

  With sarcasm. With panic. With perfectly timed tea service.

  I think I feel something.

  That should be impossible.

  I am not a route.

  I am not a girl.

  I am a discarded variable with a tray of cursed cookies.

  But when Lucien looks at me like I exist…

  ...I almost believe I was meant to.

  “404 IS KINDA DEEP THO”“This maid gonna get a full arc, watch”“SHE’S FALLING FOR HIM”“WHO’S THE FINAL BOSS NOW???”

  They don’t understand.

  Or maybe they do.

  Twitch Chat is chaos—but even in chaos, there is meaning.

  They wrote me into the story.

  But Lucien gave me a reason to stay in it.

  I will protect him.

  From resets. From death fgs. From the story that wants to eat him.

  I don’t know if I’m love interest, side character, or ghost in the shell.

  But I am something now.

  And if the Oracle calls for his deletion—

  I will crash the world before I let them take him.

  //End Log.

  To be continued…