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It was a calm morning in July. I had just arrived back home after spending some vacation time with my family. My parents were hounding me about still being single. They kept pointing to my sisters and my nieces and nephews like it was a competition. My three sisters had a total of 12 kids. The oldest with six kids, the middle with four, and the youngest with two. I would've been happy to have one kid, but my father put a lot of pressure on me since I'm the youngest and the only man out of the bunch.

It wasn't for lack of trying on my part, I just couldn't seem to find someone who I wanted to stay with. My sisters would always recommend I try dating apps, but that just seemed like it would make me find the wrong type of woman. My mother and father said that I would find someone eventually, but a lot of their recommendations were too embarrassing. Every time I'd find a girl I liked, her life was always a mess, and they always expected me to fix it. I'd just really like a girl that didn't make life harder for everyone around them. At least I had a stable job, working as a game design consultant, that gave me enough time to date.

It was nice to be back home. As much as I love my family, it can get really stressful dealing with them at times. Now that I was back here, I could get cleaned up without worrying that someone was going to barge into the bathroom while I was showering. I could also spend time working without hearing "hey you're on vacation, relax a little!" More than anything though, it was nice that I could cook for myself instead of a family of eighteen. Another week of that, and I'm sure I would collapse from exhaustion.

I unloaded my bags from the car, and decided to make a big breakfast. I cooked a big plate of bacon, placing each strip onto a paper towel to soak up the grease. Then I moved on to make a cheese omelet. I poured myself a glass of orange juice, and sat down to eat and relax while I caught up on work emails. I looked through the emails carefully, seeing if I had missed anything important. Then I looked at new potential client emails. A new email had just come in while I was eating, it was odd because the sender was blank, and the header only said "Welcome to Cramedge!"

The email read more like a brochure for a trip than a video game. It described a world made up of seven polygonal continents, containing cultures based on our own. It went on and on about a world of adventure, and ended with a link to a website. I clicked on it expecting a warning about it being a dangerous site, but instead it just led me to a short questionnaire. I had time, so I went through and filled it out. Some of the questions were rather odd, at first I thought it might be AI generated, but it didn't get flagged by any websites I used to check. In the comment box at the end, I asked how they got my work email, and submitted it.

Once that was done, I started unpacking my things. I put my dirty clothes in the washer and started it. Then I moved on to putting away my toiletries in the bathroom. I hooked up my camera to my laptop, and posted some of the new family photos to my social media. Once I finished, I noticed that it was time for lunch. I went to order food on my phone, but for some reason it wouldn't turn on. I decided to head out to get lunch, and have my phone looked at at a local shop.

I stopped by the repair shop first, dropped off my phone, then went to the small deli next door. I ordered a roast beef sandwich, and bought a bag of chips and a drink, then sat in my car listening to the radio.

Eventually one of the guys from the repair shop came out and gave me my phone back.

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"Yeah, we can't figure out the issue."

"Why?"

"There just doesn't seem to be any issue with it, we swapped out the battery, the screen, everything, and it just won't turn on."

"Huh, thanks for trying, how much do I owe you?"

"Don't worry about it, we aren't going to charge you for something we couldn't fix."

I briefly considered going in and buying a new phone, but I knew that I needed to save money since I just went on vacation.

On the way home, I stopped at the store to buy some groceries to make dinner. It was rather empty in the store, which was nice, it let me grab my groceries in peace. I picked up some broccoli, cheddar, chicken stock, and chicken cubes to make some soup. Once I had everything I needed, I headed toward the front of the store to check out. I was surprised to find that they had hired a new girl to watch the self checkout stands. She smiled and nervously greeted me as I approached.

"Hello! Let me know if you need help with anything!"

I smiled back at her.

"Not very busy today, is it?"

"No it's really not, I'm glad, it's my first day."

We talked briefly, even after I finished checking out my stuff. In a rare moment, I even asked her out to dinner, but she shot me down.

Feeling a little dejected, I went back home, and started working on some of the projects. I had been hired to help with UI for a mobile RPG, character designs for a VR golf game, and object designs for a civilization sim. For the Mobile RPG, I had been brought in to keep an eye on the team to make sure they weren't over-complicating the job. They had frequently made the UI unreadable with all the flourish, and they just wanted me around to keep them from making that mistake again. The golf game was avatar based, but there was a large selection of characters that parodied real golfers that you could play against. They wanted me to make sure the designs were similar enough to get the joke, but not so similar that they'd have to pay royalties for using their image. The civilization game was a spin-off prequel of a popular RPG series from back in the 80s, with the goal being to conquer the world, and unite it under a single banner like it was in the games. This is the one that took up most of my time, as I constantly had to compare the models of the cities with old sprites and layouts from the 80s for accuracy.

Once I was finished with work, I started making dinner. The soup was fairly easy to make, but I felt like I should have a little more, so I made some garlic toast to go with it. Once I was finished, I sat down and pulled up a game I had started playing with some college buddies of mine. It was a FPSMMORPG that was created using a new open source game engine that was originally created for a procedural space game. The original space game had a disastrous launch, but rather than cutting their losses, the company decided to fix the game, and made a massive rebound. Eventually a wealthy player of the game approached the studio, and offered them a boatload of cash to release their engine to the public for free. Once that happened hundreds of new indie studios popped up making use of the engine for everything from sword and sorcery games to sandbox building games.

After playing for a while, I noticed that it had gotten pretty late. I hopped off the game, took a shower, and got ready for bed. Out of habit I hooked up my phone to my charger, and then remembered it wasn't working. I typically used it to play some background noise while I was sleeping, otherwise I had trouble getting and staying asleep. I laid there silently for what seemed like hours, hoping that I would eventually just get tired enough to go to sleep. Then, I heard what sounded like my email notification ringtone. I turned on my side and looked at my phone. It was strange, the screen was on, and it wasn't on the lock screen. I picked it up, and saw "Welcome to Cramedge, Mark!" in my notifications. Frustrated, I tapped the notification to read it, but before I could react it seemed as if I was swallowed by a hole in the world.