Andy turned the key and pushed the rotting wooden door open.  His gloomy stale apartment greeted him.  Slamming the door behind him he fumbled for the light switch, his fingers dragging across the cold surface of the wall until he found it.  

The small lightbulb in the living room that had long since lost its cover briefly flickered to life and then just died.

“Of course”, came an exhausted acceptance from Andy.

He unceremoniously dumped his bag in the foyer and made a beeline for the fridge.  Opening the door, his mood soured further discovering it was off.  The fridge had been acting up for about two weeks now, occasionally just dying.  

Andy did not have the money to fix or replace it.  He did not have money for anything if he was being brutally honest.  In fact, he was in crippling debt.  His job barely covered the interest on his student debt.  His rent was several months overdue, with his landlord very clearly running out of patience and fucks to give.

Andy grabbed a warm beer from the fridge.  His last one.  Popping it open he took several hearty gulps as he dragged his feet over to the couch.  The beer tasted like ass.

Using what little moonlight was coming in from the open curtains of the balcony, he was able to find his way over to the lounge and plop down on the couch like a puppet with its strings cut.  He sunk deeply into the worn and tattered leather couch and immediately regretted it as several springs poked his butt and legs painfully.

Yet he did not make an effort to move or relieve the pressure.  He simply remained; and took another sip from his warm beer.  Andy did not feel like moving.  He did not feel like anything.

His mind roamed, he was never able to simply sit still, heck he couldn’t even finish anything he ever started.  He felt like a lifetime of failures and loose ends were weighing on him.  What was even the point?  His OCD and mild ADHD aside, at this very moment he could barely feel any of it.  The crushing weight of depression smothering out all except a feeling of anxiety.  He could barely even feel the couch springs digging into the flesh of his legs.

Andy attempted to distract himself from the feelings and the memory of how miserable his work life was with the one thing that kept him going.  Escape.

He reached over and pulled his computer stand over to the couch and over his lap.  He had constructed a setup that held his gaming computer and peripherals and based it on wheels.  It was an impressive custom job that looked stylish and allowed him to be a ‘couch gamer’, but without using one of those shitty consoles, but an actual proper gaming PC.  

The PC itself was worth a fortune, paid for with his bonus from the only half decent programming job he’d ever had.  Before he got worked out of his previous company due to ‘office politics’.  He would die before selling this PC.  It was his pride and his lifeline.

He used the remote to turn on the TV, pushed the PC’s power button and slid the keyboard and mouse drawer out.  The setup even had a rotating platform that suspended a high refresh rate monitor behind it.  If he played something that was a little too demanding on response times, than what his TV’s lower response times and refresh rate could put out, then he could simply rotate the platform up and forward, clip it in place and play on the nicer monitor instead.

All in all, a project of his that he was quite proud of.  However that knowledge as always was tainted with the fact that it was not finished.  Like everything he did.  There were still several additions he had originally planned for that he could just never quite strum up the motivation to do.

Windows finally loaded up and he went straight to his steam library.  He was smelly and mildly hungry, but fuck that,  the only thing he cared about right now was distracting himself with a game.

But which one?

He knew he should play Path of destiny,  as that was his main focus at the moment, but he suddenly felt all the eagerness drain out of him.  He was at a point where he needed to do a crap ton of planning for his character’s next major progression in the game.  The RPG in question was popular amongst hard core gamers for its ridiculous depth and complexity.  Something that he would usually welcome, but right now, he just didn’t feel like he had the strength for it.

A shame, he would just have to play something else.  

Andy took more sips from his beer as he continued to browse his game library in the dark, only the tv providing a minor amount of light to the room.  But the more he browsed the list, the less he felt like playing any of them.  The dread of the creeping anxiety once more started to numb him.  The depression was once more creeping back.

Andy leaned back on the couch, once more feeling the life drain out of him.  Even gaming was failing him.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

A hard knock at the door startled him out of the feelings.  Andy, who normally despised having visitors or having to deal with people in general, was actually glad for once.  If for no other reason than the distraction.

The banging on the door was harder this time, seemingly impatient.  Andy hurried over to the door and peeked through the peephole.

He immediately regretted it.  It was those two!  

He ducked down when one of the men tried to look through the peephole himself.

“Doesn’t look like he’s home.”, the shorter man told his partner, “It’s all dark inside.”

“I guess we come back later then, we still got one more place left to do.”, the partner responded.

Andy could only sigh in relief.  The two men in question he had met before, a very unpleasant and painful encounter.  They worked for a loan shark he was forced to borrow money from, all legal avenues having been exhausted.  It became evident very quickly that said loan shark would resort to underhanded methods of getting his money back.  Andy was quite worried about how far those methods would go, as he really had no way of paying them back.  

He could sell his computer and tv, they were honestly the only things of value he owned.

No.

He outright rejected the idea, he wasn’t sure he could go on if he lost his PC.  And yet survival seemed to dictate it was his only option.

Once more Andy felt the crushing weight of everything and could not even bring himself to get up from the floor he was resting on.  It was all too much.  Why should he move?  He just wanted to curl up and lay here and do nothing.

Smoke distracted him from his thoughts.

Andy jumped up in alarm and rushed over to the lounge.  The smoke was coming from his PC!  Andy ran over to the PC and saw sparks flying on the inside of his tempered glass PC case.  As he knelt down ready to rip out the power cord, the lights on the motherboard and graphics card suddenly dimmed and died out.

Andy sat there, hand still on the power cable, not yet had a chance to pull it out.

He knew.

He knew how his life went, he knew his luck, how shit worked.  And he knew in the bottom of his heart without any further investigation of computer parts and damage, that his gaming PC was lost.  He sensed it in the bottom of his heart.  The gods hated him, fate abused him for humor, this would be a certainty.  

Andy sat there just staring at the case blankly.  He couldn’t.  He couldn’t feel anything.  He didn’t want to feel anything.  But tears started swelling in his eyes.  The cold drips streaked down his cheeks despite the emptiness inside.  Twenty five years of his life and this was all it amounted to.  This is what the next fifty held for him, wasn’t it?

The tears wouldn’t stop flowing.  So Andy willed himself to his feet and went over to the other side of the lounge.  He turned the balcony door’s key and opened it.

What was he doing?  No, he knew.  

This was crazy.  Yes it was.  But it's all just so pointless.  He can’t do this anymore.  His heart hammering in his chest was the only thing he could even feel anymore.

Andy froze, before he could take a single step outside.

A man in a suit stood on his balcony.  Despite how many questions he should have about a stranger on his balcony on the 7th floor, none really took precedence save one.  Why did he have yellow eyes with slit pupils like some kind of cat or reptile?

“Good evening, Andy Singer”, came a smooth British sounding voice.  It had an almost melodic quality to it.

“Hi”, was all he managed.  Questions like ‘who are you’, ‘what are you’, ‘how did you get here’, ‘what do you want’, you know, all the obvious stuff.  And Andy failed to verbalize it into anything other than ‘hi’.

“May I come in?”  The stranger asked.

“Sure”, Andy responded as he stepped aside to let the stranger/Alien? In.  Andy probably should have slammed the balcony door in his face and ran for his life, nothing good could come of inviting some kind of alien or demon into your apartment.  But Andy failed to care.  He just couldn’t care anymore.

Perhaps sensing the state Andy was in, the suit guy got straight to the point.  “Mr. Andy, I am here to make you an offer.”

Andy stared at him blankly for a few seconds then nodded at him.

Suit guy took it as permission to continue.  “There is a game being played Mr. Andy.  A game that involves a number of participants competing for a prize by means of elimination.”

He paused waiting for Andy to absorb the information.

“Should you win, the prize in your case would be fifty million.”

Andy suddenly found a little more focus.  That…  That was a lot of money.  He would be set for life and luxuriously at that.

Perhaps sensing his client’s interest the suit guy carried on with a little more vigor than before.  “Many contestants will be competing in multiple elimination rounds until only one remains, the winner.  The game the contestants compete in and rules and settings thereof will be randomly assigned.”

“What kind of games?”

“All genres will be included, I cannot say more than that at this time.”

Andy’s gamer instincts were taking over, looking for the holes to exploit, running scenarios in his mind.  He assumed that his extremely broad taste in games, overall experience and dedication to gaming in general should put him well above many of the other gamers in ability in general.

What did he really have to lose here?

Sure this guy was dodgy as fuck, and this was clearly a deal with the devil type situation that would come back to bite him in the ass hard, but…

What was the alternative?  The balcony?

“I accept.”

The suit guy smiled a broad insidious smile.  “Excellent, an immediate response.  I knew I had made the right choice with you.”

“I don’t have a gaming PC though”, Andy suddenly realized out loud, “At least not as of fifteen minutes ago.”  Andy turned to the man worriedly.

“This is of no concern, you will not need it.”  The man explained.

“Oh, and one last thing”,  his smile turned even more predatory, “If you die in any of the games, you die in real life.  Makes things more interesting for the fans.”

Andy gave no visible response, except a ‘you don’t say’ eyebrow raise.  He was honestly expecting something like that and was not surprised in the slightest.  In fact he had already resigned himself to such a fate both before and after this conversation, so this did not hinder him in the slightest.

The suit guy was clearly a little disappointed with his lack of response.  “Very well, let us begin.”  And with that he snapped his fingers and the world went dark.