"Helen," Mica called out, forehead pressed against the door. 

The fan was going. Its motor rivaled the AC unit yet barely masked the sound of the servers inside the office. Mica called again, competing with all the noises. "Helen! Lunch!" 

Silence came underneath the door, and Mica sighed. They were tired. 

Far too tired to scream through the wooden door to get Helen's attention.  It seemed to be increasingly difficult to get the woman to stop and listen.

If they didn’t like her company so much, the whole ordeal wouldn’t be worth it.

 Mica knocked twice on the door, waited for the expected lack of response, and then turned the doorknob—fully expecting it to be locked, but instead, the door swung open, revealing a bunch of computer equipment. 

Everything was turned on, but no one was around to control it. The room was actually kind of calming in that state. 

"Helen?" they called, trying even harder to be heard over the loud fans. It was a miracle Helen could even hear her thoughts in there. 

No one responded, however. The closet was just as empty as the desk chair was. 

 Mica was confused, and their heart was jumping around in their chest. It made no sense. Helen hadn't left the room for hours, and she wasn't exactly the "shimmy out the window" type. 

A short trip to the kitchen table and back, and Mica was calling Helen's cell phone–itching to know what exactly they had missed, but her phone vibrated against the tan desk in the corner. They hung up when the voicemail kicked in and sat down on the low-backed grey swivel chair. 

Helen seemed to have vanished into thin air, which was disturbing. 

Annoying. 

Something in their peripheral vision caught Mica's attention. A blinking cursor that wasn't acting quite right. Moving, blinking, hyperactive for a nonalive piece of technology. 

The thoughts about the damn blinking line swirled around for a moment before the real reason they had looked caught their attention. Words appeared on the screen, and as they watched, more appeared. 

Please, come help me.

Then, just as suddenly, these letters stopped appearing. 

 Mica blinked at the letters, struggling to process the situation. Their first thought was simple. 

Of course Helen would be so formal.

After that, they wondered how exactly she had pulled off the trick. It took a few solid minutes for their eyes to wander to the VR headset suspended in one quadrant of the room, all by its lonesome, with the insides light up and putting on some kind of show. 

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 Mica found themselves watching the lights flicker off and on, trying to remember all of the things Helen had said about what she was working on. 

 Mica listened, of course. They listened pretty well if they did say so themselves. 

Usually, it was some kind of adventure game. Some horror exploration game—the kind Helen was always playing, but wasn't Mica's cup of tea. 

Despite themselves entirely, Mica pulled their body out of the office chair and over to the VR equipment, and in the blink of an eye, the headset was covering their eyes. 

A bad choice, they thought. This is going to be a very bad decision. 

The kind of bad decision that came with anxiety, nightmares for a week, and lots of yelling at their partner for playing whatever prank this was. 

A good prank acknowledged, but that didn't change anything.

The blinking lights went dark as the headset settled fully onto Mica's head. 

If that woman was just a little bit less beautiful, I wouldn’t put up with half this shit.

It faded to that strange black that really only comes from electronics—TV’s between shows, computers falling asleep, phones booting up—it was black but not necessarily dark. 

Words flew across the screen—white, scrawling text. 

The Demon's Den

 Mica suddenly remembered the conversation with Helen about the name. It had almost been an argument because Mica didn't think it had quite the right vibe. A demon's den wasn't spooky, they insisted. It was spiritual. 

Helen had argued that there wasn't that much difference between the two. "And what are religious people afraid of?" she had asked. 

 Mica had rolled their eyes. 

Underneath the title, options appeared—displayed to look like someone was typing them up. 

Continue

New game 

Help

 Mica stared at the options. It was all plain—white text on a black background still. No hints given as to what's inside. 

There was a temptation to select New Game, the way a person does anytime they pick something up for the first time. You want your own profile, your character, your own everything else. But they weren't there to do a play-through. They were there in the office to figure out what Helen had been up to and where she had gone. Mica reached out blindly for the controllers, finding them after turning several times and almost giving up. 

All the blind reaching felt goofy, and it was slightly embarrassing, truth be told. But their hands found them and selected continue. 

The words blinked on the screen before fizzling out bit by bit, leaving that bright blackness again. 

The light behind it faded, causing true darkness to surround Mica. The office underneath their feet faded as they focused on the sounds and sights of the headset—or the lack thereof. It was like sitting in a bathroom with the lights turned off. 

In the distance of the speakers came a breeze, slowly winding around trees, whispering like it tended to do in the dead of winter. It snuck up, gradually getting louder and louder until it pounded against Mica's ears, and a shudder went down their back. 

The screen was still dark, and when they tried to reach up their hands to see if something had gone wrong, something pulled at their navel so hard and fast that they dropped the controllers. 

It yanked up so hard it was painful, and just as they gasped in reaction, they felt their whole body pulled upward, followed by a rush of ice water over every inch of their skin. 

The headset fell to the ground, and the room was empty again.