Mystery of the Eclipse event part 2
It really was just a game.
My bed felt stiff after hours of me lying down on it. How long have I been playing?
I took off my helmet and unplugged it from my forever-running PC. It was freeing; the feeling of my hair being blown by the wind from my fans felt just right. I didn't notice it in game, but my head must've felt cramped throughout my gameplay. My neck must've held a weird position when I was playing; the slight nudge from the headset made me lay in an unusual posture. Popping my neck had never felt so good.
Looking back at my bed, somehow it was covered in a lot of sweat. A silhouette of my body was shaded onto my plain white bed. Gross.
A faint orange glow filled my room; the light from outside had seeped in through the curtains. I uncovered the window to see the outside view. The sky was bright orange, with grey blotches of clouds, and the sun was about to set near the horizon. It must've been around 5 or 6 right now.
Which means that I've played the game for around 3 hours!
It certainly didn't feel like 3 hours. I mean, what did I even do in the game? I only walked and explored the town until I found the tutorial. How long was I walking for? 2 hours? That would be insane!
Anyway, that means that my phone has been idle for 3 straight hours. I'm not used to being offline for more than 30 minutes. I mean, what if I miss an important update? There are potentially a lot of notifications waiting for me after 3 hours.
What do you know? There were 122 notifications. These ranged from emails to my UTube recommendations. It'll take a while to sort through these. So, I took the time to read every single queued notification on my phone.
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15 minutes later, I had finally read every notification. There were interesting notifications in between all the useless ones. I got an offer to review a game called "Kopeland", a single-player puzzle game. My questions about computer RAM got answered by a certified computer engineer. Someone called me a slur on Leddit. Just the usual stuff.
There was one thing missing, though. Every day I'd get spam DMs from Sanguine, a.k.a. Phoebe Star, our class president. She's the type of person who can't shut her mouth for hours on end. Usually every couple of minutes, she'd text me something so outlandish that people would probably think she's a spammer.
But today, there was nothing. No notifications, no chat, no calls from her. I don't know if I should be worried or sad that she hasn't texted me yet.
Was she sick? It couldn't be. We walked home together just today; she didn't seem sick at all. Though at school she was unusually down, that could also indicate sickness. But even then, even at times when she could barely get out of bed, she would text me every hour or so. It doesn't feel right for her to be silent these 3 hours.
I shouldn't be thinking like this. It's not like I'm the only friend she has. I admit, I am not her bestest friend. She has more friends than I do; it is likely that she has friends closer to her than I am. She could've just moved her spamming elsewhere. But when someone who used to talk to you every single day suddenly stops one day, it feels like you're being abandoned.
But that's just me being pessimistic. Star's probably out shopping, which could explain her long silence. Yeah, that's probably it.
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Gurgle gurgle
My stomach has been empty for the past 4 or so hours. I find out through my phone that it's currently 6:26. It was prime time to take in some food.
I look into my fridge to see what stuff I have left. There was almost nothing left. Just a few eggs, a can of beans, some old leftover pasta… I should get to that. There wasn't anything interesting I could use to make food.
So, I decided to take 2 eggs out, cracking them into a clean bowl. I mixed my leftover pasta into the eggs with a powerful stir. Once that was done, I took some oil and heated it up in my pan. I threw in the pasta mixture along with some salt and pepper. A quick minute later, my 2 ingredients had combined to become a revolutionary food, the Pasta Omelette.
I served it on a silver platter, a.k.a. my white ceramic plate, with some ketchup on the side. That was my dinner for the night. A very nicely decorated plate of orange stuff and ketchup. As my fork sliced the omelette, I could feel the unusual texture beneath the skin. I held it in front of my eyes to see the cross-section of my dish.
It was thick, with fat strings of pasta weaving in and out of every crevasse. If I hadn't known any better, I'd say this piece of omelette has been infested by worms. Though in between these threads of pasta delight, there were bits and pieces of meat from the Bolognese. It was an interesting cross-section to say the least.
With a gentle swoop, my fork delivered a mouthful of Pasta Omelette. The taste was immaculate. I have never tasted anything this shitty.
To cover the flavor of my meal, I dipped every single bite into my ketchup. At least with the power of ketchup, the terrible taste becomes overridden. In hindsight, Omelette-Spaghette Bolognese can never be good. The flavor can, at best, be very meh. I was lucky enough to have something that was still edible.
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After that atrocious meal, I took the time to clean everything up and get back to my room.
I immediately checked my phone for notifications. I hadn't left the phone for that long, yet the notifications were always flooding in anyway. In 10 minutes I've checked every single notification I got. She still hasn't said a single thing.
What was Star doing? Why isn't she texting me by now? If she had gone out, she should've been home by now. My worry for her just got worse and worse. I had almost forgotten why I logged out of the game in the first place.
The Forums!
The link Ms. Elith gave me… What was it??
Something to do with forums… forums… Stars of Gerhana…
Right!
gerhana.forums.stars/EclipseMysteries
I quickly got on my PC and typed that into the search bar. Well, I left out the "EclipseMysteries" part of it. This forum site is something I've never heard of before. There were tens of forums that talked about this game. Yet, come to think of it, none of those looked like they were the Stars of Gerhana official forums site.
I had to check.
Before I entered the link, I searched up the terms "Stars of Gerhana Forums". All the results that came out were from general gaming forums. There wasn't a single result that had the same link as what Ms. Elith gave me. Am I treading on deep web territory?
Time for me to actually see the official forums site, without the "EclipseMysteries" part, of course. I had to get a feel for the site before I could explore further in.
The forums page looked like any other forums site. There were sections and subsections discussing different and interesting topics about the game. Surprisingly, I didn't need to log into the site, as my profile had already been made on its own.
There were a lot of interesting pages. The first subsection I checked out was the "Player List" section. Presumably, it has the list of every player's name in the game. I just wanted to look my name up.
There were sections for art and discussions. There were people asking about the lore of the world. Sometimes I'd see someone promoting fan fiction on there. It was definitely an interesting site indeed.
However, there wasn't a section for "Eclipse Mysteries". I assumed that that would've been the name of the section according to the link. It seemed like it, as other subsections had that exact pattern for the link. "gerhana.forums.stars/[Section Name]"
But wherever I looked, there wasn't a single section called "Eclipse Mysteries". It may be because it's hidden even amongst the players. Ms. Elith did say most people have forgotten about the event. And everyone seemed offended every time I mentioned the word. Maybe even the devs didn't want to put it in their faces. I guess it would've been like rubbing salt in people's wounds.
So I put it into my search bar. "gerhana.forums.stars/EclipseMysteries"
A new site popped up. There were even more explorable sections and subsections I could look around.
As I read the posts, however, I realized that I couldn't comprehend a single word on the site. Everything looked like English, but I couldn't read any of it. No matter how slowly or how quickly I scanned through the words, I could make no meaning of it. It was like my brain wasn't working. Maybe I had developed some sort of dyslexic symptom.
But no, I can read everything on my phone just fine. Even as I placed it right next to the text on my PC, I could still read the words on the phone. I just couldn't read anything on my PC.
I tried searching for other text on my PC. The first news article that came up was very legible. Whereas coming back to the forums page, I could read nothing.
It was strange. After 20 minutes of trying, I gave up entirely. I've tried reading very fast, reading very slow, tracing the letters, reading letter by letter… I've tried everything! And still, I understood nothing from the site. I was so sure it was in English! But I just can't read any of it!
Alas, I got too tired. Clicking off the site, I wondered why I couldn't read the words. The more I thought about it, the more stressed I became.
I was this close to discovering the Second Eclipse Event! Maybe if I were a polyglot, I could've found a way to read the page.
In the end, there's no use stressing myself out over this mess. It's just a game, anyway.
I spent the rest of the night on the bed while lying down. Phone in my grasp as I watched UTube videos for entertainment. I would occasionally check on Star's DM to see if she had said anything.
Before long, I fell into a deep and really nice sleep.