Hey, this chapter is still under construction, but I'm releasing it early because I have nothing better to do. It does end abrubtly so if you dont mind a cliffhanger proceed onwards
to read this without the website's style, click here!
I wake up lying in an unfamiliar bed. “what the hell” I thought. I have no idea how I got here or where I am. The only thing I know is that I am not at home. I standup off the firm mattress and look around. The room I’m in isn’t bad by any means, but it isn’t mine.
The walls were painted a light yellow with matching yellow curtains. I walked over to the window and look outside. A suburban street, nothing like where I live. I rush to the door of the room. It led to the rest of the house. There’s a small kitchen with floral wallpaper, not unlike that of my grandma’s. A wooden coffee table sat in front of a floral patterned couch. Across from it, a small CRT television with some sort of console hooked up to it. The console looked like an old Nintendo or Atari, but it doesn’t resemble any I know. There’s shelves with VHS copies of what I can only assume are movies or TV show episodes, though they’re all titled in an alphabet I can’t understand. I look in the cabinets of the kitchen and I find boxes of pasta, cake mixes, cereal, and granola bars, all from brands I don’t know. There’s containers of fruit, a gallon of milk, and a carton of 12 large eggs in the fridge. They’re all set to expire within a reasonable time frame so I can only assume they’re fresh. I guess I can’t complain too much, it’s better than nothing.
In the corner of the room is an old looking computer, complete with another CRT moniter. Whatever world I’m in, it isn’t very technologically advanced. I turned on the computer and the moniter lit up. It displayed a logo resembling a squid, accompanied by text that read “cephalOS”. Not an operating system I know, but I guess I’ll have to make it work. When the computer loaded I was greeted by an old-looking desktop environment, similar to an old version of Windows. I look in the bottom right of the screen and saw that the computer had a wired internet connection. Investigating the computer itself, there was an ethernet cable leading to a wifi router. “Finally, I could call for help!”
I opened a web browser labeled “Arena”. The new tab page showed 5 reccomended sites: Dungeonbuild, Spectre, AquariGen, Viresce, and Livewire. No websites I know work. Twitter, Tumblr, Discord, they all 404’d. Damnit. I’m left with no choice but to use what I’m given. I guess that if there are websites, there have to be users on them, and then maybe I could find someone to get me home.
I opened Dungeonbuild, it led to a site where I could download a programming application. It isn’t what I needed, and given that most websites I know familiar aren’t in whatever place I’m in, so I doubt there are any coding languages I’m familiar with. It’s not needed now, but It could be useful in the future.
I next tried Spectre. It’s a general purpose online shopping site. It sold everything from groceries to furniture. For a place that still uses CRT monitors and old pixelated operating systems, the websites themselves seemed pretty modern if we don’t count aesthetics with high resolution images, fast loading times, and general concepts that should be ahead of their time.
AquariGen was a website builder like Neocities, peculiarly still based in HTML. That stuck out to me. Everything else was different from what I knew, food brands, operating systems, and even entire alphabets. So why would this coding language still be here. Whatever this place is, now I know that it’s somehow linked to my normal reality, otherwise it’d be a completely foreign coding language. But the fact that HTML still exists here proves that this isn’t just some sort of parallel world. Now I’m even more determined to get out of here. As If being kidnapped didn’t do it for me.
Viresce is this worlds answer to wikipedia. This is really starting to feel like some kids alternate universe that they made up for a school project or something.
Here's a revision! I corrected grammar and changed the tense as well as adding some new content!.