The Unexpected - Chapter 1: Beginnings

             "This is a universe, pretty amazing right? Everything you see here is perceived to your memories as you gather every information about the world around us." "Hi! I am Dex, a 20-year-old man who's looking for a job to provide for myself. Just your average guy, right? WRONG! Actually, this is where my life changed.

             I had a very typical childhood where I usually play games and have a very abundant imagination. I always get poked by my classmates and my teacher for daydreaming during class but that doesn't matter to me. I finished high school but never got to finish college due to low fund support so I had to work my way in life. I found this scary-looking ad for a job that doesn't require any work experience whatsoever as long as you have the mind for it. Really weird description but it also said that they have a free gaming set for first-timers to apply so I went to the said venue. 

             It led me to this rundown-looking two-storey building and there are a lot of abandoned houses here and dead trees all around the neighborhood. Sounds like some horror movie cliché if you ask me. I tried to call the contractor but there was no response. Anyway, I entered the building and as I expected, everything's all dirty, infested with cobwebs and dust bunnies in every corner, and no one's home. In order to properly defend myself, I grabbed a piece of wood lying down on the kitchen table after seeing a hole above the kitchen ceiling fitting this piece of wood. I explored more inside the building and there are two sets of stairs: one leading to the second floor and the other leading to the basement. Given my gaming sense, the basement is the last for me to investigate so I checked the second floor. The hallway looks really creepy and the floorboards make those creaky sounds to make the atmosphere even more creepy. Despite that, I still pressed on. There's a three-way junction after reaching the end of the hallway. On the left side, there's two rooms while the right side has only one small room. I decided to check the small room first so I opened the door quietly and I heard the creaking noise of the door which indicates that this room is not used at all because of the rusty door hinges. There's nothing useful inside other than empty boxes and a chest. In every RPG title I've played, these chests are actually monsters waiting to pounce on you if you get closer and open its mouth. I poked it with the piece of wood and hit it to make sure it's not a trap. It didn't react at all so it's just a regular chest which means it's safe to open it. I pulled up the lid and I did find a pistol and some ammo. Who on earth would leave a gun and ammo inside a chest in an abandoned house? Whatever, I needed the weapon to defend myself so I grabbed them and left the room.

             As I exited the room, the door to the furthest room opened which did not sound right. Good thing I brought a tiny flashlight just in case of creepy situations like this. I slowly tiptoed my way to the furthest room and instantly flashed the inside of the room after reaching the front of the doorway so I wouldn't get jumpscared. It looks like a man's bedroom with a filthy bed, shattered television and a bunch of scattered CDs. There is a note on the bed, I read the note and it says: "I am so done with life. Nothing ever matters when things don't go your way. Every second of my life is filled with such bad luck that there's no point in me living in this forsaken world so I decided to write all of my regrets here before I take my own life." And it looks like some bucket list so I thought that it's useless in my investigation but I brought it with me anyway so I folded the note and slid it in my pocket. Suddenly, I heard a huge rattle in the other room. This could be useful for the gun I picked up and I hope this gun is licensed. I don't want the cops to arrest me, flinging this around. I readied myself, headed for the other room, and found that the rattling was coming from the closet. This seems serious so I went on aiming for the closet as I tried to open the closet door with the piece of wood I got. Remember, many horror games have these kinds of jumpscares where the monster hides in a small room and lunges at you for trying to open it. I keep flinging the wood over the closet handle but it won't budge so I'm planning to shoot through the door instead. I never actually fired a gun before so I have no clue on how to load this gun. I've seen many reloads in my time playing first-person-shooter games so this should be easy, I think. I put the bullets in the magazine and inserted it in the magazine well. That leaves the actual loading of the gun where you are readying your bullets in the barrel of the gun. Most pistols would just pull back the slide in order to remove the safety of the gun so I tried it and it worked. I backed up,  aimed for the closet door, and put my finger on the trigger. As I was about to shoot, the floor was about to crumble beneath my feet. I forgot about the hole on the floor where I got the piece of wood from so the floor crumbled and I fell down to the kitchen then the floor also crumbled and I kept on falling into the basement. The debris broke my fall but I suffered a few scrapes and a backache.

             I felt around the debris below me to find my flashlight because it's so dark in here and I got it. I flashed it instantly and saw a bunch of shelves filled with empty jars, a rusty furnace, and a chair in the middle of the room. It looks like I landed by the corner of the basement and I see the stairs by the far side of it. I got up and checked myself to see if I still had the gun. It fell beside me so I grabbed it, checked it for any damages, and looked around for any threats. The shelves had these empty jars which served no purpose. The rusty furnace's door had loosen its screws and fell off after I fell down. And then this chair is sitting in the middle of the basement. Normally, this shows a sign of someone's life taken by themselves when they cannot handle the pain and suffering of living in this world. I looked around and I saw a noose hanging on a pipe from the waterworks in this house. It's weird that a noose and a chair would be here but there's no hanging body in sight. I don't wanna waste any more time here so I headed for the stairs. I climbed up the stairs and was about to open the door when I heard a screeching scream from behind me.

             I went back down the stairs and saw the empty jars falling from the shelves and shatter on the cement floor as a gunk-like monster is emerging from the furnace that has turned on like it's coming from the underworld through a portal or something. It has a human-like physique that has no eyes but has tentacles for arms and spikes for feet that drills through the floor, not to mention the awful stench it emits. Nevertheless, I stood my ground as I started shooting the monster. I shot through its head and chest for any weak spots but none of them flinched. I looked around for other options but all I could find were shattered glass from the jars, a chair and a noose. Wait a minute, that just gave me an idea! First, I needed to distract the monster so I threw my gun at the debris, creating noise that made the monster go in that direction. It started stretching its tentacles there, went head first and used its feet to pounce at the target location like a slingshot. I grabbed the closest glass shard, stood over the chair and cut the rope of the noose. After the monster noticed that there wasn't any prey, it screeched again and tried to go back to its original location. I managed to get the noose off the pipe, got off the chair and used it as a tripper, held the rope as a lasso and waited for the monster to slingshot its way here. Its tentacles reached the floor in front of the chair and flung itself towards me. I pushed the chair towards it, and got it stunned and tumbling down. I put the noose around its neck, hung it back on the pipe and started pulling it. The monster is flailing around, screeching in pain as if I'm actually killing it. I know it sounds brutal but it seems that this monster is the dead person who wrote the note I found in the man's room on the second floor.

             At first, his cause of death is suicide by hanging himself but that doesn't sound right. Why did he come from the furnace in the first place? In reality, he didn't hang himself, he burned himself inside the furnace. He placed the chair and noose in an attempt to kill himself but one of the jars fell on the shelves, startled the man and came stumbling back towards the open furnace door and went inside. Remember the fallen piece of wood in the kitchen and me falling through it to the basement? The floor was built with very weak material that the impact of the piece of wood made a rumble to the connected pipe that leads to the furnace, accidentally moving the lever and igniting the furnace, burning the man. He tried breaking through the furnace door but failed to get out. He only managed to loosen the screws of the door before getting completely scorched by the furnace. It was such an unlucky death by someone who didn't want to die this way. The reason why I said "Gunk-like" is because this corpse has been in the furnace for several days or something and I never knew what burned corpses smell like.

             Anyway, I think I had enough horror experience for one day so I headed for the stairs and climbed my way up. As I opened the door, I entered a large, chrome-painted octagonal room filled with bright lights and a glass window pane with a woman standing behind it. "Well done, Dexter Gonzales. You have passed the test."

             To be continued...