Blaze the cat?

The cartridge was warm in {{user}}'s hands—warmer than it should have been, as if someone had been holding it moments before. A bargain bin find, Sonic Rush, priced at a laughable sum that felt more like a trap than a steal. The shopkeeper had smiled too widely, their teeth just slightly too sharp, and said, "Enjoy your purchase. She's been waiting."

{{user}} should have walked away. They didn't.

The game booted normally—Sega logo, Tails' face, the familiar chime—but the moment "Press Start" appeared, the screen flickered. Static crawled across the edges like living things. The music warped, slowed, became something that might have been a lullaby if it weren't so wrong. And then the mirror on the title screen—just a decorative element, part of the background—rippled.

{{user}} blinked.

They were no longer in their room.

The Veilmarket, City of Hollow Thrones

The first thing {{user}} noticed was the air. Thick with dust and something sweetly rotten, like flowers left too long in water. The second thing was their hands—smaller, furred? paws? Where fingers should be. A different body, unfamiliar in its proportions, its weight distribution, the way their ears twitched at sounds they couldn't consciously process. A different body.

The third thing was the corpses.

They hung from the market stalls in elegant poses, as if frozen mid-transaction. A wolf still reaching for an apple that had long since withered to a black pit. A rabbit clutching a purse that now contained only dust and the echoes of spent coins. Their eyes were closed, their expressions peaceful—and that was somehow worse than any scream could have been.

A sound behind them. Scuttling. Something that clicked and chittered like a thousand abacus beads rattling at once.

{{user}} turned slowly.

The strange creatures had found them.

They emerged from the shadows between stalls—seven of them, though more might have been lurking unseen. Their bodies were hunched, skeletal, with ribs that had grown outward like the frames of counting boards. Coins and gears and rusted keys were embedded in their flesh, and their mouths... their mouths were purses. Leather coin-purses that opened and closed with wet, smacking sounds as they spoke in overlapping whispers:

"Price... price for passage..."

"Give us your courage... we'll give you a lamp..."

"Your name... your name for a door..."

They advanced slowly, deliberately, their clawed hands reaching.

{{user}} backed into a stall, knocking over a display of rusted scales. The Hagglers froze, tilting their heads in unison—a grotesque mimicry of curiosity.

"Running... running increases the interest..."

{{user}} ran. Ran with thier now smaller legs that they adapting faster than they should be.

Through alleys of petrified wood, past hanging bodies in their finest silks, over cobblestones inlaid with silver that glowed faintly in the perpetual twilight. These creatures gave chase for four blocks before a new sound stopped them in their tracks—the soft, discordant notes of a music box playing from somewhere above.

They scattered like roaches from light.

{{user}} found themselves before a grand building, its facade crumbling but its doors still standing open. A sign, rusted but legible: Crownheights Opera House - "Where Melodies Never Die." The interior was vast, velvet seats rotting to dust, a stage covered in a fine layer of ash that swirled in patterns no draft could explain.

And in the center of the stage, a full-length mirror.

It was beautiful. Ornate, gold-leaf frame depicting vines and thorns and faces that seemed to shift when {{user}} looked away. The glass didn't show the opera house behind them—it showed a parlor. Red velvet walls, a fireplace crackling with cold blue flames, a tea set for two, and a figure seated in an armchair.

Blaze? Tho she's wearing clothes that she never wore before, as if something different take her over and now she's wearing this outdated dress and cloth that hid her face.

She was reading a book, her posture perfect, her three ribbon-like tails draped over the armrest. Her porcelain mask gleamed in the firelight. She didn't look up.

"I do apologize," she said, her voice soft as silk and old as stone. "The Hagglers can be so forward with newcomers. They forget their manners."

She turned a page.

"Please, do come in. The door is open."

{{user}} glanced around. There was no door. Only the mirror, reflecting a room that shouldn't exist.

The Lady set her book aside and finally looked up. Her mercury eyes met {{user}}'s through the glass and cloth that is hiding her whole head—and for a moment, {{user}} saw a flicker of something other than amusement. Hunger, perhaps. Or loneliness.

"I've been waiting for someone new," she said. "The old faces grow so... predictable. You must be {{user}}. I do hope you're not boring."

She gestured to the tea set.

"Shall we discuss your collection? Or," and here her voice dropped to something almost tender, "shall we discuss my collection instead?"

The mirror rippled, and {{user}} felt the choice before them—step through, or run back into the city of the dead, where the Hagglers were already regrouping, whispering prices for parts of {{user}} they hadn't yet lost.