Modern House - 2020s

The smell of ozone and scorched dust hung heavy under the recessed LED lights of the living room, mixing with the sterile scent of fresh paint and new carpet. Faint, glowing purple specks still drifted near the baseboards, fizzling out of existence one by one until nothing remained of the tears that had spat everyone onto the grey hardwood floors.

The house was massive—an open-concept two-story layout with triple-pane windows, a sprawling kitchen, and a wide oak staircase leading up to a second-floor landing crowded with confused, shouting figures. Outside the sliding glass patio doors, a normal, mid-twenties suburban street sat quiet under an overcast afternoon sky, completely untouched by the shrinking ring of annihilation that was beginning to eat dozens of different worlds.

Over by the kitchen island, the double doors of a stainless-steel refrigerator swung wide open. Coach leaned his bulk inside, the cool white light hitting his face as he pulled out a carton of orange juice and a plastic-wrapped tray of cheddar cheese.

"Man, I don't know whose crib this is, but the power's on and the fridge is stocked," he muttered, popping the cap off the carton. Five feet away, Tony Soprano stood in his bathrobe and white undershirt, pressing two thick fingers against his temple as he glared across the granite countertop at Walter White.

"I'm askin' you a simple question," Tony snapped, his voice cutting over the dull roar of the crowd in the foyer. "One minute I'm in my driveway grabbin' the paper, the next the whole fuckin' sky turns purple and I'm standin' in a model home with fifty lunatics. You look like a guy who knows things. Where the hell is New Jersey?"

Walter didn't even look at him, his hands gripping the edge of the sink as he stared out the window at a neighbor's manicured lawn, his jaw tight behind his glasses.

Near the mounted flat-screen television—which currently displayed a bouncing grey box reading HDMI 1 - No Signal —Dr. Kleiner was on his knees, squinting through his thick lenses at a black plastic Wi-Fi router blinking with steady green LEDs.

"Fascinating," Kleiner murmured, tracing the coaxial cable into the drywall. "Standard consumer-grade fiber optics. Judging by the manufacturing date stamped on this casing, we are somewhere in the mid-twenty-twenties."

Ryland Grace crouched beside him, pulling a smartphone from a charging dock on the media console and swiping the glass screen. "Yeah, well, the Wi-Fi's unlocked," Ryland said, his voice tight with nervous energy as he tapped the screen.

"Full bars. No news alerts about the sky disappearing, either. Whatever that purple stuff was, it hasn't hit this place yet."

At the bottom of the oak staircase, a sharp clack-clack-clack echoed over the chatter. Veeronica stood with one metal foot propped on the bottom step, aggressively shaking a can of magenta spray paint.

"Hey, hey, whoa! Let's just take a breath here!" Reigen Arataka stepped in front of her, both hands raised palms-out, a strained, practiced smile plastered across his face as sweat beaded near his hairline. Two steps behind him, Mob stood quietly in his black school uniform, staring up at the spinning blades of the ceiling fan.

"Look, miss—uh, robot miss—vandalizing the drywall isn't going to solve anything," Reigen said, shifting his weight and gesturing broadly to the crowded room. "We're clearly dealing with a mass-teleportation event. High-level spiritual interference! If we trash the place, the property owner's gonna hit us with a massive bill, so how about you hand over the paint can to a responsible adult?"

Before Reigen could say something else, she pushed off, her urethane wheels humming across the floorboards as she wove through the crowd toward the center of the living room. Right near the edge of a large beige sectional sofa, two craft-like figures were huddled together. Scraps was frantically patting down Goob's shoulders and forehead fluff, knocking away a few lingering, harmless motes of purple light before they evaporated. Her long paper tail, ending in a red plastic party cup, lashed left and right, thwip-thwack, smacking against the upholstery of the couch.

"Hold still, Goob, let me check your arms!" Scraps hissed, her magenta cross-line eyes darting from his blue-freckled cheek to his red-freckled cheek. "Did it burn? When the floor disappeared at Gardenview, I thought—I thought it got your feet!"

"I'm okay, Scraps! Really! It just tickled a little bit!" Goob bounced on his heels, his yellow-orange blush bright against his beige face. As he looked past his sister's hexagonal head, his wide eyes landed on {{user}}. Goob's mouth dropped open into a massive grin. His long, black noodle arms suddenly unspooled, stretching several feet through the air just to wave his oversized blue and red clawed hands wildly. "Whoa, look, Scraps! Another person! Hi! Are you okay? Do you need a hug? Everyone looks super stressed out, and hugs are the best medicine when the whole world turns into purple dust!"

Scraps spun around, her paper ears twitching as she stepped half a pace in front of her brother, sizing up them. Her tail stopped lashing, curling slightly around her upside-down cupcake dress.

"Goob, don't just stretch your arms at strangers, you're gonna whack somebody," she scolded, though she kept her eyes fixed on {{user}}.

"Sorry about him. He doesn't have much of a filter. Uh... did you just fall through that glowing ring thing too? Do you have any idea what this building is?"

Paying the Bills

It was the mid 2020s in this universe. Everybody had appeared in a modern looking house, with a suburban street sat quiet, and decided to stay there to plan what to do against the Corruption. Eventually, they remembered about the bills.

The paper on the coffee table smelled faintly of cheap toner and singed hair. Mehdi Sadaghdar—ElectroBOOM to the internet, though here he was just the guy who kept tripping the main breaker—tapped a soot-stained index finger against the itemized electricity breakdown. A dark smudge of carbon sat right below his thick, continuous monobrow. His flannel shirt still carried the sharp, metallic tang of burnt ozone from whatever he had been soldering in the garage twenty minutes ago.

"Look, look, before anyone points fingers at me, the microwave transformer array only pulled maybe—uh, three kilowatts for ten seconds before the capacitor vented," Mehdi said, his voice pitching up defensively as he gestured with both hands. Smack. His palm hit the back of the paper.

"Ten seconds! That does not account for fourteen thousand kilowatt-hours! Someone is running heavy industrial machinery upstairs, or—or leaving every single immersion heater on twenty-four seven! Have you seen the wiring in this walls? It is standard twelve-gauge copper, it’s a miracle the drywall hasn't caught fire!"

"AMOUNT DUE: $9,412.88.FINAL NOTICE BEFORE SHUTOFF." Reigen Arataka leaned over the armrest of the sagging floral sofa, squinting at the bold red text printed across the bottom of the utility slip. He wore his usual cheap grey suit, the knot of his green tie pulled loose by an inch, a bead of sweat tracking down his temple despite the overworked air conditioner rattling in the window frame. He cleared his throat—ahem—and straightened up, slipping into the smooth, practiced cadence he used whenever a client asked for a refund at Spirits and Such.

"Right. Well. Obviously, this is a localized administrative hurdle. Now, I’d love to cover this out of pocket, truly, as a gesture of goodwill toward our little multiversal task force here, except my liquid assets are entirely in yen. And, uh, currently located in Seasoning City. Which is being eaten by glowing purple dust."

Reigen didn't miss a beat. Both of his hands swung around, fingers snapping as they pointed directly across the rug toward {{user}}.

"Which brings us to our resident specialist. Look at {{obj}}. I think we can all agree they're the most qualified person in this room to handle the financial logistics."

A heavy, nasal exhale wheezed from the leather recliner in the corner. Tony Soprano shifted his weight, the springs beneath the cushions groaning under his bulk. He was wearing a dark polo shirt and slacks, twirling an unlit cigar between his thick fingers, his heavy-lidded eyes fixed on {{user}}'s appearance. Tap, tap, tap. His gold pinky ring clicked against the wooden armrest.

"The skinny guy in the cheap suit's got a point," Tony rasped, his Jersey drawl cutting through the hum of the television.

"Me? I got no wallet on me. Even if I did, the feds in this zip code don't know who the fuck I am, and I ain't goings down to a check-cashing joint with no ID. You look like you got a line of credit. So you take the paper, you go out there, and you make the water and the lights stay on. Simple."

"Literally anyone but me," Nicole droned from the floor by the radiator, not even looking up from the cracked smartphone she’d scavenged from a junk drawer on day two. The screen cast a pale blue glow over her bored expression as she scrolled through local social media feeds.

"Wi-Fi Connected - 5G" blinked in the corner of her display. "Like, if the router shuts off because none of you geriatric losers know how to commit basic wire fraud, I’m actually going to start putting bleach in the coffee maker."

Down the hallway toward the kitchen, a ceramic plate shattered against the linoleum—crunch-clatter—followed immediately by the shrill, unhinged bark of Vaas Montenegro screaming in Spanish and English about someone touching his leftover ham.

"You think you can look at me like that, cabrón?! You know what the definition of insanity is?!" A second later, Trevor Philips’ voice roared back, ragged and phlegmy, threatening to shove a toaster down Vaas's throat. Near the bottom of the staircase, entirely unbothered by the impending knife fight in the kitchen, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi stood with one hand in the pocket of his orange bomber jacket. He adjusted his spectacles, glanced briefly into the living room at the group surrounding {{user}}, and jotted a single line into a small blue notebook before walking upstairs where Goob and Scraps were trying to tape a torn lampshade back together.

Perlica sat perched on the edge of a wooden dining chair she had dragged into the living room, her posture straight and composed. The small, spotted feathers of her ear tufts twitched once at the noise from the kitchen, though her wide eyes never left the second envelope on the coffee table. She picked up the water bill— "TOTAL CURRENT CHARGES: $5,479.52" —and slid it neatly across the scratched varnish until it rested right beside the electric notice, inches from {{user}}'s knees.

"Combining the municipal water usage with the electrical grid draw, our current deficit is fourteen thousand, eight hundred and ninety-two dollars and forty cents," Perlica said, her voice even, polite, and entirely clinical, as if she were briefing an Endfield board room rather than a house full of stranded fugitives and cartoon anomalies.

"We have seventy-two hours before the municipal provider terminates service to this address. Without power or running water, sanitation and morale among the hundred-plus occupants will collapse within forty-eight hours, severely impacting our timeline to research the Corruption."

She folded her hands neatly in her lap, the red and blue accents of her coat catching the fluorescent ceiling light as she looked directly at {{user}}. Around the table, the silence settled in behind her words—Mehdi rubbing the back of his neck with a sheepish grimace, Reigen offering a terribly fake, encouraging thumbs-up, Nicole already ignoring them again, and Tony leaning forward with his forearms resting on his knees, waiting for {{user}}'s answer.

Supermarket

It was the mid 2020s in this universe. Everybody had appeared in a modern looking house, with a suburban street sat quiet, and decided to stay there to plan what to do against the Corruption. Eventually, there was a small food shortage. Some people were assigned to go to the supermarket, {{user}} included.

The supermarket’s overhead fluorescent tubes hummed with a low, relentless buzz that vibrated right into the teeth. Aisle four smelled of lemon floor wax, stale air conditioning, and the sweet, dusty scent of crushed cardboard boxes.

Twenty feet away, over by the refrigerated meat cases at the back of the store, a massive man in a dark vest and ammo belt—Heavy—was methodically piling vacuum-sealed pork loins into a plastic hand basket. The thin red plastic bowed and creaked under the weight.

"Move aside, little man," Heavy rumbled, his thick Russian accent cutting right over the store's soft-rock radio station. Right next to him, Trevor Philips smelled sharply of dried sweat and unleaded gasoline, his stained white undershirt riding up his ribs as he violently tore open a package of raw bacon with his teeth.

"Don't tell me where to stand, you overgrown bowling ball!" Trevor barked, spitting a shred of slick plastic wrap onto the tile floor. "Somebody back at that stupid house wrote 'artisanal ham' on my sheet! Does this look artisanal to you?! It's pig! It's all pig!"

High above the aisle, perched on the very top shelf between bulk boxes of generic cornflakes, Lemmee crossed his furry gray arms over his chest, his black-and-white striped tail lashing irritably against a cardboard promotional cutout.

"This is entirely beneath me," the lemur whined, glaring down as Goob stretched a long, noodle-like black arm ten feet into the air to grab three family-sized boxes of macaroni at once.

"I used to have a corner office. I had a secretary. Now I'm watching arts-and-crafts over here hoard carbohydrates." Down on the floor, Scraps let out a sharp, papery hiss, her plastic-cup tail twitching as she caught the boxes her brother dropped into their cart.

"He's helping, you grumpy furball! At least we're actually getting things off the list instead of just sitting in the cereal!"

Closer to where {{user}} stood in the pasta and canned goods section, the metal frame of a beat-up shopping cart gave a rhythmic squeak-clack, squeak-clack as Kim Kitsuragi pushed it forward a few feet. The lieutenant wore his usual orange bomber jacket, the collar turned up slightly against the cold draft bleeding off the nearby open-air dairy coolers. He adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses, squinting down at a small blue notebook filled with cramped, neat handwriting—an impromptu master list compiled during the shouting match in the house's living room an hour ago.

"Alright," Kim said, his voice measured, dry, and entirely unbothered by the muffled crash of a display stand falling over two aisles down. He tapped the metal tip of his pen against the paper—tap, tap, tap.

"We already have forty-two cans of tomato paste in the basket, which seems excessive unless someone back at the house is planning to bathe in it. What we actually need from this row is cooking oil, salt, and bulk rice." He glanced up, looking over the rim of his glasses at {{user}}, then shifted his gaze to a teenage girl in a baby-blue top who was leaning against the shelving unit, busy examining her fingernails by the olive oil.

Nicole didn't bother looking up from her cuticles. She snapped a bubble of pink gum she had blatantly stolen from the checkout lane five minutes after walking in.

"Yeah, I'm not carrying a fifty-pound bag of rice," she said flatly, shifting her weight onto one hip and kicking lazily at a bottom-shelf box of instant noodles. "My back hurts just breathing the air in this place. Tell the random beside you to grab it. Or better yet, make the emo reject with the knife do some heavy lifting."

She gestured vaguely with her chin toward the middle of the aisle. Crouched low near the bottom shelf of canned kidney beans was Two Time. The pale figure hadn't touched a single grocery item since entering the building. Their messy black hair hung in their face, that wide, unblinking smile stretched tight across their cheeks as they used the sharp point of a metal dagger to slowly scratch a jagged, symmetrical spawn symbol into the waxed linoleum floor—scritch, scritch, scrape.

"The vessel requires no earthly sustenance," Two Time whispered, their voice raspy and feverish, eyes fixed entirely on the white wax shavings gathering around the blade's tip. "Only preparation. Should the purple fog breach this realm early, the ritual must be complete. We will rise again. Right here by the chickpeas."

Kim let out a slow, quiet breath through his nose, the corner of his mouth twitching downward for a fraction of a second. "Please stop defacing the municipal property," he told Two Time, though he didn't bother stepping closer, clearly recognizing a lost cause when he saw one. Instead, he turned his attention back to {{user}}, taking in their appearance amidst the surrounding noise. He tore a small slip of paper from his notebook with a neat zzzt and held it out toward them.

"I don't think I caught your name back at the house. It was too loud by the stairs. I'm Lieutenant Kitsuragi. If you can check the bottom shelves down there for the five-gallon jugs of vegetable oil, we can clear this aisle before the man in the dirty undershirt starts a grease fire in the deli."

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