It was Thursday evening. I'd gotten home from work and was relaxing on the couch, just watching whatever looked interesting on Netflix. It'd been a long day at work and I was just glad to get home. I hadn't had supper, and honestly didn't even feel like I had the wherewithal to get into a game. Hence the Netflix. While we weren't really in crunch at the game studio, it was sort of a mini-crunch, so I'd just put in twelve solid hours of staring at computer screens and trying to fix whatever bug was still remaining in the inverse kinematics. Right now, our main character's feet seemed to be floating off the stairway just about every other step. Sometimes it'd look right, sometimes it would be totally off. I knew there was something in the kinematics code that was doing it, but I'd searched all day, tried a few workarounds to try to isolate the issue, and still found nothing.

Like I said, the day had been long, but I'd also felt 'off'. I'd been pushing hard to find this glitch in our movement code. Maybe I was just too tired, but a few times that day I'd felt like there was someone around me. Someone I couldn't see. It was really strange, like a voice just at the edge of my hearing, or a fleeting impression of something out of the corner of my eye. It'd happened a few times that day. I'd looked around, and hadn't seen anyone, and when I concentrated, I couldn't hear anything. Maybe I was just imagining things, something in my brain throwing up roadblocks to my work. That's all I needed: my subconscious deciding that I wasn't going to get my job done. It might be time for a vacation, not that it would get approved since we were in a mini-crunch.

I was actually pretty worried about getting this bug fixed. I knew I'd have to have something by close of business tomorrow. If the character movement code hadn't been cleaned up, our animation guys were going to have to hand-animate the character movement for the demo, and that made the higher-ups unhappy. Partially because it was always better to have working code, but mainly because they'd have to throw the whole animation team at it for some really long days to get everything done.

I lived in a two-bedroom apartment, by myself. The second room was kind of a den, where I kept a couple computers that I tinkered with, as well as all the work gear for my biggest hobby: games. Not video games, but board games, card games, and pen and paper RPGs. My daytime job was programming for a game company, but in my spare time (what little of it there was since I took my programming job out of college) was spent trying to make games. I'd put out a couple rulesets on Boardgame Geek, and even gotten some positive feedback, along with a lot of negative. It was, after all, still the internet. But I kept at it.

I pretty much spent all my spare time on it. I tended to spend my weekends working on art for my games. The rules bit came surprisingly easy. It was having decent art that really took time. I'd seen a lot of stuff that people had just ginned up some graphics for on some map-maker program, or grabbed public domain art for cards. It looked cheap, and even though I wasn't the world's greatest artist, I had a little talent, and I knew that pretty much any game that actually succeeded had good art, art that would give players a feel for the fiction of the game.

Unfortunately, I didn't really have anyone to play my games with. I'd often asked myself how the guys and girls at work made time for a social life away from the office. I mean, most of them had stories about things they'd done on the weekends, and even weeknights (I really didn't know how that worked, as I was generally so beat by the time I got home that I couldn't even get any work done on my games, not to mention going out with friends.) I tended to get home, have dinner, maybe watch some Netflix or read a book, and go to bed.

Well, that's not entirely accurate. The real reason, though I would never admit it to most, was that I was a social failure. I didn't like crowds. I could handle one or two people that I knew, but I was uncomfortable aroudn people I didn't know. I was a miserable failure at bars. I was usually the guy sitting in the corner, sipping his beer, and cursing himself for not being able to talk to anyone. I definitely couldn't go to clubs. Dancing was seriously out of the question, not to mention the number of people on a given dance floor.

I'd tried going to clubs for games, and I had a decent time there, but I never really made any friends. I'd even gone to Dragon-Con one year. When I went, I knew I was going to have a great time, all those people that loved the same things I loved. I even took along a preliminary version of a card game I'd been working on. At the end, I felt like I'd wasted my time. I couldn't force myself out onto the floors with the crowds, and I couldn't talk to anyone. I heard other people in my hotel having a great time, and all I'd been able to do was sit in my room and curse myself for not being able to join them.

In short, I generally felt like a failure of a person. Maybe it was social anxiety disorder, but I'd never been to a shrink, and still didn't want to go. Maybe someday I'd get desperate enough. Right now, I felt like I was treading water in my life. Long days programming, hoping to help make a video game that I'd really feel proud of, followed by long weekends working on games that, in my heart of hearts, I knew no one would ever play. I didn't feel like I was living. I felt like I was just existing, and I didn't know how to go from one to the other.

By nine-thirty, the fact that I'd skipped lunch and not had any dinner completely caught up with me. I suddenly realized I was starving. I got myself up off the couch and headed for the little kitchen in my apartment. Opening the fridge door, I was dismayed to find that unless I wanted to make a meal out of condiments, I had nothing to eat. I opened the freezer and found it even more bare than the fridge. A few bags of frozen veggies that I'd had for far too long, and nothing else. I sighed, checking the cabinets. Beans of many kinds, a couple of cans of corn. Basically, the nominaly healty food I tended to buy in the hopes that if it was around, I'd actually eat better. That never really happened, though. I just wound up with a bunch of cans of beans sitting in the cabinet.

Okay then, Taco Bell it was. I stopped by the mirror on my way out the door, just to make sure I didn't look too horrifying. I mean, it was just Taco Bell, and I'd go through the drive-through, like usual, but I still didn't like to look scruffy. I didn't, or at least I didn't look too bad. Light brown hair, brown eyes, pale skin that tended to go from white straight on to red without stopping for any sort of brown in between. I was a little dumpy, getting more so after a few years in the programming business. Peter Vicars in a nutshell: not too horrifying.

I sighed and headed for the car. Down two flights of concrete stairs in my apartment complex, one of those built so that all the doors opened out onto little balconies shared by two or three apartments, and all the stairs being outside. That design only really worked in places like southern California, where it never snowed, because I could hardly imagine being back in a Kentucky winter in a place like this. Everyone who lived above the first floor would kill themselves trying to get up the stairs the first time there was an ice-storm. I hit the remote unlock when I got to the bottom of the stairs and saw the lights on my car blink twice as I walked over to it. My little Honda was serviceable, and nothing more. I'd bought it while I was an undergrad and I didn't really feel any need to upgrade it. I kept it serviced and took it to the carwash once in a while. It went where I needed it to go, and that was okay with me.

I'd pulled out into traffic and was headed out to the nearest Taco Bell, overriding the small voice in my head telling me to get something decent instead of fast food. The streetlights looked pretty, and the lines of palm trees to either side always made me thing of the shows I'd seen about Hollywood when I was little. I thought it would be awesome to live there. Well, I wasn't in Hollywood, just in Irvine, but I thought about how disappointed the younger version of me would be with how humdrum this place could be when it was just where you lived and not some exotic locale, like it had seemed back in rural Kentucky.

It was another half mile or so to the Taco Bell, and I was just cruising down the road. Suddenly, those voices I'd almost heard all day were back, except this time, they were clearly audible. Fairly loud, actually, and seeming to come from right beside me.

"For the last time, Pinkie, he can't hear us or see us. Just watch, okay?" I heard a voice say.

I turned my head, and there was nothing. I didn't have the radio on, and the windows on the car were up. I rolled down the windows and tried to listen for something outside the car.

"I dunno, Twilight," said another voice, "It looked like he heard something there."

That wasn't coming from outside. I craned my head around to look in the back seat. Still nothing.

"It must've been something outside, Pinkie. He couldn't have heard us. The spell's not supposed to work that way."

I looked around again, finally starting to panic. Where were these people? "Who's there?" I yelled, half-spinning in the seat to see behind me. They had to be in my car. How could they have gotten in here? More importantly what did they want?

All of this occurred to me in the space of a second. My heart was suddenly thrumming in my chest, and even though I couldn't see anything in the car, I felt like they had to be right there? In the trunk maybe? I spun back around and looked at the road. I'd drifted out of my lane, and I overcorrected again and the fishtail got worse, before I knew what was happening, I was sliding sideways down the street at fifty, looking squarely into the oncoming lights of an eighteen-wheeler that was about to T-bone me.

It's like that moment in time is frozen in my memory. It had only been four or five seconds since I started to lose control of the car, but time seemed to have slowed down for me. Looking back, it's almost comical, execpt for the fact that I was seconds from death. I still had my hands locked white-knuckled on the steering wheel at ten and two. My head, though, was turned and looking straight out the driver's side window at the oncoming semi, it's headlights right at my eye level. I could see the palm trees lit by the streetlights in the background, and the street almost empty except for my car and the semi. My last thought was, "At least no one else will get hurt."

Just as I closed my eyes, bracing for the impact and knowing it was going to do no good, I heard two voices scream, "NO!", and then my world went... lavender?