Rosalyn collapsed into her high-backed office chair with a flourish, spinning around once before facing her triple computer screen setup. She typed in her password to wake up the machine and neon lights flickered to life inside the transparent shell.

“Good evening, Bessie,” Rosalyn quipped as what felt like ten thousand windows all opened at once. She always had too many browser tabs going, but today had been an extra doozy researching the game she’d found.

She minimized anything she might need for reference and closed the rest that she didn’t need. As she booted up her streaming software, she sat up straight in her chair, readying herself to check the camera angle.

The beauty of this job was that she could work in comfy pj pants and fuzzy slippers and only have to worry about her top half. She adjusted the main camera on top of the left monitor to make sure she got the best cleavage angle. Weekend night streams usually brought out the rowdier fans, and the drunker they were the better they tipped, especially if she was looking cute.

And with her push-up bra and bouncy blonde curls tucked behind kitten-ear headphones, Rosalyn was good at looking plenty cute. She leaned towards the camera, batting her eyelashes to make sure she hadn’t accidentally smudged her eye makeup, and then swiped a thin layer of sparkly lip gloss across her pouty lips.

KC always teased her that she played the hot girl angle to her advantage, saying it was way harder for dudes to make it in online game streaming. It was all in good fun, though. The way Rosalyn saw it, women had a hard enough time getting taken seriously in circles like this, so if fans wanted to toss her extra money for her tits then she might as well make the mad cash.

She set up the second webcam on the right, this one at eye level. When she cut together the edited videos later, that was the one she liked to talk right into, as if she were addressing the audience. Stoking the parasocial relationships was key to retaining a fanbase.

She watched the stream lobby, watching the audience numbers tick up and up. There were already over four thousand people online, waiting to watch. She usually hit five or six thousand on the weekends, but people seemed really keen on finding out what her secret surprise was. She’d been teasing it since that morning.

Maybe I should do secret surprises more often, she thought as the viewers went up over forty-five hundred.

Her phone buzzed, the sound extra loud against the hard wood of her desk, and she glanced over at it before flicking it to silent. It was KC, wishing her luck and saying he couldn’t wait to see what she’d gotten her hands on.

Maybe it was mean, but she hadn’t even told her best friend what she’d found. She wanted it to be a surprise for him, as well, and was glad he was going to be on stream. Her audience loved interacting with him in the chat, and he was always a good sport about the shippers.

She quickly typed back a thank you and a heart emoji, and then moved her phone to the side, getting the middle screen ready for screen sharing as the last few seconds counted down to stream time.

“Showtime,” she whispered, giving herself one more whirl in her office chair just before the counter hit zero.

“STREAMING IN SESSION,” the robotic voice from the software declared, and Rosalyn shot her trademark thousand-watt grin at the camera.

“What’s up party people, it’s RosieRainbow, streaming live from somewhere in Canada, it is fuckin’ Friday night and I’m cracking a beer, how are you all doing tonight?” The words came out with the confidence of a sports announcer, rolling off of her tongue as she worked the persona of her online alter-ego. It wasn’t that far off from her personality, really, but she definitely hammed it up with a little showmanship.

The chat flooded with fans saying hello, talking about beer and saying cheers, shrieking excitedly in all caps about her surprise.

Rosalyn popped open the can on her desk, holding it up to the camera with a wink. “Cheers!” She took a swig and smacked her lips afterwards. They didn’t have to know that this was her third one so far. “So, I’ve been holding you guys in suspense all damn day, and I promise it wasn’t to intentionally torture you.” She put a finger to her chin and cocked her head thoughtfully. “Okay, maybe just a little.”

MARRY ME ROSIE, one of the commenters said.

Donations dinged in the corner of the screen, showering the chat with little animated fireworks blowing up all over the place.

She thanked those who’d donated by their usernames, familiar handles from her weekend streams. How these people had the cash flow to come back week after week and shower her in money was beyond her. But she wasn’t complaining.

“So, it’s storytime,” she said, clapping her hands together as she addressed the camera. “I was out on my Saturday morning garage saling, when I came across a super cool haul. It was like, this old condemned building that hadn’t been touched in a few decades and there were a bunch of squatters living in there, anyway, some company bought it and emptied it, and dumped all the stuff inside.” She held up a finger and smirked. “Let me say, ya girl Rosie can smell treasure from old dumped stuff.”

More dings, more fireworks, more thank-yous.

“A bunch of volunteers from the food bank asked if they could do a rummage sale with the stuff, to go back into helping people who, you know, need to squat in abandoned buildings that are getting torn down, and whatever the company is said okay and that’s how I ended up at a rando sidewalk sale with a bunch of old shit.” She grabbed the scratched-up jewel case from her desk, and wiggled it through the air, dancing it up into the view of the camera. “And I found this. Ta-da!”

She held it up next to her face, exaggerating a shocked expression as she gaped at the cover art. A Lovecraftian monster screamed across the image, blood splatters everywhere, its tentacles reaching up to coil around the title letters.

“King of Demons,” Rosalyn read, pointing to the words as she read them aloud. “Is this not the nineties-est thing you’ve ever seen? What is this font? And it’s a CD-Rom. I bet half of you are too young to even know what a CD-Rom is. Computers don’t even come with CD drives anymore. I’m about to learn you young’uns about how us thirty-year-old fogies had to play 3-D vidya games back in our way.” She was thirty-four, but they didn’t need to know that. KC was only twenty-nine and lorded that fact over her frequently.

I can’t find this game online, where do I get it? A donor added the message to their thirty dollar donation, splashing the comment across Rosalyn’s screen.

“Ah, well, here’s the kicker, and why I’m so excited about this game,” she said, fanning herself with the jewel case. “I can’t find it anywhere. Legit. I have been researching it all damn day. It came out in 1995, alongside quite a few other awesome action games and RPGs that I was playing at the time. I was pretty into the gaming scene, and being a kid with zero responsibilities other than like, going to school and cleaning my room, you know I was paying attention to every game that hit the market. I’ve never heard of this game, never heard of the company, either. And the internet hasn’t either! Or at least, not what I could find. I’m a gamer, not like a deep web gal, so if any of you party people are better at digging for info than me, hit me up with anything you find!”

She opened the case and showed off the compact disk, which had a beautifully drawn demon face. He had angular features, high cheekbones beneath gunmetal blue skin, charcoal horns winding elegantly from his forehead. His eyes had a piercing intensity, as if he could bust through the fourth wall right into the world.

“I guess this is the King,” Rosalyn said. “He’s kinda hot, right? Come on, be honest with me.” She winked at the camera, unwilling to admit just how many times she’d glanced at the disk that day. It was painted artwork, and in no way would he look like that in the game. It would be a pixelated nightmare in there, especially on her massive HD screen. But the artist had done an amazing job, nonetheless. She could amost smell the fire and brimstone coming off of the demon’s skin.

She slid the paper cover carefully from the inside of the jewel case. Most of these old games came with whole booklets of lore and images and credits and instructions, sometimes maps and whatnot, but this one didn’t. There was a small logo and copyright information in the bottom right hand corner, and she held it up as close as she could, watching the computer screen to make sure the words were in focus.

“Grab screenshots if you want,” Rosalyn offered. “The Guul Company, if anyone can dig anything up, lets bust this wide open!”

More dings. More fireworks. More thank-yous.

And ten thousand viewers.

Holy shit, she thought. “Ten k people in here, hot damn!” she exclaimed, putting a hand to her ample chest. “This is amazing you guys! Thank you so much for spreading the word. I’m so excited to share this with you. So should we dive in?”

The chat practically exploded in the affirmative, and a fifty-dollar donation splashed across the screen from KC.

Gonna be the Queen of the demons in no time, he said.

“You bet your ass I am,” Rosalyn said with a wink, and flicked on her screen sharing as the chat went wild again. Her camera window shrank to the corner, the rest of what they were seeing on the stream becoming the terminal window on her middle screen. “So, class, this is what’s called DOS. Nowadays you can get away with never seeing it, but back in the day this was our source of gaming. Look up Pong later, you won’t be disappointed.”

She popped open the disk drive on her computer—yes, she had one on hers, old habits died hard, and she still had some old CD games that she liked to play for nostalgia—and typed in a few command lines.

“Okay, let’s see if we can get this running.” She hit enter and waited as her computer decided what to do with her commands. “Since there’s no info about this game anywhere, I don’t know what it’s going to be like an action game, or what? Could even be a side-scroller for all I know.” Rosalyn huffed a breath as she watched the dark screen. “I’m so intrigued by the mystery, though.”

The chat continued like mad, scrolling too fast for her to even see the comments. The donation comment feature was super handy for that, so if people really wanted their message seen they could pay to get to the top of the queue. It was also nice for her pocket, too.

The screen flickered, and for a second panic gripped her chest. She lived in a rural area on the east coast and the power grid was spotty sometimes, but the weather was fine and there weren’t any scheduled outages, and it was just the middle screen that flickered.

“Oh my god, I thought the power was going out!” she cried, exaggerating her emotions and swiping a hand across her brow. “That would have sucked, losing you guys before we even get this thing going!”

She drummed her fingers along the top of her desk. “I don’t know if it wants to play nice. I might have to go digging in my dad’s basement and find an old nineties CPU--” She choked off her words as colours began to form on the screen, eyes widening. “What the hell, this is wild! I didn’t expect the game to fill the screen like this. Video resolution sucked ass in 1995--”

A loud rustling came through her headphones, like a breeze filtering through a forest, leaves whispering against each other. Rosalyn couldn’t tear her eyes away from the screen as tree bark winked at her through darkness, an ethereal glow like moonlight dipping between the ridges of the wood. In that moment, she forgot to monologue her thoughts. She forgot that she was on camera at all. She was just flabbergasted by the intensity of the graphics in such an old game.

This had to be some kind of trick. Someone had dressed up a newer game with older packaging to make it look like something else...which took a little wind out of her sails but she couldn’t deny that the mystery of it all was still intriguing, the fact that there was nothing about it online--

A scent assaulted her nostrils then, something viscous and sickly sweet, and Rosalyn’s first thought was that she’d left the lid off of her compost bin. That was the only logical answer, the only solution to the sudden problem that her brain was desperately trying to piece together into something coherent.

Because there was nothing even remotely logical about what the hell she was seeing.

Feeling.

Hearing.

Rosalyn absently reached up in her shock to remove her headphones, but they were gone. Her curls wisped around her head in the night breeze, carrying a salty sea freshness laced with that thick, rotten waft. The tree bark wasn’t encased in a screen anymore, but right before her, and her blood roared in her ears as she shakily reached out to touch it, the rough gnarled wood scraping against her fingers.

Something glopped nearby, followed by a wet, fleshy thud, bringing to mind the tentacled horrific beast from the cover of the game.

The game. The game the game, what the fuck is happening I’m supposed to be in my--

Her thoughts fizzled out, all brain functions evaporating in shock as she whirled around, on two feet instead of an office chair, fully expecting to see her room behind her, had to, logic, logic...but the room was gone. There was only woods. Darkness. Moonlight. The leaves whispering a warning to run from the gargling monster in the shadows.

Thud.

“Wh-what is this?!” Rosalyn shrieked, panic squeezing her lungs so hard the words came out in a whooshing scream.

Thud.

“VR, it’s gotta be VR, right, like somehow this thing like hacked my fucking brain or something but how that doesn’t make any--” Her babbling ceased as a dark thing slithered from behind a tree, moonlight reflecting off of ebony scales, shiny with some kind of jelly-like fluid, such a buildup that it slid off in drips the size of her fist, causing that sick glop, but there wasn’t just one, there were more, curling through the trees towards her, and there was no more time to think about the why or the how, there was only fear and instinct.

So Rosalyn ran.