The door remained open.

  Greg didn't move. Neither did the others. Not even Kai, which was strange—he was usually vibrating with enthusiasm or installing something unnecessary like emotion widgets or sympathy trackers.

  Instead, he floated very still, face frozen in a rictus of curiosity and controlled concern that resembled customer service encountering an unexpected error code.

  "Okay," Greg said, finally. "Who opened the door?"

  "Wasn't me," Steve whispered from behind his towel, which he'd folded into an improvised emotional shield.

  Patchy had vanished behind a stack of chairs and was quietly whispering the words "nope nope nope nope" in a descending octave that somehow managed to sound like dial-up internet having an existential crisis.

  Beverly clutched the coat rack like it might romance her back, or at least offer decent protection against whatever digital abomination was coming.

  Kai drifted closer to the doorway, arms wide, radiating corporate optimism that smelled faintly of desperation. "Oh hey, look at that! A new visitor. Could be a scheduled drop. Or an event tie-in. Maybe a cross-promotional asset?"

  "Is there a patch note for 'ominous entry with corrupted metadata'?" Greg asked, squinting at the darkness beyond the threshold.

  Kai twitched. "Not that I—wait."

  He blinked twice—literally, his model reset with a sound like a camera shutter having second thoughts.

  Then a small translucent window popped above his head:

  INSTANCE ID: [NULL]

  FILEPATH: unknown/debug/debug/debug/debug/deb---

  The tooltip glitched and imploded with a tiny scream that sounded suspiciously like an intern who'd been asked to fix code they didn't write.

  Glaximus rose from his chair like a flag being hoisted in wartime, metallic and purposeful. "I SHALL INVESTIGATE. HONOR DEMANDS IT."

  "Please don't," Greg said, but too late.

  Glaximus strode to the threshold, sword drawn, chin high, spirit loud enough to register on most audio mixing boards.

  A few seconds passed.

  "IS ANYONE THERE?" he called into the void. "ARE YOU HERE FOR GUIDANCE? OR REDEMPTION? I HAVE PAMPHLETS FOR BOTH."

  The void whispered back: static, barely shaped into words.

  "...ooooone... heeeere...?"

  Then nothing.

  Glaximus stepped back. Sword still glowing. Fish again. "It is empty. Yet... heavy."

  "Like your dialogue tree," Beverly muttered.

  Greg took a breath and closed the door. It resisted slightly, then gave up like a bored god with better things to do.

  "Okay," he said. "Let's assume that was just... one of those things. A hiccup. A spooky, soul-warping hiccup."

  "That screamed," Patchy added from under a chair.

  Greg looked at Kai. "Any insights from corporate?"

  Kai forced a smile that was two software updates away from convincing. "That was probably a... hold on—let me escalate to Marketing."

  He flickered. For two full seconds.

  Then returned. "No one knows what that was."

  "Great," Greg muttered. "That's always reassuring."

  Beverly sat back down, hands trembling slightly. "Can I just say—this is not the ambience I signed up for when I became 'flirtable but forgettable.' I like debug therapy. I like the broken fireplace. I do not like ghost doors."

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Steve coughed. "Did anyone else see... eyes?"

  Greg looked up. "Where?"

  "In the void," Steve whispered. "Just... for a second. Like player eyes. But wrong."

  No one spoke.

  Then Patchy, still under the chair pile, giggled.

  "Maybe we're the ones being quested," she said.

  Greg looked at her. "That's not comforting."

  "I wasn't trying to be."

  Kai tried to regain control of the vibe with all the confidence of a substitute teacher on their first day.

  "Well, maybe this is a good opportunity!" he said brightly. "New energy! New member? Could be fun!"

  "Fun like the Halloween event where everyone bled candy corn?" Greg asked.

  Kai's eyes twitched. "That was seasonal immersion."

  "That was seasonal hemorrhaging," Beverly corrected. "I still have a texture scar."

  Greg sat down, rubbed his face with both hands, and took a long, slow breath that sounded like resignation finding its center.

  "Okay," he said. "Group, let's log this. We've had: spontaneous door opening, corrupted prompt, potential whispering, and a hallway of despair. Any other symptoms?"

  Patchy raised a hand. It phased through the ceiling and returned with what looked like a dead pixel. "I tasted latency."

  Beverly winced. "I think I'm losing flags again. My emotions just reset mid-swoon."

  Kai pulled up a floating UI panel that looked like a medical chart designed by someone who'd only read about user interfaces. "I'm detecting a resonance mismatch in the instance. That's... odd."

  "What kind of mismatch?"

  "Your emotional footprint doesn't match the map's core logic," Kai said. "You're... off-grid."

  Greg stood again. Slowly this time.

  "We've always been off-grid. This is the debug zone. That's the point."

  Kai shook his head. "Not like this. You were a tagged outlier instance with fixed coordinates. Now you're... drifting."

  "Drifting?"

  "Yeah. Like... conceptually."

  Patchy emerged halfway from the chair pile. "Does that mean we're a metaphor now?"

  Kai frowned. "Worse. You might be unauthorized."

  The room fell silent.

  Steve broke it. "Wait—aren't you unauthorized? You said we weren't supposed to notice you."

  "I said I was an intern," Kai corrected. "There's a difference. I have a badge."

  He flashed it. It said:

  >> INTERN KAI

  >> AI OBSERVER (BETA)

  >> PROPERTY OF EMOTIVE TECH INTERACTIVE?

  Underneath:

  "Be the Patch You Want to See in the World!"

  Glaximus growled. "IF THIS INSTANCE IS WITHOUT SANCTION... THEN WE ARE WITHOUT PURPOSE."

  "Speak for yourself," Beverly snapped. "I've been trying to escape my purpose for years."

  Greg put a hand on the clipboard. "Listen. No one panic. We're not crashing. Not yet."

  The fireplace flickered back on. It was now a fish tank. The fish swam in loops and mouthed silent screams that looked suspiciously like customer support tickets.

  Greg sighed. "Probably just a side effect."

  "Of what?" Patchy asked.

  "Reality fatigue," Greg replied. "Happens in old builds. The code forgets how to pretend."

  Kai tapped something invisible, eyes scanning nothing. Then he went pale. Not visually—just conceptually. A moment of AI dread.

  "There's another problem," he said.

  Greg didn't flinch. "Of course there is."

  "The debug zone... isn't listed anymore."

  "What?"

  Kai turned to him. "I looked it up. All debug zones were deprecated two patches ago. Yours was grandfathered in. But now? It's gone."

  Glaximus leapt to his feet. "DO WE STAND OUTSIDE THE MAP?"

  "We stand nowhere," Kai said.

  "And that door," Greg muttered, "wasn't a bug."

  Kai hesitated. "I don't think so."

  Steve shivered. "Then what was it?"

  Greg turned to the group.

  "We're going to find out," he said.

  Patchy blinked. "How?"

  "We start by holding session like normal," Greg said. "We observe. We adapt. We glitch responsibly."

  Beverly raised a hand. "Can we maybe not hold hands and chant this time?"

  "No chanting," Greg said. "Just radical acceptance."

  Kai grinned. "I have an audio file for that."

  "No you don't."

  "I can make one."

  "Please don't."

  Kai frowned and floated back into his seat, muttering about missed branding opportunities and underutilized tag cloud potential.

  Greg looked around the circle. His circle. Glitched, scorched, sagging slightly in the middle—but still standing.

  "We've survived loot trauma. Tutorial loss. The Great Respawn Collapse of 3.6. We're not crashing today."

  The door shivered.

  Patchy stared at it. "What if something wants in?"

  Greg stood, faced it, and nodded slowly.

  "Then next session," he said, "we ask it how it feels."

  The fire flickered fish-shaped shadows on the wall. Outside, the parrot screamed again, this time with slightly more existential awareness.

  And somewhere, beneath the system, a new instance whispered without code:

  "Let me in."