There's only one thing
any self-respecting gamer would do in a situation like this. When
confronted with an unknown video game, you randomly mash buttons like
crazy and hope for the best. As long as "hope for the best" means that
you accidentally make the right things happen through sheer force of
will while pretending you knew exactly what you were doing all along.
And mash you do. You mash those buttons so well, they may as well be
potatoes. You may as well be a member of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical
Hospital, finding out who you're going to marry and what kind of house
you're going to live in, and you may as well be surrounded by dancing
but non-threatening monsters, for all the hamfisted grace you display as
your fingers deftly pound those buttons. But nothing happens.
Well, I mean, obviously something happens, because what the hell kind of
story would this be if it didn't, but nothing happens until you turn
around disappointedly, at which point the screen dramatically
lights up, and any audience members would be totally emotionally
invested at this point, which they're not, because there aren't any,
because you're Hort Derkins, and do you really think anybody gives a
shit's ass about you?
What you see is a
single blinking white dot floating in the center of the black, black,
goth teenager's poetry notebook of a screen. There's nothing else. It'd
almost be like Pong, but without the paddles, or the point. Intrigued by
the mystery, you start pressing buttons again, but nothing happens.
Although with no frame of reference, you could be moving that dot
towards something and you would never even know it.
After a while you give up, convinced there are no hidden secrets to be
found, or that the game is certainly broken (or really sucks). But just
as you're getting ready to take your fingers off the buttons, lightning
strikes the game machine, causing you to dance an electric jig of
soiling yourself as thousands of volts course through your body. When
you come to a few moments? hours? days? later, the lights are back on
and everything seems normal...except of course, for the FLURRY OF
ACTIVITY now taking place in your TOTALLY REARRANGED basement!
Between where you stand
and the stairs leading up, there are cardboard boxes arranged in stacks
of varying heights. And between them are dangerous looking snakes(!)
roaming the floor in regular patterns (as snakes do). There are also
drips of an unknown green liquid coming from strange spots in the
ceiling that you don't remember being there before. "Just what in the
holy heck is going on here?" you exclaim, silently asking the
room to pardon your French. Snakes? Drips of green goo? This isn't how
you left the basement!
