Work Text:
Citrus sat down on the bench, taking deep breaths. He really should replace the playing on his legs, they were getting worn out and every step was a chore at the moment.
People were walking by, hurrying little figures paying no mind to the Hub surrounding them. He didn't either, taking off his monocle to clean it.
Then something started.
It didn't register at first, but then their threat central started freaking out. He tensed up and looked around, but there was nothing in sight.
As the Hub wasn't a world, there couldn't be an ordinary mob like a zombie, and the pings he received wasn't the normal pings of an unknown player either. This was a constant stream of purely scrambled and corrupted code and nothing else.
It conflicted in his mind, the reaction central ordering him to do something and simulating distress, but no one else in the Hub seemed to even get so much as goosebumps. That was the strangest thing. No one else even reacted.
Then, as if it'd never been there in the first place, the messages stopped. He hadn't even noticed the high pitch of the reaction and threat central in his head fighting with the visual and analyzer centrals until it disappeared.
And then the screaming began.
They jumped and looked around for the source, but heard another, and another, until it was all a cacaphony of screams. He clapped his hands over his ears to shut out the echos of people's terror, but it still rang in his ears.
He looked across the Hub, aiming for the portals, and his breath caught in his throat.
An eye had blinked open in the wall. It looked as though it had been fused together, built into the empty concrete, but he swore there had never been an eye there before.
It looked around at the people below, seemingly scanning for something, and he felt dazed. The eye hadn't so much as made a crack in the wall, but it wasn't a projection either.
It looked at a young person beside Citrus, who immediately started wailing with a desperate sort of tone. Citrus stood up and looked around for an alleyway, away from the screams.
Then he saw them. A group of six players, running as if chased by the gods themselves, in a nearly empty hallway. Then they disappeared from view, and an enormous purple sphere followed.
Citrus squinted at the hazy mess. Suddenly, for but a second or perhaps all of time, it became a singular. One solid point in the void of the universe.
And the universe looked back.