It was a Friday afternoon in the office when Betty realised her world was losing color.


    When she was younger, the world felt bright, the sky a vivid blue. Greens were so sharp to her eyes that she could almost smell them, delightful like freshly mowed grass on a Saturday morning.


    But she was only twenty-something, she thought. She was twenty-something, and everything was losing color. The world was losing its hues, it was once a sparkling ocean, and now it was just a place where great big storm clouds rolled over, obscuring beauty in their wake.


    Even her name was washed out, she thought. Betty. She pursed her lips in a grimace as she watched the printer-copier suck and thud. A name seen on an obituary at the end of a black and white newspaper, reserved only for those born sixty or seventy years before her.


    She watched the ebb and flow of the copier as if it were something natural. First, a page was pulled into the mechanism, then a bright light brushed the surface, and then it was gone. On and on it went.


    Betty didn’t even realise she had zoned out.


    She was staring at the back of her eyelids, listening to the machine. And in her mind’s eye, she found herself in the middle of a dimly lit warehouse.


    Each click, thud, and scan of the machine dropped pages down from the skylight.


    Click, thud.


    First, a drizzle. Then, a monsoon.


    Click, thud.


    The paper leaves kept falling like corporate snow until she was being suffocated by a mountain of white rectangles.


    And when the summit had breached the ceiling, all light had begun to fade. It was so dark, in fact, reds and blues seemed to meld together. Monochrome.


    Before long, the paper had no more space to pile and pressed down. When it did, she found it harder to breathe. If only it would stop for a moment, she thought. If it would give her a rest, only for a while, then maybe she could last another forty years beneath the mountain.


    “Ah, Betty Beasley!” A voice interrupted.


    When she snapped out of it, she found herself still photocopying in the same office she had found herself in for the last two years.


    “Hi - uh, yes Mr Simmonds?”


    Her boss was a plump, bald man that was bursting at the seams. Betty thought he looked stitched together, like a big beige animal-balloon held together by an odd-fitting dress shirt and trousers.


    “Machine’s out of paper,” He said.


    Betty noticed she was standing in his shadow of sorts, his body blocking out the dull-blue overhead lights of the office printing room.


    “Be a darl’ and fetch some reams for me from the basement, will ya?’


    She caught a waft of coffee-breath as he dropped the keys in her hand, and before long she was off.


    Trailing down the stairs towards the basement, she walked with the pace of somebody not paid enough.


    And when she did, she thought about the daydream she had about being suffocated by mundane paperwork. The same paper, all day, in and out, scanning documents for a company she hardly knew much about. Then she thought about this little job Simmond’s had given her.


    A little sidequest, her mind quipped.


    It dampened her spirits to think about how something simple like being tasked with something out of character at work brought her such joy.


    Even though she had worked at the company for some time, she really didn’t understand what they did there. Most of her job entailed printing and copying purchase orders for codes of products she never saw, objects that she could never visualize in her mind’s eye.


    On the long days it helped time go quicker when she imagined what things people might be buying or what her job really meant in the big world. But she never did figure it out, so she learned to enjoy keeping busy was the best way to keep the clock’s long hand tick-ticking away.


    The elevators never worked in this building, so she walked the stairs down to the lower levels towards the basement.


    And it was on those very stairs when she noticed something.


    It wasn’t a trick of the light, a mirage - Betty’s world really was losing color. Her stomach turned and seemed to bounce with every step. Was she sick? If so, was it her mind, or her body? Her eyes?


    Before long, she had reached the basement door. What she did know was that no-one had visited this dilapidated part of the building in a long, long time. This can’t have been where the company stored office supplies, she thought. It was too untouched, a place where people no longer visited. All it was missing were the cobwebs.


    The steel of the basement door was cold to the touch, and the lights that flickered for a moment dissociated her, further bringing her away from assessing her vision.


    This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    “Hello?” Betty called out.


    The door clicked open and gave way easier than she thought it would.


    “Anyone down here?”


    There was nothing but a small echo in the dark room. She flicked the lightswitch, and long strobes of lights flickered on, each revealing how far the storage room really went.


    The walls inside the room were rather nondescript. Stockpiles of files that spilled out haphazard documents were stacked on each wall of the elongated room. Even so, everything was meticulously labelled and numbered.


    Betty grabbed one of the folders and blew away the coat of dry settlement on top. When she did, dust coated her tongue and throat and caught in the light that shone from overhead.


    Despite the effort that somebody had clearly put into labelling these files, once pulled out, the paper itself contained nothing. No print, no writing, nada.


    That’s when something caught her eye. It was only after the final lamp made a mechanical shutter, click and pop and switched on that she saw it for what it was.


    At the far end of the long room, seemingly a hundred feet away, was a single, blinking computer terminal.


    Betty made her way towards it as fast as she could in her office heels, never keeping her eyes off the documents flanking her sides in case anything of interest popped out to her.


    But nothing ever did.


    Nothing ever popped out to Miss Beasley.


    Everything until now had begun to feel so… washed out.


    But something about the computer screen she was then face to face made her feel alive. It was different. It was mysterious, it was something new.


    Her hands brushed the dust from the keyboard as she stared at the interface. After a while, it whirred on, and a single, green chevron blinked upon its black screen.


    I don’t know what to type - I don’t know how to use these old things, she thought. I just do the copying.


    –HELLO WORKER!--


    A robotic voice sounded from the corner.


    She had been too preoccupied with the computer terminal to notice a small television in the corner. It was mounted the way a security TV might be, hunched and in the corner with a staticky screen reminiscent of all old big-back televisions.


    “Hello?” Betty said.


    She felt unnerved, a sudden feeling of I-shouldn’t-be-here-right-now overcame her. And when she turned her head behind her shoulder, she was reminded how long the hallway was. How far she would need to run out of there.


    –IS YOUR WORLD FEELING DRAB?--


    Upon the screen was a single smiley face that moved to different expressions. The same sort of text-based emotions that Betty may have received from her grandfather testing out texting.


    –LIKE NOTHING MATTERS? LIKE EVERYTHING IS LOSING COLOR?--


    How does this… thing… know about that? It was my mind after all. The marbles had already started rolling, and the track’s out of length. Now they’re falling out, and I’m losing them.


    A short video began rolling on the archaic TV. The visuals were fuzzy and the sound muffled - it reminded Betty of an old VCR.


    The smiley face from earlier flew onto screen with the technology of a PowerPoint animation. From it, a large white beam shot across the display to what seemed to be a cartoonish crystal. Once the light hit the prism, it refracted into several different colors of a rainbow before the robot started speaking again, this time over the logo of his company.


    –PRISM INDUSTRIES: BRINGING COLOR BACK TO YOUR LIFE.--


    For a while, Betty sat in silence, always checking behind her shoulder, half expecting her boss to be standing at the doorway with his arms crossed, half expecting to wake up out of a feverish nightmare in her bedsheets.


    Back on the computer display were a few text boxes she was beckoned to press with Enter and Arrow Keys:


    ***


    CLASS:


    WARRIOR


    ARCHER


    MAGE


    WORLD:


    1 - BLUE


    LEVEL:


    0 - TRAIN


    ***


    –PLEASE SELECT YOUR STARTING CLASS, WORLD AND LEVEL ON THE TERMINAL, WORKER.--


    Her hand reached for a few keys and it hovered there for a moment as she caught her reflection upon the glass.


    Without a second thought, she turned tail and made way for the exit. She couldn’t possibly mess around with the controls, pressing anything at all might make something in the company go awry.


    She pictured Mr Simmonds and his bald head shaking with disapproval if she reached her office floor with no paper reams, nothing but dust and spiderwebs in hand. Before long, her time paid for the week would be cut in half once the higher-ups caught wind.


    She had no time for these sorts of misadventures.


    Luckily for Betty, the walk to the exit was long. Really long. A far stretch of boring documents that spared her enough time to think.


    A moment was all she needed to ponder back to the daydream she had earlier with the pile of documents swallowing her. Enveloping her as she did the same copying and printing day in and day out for a company she hardly knew.


    Betty could hear the lights shutting off behind her every step as she approached the door. The robot was relentless.


    –PLEASE SELECT YOUR STARTING CLASS, WORLD AND LEVEL ON THE TERMINAL, WORKER.--


    Don’t turn around, just go. She thought.


    –PLEASE SELECT YOUR STARTING….--


    She froze for a moment. She never felt a feeling like she had in that moment. That her purpose, until now, was as meaningless as the blank pages filling the documents around her.


    How many years would I survive in this place? She pondered. Screw it.


    With one quick motion, Betty turned back around towards the computer end and began sprinting towards it with all she had. Loose pages of files began to fly into the air and float down to the ground in her wake as her running wind shook them from their shelves.


    She didn’t think to choose a class. She didn’t think about much of anything.


    Betty only thought of doing something new. A game? A puzzle? What was this?


    The floor made an audible screech as she brought herself to the computer and smacked ENTER on the keyboard.


    What’s the worst that could happen?


    The computer whirred, beeped, and played an 8-bit chime.


    That’s when the ground began to shake, and everything turned a blinding white.


    And Betty began falling.


    Very, very quickly.