2. The Mirror Takes You

Everything Comes to Light - Choose Your Own Adventure

Jul 08, 2025

You reach for the mirror, and it yields. It’s warm, like a living body. There’s a brief resistance, like pushing through a thick web—until it pulls you in. You’re threaded through like silk. For a single heartbeat too long, you are little more than sinewy organics than complete person.

And now, just bits of information; the sound of temperature, color of memory, and at times only a whiff of nostalgia. Nerve endings firing in the wrong order. You feel your pulse as a blinking light in space. Your ribs don’t know where to settle. Something inside you screams in binary—then silence.

Then comes reassembly. You snap back into shape, standing somehow—upright. Your precious feet touch solid ground. But the world around you is wrong, it is drained. Everything is in grayscale, soft-edged, and moving?

You’re in a room obsessed with mirrors—floor to ceiling, infinite recursion. But the glass doesn't reflect you, not entirely. It shows versions of you: one with wet hair coiled like wire and eyes bloodshot. One bleeding from the palms, holding a book that weeps something sinister. One of you has only one arm. One turns away when you look too long. One that doesn’t, unblinking, with a smile that doesn’t belong on anyone.

Some of them are holding weapons. Some are holding hands. A low whir draws your gaze downward. Your vision blurs and clears. Color has returned to the room, most noticeably blue and red neon flares of blinding light. In the center of the room, sits a console, with a single black button, backlit in a sickly green hue. The word breaths, brightening and fading, it reads:

‘RECLAIM’

You hesitate. Because you know it’s too easy, this has every making of a trap, and pressing this button won’t fix anything…right? What if it makes everything worse? What if it takes something else?

Behind you, the mirror you entered into has sealed to a cool solid silver. The versions of you have started to scream at you, but their voices are muffled—like sound under water. But you can still tell that some are screaming to smash the console, and others begging you to press the button. You can hear your heartbeat, but it’s not just yours anymore.

If you press RECLAIM, skip to Segment #4.
If you smash the console, skip to Segment #5.