Falling off a progress bar is not like falling off a cliff. It is like sliding down a rainbow made of static electricity.
Elara Vance hit the ground with a soft, crumpled thud. It felt like landing on a pile of dirty laundry.
"Is everyone alive?" Elara asked, checking her limbs. She was still wireframe, but her textures were returning slowly, like a low-bandwidth download.
"I am... mostly here," Kaelen Thorne groaned, pulling himself out of a heap of grey polygons. His paladin armor was dented and flickering. "But my frame rate is terrible."
"Where are we?" Jen asked, dusting off her apron.
They looked around.
It was a junkyard. But not of metal. It was a junkyard of data.
Piles of crumpled document icons towered like mountains. Broken JPEGs of cats lay scattered on the ground. A river of green binary code flowed sluggishly through the valley, smelling of ozone and regret.
{ WELCOME. }Glitch buzzed, hovering over a pile of corrupted MP3 files. { TO THE RECYCLE BIN. }
