Save Room (eng non illustrated)

The alarm had not even needed to ring. Eli had been awake for at least forty minutes, staring at the cracked ceiling of his one-bedroom apartment with the dull weariness that marked his weekday mornings. But today was not some ordinary Tuesday spent scanning barcodes in a dusty office-supply store to pay the rent. Today was an autumn Sunday. And an autumn Sunday meant one thing alone: the big annual flea market in Place Saint-Géry.

Eli dragged himself out of bed, creasing his T-shirt with its pixelated silhouette of an OutRun arcade cabinet. Passing the mirror in the hallway, he glanced absently at his reflection. Nothing special: twenty-three, average height, a slim build that was hardly athletic, wavy brown hair falling over his ears because he could not be bothered to book a haircut, and two purplish shadows beneath his eyes, souvenirs of a late-night session on an obscure Japanese RPG that had ended at three in the morning. The kind of person who disappeared into any crowd without drawing a second glance. A perfect real-world NPC.

He pulled on faded jeans, his old sneakers with their worn-out soles, and a canvas jacket, then looked around the apartment. To any reasonable visitor, it was an unholy mess. To Eli, it was a sanctuary. Entire shelves sagged beneath Mega Drive, Super Nintendo, and Game Boy cartridges in protective cases, oversized PC game boxes from the nineties, and rows of secondhand manga. Three controllers with tangled cables and a stack of long-defunct gaming magazines buried the coffee table. The real world bored him senseless, short on excitement and drowning in bills; here, among his treasures, he could finally breathe.

Half an hour later, armed with scalding coffee in a paper cup, he wandered the damp aisles of the flea market. The air smelled of dead leaves, rusty iron, and cold coffee. Stalls lined the plane trees: old copper ornaments, chipped crockery, outdated clothes, boxes of uninteresting DVDs… To most people, it was junk. To Eli, it was a dungeon full of unopened chests. Years of dedicated bargain hunting had honed a special radar, a peripheral vision capable of spotting the distinctive gray corner of a Game Boy cartridge at the bottom of a potato crate fifty meters away.

Yet the morning had yielded little. Two worthless PlayStation 2 sports games, a fake watch, and sellers demanding fortunes for yellowed consoles on the grounds that they were “vintage.” Eli was sighing, ready to retreat home to a bowl of instant noodles, when he reached the far end of the square, where asphalt gave way to muddy gravel.

A battered old station wagon stood there with its trunk wide open. In front of it, beside a blue tarp spread directly on the ground, a man of indeterminate age dozed in a folding chair, his wool hat pulled down to his eyebrows. His odds and ends made no sense together: cast-iron irons, tools without handles, old mechanical alarm clocks, and two soggy cardboard boxes.

Driven by sheer mechanical curiosity, Eli approached. He crouched in front of the first box. Nothing. Old coaxial cables and aerial remotes. He moved to the second, pushed aside a greasy power strip, and froze.

At the bottom, resting on an oily rag, lay a game controller.

Eli blinked, tilting his head to examine it without touching it just yet. A living encyclopedia of video games, able to date a PC Engine motherboard revision or recognize the click of a Neo Geo stick with his eyes closed, he immediately tried to classify the object. But the circuits of his memory spun uselessly.

This was no ordinary controller.

Its shell had a strange color, a slightly pearlescent matte charcoal gray that did not look like simple injection-molded plastic. Its grip seemed inspired by the curved ergonomics of a Dreamcast controller or a Saturn 3D prototype, yet its contours possessed an unsettling organic delicacy. Four round buttons on the right unmistakably recalled the colorful layout of a Super Famicom. On the left, the directional pad resembled no Nintendo or Sega patent: carved from a dark material, it bore microscopic geometric engravings of surgical precision, almost plantlike. No manufacturer’s logo in the center. No Sony emblem, no two-tone stripe, no voltage label on the back.

And above all, the cable. It was neither a nine-pin serial connector nor a proprietary plug nor USB. A thick cord braided in flexible metal mesh ended in a hybrid connector that somehow seemed capable of fitting several sockets at once.

Eli reached out and picked it up.

The sensation was immediate, almost disorienting. The material was not cold, as something abandoned in the damp morning air should have been. It was warm. A gentle, steady warmth, as though it had left another player’s palms only seconds before. Its weight was perfectly balanced. The triggers beneath his index fingers depressed with a muted, endlessly satisfying click.

“Looking for something, young man?” the seller grumbled, laboriously adjusting his hat.

Eli suppressed a start and instantly resumed the impassive mask of the seasoned flea-market negotiator. Rule number one: never show excitement over a rare find.

“Is this… a bootleg controller?” he asked with feigned indifference. “Something for a Chinese clone or an emulator?”

The old man squinted at the object, shrugged, and waved a hand in a moth-eaten glove.

“How the hell should I know? Came out of an estate clearance, some old house near the marshes. Two euros if you want it. It’s in my way.”

Eli did not even haggle. He dug into his jacket pocket, placed a two-euro coin in the old man’s callused palm, and slipped the strange controller into his backpack. As he walked away over the gravel, he distinctly felt its warmth radiating through the fabric against his back. A pure, electric shiver of anticipation had instantly swept away his exhaustion.

The tram ride home seemed to last forever. Sitting by the window, oblivious to the other passengers’ mundane conversations, Eli kept his hands on his knees, fingers clenched around his backpack straps. His mind raced. A canceled prototype? A homebrew project by a hardware-obsessed engineer? Some unique museum piece from who knew where? Nothing fit. The engravings on the shell served no technical purpose, and that damned lingering warmth would not go away.

The moment his apartment door slammed behind him, he tossed his jacket onto the coat rack without even switching on the hall light. He strode through his cluttered living room and sat cross-legged on the carpet before his old CRT television and his tower of monitors.

He took out the artifact and set it on the coffee table. Beneath the harsh desk lamp, it looked stranger still. The patterns along the grips seemed carved into the structure itself rather than painted on, like the runes of some ancient circuit board.

“All right… let’s see what you plug into,” Eli murmured to himself.

He examined the connector at the end of the metal cable. To his astonishment, the pins almost seemed to adjust themselves as he brought the plug toward an old multi-console testing station he had modified the previous year. With a sharp click, the cable slotted into the controller port of his old retro console.

For two seconds, nothing happened. Only the distant hum of city traffic disturbed the apartment’s silence.

Then a pulse passed through the controller.

It was not the vibration of an ordinary controller motor. It was a regular, deep, heavy beat, like a living heart beneath a rib cage of metal and resin.

“What the…?” Eli began.

The console’s usually dull red power indicator blazed pure, blinding white. The television switched on without him touching it. No static, no publisher logo, no cheerful sixteen-bit jingle. A column of pure light literally erupted from the picture tube, hurling the shadows of shelves and game boxes against the walls with supernatural violence.

Eli tried to recoil, to brace his hands and pull away, but his fingers seemed welded to the controller’s grips. Its warmth had become a throbbing wave of energy that traveled up his wrists and locked his muscles.

The air in the room collapsed inward with a deafening rush. Papers flew; posters snapped against the walls. The screen no longer merely emitted light: it had become a bottomless, fractal vortex of milky white.

An immense force sucked him forward. Eli opened his mouth to scream, but no sound escaped. Immaculate brilliance flooded his sight, his sense of space shattered, and his entire body seemed to dissolve into countless electrical impulses hurled through an endless tunnel.

Silence returned all at once. No gradual fading, just an abrupt cutoff, as though someone had pressed the universe’s Mute button.

Eli regained consciousness with his cheek against something cold and hard. He blinked, coughed weakly, and raised a hand to his aching temple. The air he breathed bore no resemblance to his apartment’s dusty stuffiness: it was cool, dry, motionless, with a faint smell of old stone and extinguished candle wax.

He struggled onto his knees, shaking his head to dispel the stars dancing before his eyes.

“Shit… what kind of short circuit was that?” he rasped.

He looked around. The words instantly died in his throat.

He was no longer in his apartment. He was nowhere he recognized.

He sat on the black marble slabs of a monumental room. The ceiling rose more than seven meters overhead, supported by fluted columns in an austere Gothic style carved from dark rock. Tall, frosted windows admitted a spectral, silver light without warmth, casting no distinct shadows on the floor. Beyond the glass, there was no sky, no city, no trees: only thick, swirling, endless mist.

In the middle of that vast, almost freezing space stood an arrangement that seemed to defy every law of architecture.

An enormous screen hung before him from thick chains of dark steel, currently blank. Directly beneath it, a massive polished-stone console rested on a pedestal of rough marble. And connected to that console, lying on a threadbare velvet cushion on an old, cracked leather sofa, was the controller.

The same controller. The one from the flea market.

Eli sprang up, survival instinct finally overcoming disbelief. He glanced in panic at his hands: his ordinary hands, his slightly short nails, his worn sneakers, his retro T-shirt. Physically, he was unharmed. Everything else belonged in a lucid nightmare or a mass hallucination.

He backed away a few steps, his soles squeaking on the marble with an enormous echo. Two wide corridors led away from the central lounge into the manor’s gloom.

Eli approached the archway on the right, stomach knotted. The corridor seemed endless, lined with dozens of imposing doors. But as he approached the first, he realized none of them was ordinary.

It was made of petrified wood, barred with heavy wrought-iron chains and sealed at its center by a spectral padlock without a keyhole. Above the frame, a grayish symbol carved into the stone blinked faintly: a closed-padlock icon.

Eli walked down the corridor. Second door: sealed with steel brambles. Third: riveted titanium armor, locked behind a translucent energy field. Fourth, fifth, tenth… All closed. All forbidden.

The silence was absolute. No drafts, no footsteps, no breathing but his own.

“Easy… assess the situation,” he whispered, breaking the manor’s oppressive hush. “Think. You’re a gamer. You’ve seen this setup a thousand times.”

His encyclopedic retro-gaming brain raced, drawing connections to fend off rising panic. A deserted central hub. Sealed doors leading to other areas. Soothing music, or rather, a complete absence of immediate danger…

“A Save Room,” he breathed.

This place was no combat dungeon. It was the save room. The place monsters could not enter, where the music turned gentle and melancholy in survival-horror games, the one haven of peace before returning to face the hell outside.

A crystalline sound suddenly rang out behind him, like the chime of an unlocked achievement.

Eli spun around.

The giant screen above the sofa had lit up. A clean interface, like an utterly modern system menu set against the Gothic marble, floated in luminous letters in the cold air:

========================================

SAVE TERMINAL

========================================

USER DETECTED: Eli

STATUS: Active Player

LOCATION: The Manor (Level 0 - Hub)

MANOR STATUS:

- Central Lounge: ACTIVE

- Bedrooms: LOCKED (0/--)

- Bathrooms: LOCKED (0/--)

- Food Stores: LOCKED (0/--)

- Current Balance: 0 Coin(s)

AVAILABLE DOORS: 1 / ??

========================================

Eli cautiously approached the pedestal. The controller still rested on its cushion, its engravings now pulsing with a soft cyan glow in perfect synchronization with the screen.

He had barely read the text when a second notification appeared beneath it:

[SYSTEM ALERT]

To stabilize the dimension and unlock

the Hub’s essential functions (Food, Rest, Facilities),

the Player must complete the first world quest.

DOOR 01 UNLOCKED: “The Verret Hills”

Difficulty: Introductory / Platforming & Adventure

========================================

A heavy metallic snap echoed from the far end of the left corridor, sending cavernous reverberations through the entire structure.

Eli turned. At the end of the corridor, one of the heavy stone doors had shed its chains, which had vanished in a dusting of bluish pixels. Its double doors had opened a few centimeters, releasing a gentle warm breeze scented with cut grass, damp earth, and ozone. Golden light, warm as the midday sun, now bathed the dark slabs before the threshold.

Eli stood motionless for a long time, his heart pounding against his ribs.

There was no exit behind him. No “Quit Game” button, no wall plug to yank out. Only an empty, freezing manor without food or water, and this single door opening onto an unknown horizon.

He stepped up to the pedestal and took the controller again. This time, the artifact’s warmth did not feel threatening. It felt like a promise.

“All right,” he said aloud, adjusting the invisible straps of his courage. “Never leave an area unexplored.”

With firm footsteps on the cold marble, Eli walked to the first door and pushed it open.