Perspective: First person

It’s 4th of July or a similar festival. I am going going somewhere or perhaps returning. The sun has already set but the temperature is still pleasant. Fireworks went off overhead on occasion. I’m with a friend and someone she knows. I have a game radar up on my phone. As I’m passing under dark trees, I’m idly playing. I’m playing a game where I get to catch Pokemon or Palworld. Somehow I’m interacting with and seeing them in real life. It’s like using VR. I drop poles into the ground near them and if they touch the pole, they get absorbed. I figure out that there’s a new one in a tunnel nearby. Me and my friends detour through. I dropped a pole down but the creature is not walking into it. My friends even try to lure it to where it needs to go but it just doesn’t work. I give up on it for now and leave.

I end up at my friends house. It is a mansion that is very very old. It had been owned by a different family previously. It also had a dark past. I stayed the night and the next day is overcast. My friend and I started hearing sounds in the basement. When we went down, we kept seeing movement out of the corner of our eye. Excitedly I took out my game app thinking that it was a game creature but there was nothing on the radar.

My stomach dropped.

Quickly I left the basement for the second floor of the house out of caution. I just started to get brave enough to try and investigate again when I looked outside. Against the gray of the sky was a humanoid shadow on the neighboring roof. It moved unnaturally like a sneaking cartoon character. As I was just staring at it when it suddenly looked directly at me.

All I knew in that moment was one thing: that was definitely not a Pokemon.