A F K

“I always wondered what happens when you’re A.F.K.”
That's what I asked my 12-year-old self a year ago. You see, back then, I was a ROBLOX '''FANATIC. I was always the “weird kid” '''growing up, so I didn’t have that many friends, and the ones I had lived far away. To get rid of my loneliness, I played ROBLOX everyday whenever I could. I liked to discover every little nook and cranny in each game, filling my days with playing and building, I had a lot of virtual friends. One friend, named “Jadewind406” messaged me, telling me that she was in a server where a guy was A.F.K., and he was hacked. Being the curious little child I was, I decided to try an experiment - an experiment in which the results still haunt me today.

So, I devised a plan. I would play around a bit on the server, type “AFK for a bit” in chat, start a preset timer, and just watch my screen for 5 minutes. I was convinced that something weird would happen the first time, but I was wrong. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened, but being me, I decided to keep trying. As, you might have guessed, still, nothing happened. Again, and again I tried, and nothing. Absolutely nothing. I thought Jade was lying to me, so I asked her if she was trolling me. She told me she wasn’t, so I decided to try one last time.

I did my usual routine, but this time, I thought about everything that I had done. So determined to prove myself and I was made a fool. All the effort had been for nothing. I decided to stop early. I was just about to push the stop button on my timer when, right then, in that moment, I saw a figure walking toward me.

It looked like an NPC, its body was light gray while wearing nothing, and its face was a simple default smile. I saw its name tag “AFK”. Since I was in a roleplay game, I thought it was just an r.p. name. I checked the player list and I saw the name “AFK”. I realized this was no joke, and I tried to move, but I was stuck in place. Desperately, I tried exiting the game, then resetting my character, but nothing happened. Slowly, the figure got closer, and it became distorted, its eyes turning red. I was the forced into first-person-mode, and soon, I mostly saw the figure. It walked right up to me, and all I saw was the distorted, horrifying face of the figure. I screamed for help, but all I heard was a loud, horrible noise drowning out all other sounds. I looked at the chat, and everybody was freaking out. From what I saw, we had been teleported to another area. I frantically tried to turn off my computer, but it stayed on. Suddenly, the game froze and the sound stopped. Relief flooded through me. I had been disconnected. I looked up at the top of my screen for the message. Instead of saying “You have lost connection, please reconnect“, it said “look in the mirror“. I became scared again, but I a new sense of curiosity took over my fear. Slowly, I got up from my desk, walked up to the mirror and saw......

........... That the face of the figure was now my own.