Don’t Play This Game: Event 5: An Insidious Incident
It started with a song.
“Creep.”
Not the Radiohead one—the mxmtoon cover.
It’s my favourite song. Always has been, since the first time I heard it in Life Is Strange:True Colors.
It’s not something you hear out in the world. Not on the radio. Not in cafés. It’s not that kind of song.
So when I heard it, faintly, playing from an open shop door while I was walking through the village, I froze.
Part of me felt… elated. Like the universe was giving me a moment. A secret handshake.
But then I heard it again, twenty minutes later, piped from a garden speaker as I passed someone’s fence.
Then again, two days later, through someone’s phone speaker on the bus.
It wasn’t on a playlist. It wasn’t a hit.
It was following me.
I tried to tell myself it was coincidence. I even smiled the first few times. Thought maybe it was just synchronicity, some weird twist of fate that had dropped a comfort into the chaos.
But the record player started spinning up the track on its own—even when I’d put on something completely different.
And in the car? It overwrote my podcast. No signal. No Wi-Fi. No data. Just… her voice. Soft and broken and wrong now.
Every time the song played, I felt it. A pull. A shiver like something walking over my grave.
And every time, without fail, there was a magpie.
The same one, I think.
Jet-black eyes, glossy feathers. Watching.
Perched on the fence, the wires, the windowsill.
It didn’t do anything.
But it never left until the song ended.
I started trying to shut it out. Unplugged the stereo. Packed up the vinyl—my favourite record, now turned against me. I uninstalled True Colors from my laptop. Walked with earbuds in, no music, just dead silence.
Still, the song found its way in.
Until it didn’t.
Eventually, the song stopped. The magpie vanished. Luck, maybe. Maybe it was satisfied. Maybe it just moved on.
But that feeling—that someone reached into my memories, took something beautiful, and used it to scratch their way under my skin—
That doesn’t fade.
It wasn’t just haunting me.
It was mocking me.
And for a moment, I listened like it meant something good.
DON'T PLAY THIS GAME is a Solo TTRPG
