Don’t Play This Game: Event 10: The Newspaper
The world had just started to feel normal again.
And then the paper dropped through the door.
Not the digital newsfeeds I usually scroll. A real, ink-smudged, folded-in-half, local paper.
Front page, bottom corner, near the obituaries:
“Mysterious Wreck at Village Entrance Remains Unsolved“
The article explained it away like they always do.
Driver unknown. Vehicle abandoned. No ID. No witnesses. No CCTV footage of how it got there.
The crash was minor. No fire. No blood. The car looked almost placed there—like a warning left at the edge of the road.
The same blue hatchback I saw every single day during the loop.
It wasn’t a coincidence.
I could feel it down to my teeth.
I found the journalist’s name at the bottom of the article: Alec Morrisen.
After a little digging (and one mildly desperate email), we agreed to meet. His only condition?
“If you find out something bigger than what’s in the paper—you tell me first. No games.”
Deal.
We met at a grimy café tucked behind the library, the kind of place that always smells faintly of burnt coffee and old carpet.
Alec was everything you expect from a small-town journalist trying to pretend he hadn’t lost the fire:
- Crumpled jacket.
- Shaky hands from too much caffeine.
- Eyes that didn’t miss a damn thing.
I told him a filtered version of the truth.
Mentioned strange coincidences. Dreams that bled into real life. Patterns that didn’t make sense.
Not the Entity. Not the cursed book. Just enough to keep him interested without getting a mental health welfare check called in.
In return, he told me what the police wouldn’t:
- The car had no VIN number. Scrubbed clean.
- The driver’s seat was soaked in condensation when they opened it—as if someone had just breathed out a soul and left.
- Witnesses saw the car appear overnight. No noise. No headlights. No disturbance. Just there.
He slipped me a scrap of paper before he left, casual as passing the sugar: a name and address.
Someone who lived just across the road from the crash site. Someone who had “seen something.”
Later that night, I went.
Small, sagging cottage overlooking the village entrance. The woman who answered the door looked exhausted, hollow-eyed. She didn’t want to talk at first, but something in my face—desperation? shared trauma?—got her to open up.
She said she saw it.
A figure standing by the wreck the night before the story broke.
Not a driver.
Not a rescuer.
Just standing there, staring into the windshield, long after midnight.
And then… melting away.
She described it in the same way I would have:
“Blacker than night. Wrong.“
Just like the thing in my photos.
Just like the figure in the open doorways.
Just like the thing that’s been following me since all of this began.
It’s not just me.
It’s never been just me.
It’s been here for a long, long time.
Waiting for someone to notice.
DON'T PLAY THIS GAME is a Solo TTRPG
