With the death of a grieving soul, a chance is given to the innocent...
Feeling like he just woke up from a nightmare, Nick woke up. He had expected to see either his office or that familiar dusty gray ceiling of his bedroom, but what he saw was something that he never heard about from any religious sermon. It wasn't either Heaven or Hell in the sense that there wasn't any pearly white gates with Saint Peter manning the gates nor fire and brimstone for damned souls lined up to be judged for their crimes in life.
All around him was a dark crimson sea and an endless sense of dreadful despair. He looked up to witness stars going out—blinking in and out—as if this place was beyond the reach of those stars. While he looked up to witness the blinking stars, he daydreamed of what happened after his death.
=={DW:NG}==
After the explosion happened and the news broke out that Nick Jackson was dead, everything slowly broke down. The game company Nick once worked at, Alternate Reality, suffered an immense setback as the project Nick last worked on was destroyed in the blast.
His coworkers tried desperately to recover what little they could, but considering most of their backups were on servers on the third floor where their offices used to be, it was clear that this game wasn't ever going to see the light of day. Blood ofAnima held the potential to bring in a lot of much-needed revenue to the company, yet the explosion forever destroyed the company's bright future.
With the news of the game's unexpected cancellation and refunds of all the pre-orders, it put the company on the edge of bankruptcy. Investors were smelling blood in the water as the company was going to crumble into nothing and began to pull out their investments. This was also a sign that the mysterious killer's plan worked in eradicating the traces of Nick's life from the world, yet it also worked too well.
Despite the glaring stupidity in designing the game offices with their backup servers in the same floor, the security offices were on the ground floor and remained unaffected by the explosion. As the company security began to go through the tapes, they ultimately uncovered that someone suspicious visited the company the night before the explosion. With this discovery, they immediately called the police.
Days later, they brought in a crazed madwoman in. The woman was shrieking in joy, her eyes full of deranged satisfaction, as she kept on saying how she had been avenged for a previous wrong. With the investigation digging in deeper, the police uncovered that this woman they brought in, a lady by the name of Allison Miller, is an extreme homophobe and had once tried to go out with the victim in high school. When Nick rejected her due to having a boyfriend and that his preferences lay with males only, she became devastated to the point her resentment slowly boiled in her blood.
For over a decade, her homophobia fed into her resentment and twisted it into something completely deranged. She had found a new love and married him, yet despite concerns from his family, it only took one single night for her twisted mind to break apart.
One dark night, she went into her child's bedroom and committed a horrible and unspeakable act. This act, done in her dark madness, left a blood-stained teddy bear and a self-implanted seed of "righteous revenge" against her perceived target.
Now, much later and with her "revenge plans" carried out, she broke out of the maniac mindset she was in and had plans to flee into another country. She divorced her husband and left him with a much more peaceful mind filled with Zen, but just as she was going to purchase a plane ticket to leave for another country, the police quickly apprehended her. They told her of the crimes she committed and that sent her spiraling back into her maniac state, but as mentioned previously, this maniac state allowed her to shriek in joy about killing Nick to avenge a past wrong.
From this point, the investigation drew to a close and the killer was brought to justice...
=={DW:NG}==
Stirred from the dream, Nick wandered along the thin line where land and sea meet. As the stars blinked in and out above, bathing this place in an eerie starry twilight, something in the water drew Nick's attention.
He didn't know what he had seen in the dark waters of the sea in front of him, but what he did know was that something terrifying had glanced at him. While normal glances didn't hold much weight, this one somehow had more than enough to make Nick breathless and his soul shiver in dreadful fear.
Then, like a fog parting in the soft morning sunlight, Nick trembled in place. He looked at his own hands and feet to find that, instead of warm living flesh and blood, they were translucent and somewhat crystalline. While he did instinctively know that he was dead, seeing his soul like this was a different story.
A thought came to mind as he saw this weird and odd structure of his soul. He asked himself what would happened if he dived into the dark crimson water and he did want to test that, but before he could, something happened.
[Integration Progression: 80%]
A translucent cerulean screen popped up in front of Nick's vision. This stopped him from diving into the dark crimson water, but it did not stop the same water from touching his hands, feet, lower arms up to the elbow, and legs up to his knees.
When this happened, Nick felt sick. It was like this water was toxic to his current being and he regretted trying to dive into the water, but even as he retreated back further into dry land, the toxic stains on his soul remained. His hands, arms, legs, and feet remained stained a toxic dark crimson color for a short moment, but the color slowly turned darker.