The pale glow of Alex's laptop screen painted harsh shadows across the cramped dorm room as another Honkai: Star Rail battle concluded with the familiar victory fanfare. Empty energy drink cans formed a small aluminum graveyard beside their textbooks, and somewhere beneath the scattered notes on stellar mechanics lay a half-eaten sandwich that had been forgotten hours ago.
"Come on, just one more pull," Alex muttered, fingers hovering over the mouse. The latest banner featured Dan Heng's new form, and despite knowing the odds were terrible, the temptation gnawed at them like a persistent itch. Their wallet disagreed, but finals week had a way of making bad decisions seem reasonable.
The astrophysics exam loomed tomorrow morning—something about binary star systems and gravitational waves that Professor Martinez had droned about for three weeks. Alex should have been reviewing orbital mechanics, not trying to understand why a fictional train traveled through space. The irony wasn't lost on them.
They glanced at the clock: 2:47 AM. Definitely too late to start studying properly now. Besides, the soft piano melody from the game's main menu had a hypnotic quality that made the real world feel distant and unimportant. In Star Rail, problems could be solved with the right team composition and enough coffee. If only actual stellar physics worked the same way.
A notification pinged—someone in their study group asking about tomorrow's exam. Alex minimized the game window and typed back a half-hearted response about meeting at the library, knowing full well they'd probably oversleep and show up with ink stains on their fingers and the faint smell of defeat clinging to their clothes.
The dorm room felt smaller tonight, walls pressing in with the weight of unfinished assignments and uncertain futures. Everyone else seemed to have their lives figured out—internships lined up, graduate school applications submitted, five-year plans that didn't involve staying up until dawn playing mobile games. Alex's plan currently extended about as far as "pass finals, maybe."
They returned to the game, watching Himeko guide the Astral Express through another stunning vista of impossible space. The visual design never failed to amaze them—whoever worked on the backgrounds clearly understood the romance of the cosmos in a way that Alex's professors, for all their knowledge, seemed to miss. Stars weren't just nuclear furnaces; they were beacons calling to something deeper than scientific curiosity.
The gacha screen appeared again. Dan Heng's crimson eyes stared out from the promotional art with an intensity that seemed almost accusatory. You're wasting time, that expression seemed to say. You're wasting everything.
Alex closed the banner without pulling. Even fictional characters were judging their life choices now.
A strange sound made them look up from the screen—like wind chimes in a hurricane, if wind chimes could carry music from another dimension. The laptop speakers weren't producing it; this came from outside, filtering through the thin dorm walls with an otherworldly quality that raised goosebumps along Alex's arms.
They walked to the window, expecting to see late-night revelers or maybe construction work from the new science building. Instead, the sky above campus writhed with colors that had no business existing in the middle of Illinois. Sheets of green and gold aurora danced across the stars, pulsing in rhythm with that impossible music.
"What the hell?" Alex fumbled for their phone, fingers shaking as they tried to focus the camera. Aurora borealis this far south was impossible—completely, utterly impossible. They'd studied atmospheric physics enough to know that solar activity strong enough to produce aurora at this latitude should have knocked out half the power grid.
The lights grew brighter, more violent. Other students were emerging from nearby dorms, pointing and shouting, their voices barely audible over the growing celestial symphony. Someone was livestreaming; someone else was calling their physics professor. Normal responses to an abnormal situation.
Alex pressed their face against the window glass, watching the aurora spiral inward like a cosmic whirlpool. The music was louder now, and underneath it ran a deeper sound—the distant whistle of a train that couldn't possibly exist.
The laptop screen flickered. For just a moment, the game's startup logo appeared without Alex touching anything: Across the Star Rail. Then the aurora pulsed once, brilliantly, and every electronic device in the dorm went dark.
In the sudden silence that followed, Alex could hear their own heartbeat and the confused murmurs of other students. Emergency lighting kicked in, bathing everything in hellish red. Through the window, the aurora began to fade, leaving only ordinary stars and the lingering scent of ozone.
"Did everyone see that?" someone shouted from the hallway.
Alex remained at the window, staring at the now-normal sky. Their laptop remained dead, the screen black as space. When they tried the power button, nothing happened. The mysterious aurora had apparently fried every electronic device on campus.
But that wasn't what bothered them. What bothered them was the certainty—irrational but absolute—that the aurora had been looking back at them. That somewhere in those impossible lights, something had taken notice of one lonely astrophysics student playing games instead of studying for finals.
They tried to convince themselves it was just a freak solar storm, a once-in-a-lifetime geomagnetic event that would have scientists scrambling for explanations. These things happened. Not often, but they happened.
The train whistle sounded again, closer this time.
Alex closed their eyes and waited for the world to end.