Interactive fiction where YOU are Abi — a slim 122lb English lit student with a secret who discovers a mysterious potion website. Slow burn, first person, time-tracked.
Friday, September 12 — 1:17 AM
You're lying in bed in your small studio apartment — the one with the narrow kitchen, the secondhand bookshelf overflowing with dog-eared novels, and the single window that looks out onto the alley. It's past 1 AM, and the blue glow of your phone screen is the only light in the room.
Your thumb hovers over the app you never open in public. The one buried three folders deep on your home screen, behind a generic utility icon. Your secret Twitter account — @CuriousAbi_25 — where nobody knows you. Where you follow accounts with names like CurvyCara, PiggyPrincess, and FoodieFantasies. Where you like posts you'd die if anyone saw.
You push a strand of wavy light brown hair behind your ear and absently trace a finger along your collarbone — slim, pale, the same body you've always had. The body everyone at the grocery store sees when you ring up their groceries. The body your professors see when you raise your hand in seminar. The body that doesn't match what you think about when you're alone in this apartment at night.
Tonight, something's different. One of the accounts you follow — @TheWeighStation, who posts cryptic, half-poetic nonsense that most people scroll past — has put up something new. Not a link. Not a direct invitation. Just a short block of text that looks like a poem, or maybe a riddle:
Where the water stills and the light goes dim,the surface is only what you swim in.Find the place below the reflection.Bring your curiosity, not your protection.
Below it, a single string of characters that doesn't look like anything:
t-g-t-o. n-e-t / s-t-i-l-l-w-a-t-e-r
Your heart is hammering. You've seen enough of @TheWeighStation's posts to know this isn't random poetry. The community talks about them in whispers — people who post cryptic things, things that mean something if you already understand, and look like nothing if you don't. You've always been a lurker. You've never followed a thread this far.
You stare at the characters. Your fingers are already moving, reassembling the URL in your head.
t-g-t-o...
What do you do?