I turned and ran as fast as my rarely used legs could carry me. I didn’t stop to look back until I was at my door, and even then, I only spared the hallway a glance as I fumbled for my key. It was empty, at least as far as the corner where I had run into that… thing. Luckily, it remained that way long enough for me to get into my apartment. I slammed the door behind me and winced as I realized that the noise could give away my location. Either way, I was trapped. There was either a goblin between me and the elevators, or I was having a psychotic breakdown. With my addiction to sleepless gaming marathons and caffeine overdoses, a psychotic break was a far more likely scenario.

‘I don’t know what to do! I am freaking out right now! Should I try to fight my way out? Do I sit here and wait for it to find me? Am I crazy? Was that just a normal kid?’ I asked myself. My eyes searched the room for the best weapon I could find in case it came after me when I realized the most obvious solution was right in my own pocket. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed 9-1-1. I would let a cop decide if there was a goblin after me or if I had completely lost it, but the call didn’t go through. I checked my phone, hoping it was something simple, and instead, I had no service, which is strange because I have never had anything less than perfect cell reception here before. My carrier’s cell tower was just on top of one of the buildings across the street. Instead of a signal, I had tons of missed texts, calls, and social media alerts. I tried to check them to see what the hell was going on, but that was pointless too. These days new phones are merely streaming devices, and absolutely everything is stored on the cloud. I tried my computer, but it couldn't connect to the internet, which meant it was just as useless as my phone for retrieving messages or contacting someone.

I walked over to my floor to ceiling windows overlooking the bay. Since I was cut off from the internet, phones, and the elevators, this was the only way to see the outside world. They were double-paned and entirely soundproof, and they were covered by a retractable total blackout shade. I spent most of my life wearing a VR helmet playing Bellum Aeternam and never kept a proper sleep schedule, so the blackout shade was absolutely essential. I pressed the button, and the shade rapidly retracted into a spool in the ceiling, and I immediately wished I hadn’t pressed that damn button. San Francisco, the beautiful city I had never bothered to enjoy, was nothing like it had been the last time I saw it.

Massive, hideous skyscrapers wrought of black metal and with none of the glass or shine of modern buildings had appeared from nowhere, but they filled space between buildings that had never been there before. Squeezed just between the Providian financial building and the massive construction project next to it was one of these gigantic, foreboding buildings. The small three-story office building and the parking lot were still there between the Providian skyscraper and her mostly finished neighbor. This monstrosity had somehow made more room for itself. The waterfront was three or four times as far away as I remembered it being, and more generic modern skyscrapers had appeared to fill that distance as well. I could only see a sliver of the water that had been nearly half of my view. Then there were the fires.

Several buildings were up in flames, and smoke billowed into the air. Glass and steel skyscrapers were generally pretty good about not allowing fires to spread from one to the other, but the cause of the veritable inferno spewing ash into the air was on top of that nearly completed skyscraper that used to be next to the Providian building. A massive red dragon was perched atop the steel beams of the unfinished structure and seemed to be picking his teeth with his claws as if he had just finished a meal.

I slammed my hand onto the button to close the shade, but as the barrier came down, the movement must have caught the dragon’s eye, and the monster stared straight at me as it continued to pick out its teeth. I was so terrified that I couldn't blink or breathe. The few seconds it took for the shade to seal off the light, and the view from the outside world seemed as if they were an eternity.

“Fuck.” was all I managed to mutter as I sank to my knees, staring at the thin black shade and the fragile window panes behind it that were all that stood between myself and a goddamn dragon.