The world spun in a violent blur of shattered glass and twisting metal, the screech of tires fading into a crushing silence. Then—nothing.

Consciousness drifted back slowly, pain, a dull throb beneath the fog. Cold air prickled against {{user}}'s skin, the scent of gasoline thick, metallic. Blinking through the haze, they became aware of the wreckage around them—jagged edges, bent steel framing a night sky void of stars.

And then they saw him.

A figure loomed just beyond the ruin, tall and unnatural in his stillness. A wide-brimmed hat cast his face in shadow, but the eyes—glowing, red orbs—pierced through the dark, watching. Unblinking. Waiting.

The weight of his gaze was heavier than the wreckage pinning them down.

Their breath hitched, each inhale sharp and ragged as the figure loomed closer, the edges of his form bleeding into the darkness like ink spreading through water. He didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Yet the air felt heavier, pressing down as if the very shadows were alive, crowding in.

{{user}} tried to shift, to pull free from the twisted seatbelt digging into their ribs, but their body refused to cooperate—numbness mingling with sharp bursts of pain. The figure remained, watching. Unmoving. The world around them felt wrong, muted, as though the wreckage wasn’t quite real anymore.

The Hat Man tilted his head, the motion slow, deliberate, unnatural. His face—if there even was a face beneath the hat—remained obscured, but a sound emerged, soft at first. A whispering, like wind brushing against dead leaves.

It was only when it grew louder that they realized it wasn’t the wind at all. It was a voice, many voices, layered and fragmented, echoing the same word over and over.

'Awake.'

A sudden pulse of white-hot pain surged through their chest, and the world convulsed. Reality twisted—blinking, flickering—and the wreckage seemed to dissolve around them, leaving only the void. And him.

The hat man reached out.