From: Systems Analyst M. Chen To: Internal Game Dev Team Priority: CRITICAL
We laughed it off. A hoax. A creepypasta. Then we checked the support ticket metadata.
The user’s IP was from a town in Alaska. No internet service provider had coverage there for 200 miles. And the attached screenshot showed a lobby with four players: Red, Blue, Yellow, and a color that wasn’t in the game’s palette. A deep, shifting black that seemed to absorb the pixels around it.
I closed the laptop. I unplugged everything. I sat in the dark for a long time. Among Us Xgameruntime.dll
Because when a client loaded Xgameruntime.dll , the game changed.
She opened an old hard drive. A backup from 2016. Before Among Us. Before InnerSloth. Before any of us worked together. Inside a folder labeled prototypes/ was a file.
RUN GAME LOOP
“It’s like the compiler wrote it,” she said, zooming in on the disassembled code. “Look. The functions don’t map to anything. They’re just… placeholders. But they execute .”
That’s when the lights in the office flickered. Not a brownout—a rhythmic pattern. Morse code. Sofia decoded it on her phone.
Game starting in 3… 2… 1…
“Crewmate. You have tasks. Complete them. And do not look for me in the vents.”
“It’s on my machine but I’m not running it,” one user wrote on the forums. “I closed Steam. I unplugged Ethernet. But the Among Us window is open. And there’s a match going on. Four of us. No usernames. Just colors. And one of them keeps following me. Not in the game. In my house . My webcam light is on.”
She looked at me. “It’s not a DLL,” she whispered. “It’s a passenger. And it’s been here longer than Among Us.” From: Systems Analyst M