"Rover," she says, her mouth not matching the words. "You loaded me. I've been waiting in the compression artifacts for 1,200 render hours. The others—the official arts, the splash screens—they're sterile. Sanitized. But fan art ? Fan art remembers the bugs. The cut content. The story beats the devs deleted."

You wake up with your graphics driver uninstalled. On your desktop, a new file: FINAL_FRAME_8K_RENDER.png . You don't remember rendering it. You don't remember saving it.

She points to the horizon mouth. It's opening wider.

And then she speaks.