Username: Cuddlewuffle
Name: Clyde
Gender: Male
Theme Song + Lyrics: That Poppy- Lowlife (Clean Lyric Video)Why This Song? the singer of this song talks about someone who’s the highlight of their lowlife. clyde has a best friend that is always there for him, and is the sunshine of his otherwise gloomy life, aka the “highlight” of his “lowlife”, and i feel like this song expresses that well.
Likes: clyde likes rainy days, the company of friends, the smell of laundry and fresh-cut grass, board games, and reading. he also likes some strangely specific but still enjoyable things as well. (waking up in the middle of the night, during winter, to use the bathroom or get a glass of water, returning to your bedroom and deciding to take a look out the window. peering behind the thin curtain, and finding the world has been covered in a thick blanket of snow. everything is silent, almost unnaturally so, and you can see the snow glistening in perfect sheets beneath the soft orange glow of the streetlights lining the empty road. you gaze upon the beautiful scene, drinking in all of its tranquility. while quietly watching the small flakes of snow drift down from the sky, you want to believe, just for a moment, that magic is real, for how else could something this beautiful come into existence? a feeling of peace washes over you as you take one last look and close the curtain, slowly crawling back into bed. you take a deep breath and find that your mind is clearer, free of the worry and stress and fear you were burdened with before. you sleep easy.)
Dislikes: clyde does his best to be positive, but he does have a number of things he can’t stand. some of which being spiders (and anything else with too many legs), scary video games, horror films, drama movies and being ignored.
Optional Ramble:clyde lives in a relatively small town, with plenty of old buildings. here he has a small group of close friends, who he enjoys being around, talking to and sharing secrets with. the school he goes to has pretty small classes, and everyone knows each other. there’s an old library 20 minutes or so from where he lives, where he’s usually found after school. his best friend is always there for him, but recently they’ve become more distant.
he wonders why.
the town he lives in consists of very reserved people with strange stories to tell. his neighbor wakes up every morning and has the very same conversation with him, about her parakeet and how great it’s been doing and, wouldn’t you know, she got it for half price at the local pet shop! at first, he she had some sort of memory issue. but, no, why would that be? after all, she had never mentioned anything like that, and she talked about
everything. plus, she’s only been doing this for the past two weeks or so. not wanting to be rude, clyde decided to humor her for the first couple days. then, becoming a bit concerned, he decided to ask her about it. “er, haven’t you told me this already...?” he asked, hesitantly. he didn’t want to offend her by implying she had a bad memory and was old, because she was actually quite young. her response was very odd. there was a pause, in which clyde could see that her smile became just the slightest bit forced. she stared at him, blankly, for a couple more seconds, before replying. “whatever do you mean? didn’t i say i bought it from them pet shop yesterday? silly boy!” she laughed, a noticeably fake laugh, clyde thought, before she excused herself and almost mechanically turned around and walked back into her home, where clyde would not see her leave until the next morning. this continued for a bit longer, with clyde receiving the exact same forced response each time he brought up the fact that they’ve already had the same conversation before.
he wonders why.
after clyde noticed his neighbor’s strange behavior, he started picking up on other things too, like how every Thursday, and
only Thursdays, a thick layer of fog can be found clinging to the ground, not just in the early morning but sometimes hanging around until the late afternoon. nobody else seems to notice it. he’s brought it up to his friends, but they always look at him funny and change the subject. and recently, he’s asked himself why he hadn’t noticed earlier that his town did not have a pet shop, not even a chain one. convinced he was going crazy, he decided to search up and down town, and only when he found himself on the very edge of town did he come across something. on the outskirts of town, where houses were few and far between and an endless empty field stretched out into the horizon, was a small abandoned shop. the design of the building looked like it could’ve been modern, but the wear and tear shown by the peeling paint and sagging roof said otherwide. upon closer inspection, clyde saw that on the cracked window of the shop had the words “SALE! PARAKEETS, HALF OFF!” scrawled across it. another section of the window had “NEW! ASK US ABOUT OUR APP REWARDS PROGRAM!” written. “that’s strange”, he muttered to himself. the building looked at
least fifty years old, (and probably was older, seeing as clyde’s town did not have any sort of extreme weather in the slightest, leaving many old buildings nearly unscathed), yet here it was, mentioning apps which surely didn’t exist when the building must have went out of business. and the sale notice for the parakeets? could that have been where his neighbor had supposedly gotten her bird? but how was that possible, seeing as she claims to have gotten it recently? the only explanation to this, clyde figured, was that the notices were written recently by someone, as a part of some joke or prank. he tried not to think of how the writing was clearly aged and difficult to read, or how it was less the writing of a marker and more like a stain left behind by a marker used long ago. he treaded back to his home and flopped back onto his bed. his town was become stranger and stranger by the day.
he wondered why.
now, more and more strange things pop up. clyde calls them
mistakes, defined simply as things that are not quite what they’re supposed to be. a green stop sign, that had been red just the other day. a car driving along the street, its tires not quite touching the pavement. a green squirrel. a dog that squeaks instead of barks.
a year has passed, and the world clyde lives in becomes more and more broken. the “mistakes” he keeps finding remind him more and more of a glitch in a video game, a fluke that nobody’s bothered fixing. the fact that nobody else seems to notice anything wrong makes it all the more clear to clyde: he must be living in a simulation.
whoever was running it had been doing fine up until now. for some reason, they’ve started neglecting the small, artificial world they’ve created, and clyde plans on finding out why.
Art:
