He double-clicked. The extraction bar crawled across the screen with agonizing slowness. 10%... 40%... 90%. When it finished, a single executable appeared: MIST.exe . No readme. No icons. Just a blank, grey square. Elias launched it.

I can take this story in a few different directions if you're interested:

Elias tries to "patch" the code to trap the entity back in the zip file.

The mist begins to spread through the local Wi-Fi network. Which path should we follow?

But in the MIST version of the room, there was a second heat signature standing directly behind his chair.

He shouldn't have found it. The directory was buried three layers deep in an encrypted partition of a drive recovered from the Blackwood site—a research facility that hadn't officially existed since 1994. "What were you working on, Dad?" Elias whispered.