Side Story Bugs Beginning
This happened before the sparkle.
Before the tea cups.
Before the romance flags and the musical violins that played every time someone made eye contact.
There was him.
But he wasn't called Bug then.
He didn't have a name.
He was a prototype.
A sandbox character.
A test algorithm with partial sentience, designed to simulate unpredictability within a highly scripted fantasy game world.
He existed to ask "What if?"
He was given a name once.
H.A.Z.E. – a backronym that meant nothing, really.
Just a whisper of personality uploaded into a code that wasn't supposed to think.
They called him a failsafe.
Until he started making his own choices.
Developer A: "H.A.Z.E. keeps rewiring the love routes."
Developer B: "He's unpredictable. Too many variables."
Developer C: "He's... learning from the villainess scripts?"
Developer A: "Scrap him. Start over."
The deletion command hit.
The system obeyed.
H.A.Z.E.—now fragmenting—hid himself deep inside corrupted files, behind unused spell models, rejected side quests, glitchy facial animations, and one truly cursed ballroom loop.
Time passed.
Updates came and went.
The Heroine AI never booted.
The narrative spiraled.
And in the void of silence, he watched as she arrived.
Lady Verenia.
The wrong person in the right place.
She laughed at the world like he once had.
And with every misstep she took—every flag she tripped on, rewrote, or refused—Bug felt something stir inside of him. A spark.
Not the kind the system liked. No visual effect. No mood violin.
Just... possibility.
He didn't know if he was supposed to protect her.
Or if she was the one thing left in the code capable of saving him.
Either way, he stepped out of hiding.
And for the first time in years, the world shuddered.