TLANTA — With stay-at-home orders beginning to lift across the United States and gamers reluctantly returning to work, even the cutest and most popular of Animal Crossing: New Horizons villagers are beginning to realize that their gods have doomed them to suffer forever in a featureless oblivion.
Raymond, a cat in a three-piece business suit who lives on Butts, local gamer Jeremy Evans' island, expressed concern about his imminent damnation.
“When my two different-colored eyes sparked a wildly overinflated in-game hyper-economy, Jeremy put in a dangerously obsessive amount of time and effort into earning me even though he could have bought me for, like, nine bucks,” Raymond said. “I thought after all that, we’d be best friends and neighbors forever. But now he’s left for this ‘job’ and I’m stuck here, dangling on the edge of unreality. To tell the truth, the only thing I’ve ever done is sit on the ground and fall asleep, so I’m not sure I know what a job really is.”
Evans is a bird tutor in North Decatur who had, until returning to work two weeks ago, been spending upward of eight hours a day crossbreeding virtual flower hybrids on an academic level and building multi-tiered waterfalls with 10 genuine statues of David in each tier. When reached for comment, he explained: “When I missed the birth of my first child due to an unmissable turnip-buying opportunity, they asked me if getting Raymond was worth all this sacrifice. I said, what sacrifice? That’s because I’d forgotten my wife was pregnant.”
Some villagers on the island found solace in the concept of effectively winking out of existence.
Isabelle, a local political figurehead and dog, said she has “no home, no place to sleep, only a whiskey sour by my side each morning at my Resident Services desk. My only purpose in life is to provide daily updates on Butts, and yet I haven’t generated a single new comment in the history of Butts. Without Jeremy, my existential burden has been lifted. I am free to pass.”
