---
title: Save File
date: 2020-07-22
tags:
- unstagnation
- literature
---

The sun shone brightly through an open window and its rays bounced happily around Peanut's house before slamming into his eyes.
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"Argh!" Peanut shut his eyes, holding back a few tears. "Stupid sun… Let me play my games!"

The sun no longer shone through the open window, its rays instead slamming into the thick curtains draped over the opening. Darkness reigned in the room for only a moment before electric lights illuminated a sleek-looking desktop computer setup. Sitting on a glossy wooden table, three large monitors displayed a video, collage of applications, and the desktop wallpaper, respectively.

Peanut blinked a few times to get the black spots out of his eyes, reclining all the way back in his gaming chair. It took a minute, but eventually he had dabbed all his salty eye fluids away. "Now, how do I install this…" he said, going back to clicking through his folder and files. "Maybe if I get rid of this and try again?"

*Are you sure you want to permanently delete this folder?*

"Yeah, I'm sure. What's in a NAND anyway? Just some system archives, right?"

*Folder deleted.*

"All I have to do is get the new dumped data in, and…" Peanut rubbed his hands together while he waited for the file copy operation to complete. "Let's try it!"

*System dump not found. Load failed.*

"Aw, man! What do you want me to do, junos? I've deleted and reinstalled and tried everything!" said Peanut, grumbling as he eventually closed all of his windows, pulling up junos again to play another game. "You win, for now. Rutadex it is, I guess."

*Please select your language.*

Peanut blinked. Then again. He squinted at the screen, hoping against hope that his heart wouldn't plummet any further as his brain asked his eyes to double-check that they had read the on-screen text correctly.

His save data, the save in which he had spent dozens of hours to grind and upgrade his character to the best character it could possibly be—all completely gone. As soon as his mind finally caught up to the present and fully, completely understood what had happened, he reeled back, shocked.

"Wha—How—what—when—h-how did this happen? No, that's impossible!" A thought occurred to him. "junos's save data is kept in the *NAND?* Oh, no… It might be salvageable!"

Typing furiously on his keyboard, he opened up terminal window after terminal window, launching all the data recovery tools he had.

*File not found.*

*File does not exist.*

*Error: Not found.*

*File not found: Check the path?*

*Space reallocated.*

As negative after negative flashed by on the screen, he was about to curl up into a ball and cry for days until one last program chirped a notification at him.

*File 00 found. Recover?*

"*YES! YES!* Oh, give me my gummies back, thank you testdisk I love you!" Gleefully, Peanut took the recovered file and plopped it into Rutadex's save directory as junos loaded in the background. "Still better check it, just in case…"

*Save data corrupted. Deleting and resetting…*

Wordlessly, Peanut stood up, gently pushed his chair away, and then went up to his room, where he lay down and cried himself to sleep.
