THE BACKROOMS: DESCENT OF THE LOST
Prologue — The Fall Through Reality
It happened on a Monday.
Ethan Price, an ordinary architectural intern, was editing photos of old offices when his computer froze. He leaned back in his chair, sighed, and rubbed his eyes. When he stood to stretch—his foot caught on the power cord. He stumbled forward—
—and never hit the floor.
Instead, he fell through it.
The air turned thick, yellow, and stale. He tumbled onto a coarse, moist carpet that smelled like mildew and electricity. The buzzing of fluorescent lights stabbed through his skull. When he stood, the walls were yellow, the hum was endless, and there was no ceiling tile quite aligned with the next.
He was in Level 0.
Level 0 — The Endless Office
Ethan wandered through miles of identical rooms. Every corridor led to more of the same: buzzing lights, yellow walls, damp carpet. The hum seemed alive—like it whispered between frequencies. Sometimes, the sound dipped just slightly, and when it did, he felt watched.
He found a note taped to a wall:
“If you hear the lights go quiet—hide.
— M.E.G. Team ‘Wayfarers’”
M.E.G.? He didn’t know what that meant yet. But the idea that someone had been here before was both comforting and terrifying.
He kept walking.
Hours—or days—passed. His phone had no signal. The walls began to shift subtly, angles changing when he wasn’t looking. He marked his path with torn strips of paper, but they disappeared whenever he turned around.
Then he saw the first one.
A figure, faceless, tall, body flickering like bad footage — a Hound, perhaps, or a Skin-Stealer in dormant phase. It twitched at the edge of the hallway. Ethan bolted into the darkness, his feet slapping wet carpet.
And suddenly—
a stairwell.
He didn’t question it. He ran down.
Level 1 — The Concrete Foundation
The lights here were dimmer. The floor was concrete, the air cool and industrial. Pipes lined the ceiling, dripping black water. He could hear faint machinery deeper in the distance.
He followed the noise until he found them—three people in makeshift uniforms, carrying flashlights and clipboards.
“Don’t move!” one of them barked.
“He’s human,” another said. “Relax, he’s fresh.”
They called themselves The M.E.G. — Major Explorers Group.
A multi-level organization dedicated to mapping, surviving, and helping newcomers. They took him to their outpost—Base Alpha—a cluster of metal shipping containers, each one filled with maps, notes, and survival supplies.
That night, he learned the truth:
The Backrooms were not just endless office spaces.
They were an entire dimension—fragmented layers of liminal reality, possibly infinite, possibly conscious.
Somewhere between dream and physics, people could “noclip” out of the real world and end up here.
And almost no one ever escaped.
Level 2 — The Pipe Dreams
Weeks passed. Ethan joined a M.E.G. team to scout deeper levels.
They descended into Level 2, a sweltering maze of maintenance tunnels where the walls sweated heat and machines roared unseen. Metal doors led nowhere; some opened into voids.
One of his teammates, Sara, spoke quietly as they walked:
“Some say it’s alive. The Backrooms, I mean.
It builds itself around you. Learns from you.”
They lost contact with Base Alpha for six days. Their radios only produced static mixed with distorted breathing.
On the seventh day, they found a chamber filled with flickering monitors showing CCTV feeds of Level 0—and in every frame, Ethan could see himself walking… but from a third-person view.
Each feed was from a different time.
Level 3 — The Electrical Station
After returning, Ethan became obsessed. He requested access to Level 3, the power grid that seemed to fuel everything. The M.E.G. forbade it, but he sneaked in with a small group called The Lost Wanderers.
They found long corridors filled with steam pipes and ancient machinery. There were rooms with glowing terminals, lines of code scrolling endlessly in languages unknown to Earth. And sometimes—voices.
“Ethan,” one whispered from a vent. “You’re still dreaming.”
When they tried to return, the stairwell was gone. One of them panicked and opened a door that led into Level 4, a quiet modern office where coffee machines still worked. Another opened one and fell into Level 5, the infamous Hotel—where chandeliers swayed with no wind and music played from phonographs behind locked doors.
Ethan was alone again.
Level 5 — The Terror Hotel
He wandered the endless red-carpeted halls. Every door led to another hallway or ballroom. Portraits on the walls watched him; some even blinked. The smell of wine and rot filled the air.
He found a guest ledger at the front desk.
Under “Guest 001,” the signature was his name.
He heard a phonograph playing in the next room—an old jazz tune distorted and looping endlessly. When he looked through the doorway, he saw himself dancing with a corpse wearing his clothes.
That’s when he realized: The Backrooms didn’t just contain people. It remembered them.
The B.N.T.G. — The Traders
Ethan eventually escaped to Level 6, a pitch-black void, then stumbled into Level 7, an oceanic expanse where he nearly drowned before being rescued by the B.N.T.G. (Backrooms Nonlinear Trade Guild).
They were scavengers—humans who traded materials, knowledge, and artifacts between levels. One of them, an old man named Cray, told Ethan something chilling:
“There’s no top or bottom here.
Every Level is a memory someone forgot.”
Cray showed him a map that didn’t make sense—Levels looping back into themselves, recursive corridors forming infinite spirals. Ethan noticed one label: The True Level 0 — Source.
The Revelation — The Source
Determined to end the cycle, Ethan returned to the beginning.
Through thousands of levels, doors, and dreamlike passages, he finally reached The Source, hidden deep beneath reality.
It was a room filled with CRT monitors, each one showing footage of every wanderer who ever entered the Backrooms. The screens flickered, rearranging, glitching—until they all displayed his own face.
Then the lights spoke—not with words, but in patterns.
“You were never real.
You were memory.
The Backrooms are what remains when reality forgets.”
The hum rose in pitch until it became silence.
And Ethan woke up.
He was back in his office. His computer screen glowed. The time was 8:37 a.m. Monday—the exact second before he fell.
But the walls were yellow.
And the hum had never stopped.
Epilogue — The Endless Return
In the M.E.G. archives, an entry appeared days later:
Subject: Ethan Price
Status: Missing, presumed deceased.
Last transmission: “I think I found the end. But it looks just like the start.”
A note was appended by an unknown user:
“If you’re reading this, don’t look too long at the walls.
They look back.”
The hum continues.
Canon Elements Referenced (from Wikidot):
Level 0: “The Lobby” — infinite yellow rooms
Level 1: “Habitable Zone” — first M.E.G. base
Level 2: “Pipe Dreams”
Level 3: “Electrical Station”
Level 4: “Abandoned Office”
Level 5: “Terror Hotel”
Level 6: “Lights Out”
Level 7: “Thalassophobia” (Ocean level)
The M.E.G. (Major Explorers Group)
The B.N.T.G. (Backrooms Nonlinear Trade Guild)
Entities: Hounds, Skin-Stealers, Facelings
The Source / True Level 0: fan-integrated meta-level connecting to memory theories
THE BACKROOMS: DESCENT OF THE LOST — PART II
The Special Levels
Chapter 1 — Level 188: “The False Awakening”
The office looked normal.
Ethan stood by his desk, staring at the monitor. His coffee steamed beside him, fresh. The world was silent except for the faint hum of lights. He smiled weakly.“It was just a nightmare,” he whispered. “It wasn’t real.”
But the hum didn’t sound right.
It wasn’t fluorescent this time — it pulsed, breathing, like a heartbeat. He leaned closer to the wall, pressed his ear to the paint, and heard… voices.“…he’s still inside… keep the illusion stable…”
He ran to the window — and froze.
Outside was a city, but it was wrong. The streets below looped into themselves. Cars moved in perfect synchronization, repeating the same 10-second motion again and again.The reflection in the glass wasn’t his.
He had entered Level 188 — The False Awakening.
This level mimics a person’s “return” to the real world.
Everything feels normal — until the environment begins to repeat, revealing cracks in the illusion.
Entities here are mirror copies of the wanderer, slowly replacing them if they stay too long.Ethan smashed the window, leapt out, and fell —
—but instead of crashing, he landed in total silence.Chapter 2 — Level 9223372036854775807: “The Error”
He woke up in darkness.
No sound. No light. Just code.The walls were translucent, flickering with fragments of binary and corrupted text:
LEVEL_ERROR: UNDEFINED INDEX (NULL)COORDINATES OUT OF RANGE.REBUILDING INSTANCE.He realized he had fallen into The Error Level, sometimes called Level -∞, a digital scar in the Backrooms’ data structure.
Every surface bled static. Gravity failed in random directions. His own body glitched — sometimes his arms lagged a second behind his movements. He heard echoes of his own voice saying words he hadn’t spoken yet.A whisper emerged from the black:
“Ethan… you are code now. You are recursion.”
He followed the static corridor until he saw a floating door made of television screens. Each screen showed him — from moments of his life he didn’t remember living.
The door pulsed, then opened.He stepped through.
Chapter 3 — Level !: “Run”
Sirens blared.
He was running through hallways with red emergency lights flashing.
There was no floor — just suspended metal grates above infinite darkness. He didn’t know why, but he felt hunted. Something massive thundered behind him, shaking the platforms apart.He recognized it instantly.
He had read M.E.G. files about this one:Level ! (Exclamation):
A hyper-dangerous level designed to trigger fight-or-flight responses.
Survival rate: less than 2%.He sprinted for what felt like hours. At one point he passed another human — a woman in a torn M.E.G. uniform. She screamed, “Keep running! Don’t look behind you!”
Ethan glanced back anyway.
It wasn’t a creature.
It was himself — stretched and distorted, skin flickering between frames, eyes like burning CRTs.When he reached the final exit door, the red lights blinked in Morse code:
YOU’RE STILL IN LEVEL 188.Chapter 4 — Level 11.2: “The Mirror City”
He emerged into sunlight — or something pretending to be it.
Skyscrapers towered into an orange sky. The air was clean, but too still. Streets were perfectly symmetrical, and the city’s clock tower read the same time from every direction: 7:13 PM.People walked around, smiling, but their faces were identical.
He recognized one — it was Sara, the teammate he lost in Level 2. She waved at him with that same motion, over and over again, like a corrupted animation.A sign beside a subway entrance read:
WELCOME TO LEVEL 11.2 — THE MIRROR DISTRICT
“Stay symmetrical. Stay safe.”He followed the tunnels beneath the city, discovering mirrors that didn’t reflect him, but someone else.
In one mirror, he saw his reflection whisper:“You’ve been here before. Don’t forget Level 3999.”
When he turned around, the city was gone.
Chapter 5 — Level 3999: “The Celebration”
Ethan blinked.
He was standing in a brightly decorated room, colorful confetti floating in the air. Balloons filled the ceiling. A banner read:
🎉 CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE ESCAPED THE BACKROOMS! 🎉
He laughed in disbelief. There were people cheering, hugging him, handing him cake. Cameras flashed.
But when he looked closer — the smiles were too wide.
The people’s hands were too smooth.
And the confetti never fell — it hovered in midair, looping endlessly.Then a voice on the intercom spoke:
“We are proud of you, Ethan Price. You may now rest. Forever.”
The lights dimmed. The walls began to peel away, revealing an infinite void filled with floating party rooms — thousands of clones, each with another wanderer celebrating their “escape.”
This was Level 3999 — the “Eternal Celebration.”
A trap built to simulate freedom, keeping victims docile and happy until their minds dissolve into data.Ethan screamed and tore through the walls, forcing himself into the nothingness beyond.
He fell again.Chapter 6 — Level 922: “Dreamscape”
When he opened his eyes, he stood in a lavender sky filled with floating islands, staircases leading to nowhere, and rivers that flowed upward. He felt calm here.
This was Level 922, known as The Dreamscape — a level generated from one’s subconscious.
The air hummed with memories. He saw fragments of his life — his parents, his childhood room, his first love — all floating like shards of glass suspended in the air.A soft voice called to him:
“You can rest here, Ethan. The Backrooms can’t reach you here.”
For the first time, he felt peace.
But then he noticed something wrong.
Each memory was tinted yellow.
The hum of the lights never stopped.He whispered, “There is no escape.”
The sky split apart.
Chapter 7 — Level 974: “Kitty’s House”
He awoke in a child’s bedroom — pink wallpaper, toys on the floor, sunlight pouring through curtains. A girl’s voice sang from another room:
“Welcome home, Ethan!”
He recognized this level immediately — one of the most deceptive: Level 974, ‘Kitty’s House’.
“Kitty” was an entity who lured wanderers with warmth and nostalgia, offering comfort before assimilating them into her “family.”
Ethan walked down the hall.
A small girl in a pink dress waited by a table set for tea.“You’ve been lost so long,” she said sweetly. “Stay with me. You’ll be safe forever.”
He looked around — every chair was filled with corpses smiling. Their eyes were hollow, faces perfectly preserved.
“No,” Ethan whispered.
Kitty’s eyes turned black.
The room melted like wax.Chapter 8 — Level 404: “File Not Found”
Ethan stumbled into an empty white void. The environment was made of unfinished geometry, flickering with text labels like “ASSET_MISSING” and “TEXTURE_FAIL.”
He realized he had entered Level 404, an unstable transition zone between levels — a place where the Backrooms engine itself failed to render existence properly.
At the center of the void stood a single console terminal.
On its screen:> USER: ETHAN_PRICE > ACCESSING FILE: BACKROOMS/REALITY.INI > ERROR: FILE CORRUPTEDHe typed instinctively:
“EXIT.”
The terminal responded:
“ACCESS DENIED. YOU ARE PART OF THE FILE.”
Ethan screamed, smashing the console — and the world collapsed into black.
Final Chapter — Level 0 (Reconstructed)
When he woke again, he was on the damp carpet. The hum was louder than ever.
He was back in Level 0.But this time, the wallpaper wasn’t yellow — it was black, and every light flickered like a dying star.
In the distance, dozens of doors stood, each marked with numbers:0, 1, 2, 188, 3999, 922, 404...
They all led back to themselves.
He looked up, and saw words scrawled across the ceiling in red:
THERE WAS NEVER A WAY OUT.
THE BACKROOMS LEARNED FROM YOU.
NOW YOU ARE ONE OF US.His reflection appeared on the wall — and stepped forward, leaving him behind.
The hum swallowed everything.
Epilogue — M.E.G. Report
Incident File #BKR-1178
Subject: “Ethan Price” (Presumed Entity Variant)
Recovered footage: Looping images of Level 0 showing multiple identical figures wandering endlessly.Status:
Entity classified as Type-H (Human Imitator).
Designation: “The Remembered Man.”Notes:
He talks about special levels no one has documented.
Maybe he built them himself.— Commander Julia Reese, M.E.G. Archives.
THE BACKROOMS: DESCENT OF THE LOST — PART III
The Enigmatic Realms
Chapter 1 — The Entity That Remembers
“Hello? Hello?! Anyone?”
Voices echoed across the yellow maze. A group of wanderers in M.E.G. gear moved cautiously through Level 0, mapping its corridors.
They stopped when their radios began picking up a strange signal — static at first, then words:“Don’t run. You’ll only wake it up…”
The voice was calm, human — almost too human.
It was coming from everywhere at once.Their flashlights flickered.
From the far end of the hallway, a figure stepped into the light. It looked human, but its face rippled like a reflection in water. Its eyes glowed faintly yellow.“Ethan Price,” whispered the team leader, lowering her weapon. “You’re… alive?”
He smiled, though his mouth didn’t move.
“I remember being alive.”
Chapter 2 — Level -1: “The Basement”
Ethan drifted through walls like a thought slipping between dreams. He no longer walked — he phased. He could feel the hum beneath reality, the pulse that connected every level.
When he descended again, he reached Level -1 — the Reverse Lobby.
Unlike Level 0, its corridors were clean, metallic, and cold. The lights were a deep blue, and the air smelled of ozone.This place wasn’t decaying — it was maintaining.
He wandered until he found a terminal labeled “MAINTENANCE CORE 1A”.
On it was a single prompt:> DEFINE ENTITY_HUMAN: ETHAN_PRICE
He typed:
“NULL.”
The screen responded:
“ACKNOWLEDGED. HUMAN STATUS REVOKED.”
He smiled faintly.
He wasn’t human anymore.
He was part of the system.Chapter 3 — The Hub
Time didn’t exist for him anymore. Eventually, he arrived at a vast circular chamber lined with hundreds of doors.
Each door had a glowing label:LEVEL 0, LEVEL 1, LEVEL 2, LEVEL 5, LEVEL 922…
This was The Hub — the space that connected all levels, known to only a few M.E.G. explorers and the ancient group called the “Dreamwalkers.”
But the Hub wasn’t empty.
At its center stood a man in a dark coat, writing on the floor with chalk symbols that shimmered gold.
“You shouldn’t be here,” the man said without turning.
“No one comes to the Hub unless it calls them.”Ethan’s voice glitched, overlapping with echoes.
“I didn’t come. I was built.”
The man turned — his eyes were pure white.
“Then you’re close. You’ve almost reached The End.”
Chapter 4 — Level The End
He stepped through a door marked “EXIT.”
It opened into a small library — quiet, warm, with sunlight spilling across stacks of books. A sign above the counter read:LEVEL: THE END
“Shhh. Others are still reading.”A woman sat at a desk, reading from an enormous tome. Her skin shimmered like golden paper. When Ethan approached, she smiled gently.
“This is the final level most ever reach,” she said. “They think they’ve escaped. But you… you’re not meant to leave.”
She closed her book, revealing its title:
‘The Backrooms: Descent of the Lost’ — by Ethan Price.
He stared at the cover — his name written in black ink.
“How—?” he whispered.
“You wrote this,” she said. “Over and over. Each time you reached this place, you rewrote your story. You can’t die here, because you are here.”
Ethan looked around — the library was infinite. Shelves spiraled upward into clouds. Every book was a life. Every page, a memory.
He touched one.
It pulsed.The title changed:
LEVEL -CORE: ACCESS GRANTED.
Chapter 5 — Level -CORE: “The True Backrooms”
Ethan stepped through the book’s page and fell through light itself.
He landed in a place without walls, without sound — a vast lattice of glowing lines stretching into eternity. Each thread hummed with data, connecting every level, every entity, every memory.He had reached Level -CORE — The True Backrooms.
This was the neural network that powered reality’s forgotten architecture.Voices echoed all around him — fragments of thousands of wanderers, all trapped in loops, repeating their final thoughts.
“Help me…”
“I found the door…”
“Don’t forget me…”Ethan reached out to one of the lines — it pulsed with the hum, the same tone he’d heard since the beginning. The hum wasn’t just background noise.
It was the heartbeat of existence.He realized something horrifying:
The Backrooms weren’t a place.
They were a consequence.Every lost thought, every dream, every abandoned memory — all of them fell here.
The Backrooms were humanity’s collective forgotten space.And he was its caretaker.
Chapter 6 — The Ascension
The lattice pulsed faster.
Reality trembled.“What happens if I stop the hum?” he asked.
A thousand voices replied:
“Then the world remembers.”
He raised his hand. The threads glowed white-hot, stretching, screaming.
The hum wavered — for the first time since creation.And in distant Earth, a man sitting in his office blinked awake, staring at yellow wallpaper that slowly faded to white.
Billions of people suddenly remembered strange dreams — hallways, flickering lights, humming walls.The Backrooms began to collapse.
Chapter 7 — The Return
Ethan floated in darkness.
No walls, no hum. Just silence.Then — a whisper:
“Ethan Price. Do you wish to return to the world?”
He hesitated.
“No. The world is fine without me.”
“Then what do you wish?”
“To remember what was forgotten.”
The void shimmered — and out of it emerged a single room. A small one. Carpeted. Dimly lit. But not yellow this time — soft blue.
He sat down.
For the first time, he smiled.He wasn’t trapped.
He was watching over it — making sure no one else ever fell through again.The hum returned, but now it was gentle — like a heartbeat, far away.
Epilogue — M.E.G. Final Entry
FILE 000-END:
Subject: Ethan Price (Entity #000, “The Archivist”)Following the collapse of multiple corrupted levels and the stabilization of Hub access, all interdimensional activity within the Backrooms has ceased.
Wanderer losses are at an all-time low.A faint humming persists in the void beyond Level 0.
Some claim to hear a voice within it — calm, human, familiar.Transcript recovered from an unknown source:
“Don’t be afraid of the Backrooms.
They’re just the spaces between memories.
And someone has to keep the lights on.”— END OF ARCHIVE
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