Dn their wildest dreams, Ulla and Martin Schreitz from the Hessian community of Daddeln would never have expected it: They have become parents once again! “Actually, our family planning was complete with a sweet daughter, but then suddenly there was this wildly strange young man sitting in our living room,” remembers telecommunications mechanic Martin Schreitz of that scene in the early morning hours that abruptly turned the couple’s lives upside down.

As it turned out, the deranged 17-year-old was not a burglar at all, but the Schreitzens’ biological son. “Yes, I can remember this face darkly,” says the 48-year-old mother, who discovered the teenager in the living room.

He kept saying, “Fortnite.”

“He was suddenly loitering there, complaining all the time that there was something about this ‘Fortnite,'” Ulla Schreitz says. Her husband immediately wanted to call the police, she says. But then they noticed the footprints surrounded by pizza leftovers, which led to a room in the family’s 70-square-meter apartment that no one had entered in years.

The fire department, which was called in and searched the room with breathing masks for more missing people, reported a disturbing scenario. Around a computer screen showing a strange black hole were bags of chips, energy drinks and unidentified life forms that appeared to have formed on the back of rotten salami. “We recommend immediate concrete sealing of the room,” the pale exterminators said.

What does Horst Seehofer know?

Psychologists looking after the boy now want to introduce him very slowly to things that are unfamiliar to him. Respect is great: “The biggest challenge will be to expose him to unprotected sunlight and fresh air, hopefully he will survive.”

By all accounts, the Schreitz family is not an isolated case: more and more surprised parents are reporting the sudden appearance of long-forgotten children. Whether this mysterious phenomenon has anything to do with the fact that the popular game “Fortnite” is offline cannot yet be conclusively answered. Computer game experts are only sure of one thing: Instead of simply shutting down “Fortnite,” Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer would be better off dealing with right-wing terrorism.