Badfic!

Lawlz badfic *sfaj/Slender Man crossover. You know it had to be done…

I think this is and will be the only *sfaj story ever where Dee is the explicit POV character. Given the nature of the genre, I thought in this case it was an excusable little bit of vanity.

~2,300 words. Not technically horror, though YMMV.

(Also see.)

It all started on Movie Night. Horror Indie Webseries Movie Night, in fact. An evening spent on the couch at Sigmund’s place, hiding behind pillows at the best no-budget horror YouTube could offer. Well, sometimes hiding behind pillows. And sometimes not.

“The problem with most of these clips,” Dee had said, “is that they’re too keen to show you the monster. I mean, whatever happened to the days of Blair Witch?”

“Twenty foot bugs,” said Lain, in what Dee chose to think of as agreement. She figured if anyone was going to Get It, it was going to be their resident urban deity.

“And the monsters have no motivation. It’s like, ‘It’s bad and it hates you and wants to hurt you because…’ why? It just does?”

“Well, it worked for H.P. Lovecraft,” Sigmund said.

“Not… really,” Wayne added, crewing thoughtfully on the end of one bright pink dreadlock. “I mean, we ‘know’ what the Elder Gods want. It’s just, yanno. Not cool for us.”

“We could totally do this better.” Dee warmed up to the idea as soon as she’d said it. “We can shoot shitty phonecam films as well as anyone. And, we wouldn’t even need to fake it on the special effects.” She shot a pointed look at Lain, who cringed.

“Don’t look at me,” he said. “Horror’s not exactly my genre.”

“Spoilsport.”

So Lain wasn’t going to play their monster, but that didn’t mean he’d forgotten the idea. Dee found out exactly how much he hadn’t forgotten about it a week later, when an email arrived in her inbox just before lunchtime.

To: JOHNSON,Delia <delia.johnson@lokabrenna.net>
From: just.call.me.the@apocalypse-junkie.net
Subject: come up and see me - i have something you might like

No message in the body, and though the address looked external Dee knew the IP was coming from one of LB, Inc.’s “private” datacentres.

There was only one person who used that address, as far as Dee was aware, which didn’t go to great lengths to preserve the whole “anonymity” thing but, whatever. So she slipped from her cubicle and went to find Sigmund on the other side of the floor.

“I need your White Card,” she said when she arrived at his desk, peering over the partition.

Sigmund didn’t look up from where he was engrossed in a game of Plants vs. Zombies on his cell. “Why?”

“I dunno. Got summoned by His Apocalyptic Magesty.”

“Fair enough,” Sigmund said, shifting around awkwardly to pull the passkey out of his pocket without pausing the game. “He can’t come down?”

“Apparently not.”

“Well. Have fun with that.”

“Unlikely.” Dee took the passkey when Sigmund proffered it, tipping her head in thanks before heading to the elevators.

The White Card was a credit-card-sized piece of featureless white plastic that, when proffered to the elevators in the LB, Inc. HQ, would take the holder up to the top floor executive suite. Dee felt her stomach drop to the floor as the elevator rocketed skywards, eventually settling with a faint chime and a dour female voice informing her of the destination.

The doors opened onto a luxurious, glass-roofed atrium with two large wooden doorways leading into two separate offices. The first set of doors stood open, the office empty. So Dee opened the second set, striding in with a, “Okay, so what’s so important up here tha–” and promptly nearly shat herself in terror.

The thing was, Lain — a.k.a. Travis Cameron Hale, CEO of LB, Inc., a.k.a. Loki, Norse God of Random Bullshit — was, well, a god. Like, literally. And gods knew other gods and things like gods. Even outside of their own little ethnic god-club. Dee knew that, instinctivley, but it didn’t come up much — gods were territorial, Lain told them, and tended not to hang out together as a general rule — so she didn’t think about it. And, of course, there was that other issue about what the definition of a “god” was, exactly. Gods were gods, obviously, but they shared their world with other things too. All the lurking monsters and valiant heroes of human story and fable. And the thing about myths, Dee had learned, was that while they had a sort of critical mass to reach before becoming manifest, there was no temporal threshold. A popular myth invented yesterday was just as powerful as one dreamed up a thousands years ago. Maybe moreso.

Yesterday’s popular myth was currently folded up awkwardly in one of the leather chairs in the LB CEO’s office. Loki sat opposite, sipping espresso from a tiny cup and looking more than a little bit pleased with himself at Dee’s current terror.

“W–?” was about the most she could make her mouth say, eyes still fixed on the second chair’s occupant. It was difficult to look at. Both in the psychological sense of the word and the physical. It felt like an eyelash in her eye, looked like a smear of grime across her retina; gritty and slightly out-of-focus. Then she blinked, and in that fraction of a second the thing turned its head to look at her.

Well, would have been looking at her. If it’d had eyes.

“The other day,” Loki was saying, “You said you wanted help. Fear isn’t really my forte. So I hired the best.”

“Hired?”

“Yes. Our, a-har, friend here has agreed to help you out with your quote-unquote ‘shitty phonecam films’.”

The thing in the chair smiled which, Dee thought, was ridiculous given its total lack of any discernable facial features. Or, apparently, ability to move while she looked at it.

And what Dee’s brain said was, No!

But what her mouth said was, “Why?”

Loki just shrugged. “Why not,” he said. “Your aim is to scare people on the Internet, yes? Well, scaring people on the Internet is our friend here’s raison d’être. It doesn’t normally get to work with actual cameras. I suspect it thinks the experience will be fun.”

Dee got the impression from the thing that this was, indeed, partially the case. Though the main reason was slightly more complicated, something to do with the growing popularity of its mythos and the subsequent reduction in quality and focus of output being deteimental to the—

“Okay, I get it! Stop putting words in my head!” Clamping her hands over her heads and squeezing her eyes shut didn’t help. Then she remembered, and forced her eyes open again in a hurry; the thing in the chair had moved its… arms, frozen in a blur between keyframes in an aborted posture that was impossible to read. So Dee tried not to. Tried not to notice how the pale, twisted shaped emerging from beneath meticulously white French cuffs looked more like branches than hands.

She half-turned to Loki, still not taking her eyes off the second chair. “I can’t believe you! That– I can’t–” That thing is dangerous! Except, it felt weird saying that when the “thing” in question was sitting right there, carefully drinking a cup of coffee between eyeblinks. (And, incidentally, how?)

Loki just rolled his eyes. “Just think about that for a second,” he said. “You’re dealing with the personification of an irrational phobia. How is that dangerous? If it were actually dangerous, your fear of it wouldn’t be irrational and therefore it wouldn’t be, well, it.”

“It makes people sick! It sends them insane! That’s what it does!”

“Sort of like how you’re acting right now?”

“Wh– yes!” Except…

Except, what had actually happened since she’d walked into the office? Other than exactly nothing and, okay, it was scary-looking — even here, in the most mundane of settings, in broad daylight — but, well. So was Loki, when you got down to it; the burnt-out eyes and stitched lips, technically, way more scary than what was essentially a tree dressed in a rather natty bespoke suit. (From where?)

And, suddenly, Dee Got It. “This is how it works, isn’t it? It does nothing, and people shit themselves in terror, and that’s what makes it.”

“Bingo.”

The mind was a terryfing place, the human mind even more-so, birthing depravities and horrors on a daily basis. But the ironic thing about said horrors was that, often, they really weren’t all that horrible. They didn’t actually hurt mortals because they didn’t need to; mortals didn’t need the outside prompting, and the irrational fear of boogeymen and monsters was exactly that. The fact that no-one had ever actually been spirited away by whatever demons were in cultural vogue had never, in any society ever in the history of time, stopped people from saying they might be.

Suddenly, Dee realised, it was even deeper than that. Because as soon as said personifications of irrational fears did start actually acting on the world, they went from being “unknown, space-warping Eldritch Horror” to “crazy tall guy in mask abducts children, film at 11″. Occam’s Razor was brutal like that.

Not all of the thoughts were her own, but Dee decided maybe she should take it a bit easier on a being whose communication would otherwise be limited to semaphore and the surreptitious passing of notes.

“All right,” she said eventually. “When do we start?”

That Friday, as it turned out. Dee was having a quiet freak-out in the bathroom when the doorbell rang, Wayne’s sing-song, “I’ll get it!” drifting under the door before Dee had even had time to think.

“Wayne, wait!” Dee started, but by the time she’d rarranged herself and made it to the door, Wayne was already greeting their guest.

“– big fan of yours, like ohmigawd the first time I saw that vid I couldn’t sleep with the light out for like a week and, oh, Dee! Look who it is!” Wayne’s smile was bright as she gestured to the figure in the doorway, silouetted against the streetlights and cut off at the shoulders by the top of the doorframe.

“Um, yeah,” Dee said, biting her lip and shooting Wayne a sheepish look. “Lain introduced us.”

“Oh, for your project? That was nice of him.”

Honestly, Dee was fairly convinced Lain had done it just to fuck with her. She’d certainly spent the last two days in a state of elated paranoia, too mortified to even mention the incident to Wayne.

“So you gonna shoot some stuff or what?”

“That was the– shit. Gotta get my camera. Be right back.”

She left Wayne happily chatting in the foyer, ducking back to her room to grab the bag of gear from her bed. It was awkward running through the house constantly trying to look behind her, half convinced she’d turn to find their erstwhile new “friend” just standing there, doing nothing in the most terrifying way imaginable. Except she didn’t, of course, which was even more frightening. When she got back to the door, the figure hadn’t moved. Not a twitch.

“So where were you planning on going?” Wayne, who apparently had no fear. At least, none of the irrational kind.

“Not far,” Dee said. “It’s dark so… was just planning on going round the streets.”

“Oh! Around the house,” Wayne said. “It’s always scariest when the monster is in your house.”

Exactly which, of course, was why Dee was planning on shooting entirely outside thank-you-very-much.

They spent a month filming and snapping stills, on-and-off. Initially deserted night shots around the local streets, until Sigmund had the idea to go out to Jarnwood.

“You gotta have trees,” he’d said. “It’s like, part of the mythos.”

It was, so they did. Getting up super early, filming in the dark and through the dawn. Dee’s original idea was just a series of disconnected footage — minimalist, no plot, no characters — but even she had to admit a narrative started to emerge after a couple of days. Isolation, paranoia; initial shots of darkness and lonely places slowly being replaced by scenes in daylight, on busy streets, in homes (albeit still not hers).

She was never sure how the star of their show knew when and where to turn up after that first time and, on second thought, she decided she didn’t want to. Eventually she just took to filming and photographing almost everything; sometimes it’d be there, sometimes it wouldn’t. It should’ve sent her paranoid, except for the fact that it never turned up unless she was activley looking for it. A photo of something funny in the mall would be untouched. A second photo two minutes later of a crowded food court — horror was always super-scary in the day, with company — ended up with an appropriately blurry and distorted figure lurking off to the right of the frame.

The next two months were editing, Dee trawling through footage trying to pin together something cohesive. She kept things mostly as-is; no point messing around with retouching or editing software when all the required effects had been produced, ahem, “naturally”. Occasionally, as she worked, she felt a presence behind her, just watching.

“You’re having too much fun with this,” she’d said eventually. “Also: Get the hell out of my room or I’ll turn around.”

She never had to.

The first “episode” of filmgirlXO appeared on YouTube three months after the initial idea. Reception — once people had found it — was mixed.

“Effects are probably the best I’ve seen, but needs more story,” said the top comment on the first entry to score over a thousand hits. “Creepy, but no mystery,” said another.

Dee read every critiscism, stared at the wall for a while, then began to write.

The evening of the final episode, a package appeared on their doorstep. Wrapped in brown paper, nothing written on it but a name.

“It was here when I got home,” Wayne said, hovering as Dee turned it over and shook it slightly. It rattled, but not in a threatening way. “Open it!”

Dee did so. Inside was a box of rather nice choclates shaped, of all things, like little trees. Taped to the top was a short note, handwritten in painstaking copperplate.

See you in Season 2, it read. Dee got the impression it wasn’t a suggestion.

“I think,” she said, “I’m going to need a bigger cast.”