Chapter Text
As the makeshift bed decorated with fake daisies, nettles, crowfoot, and purple orchis flowers wheeled past him, Ryder looked at the hazel-skinned girl laying upon it: his girlfriend, Fleur.
She laid still, seemingly asleep, with her hands clasped over her stomach like Snow White and her sash draped over her face like a veil. The custom-made white gown she wore was adorned with the same faux daisies, the same ones decorating the comforter below her.
She did an excellent job playing Ophelia, he felt, and while she was only wheeled onto the high school stage at this point for mere effect, Ryder hadn’t expected her to be so still, even after the scene.
Still, no one woke her as the cloaked trunk she laid upon was wheeled back into the back room, next to the dressing room, taking its place in the center of it. Ryder would’ve taken it upon himself to wake her, if not for the fact that the director and theater class teacher, the stern Mr. Michaels, hovered near the door with his arms crossed and his eyes glued to him in a firm stare. After all, Ryder was playing Hamlet, and as luck would have it, he was needed for the next scene.
He followed the student playing Horatio out, glancing back at Fleur for as long as he could manage. Then, once he was completely backstage, he tried to get her out of his mind by discreetly peeking past the curtains before him.
Gazing out onto the stage as the students playing the First and Second Clowns bantered, he glimpsed the audience. It was comprised mostly of children and their parents, and he wondered how bored the kids must’ve been by now. There hadn’t been much reaction from the audience tonight, and maybe that was what added on to the ominous feeling that clung to him like a rotten odor.
It’s silly, he tried to convince himself. There’s no way he would’ve come all this way just to do something so . . . obvious. If he comes after me, he’d do it somewhere where he couldn’t get caught, not in broad daylight. It dawned on him that it was about six in the evening by now, and late December, no less. Or, well, in the middle of my school . . .
“Geez, I dunno,” someone said, and Ryder was so lost in his own thoughts that it almost felt like it was a reply to them. However, when he felt a nudge, he noticed that it was from Horatio, who was now striding toward the leftmost stage entrance.
He soon realized that what he’d heard had merely been the Second Clown on stage giving them their cue to enter, so he trailed along, doing his best to keep in character as he followed Horatio onto the stage . . . not that it mattered. As much as he enjoyed acting and the theater class in general, he knew it wasn’t anything to be too jazzed about, especially in light of recent events.
The First Clown, pretending to dig at the stage with the plastic shovel in his hands (it had been deemed inappropriate to give him a real shovel, though no doubt Mr. Michaels probably tried to arrange that, too), began to whistle to himself. While he was meant to have lyrics, Mr. Michaels found out rather quickly that he wasn’t very good at remembering them, but he was good at whistling.
So, accepting his second cue, Ryder sighed. “Is this guy so completely devoid of feeling that he’ll whistle while digging a grave?” he asked, his voice laced with hostile sardonicism.
“Well, it’s his job,” replied Horatio with a casual lilt, “so I guess he’s done it so much that it comes easy to him.”
Ryder scoffed, rolled his eyes, and turned his head to the audience, though he directed his next line to his fellow actor. “I don’t know about—”
His words caught in his throat at once. The audience was as hard to see as ever with the light shining down into his eyes, but there was no mistaking what—who—he saw. Near the middle of house right, sitting calmly in his seat but smirking as he watched, was a familiar face. A face that filled Ryder with indescribable dread. The man who had promised to hunt him down.
Cameron Fenn.
* * *
The disappearances of streamers KasGaming and Valcupine, August Lund and Val Kozel respectively, had always been an interesting case to Ryder Scott. It had been over a year since the last stream from the latter, in which he’d insisted he was about to die. Everyone in the chat thought it was an act—that the person who came out and “attacked” Val was August in disguise. It took until Christmas for it to sink in that they hadn’t streamed nor posted anything for over a month. In fact, a year later, still, no one had heard from them.
As a fan, Ryder wished he’d watched their streams rather than waiting for highlight reels. Various users had uploaded the final stream in full to YouTube, but he would’ve liked to have seen it for himself. That way he could be sure that what he was seeing wasn’t doctored by a third party.
Leading up to the finale, the two streamers played an indie game called Bashful Bunny. Featuring a pink anthropomorphic rabbit of the same name, it seemed to pose as a game for children. But August and Val weren’t the only streamers to disappear soon after playing it. They were two of many, but also the last two. Ryder’s biggest question was: why?
Was it because they were popular, more popular than the creator of the game was ready for? All the other streamers swallowed by the game were smaller. Or was there another reason?
Conspiracy theories filled the KasGaming and Valcupine fan bases, but Ryder took them all with a grain of salt. What he paid more attention to were the articles written on the disappearances by news stations. The police in Pittsburgh had yet to get anywhere with the case. Ryder could only hope the police in Syracuse would be better in such a situation, though he doubted it.
Sitting in bed with his legs crossed, Ryder scrolled down on the current article he was reading. This one did a brief analysis of the frame that Bashful, or rather a man in a costume of the character, appeared. Following the chat’s recommendation of it being August, it compared a frame of August. Even Ryder had to admit the similarity was uncanny, but . . .
“It doesn’t make any sense,” he muttered to himself and scratched the underside of his chin.
What the news outlets ignored was how Bashful Bunny got pulled from IndieDB a few hours after the final stream. Then, mirror downloads of it on the same and other platforms all started getting taken down. Someone was, even to this day, going out of their way to make sure the game got as few players as possible. Streamers who played it now had their streams blacklisted on Twitch. Did that mean Twitch had been in contact with the game’s creator? Either way, it wasn’t like anyone representing the platform would ever give away that information.
Every so often, the game would resurface for a few minutes. Ryder had never bothered to hunt for it. Yet, now, all of a sudden he had a desire to investigate. The game was made on a common engine: RPG Maker VX Ace. Though the project would be encrypted, decryption tools were readily available. He was only seventeen, but easily at the top of his computer programming class. If he could only find a real copy of the game . . .
When his eyes fell onto the clock at the bottom right corner of his laptop screen, it was by accident. In doing this, though, he noticed that it was 6:50 AM.
“Oh, shit!” Without even closing the article, Ryder slapped his laptop shut.
A few minutes later he was bustling down the stairs, laptop bag slung over his shoulder. At the foot of the stairs, he turned left, heading into the kitchen. On the counter was a plate with eggs and bacon on it.
“Your breakfast’s on the counter,” called a male voice from the other side of the house, in the dining room.
“I noticed,” Ryder called back. With how much of a rush he was in, he didn’t have time to sit down and eat. So, instead, he picked up one of the meaty eggs between his thumb and forefinger and stuffed it into his mouth. Though he preferred his eggs runny, he was for once thankful they weren’t.
On his phone, he opened the Spotify app and pressed play on one of his playlists. Then, he popped an earbud into his right ear. With the music now playing at a low volume, he slipped his phone into one of the pockets of his dark purple hoodie. He then headed for the front door, a little to the right of the staircase. From the coatrack, he grabbed his dark red parka.
“Aren’t you gonna come eat at the table?”
Ryder turned and looked down the hall, at the man sitting alone at the dining table. He took off his laptop bag and set it down beside the stairs, then approached the dining room as he pulled on his coat. “I thought you’d be at the station, dad.”
His father, Chris, shrugged his shoulders with a small smirk. “Not today, sport.” He took a long sip of coffee.
“You’re in uniform, though, so . . .”
Chris hummed, then hurried to swallow. “I’ve got to be there by 7:30. Which reminds me, aren’t you running late?”
Ryder zipped up his parka. “Yeah.”
“Well, eating at the dining table can wait until dinnertime, I suppose.”
Though the teen smiled at this remark, he felt a well of sadness opening up in the back of his mind. His indigo-colored eyes fell onto the seat he was standing in front of. With the table placed against the wall like this, there were only three seats. Before, he’d sat at the third, across from the wall. Now, there was no reason to, because . . .
He cleared his throat and looked up at his father. “I’d better go before I miss the bus,” he said, then turned and headed back toward the door.
“Did you check when it’s supposed to come?” Chris asked.
“Yeah,” he lied. As he walked past he snatched his bag from the floor. Draping it over his shoulder, he pulled open the door and closed it behind himself. After locking it, he started walking down Elliott St.
Halfway down the block, he unzipped his parka and pulled out his phone. After turning the volume up, he shoved the other earbud in, drowning out his surroundings.
He got to the intersection of West Onondaga St. and Dudley St. right as the 64 bus was pulling up to its stop. Once he’d stepped onto it, he revealed to the driver his student pass. Getting a nod from them, he put it back into his parka and moved further onto the bus. Then he wrapped his arm around one of the narrow beams and took out his phone again as the bus started to move. With one hand he minimized Spotify and opened his texts, selected his girlfriend’s name. On his phone, he’d nicknamed her “Flower”.
“On my way to school now,” he wrote. Before sending it, though, he reconsidered.
Who gives a shit?
With that line of thought in mind, he deleted the text and put his phone back into his pocket.
It was around 7:20 by the time he arrived at Westhill High. Inside, he made a beeline for his locker. The halls were packed, so he almost had to push past people to get there. Something that got on his nerves more than people who walked slowly were people who sat in the halls with their legs out. He always worried that he’d step over one of them and they’d take offense. He’d already been beaten up on the street once for walking around someone who walked like they were coming down from a heavy MDMA binge.
No one paid much attention to him as he pulled open his locker. There wasn’t a whole lot inside—nothing relevant, at least. His binder fit nicely in his laptop bag, so he took it with him everywhere. What he did put inside now, though, was his parka. When he moved to close the locker, the sight of someone leaning against the one beside his almost made him jump.
“Christ, Isaac,” he grumbled.
The intruder, none other than his good friend Isaac Matthewson, laughed. Isaac was a bit of a douchebag, but he could be funny sometimes, so Ryder stuck around him for that. Other times, though, he was . . . well, a douchebag.
“What’s up, man?” he asked.
Ryder widened his eyes in mock intrigue. “Life. Going to class.”
“Geez, you’re such a great actor. No wonder they cast you as Hamlet.”
“Shut up.”
At the other end of the hall, a pink blur passed through the crowd and headed to a locker. Ryder watched. When the crowd dispersed, he saw Fleur Petit there. Three years ago, Fleur’s family had moved to Syracuse from somewhere in France. She was in the grade below him, but the instant he saw her, he knew she was the one. He wasn’t even sure when they’d started dating anymore; it felt like they’d been dating forever.
Noticing he’d lost his friend’s attention, Isaac looked over his shoulder and too spotted Fleur. At the sight of her, he let out a wolf whistle. “Say, have you two banged yet?”
Ryder grimaced and slammed his locker shut. “Dude. Gross.”
“Gross? What, you don’t think she’s smokin’ hot? I mean, look at her!” He pointed with his chin in her general direction. “Look at how those red skinny jeans hug her legs, how that wavy strawberry blonde hair falls onto her shoulders . . . Could do without the mole on her cheek, though. And the ruby-red demon eyes. And you’ve got to admit she’s kind of toasty for a Frenchie, but still. Mmm, mmm! What I wouldn’t give to get a slice of her.”
“Cut it out, you dick.” Ryder elbowed Isaac in the stomach, earning a guttural cringe from him. Looking at Fleur again, he explained, “It’s not that; she’s beautiful. But . . . she’s timid, you know? I don’t want to scare her away or anything. I want to”—he searched for the words to describe his feelings—“make it right, you know?”
“Ha! Ryder, come on. Unless you’re going for some PC bitch, ‘right’ is boring! Chivalry is dead as fuck, so live a little!”
Tightening his grip on his laptop bag, Ryder shook his head. “And you wonder why you don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend, smerlfriend. At least I’ve got some pussy.”
He shook his head again. “Why am I friends with you?” The question got no answer, as Isaac moved on and started bothering someone else in the hall. Fleur must’ve sensed eyes on her, because she turned her head and met his gaze. With a small smile, she raised her petite hand and waved at him. Smiling back, Ryder returned the gesture. Then, the bell rang.
Isaac passed by, shaking his hands in the air. “Oh, my God!” he gasped. “Time for class! I’m so excited!” As he disappeared around the corner, he let out a hushed scream, as if trying to simulate a cheering crowd.
Ryder rolled his eyes in amusement and followed after him. “Fuckin’ idiot.”