Chapter Text
Ranboo clutches his Azrael to his chest, the cat shaped Daemon digging her claws into his shoulders. Sneeg and Austin were fighting over who would stand in the square and pass through the strange hole-in-the-wall knockoff, while he stressed over what to do. Was there even any point in trying to reason with the other two? Figure out which of them should survive? And really, why couldn’t they all just stand in the cube and mimic the pose-?
The mask he was wearing, and Azrael’s collar pulsed red, and fine sparks ran across both Showfall TM accessories. He felt- Oh, it hurt , why? What had he done wrong?
That was a silly thought. Of course they couldn’t all fit in the box, and pass through the cutout. That was just the way things worked. That was how the game was supposed to be played. He pointedly didn’t look at Az’s fogged over eyes, or how they’d gone limp in their arms.
Zoning back into the fight between Sneeg and Austin, Ranboo watched Sneeg shove Austin out of the square, and both of them tumbled to the floor. Almost mechanically, Ranboo walked over to the marked off square, and moved to match the pose of the wall hole. Azrael sluggishly shifted to the form of a Magpie, trading black and white fur for feathers, and a smaller body so the edges of the hole won’t clip them.
They tried not to think too hard about the screaming behind them, the crunching of crushed bones, the whimpers of pain. He didn’t even notice the two rat people behind him, pulling the bleeding corpses out of the wall and disentangling their limbs. He was too busy looking at what was ahead of him. Looking, and actually seeing .
It was a little horrifying, actually. The Puzzler was exploded all over the room he’d apparently been using as a control room for the warehouse. Bits of flesh hung off of the desk and intercom setup and everything within a foot of where the man had been sitting was drenched in blood.
He wasn’t sure exactly why he did it, but he pulled out the chair from the desk, and rested a moment in the bloodied yet still ornate chair. The exact place and position another person had died at and in.
Azrael shuddered, puffing out their feathers.
Ranboo hunched over and dipped his head and-
And his eye caught a reflection in the blood splattered screen in front of him. Past the glowing red of his mask, and Azrael’s black and white feathers, to the people behind him.
Distantly, he was a little disappointed. There was something off about the people they’d been surrounded by since- since he woke up in the electric chair. Not a single one of them had something like Az, and he was pretty sure that was strange. But once again, there were more people, and the feeling of wrongerongwrong returned.
A filming crew..? People sitting, faces obscured by masks. Not masks like his, harsh gunmetal gray and biting into the sides of his face where the wires loop too tight, glowing red just below where he could see. No, their masks were white and covered their entire faces, with an assortment of shapes, cubes and triangles and lines… It kind of looked like an office building.
Building. Maybe like the outside of a mall, because ohhh fuck, he wasn’t in a warehouse at all. This, this was a mall.
He walked slowly past the film crew, all posed perfect and still and unmoving as he walked by. Not even a halfhearted wave in front of their masks would gain any form of response.
There was a railing, and a banner with the same office building symbol as the masks hanging off of the railing a floor above.
Azrael voiced his thoughts, a horrified sort of wonder audible in their words. “What the fuck. What the fuck. How- Was any of it real? Were the deaths real?”
“They were real. They are all dead.” A voice emanated out from one of the camera people, albeit sounding a bit strange, off, familiar. The person shuddered, a brief shower of sparks tumbling down from their mask.
Ranboo shifted his stance to a defensive position, ready to either run or fight back, but he also knew that voice. That was the voice of the person on the, the TV? Not the guy who exploded, not the Puzzler. The one from before. Before the tranquilizer and the electric chair and Charlie the Patient. There was, there was another thing. A house, a cabin? There was a cabin, and there was Sneeg the Taken and Charlie the Spirit and the man on the TV screen that tried to talk to him. Tried to tell him to play the game.
Things were starting to come back. He’d, the faceless masked people had flooded into the cabin room and something had happened and they had grabbed Azrael, they had put their hands on his soul and held them too tight and had ran electricity through their mask and collar until their sight whited out and their memories went blank and they passed out to the sensation of pulling, pulling, his daemon dragged away from him too far for their abused bond-
No. Calm. Deep breaths, panicking would not be helpful right now. There was a potential threat to deal with. Azrael’s feathers bled back into fur, and they wrapped their long ermine body around Ranboo’s neck like a living scarf. It wasn’t happening right now, and the TV person had tried to help him before, he could probably be trusted now.
“You, you were in the Cabin. You were going to help me escape.” Ranboo stated, hoping this wasn’t another trap. That he wasn’t about to, be beaten to death or something by a masked person strapped to a massive camera harness.
Hah, that sure would be a way to go out.
But alas, it seemed he wasn’t about to be bludgeoned with a camera, or shoved off the railing to the fog obscured ground floor, or any of the other horrific methods of murder he could think of right now.
“Yes. I managed to disrupt their show a few times, I tried to get messages to you. It seems they didn’t wipe your memories as well as I’d worried. I’m Hetch.”
“Okay. Uh, okay. That, that isn’t even the strangest thing that I’ve heard or gone through today, hah. Might as well believe you. But, what’s up with the camera? The masks? Why are you still wearing yours?” Ranboo almost stepped forward to get a closer look at it, but Azrael tensed up, and yeah, maybe they don’t actually want to put their daemon within grabbing distance, even if this one claimed to be a friend.
“Oh, this isn’t actually my body. I’ve hacked one of Showfall’s camera drones. I can only see you through the security cameras and, of course, the show cameras. This way, I’ll be able to see what is happening better, and use the speakers to talk with you.”
“...Oh. So they aren’t people, really. They are computers.”
“Yes and no. They were human at one point, but their daemons have been cut away. They are little better than a mindless vessel. And while some of them are… more mechanical and wired than others, almost all of them are still somewhat human. There isn’t time to just stand around and play 20 questions, though. We have to leave now, if you want to escape.”
Ranboo was prompted into motion by that, and he started searching the mall level he was stuck on. Azrael had clutched themselves even closer to Ranboo’s neck at Hetch’s mention of cutting away these people’s daemons. He couldn’t even imagine what that’d be like… He decided to distract himself with really looking around, and Azrael decided to keep talking to Hetch. Hey, it wasn’t a waste of time if they were playing 20 questions and figuring out how to escape this godforsaken mall.
“So, the other people- Charlie, Sneeg, Niki? Are they really all dead?” Az asked, peeking over at the camera drone over their fluffy white tail and Ranboo’s shoulder.
“...Some of them are. A few are alive. You might have enough time to save them, if you don’t waste time.”
Azrael scrunched up their fluffy face in distaste, a bit irritated at Hetch’s pointed comment about wasting time- as if they didn’t want to get out just as much as Hetch did! But Ranboo interrupted the argument in the making. “Uh, Hetch? What’s this-?”
Ranboo was looking at one of those anti-break-in gates, but instead of it blocking off a store entrance, it was securing a fog filled room. A large shape lurched out of the fog and slammed against the plastic and metal gate, clawing against it with long and sharp metal talons. Ranboo flinched back with a yelp, putting a good few feet of distance between themselves and the wire monster.
“Oh, that’s just Security. You should be fine as long as you stay on this side of the gate, and do not set off any alarms. ”
Ranboo and Azrael gave the ‘security’ a wary look, and Ranboo edged on past it.
—
Luckily, the next ‘store’ was much more useful, according to Hetch. Some kind of office setup.
“We have to go in there?!”