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They weren’t quite sure how it happened. One minute they were watching the flames roar as the wind whipped their hair, a manic grin behind the fabric mask they wore and wild laughter echoing in the silence, and the next, they were surrounded by Showfall employees.
The situation was, to put it lightly. The building that he’d been in the process of burning down belonged to the assholes that called themselves Showfall Media, a company that used hiring actors and crew for their shows as a front for human trafficking, and now they’d found him.
The mask that he’d been using to cover his face wasn’t going to cut it now.
“Ranboo!” Someone shouted from the other side of the frankly ridiculous blockade that their security vehicles had made. They may have been the coolest guy to ever exist (oh god now he sounded like his friend Tommy), but they were still just one guy. “Put your hands up and don’t resist! We have you surrounded!”
“I can see that, Showfuck!” Ranboo shouted back, before dropping to the ground with a grunt of pain as electricity coursed through their veins. Wincing, they pulled a dart out of their shoulder. The bastards had tased him. And now two of them were grabbing his arms and hauling him towards one of the cars.
They threw him into the back without gentleness at all. “Greetings, Ranboo,” the same Showfuck, as Ranboo liked to call the employees, from earlier said. “You’ve made quite the name for yourself with your crimes.”
“I could say the same to you,” Ranboo muttered, gritting his teeth and going stiff to stop himself from giving the Showfucks the satisfaction of hearing him scream as they zapped him again. Looking up, they saw a masked employee holding what was definitely a cattle prod, only modified. Knowing the company, it was modified to make it more painful.
***
Ranboo didn’t remember the rest of the drive to Showfall’s “actor dorms”, or, more accurately, prison. After a rather painful process that they didn’t care to think about again, he was given a new mask that would apparently shock him whenever he did something that was considered ‘out-of-line’.
Or, to put it simply, anything at all.
Then, he was unceremoniously chucked into a cell. As he pushed himself off the dusty floor and into a sitting position, clutching his now pounding head and hoping the slight wetness was just from how hot it was in here, he heard the lock click shut.
“Bastards!” He yelled, ignoring the current of electricity flowing from his mask into his head. “Someone will get you! You can’t get away with this!”
Nobody even bothered to respond to him.
Nobody, at least, until a few minutes later, when there was a tapping sound, presumably from the cell across or next to him. “Hey. New guy. You in there?” a voice asked. It sounded like a man, somewhere between five and ten years older than Ranboo, maybe?
“Ye-” Ranboo began to answer, before cutting themself off with another muffled scream. The mask had shocked them again. “Yeah, ‘m here. You know Morse code?”
“Enough to have a conversation, if you tap slowly. Why?” the stranger asked.
They put some kind of mask on me , Ranboo tapped out slowly. It zaps me whenever I do something wrong.
“Oh shit,” the stranger responded. “What did you do to make them do that?”
My name is Ranboo .
“Wait, like the arsonist?”
Yes.
“Charlie! We’ve got a celebrity in our midst!” the stranger crowed, and a voice from the cell to Ranboo’s right piped up.
“I know,” said a man who sounded slightly younger than his companion. “I was listening to you.”
You know Morse code too? Ranboo asked, and the man – Charlie, presumably – made a sound of agreement. “Sneeg- Sorry, that’s the guy you’ve been talking to, taught me. Neither of us are incredible at it, especially when we have to think about how to spell words while we’re tapping them, but we’re good enough at translating what someone’s saying.”
“Helps with how dusty these cells are,” Sneeg quipped. “We’ll never be short of something to write in.”
A door at the end of the hallway slammed open, and a chorus of hurried “shush”’s and “shut the fuck up”’s carried down the hallway of cells.
Oh shit it’s Hetch, Sneeg tapped out. Or maybe oh shit it’s Hach ? It was hard to tell. It seemed that Hetch/Hach was the man walking down the hallway now, the one who had captured Ranboo in the first place. “Ranboo,” he said as he stopped outside of Ranboo’s cell. “Come with us. It seems you haven’t learnt your lesson yet.”
Showfuck, Ranboo tapped out, and they were rewarded with the sound of muffled laughter from Charlie and Sneeg, at least until Hetch (they were going to go with Hetch, it sounded more stupid) turned around and glared at the others.
***
Ranboo felt like they were about to pass out from heat exhaustion or something. Hetch had made him run on a treadmill while the room got progressively warmer. The temperature readout said it was 49 degrees Celsius, or 120 Fahrenheit now.
“Enough,” Hetch finally said, and Ranboo couldn’t keep up his facade anymore. He crumpled to the ground in defeat. Thankfully, his mask had been deactivated, so he didn’t have to try and silence any sounds that came out of him.
Hetch pressed a button, and a section of the wall slid open to reveal what appeared to be a swimming pool. “Go on, Ranboo,” Hetch said, and there was something strange about his voice, but Ranboo was too tired to try and decode it. “ You’ve earned it. ”
Ranboo didn’t need to be told twice, and dragged themself pitifully towards the pool. Upon confirming that the water was cool, they fell forwards, resting their head on the edge in order to stay above the water line.
Then, they made the mistake of closing their eyes.
There were footsteps behind him, and the telltale sound of one of the prods firing up. Ranboo processed the threat almost instantly, and tried to drag themself up out of the water.
They weren’t fast enough.
Hetch plunged the now crackling cattle prod into the water. “I told you you’d earned this, hadn’t I, Ranboo? This is what happens when you go against Showfall.”
Ranboo didn’t, couldn’t respond before everything went black.
***
They were chained to the wall of their cell now, and he couldn’t move his arms or legs. He had no method of communicating, and the grid on his cell window was firmly closed. As far as anyone was concerned, Ranboo the arsonist may as well have been dead.
Strangely enough, he found himself thinking that he didn’t even care. As far as they were concerned, they were dead the moment they’d been captured.
It was only a matter of time now.