Work Text:
Testimony given by a wizened going by C ███████. Entity originally described as "that thing that kidnapped Michael Jackson and stole his name before turning his face against everything he stood for" and went simply by "the Master" to other Changelings who claim to have had contact.
Audio transcript begins.
"So I need you to understand some things first. The reason I came to you is because I know your organization... your so-called Foundation... and what it's for. I also know that, somehow, we ended up living in... well, let me put it this way. Combining the internet's most famous Creepypasta wiki with the world's most depressing Tabletop RPG sounds like Nightmare Fuel unleaded, right? Except to do that, some wires get crossed, don't they? An 'anomaly'? Are you freaking kidding me? It's magic, get over your stupid Hunter-style aspirations. Still, things stop making sense. Is Arcadia the realm of the True Fae or the name of a video game company that steals souls? I'm here to tell you something about the Fae. Their relation to [DATA EXPUNGED] Oh no you don't. The sasquatches. You know what I mean."
"Now, you know the Oneiroi Collective? The 'Original Characters', har-har. It's them. They're the True Fae. I'm not a loyalist. I don't just do my Master's bidding because I'm deluded or anything. If you asked a cat why it sticks around, I think if it could it would say it loves you because you're a giant kitten. I'm the cat, except I'm just a kitten myself. My Master isn't a monster in the way you'd expect. I know because of how I ended up there and what I came back to."
"Let me give you a date. September 10th. Yes, 2001. That's the day I disappeared, not that anyone noticed. I was taken by a really nasty pair of... they were like witches, but all they were was a twisted mockery of the people my fetch was encountering. Imagine the two witches from 'A Christmas Story' except the first time I was made aware of that movie was through my Fetch years later. "
"I spent two years being constantly mocked by them, told that I would be miserable forever and that my parents would never find me. Then I decided that even if I froze to death I would rather leave. The Master found me delirious in the snow, asking with all my heart to become a snowman. For a while I was, even my fetch knew it. There was this link, like I'd become trapped inside the mind of my fetch. Maybe that's why I hate evil clowns so much, he seemed to know they are a perversion of something that should be innocent."
"The Master is... yeah. The description was accurate, at least at that time. For a decade, I was like his favorite video game, and even when the Master got bored, he didn't destroy or hurt us, but... as far as I remember, I never met the Master himself all those years. Not until my snow melted."
"I was inside that snowman. My soul, I mean. I don't remember how it melted off me, but when it did... I was like Pinocchio. You know how in the Disney movie - and no, that's not why I brought up the OC - that Pinocchio looks so cute and helpless inside a cage owned by that evil ringmaster? That's what I was. The Master didn't hurt me then either. He appeared to me as, get this, a teddy bear. Ironic, huh? But he just gave me a hug, warned me of what was going on, and said he wished he could prevent it."
"The reason he couldn't is because of their nature. What the True Fae, the Oneiroi Collective, whatever you would call them... are. He didn't tell me that part, I don't know why. Maybe the fact that I didn't think that was possible was why. I was half-convinced it was just fantasies, that my waking life was real and it was just a very long lucid dream."
"That's why I knew about you, actually. You questioned my fetch about a dream and wiped his memory, or at least you thought you did and it faked it. Nice job, ashtrays. Anyway, that was the last time I would see the Master for three years. Not sure why time passed normally for me, but it did. Except even though I got smarter, I never got older, never really changed. The snowman felt almost like some weird phase that teenagers go through, like it only existed to pass myself off as 'being a good kid'. It wasn't until it was gone that I started to realize that the endless hallways weren't normal. Malls, schools, airports, sometimes I would see the outside through a window, but I'd always be indoors."
"Then it just... ended. I stepped out of a bathroom on a plane to find my fetch waiting for me. He said he was just keeping my seat warm all these years, went in and let me find my parents waiting for me in their seats. Mid-flight, too. It was like I'd fallen asleep on September 10th of 2001 and woke up on February 31st of 2017. I know because I never saw my fetch again but he, or it, left a smartphone. I literally thought it was just a portable TV."
"Now, at this point, I've done a lot of talking but gave no hints as to what all this is. I'm not describing all this as an ego trip. Well, let me put it this way. My fetch left quietly without a fight or anything. Do you know how rare that's supposed to be according to Black Dog Games? Kids specifically never survive in the hands of the True Fae, if it's to be believed. I can tell you the truth has more hope, but it means accepting one fact. A hard one to accept. The True Fae aren't the bad guys. In the minds of the Fae, they must always treat you like you treated other people. I've looked, you weren't part of the in-group but real changelings know the True Fae are made of ideas. Sound familiar? Yeah, the Oneiroi Collective. It's the same beings."
"I looked into you guys while I tried to compile proof of kidnapped children to the world. You've ignored countless times when kids have died, if there wasn't an afterlife that they've ended up in, I'd be freaking done with existence. In my investigations, I wasn't able to find a single kid that didn't come back after disappearing. The Fae don't kill in the literal sense."
"My fetch... I saw where he went, into the hallways of the House. That's when I remembered the first time I really saw what the Master looked like."
"I just don't know how a year passed after that before the link broke and I could think straight, but at some point it climbed a set of stairs. Well, correction. I opened a door and it had stairs leading down into darkness. Really not the kind of place I want to go in a place like that, terrifying. Moving on. My fetch climbing those stairs reminded me of when I must have met the Master for the first time by climbing the same steps."
"I climbed a set of stairs that were just to the right for that door, heading upwards into the House proper. I talked to a boy named Black Pete to ask where the Master was, because as you'd expect, I was terrified of him. I don't know for sure, but I think that the Master stole Black Pete's name and his reputation. He was the nicest one there, I don't know what he could have done to deserve that but if he was always that nice then I'd say it was probably just that he and his dad never saw eye to eye. I don't know if he was actually Michael, but if he wasn't, I got the feeling he might have been an escaped slave from the Deep South. I felt bad for him either way. Running from people only to end up in the hands of something worse. But... I'll get to that."
"I asked him if he knew where the Master was. I was terrified. Something about the Master was just as creepy as you'd think, and I didn't want to find out what would happen if I failed."
"Pete pointed me over to the bedroom at the end of a hall. It was just... expensive. Like, I don't exactly live frugally, but all my most expensive stuff is related to video games. I don't buy for prestige, and I think that's why. This place, it was like... that the Master's bedroom had to make us hate how ostentatious it was, but fear what he would do to us if we dared speak."
"Don't get it twisted, the Master eats kids. Except not the way you expect. Everything is as horrifying as you'd think, up until the morning after you've been served to him on a silver platter. That's when you stop being you and start being your soul."
"No, I don't mean as ghosts. The Master... he doesn't eat the kid themselves. He eats their potential. You 'respawn' the next day and you're not the normal you anymore. You're the person you would be if souls had a shape, because that's how things work inside the human brain. The True Fae are metaphors made literal, and Changelings are souls made literal. That's why you have to become a Changeling if you end up in Arcadia. Not some bullshit contracts, but because you literally can't survive unless you become a symbol of who you really are, a character in both senses of the word. That's what we are to the Fae, just images, and it takes most people by surprise. They don't really kill us, or I wouldn't be here, but we really are entertainment to them, kept because we are one of the only things that can surprise them."
"The Master eats the potential for a child's character to grow up, but only when a kid wants to grow up purely for the sake of the adults around them. He takes away that option because if you want to be mature, there's nothing more mature for a kid to do than to choose to remain small and powerless instead of idolizing whatever works of fiction sound mature. Sometimes people don't know what they want. The Fae always know, and they'll deliver, but the question is how painlessly do you deserve to get what you want? The reason I said so much about myself is, I've made mistakes. I'm a failure in almost every sense of the word. But I know who I am and I know I don't like being controlled, and that's what you see in that special camera you have locked in some warehouse. The day he ate 'me' was the last day I could have grown up. Like I said, as if I'm just a living toy of what people think kids are. But he didn't eat me on that day that I got out. He did it already long before then."
"I don't know how I know it, but I know there's no way I could have survived if things were that bad. The Master chose one of us to be a meal every day, all of us had been forced to serve the last kid to fail the Master, and I'd hate him for that... except I never saw an oven. I never saw anything or anyone be eaten. And the times don't match up, unless we continued to exist even after we'd been turned into a dish."
"I was told to 'prepare' a girl named Alice, and yet... that's where I don't remember anything more. Believe me, I was thinking what you were thinking; there's no way it isn't just memories blocked out. They're dead, they have to be... except the Master may have looked like post-surgery Michael Jackson floated above the ground, but that wasn't his true form. He only wore it at the time."
"I never escaped, I'm collared as I say this, so I get your skepticism. Alice is out there, alive. I know because she's a member of my Freehold, but I'll die before I let anyone, even my Master, tell me to hurt her or anyone else under duress. The thing is, he never did and never will. That's why I let the Master continue to own me, the reports that the Fae are monsters don't come from people who realize what's going on."
"The Master eats potential, it's what fuels him, but that's a mercy. What's scary is that it looks like he eats us, feels like it, even though we draw a blank even to the question of whether one of us died in an oven or being eaten alive or something slightly less gruesome. None of us mysteriously disappeared, we'd talk about how horrible it was to be forced to betray each other and... none of us remembered the part you would think was the most painful."
"The reason I figured it out is a long story. When I got out of the Hedge, I was devastated to realize the one story reality seemed to actually represent was one so terrifyingly hopeless. Completely depressive, wanting to die. The Master was the one who told me I didn't need to blame myself, that he did this to me, made me what I am. He did it through my dreams."
"It got me kicked out of every Freehold I tried to join. They refused to trust me because of it. I couldn't blame them. What kind of Changeling lets a being like that continue to toy with my soul?"
"The reason I didn't reject the Master on the spot when he started guiding me was because I had nowhere else to turn and it didn't make sense. Why give me special treatment? How is it that I'm the first Changeling that the Fae would tell the honest truth to, and why was the honest truth not contradicting all that we've said about them? The Master didn't say they weren't monsters, that he wasn't a monster. He just said he loved me with a warm blanket wrapped around me as his hug, in one dream. In that one he had no physical form, I just knew he was there."
"But the first time I saw his true form was because he started guiding me. I fell asleep, exhausted because my life was insufferably painful, and suddenly there was this school. A school I didn't belong in. So I left that school. Then the Master grabbed me, and... you'd think the Master was a person, right? That the thing that grabbed me with slender, eldritch appendages of strangeness was the Master. Those tendrils picked me up and he pressed a sharp fingernail jab into my belly button. I woke up with an infection in there, but it was more than a 'please take better care of yourself' and it wasn't a threat. He knew, KNEW that I wouldn't survive. His intent, somehow, came across crystal clear. 'I made you. This is my fault. Don't blame yourself for being who you are, I wanted you to be that and that's why you are you. Please don't punish yourself for liking that you are you just because everyone else we take hates us."
"Since then, I've done a lot of research. Trying to figure out why the historical record and stuff matches what Black Dog Studios says the world is. I traveled, I asked around, and here's the conclusion I came to."
"Science calls souls 'the subconscious'. It calls the Fae 'the unconscious'. That is apparently the facts, but then the magic comes into it. I don't know how or why magic is possible, only that the subconscious is more than just the software of the mind in a brain. It does exist spiritually, and most people don't realize that when they're changed, what they're made into is defined by who they really are. Even who they are in the dark, when no one else seems to be looking. If someone becomes beautiful, in some way they are a good soul, in fact it was probably their core virtues that were all they were able to defend themselves with. If someone is ugly and brutish, they're a cruel and bullying person. If they look like an untrustworthy corpo rat, they probably are. In my case, I had the potential to be a person, to do something meaningful, and the Master didn't simply consume it and toss me aside. He took it from me because, in the end, I'd have been miserable growing up for an ideal that I didn't even believe in. Instead, even though over 15 years passed, everything I cared about was still waiting for me when I got back. That wasn't luck, we all know that doesn't just happen when the Fae want something."
"I went looking and as I talked to other Changelings, finding out what their durances were like, I came across a common theme. The mysterious 'men in black' that go around questioning people who saw the impossible. The Foundation. So I came to you, came looking to exchange info, because I don't know why the Master is benevolent, but he doesn't even give me orders. When he was showing me in a dream that I had it all wrong and this really was his fault, his eyes glowed bright blue."
"It's the eyes. I never know when he will show up next, but the reason the Master came in a dream first was to let me know he wasn't out to get me or anyone else. Since then, if someone's eyes glow blue, I know he's there, that his... avatar, I guess... is him even if it never looks the same. Those blue eyes aren't notable in themselves, but when he glows to let me know those eyes are him, I just... I remember my place, in a sense, but the magic is that it's NOT mind control. I just want him to be entertained by me. I always wanted to be a story character and live in a world that was better than reality, to be someone people would like because I was fun, and now I am fun, even if the Werewolves know the world is inevitably doomed."
"I don't know how but I got dealt a good hand on the first turn. My actual parents cared about me and taught me how to be a good person who questions authority. I find most other Changelings to be jerks, to be honest. They don't even react to things like kids dying, or how unfair life is. It's like that's supposed to be normal, just because some Boomer said it's always been like that. 'Changelings are all cyberpunks and zombie survivalists now. There's no craftsmanship!' isn't a sign of growing old and set in your ways, it was overdone in the 80s and it's overdone now. Y2K didn't even GET to have it's time in the sun before everything was a bunch of meaningless garbage about the War on Terror being a necessary evil and how much money the Kardashians were worth. I was born in 1991 and hated everything teenagers did during the time my fetch experienced the 2000s, and we were linked closely enough that the night immediately after he showed me everything he'd seen in that time in a single night, don't look at me and tell me I'd have been better off without being a thrall to something that has never actually made me kill anyone. You see, that's the problem. The Fae... they're US, in a way. Fetches are just another avatar of the True Fae that took that person, and everything they do to us, whether we admit it or not, is what we do to the people around us. Because even though I'm small and cute and perpetually 10 years old, I'm just the property of my Master, and the only reason that hasn't backfired is because I don't use people, not on purpose, and keeping myself from unintentionally using people just to get my way is something I really care about. I don't just want to take advantage of people. So my Keeper decided he didn't just want to take advantage of me, that I deserved, at the very least, to be allowed my freedom and happiness."
"That's the real reason they remade us. We're not just toys, we're prisoners. Something we did or do made them angry, and they only judge us by what we truly believe, but only when we don't want to admit we believe it. I don't believe in authoritarianism or slavery, they're awful. I believe, well, believed... that God was just a spoiled brat and my soul, me... just a piece of fan merch to him. I think the reason my Keeper told me the truth is because I was so close to the truth, yet so far off the mark. Most Changelings are too proud to admit they think - well, thought - they're the center of the universe. I was too scared of true death - something I no longer think happens - to admit that I would rather be in Hell than stop existing, and I hated arrogance so much that that I wouldn't admit the only reason I don't succeed is because I don't want to become arrogant. Saying all this, I'll admit I haven't exactly been humble all the time, but I don't feel like being remembered. At all. I'm not in this to leave a legacy behind, I won't go out in a blaze of glory unless someone else is already being truly evil. I don't have or want anything to do with sex and genetic reproduction. I don't want to be remembered, I want to live forever! If Mr. Nobody could live forever, why not stay quiet?"
"Oh, that guy? I know a bit from your own records but no. I've never met Nobody."
"Good souls, ones that didn't allow themselves to justify their own actions, apparently end up back home somehow. The ones who don't, the bad souls... That's why I fear my Master. I worship him but I don't do his bidding because I fear him. He gets angry, like I used to. Except he's not humanly imperfect. He might not be an actual god, but he is perfect in his fairness, and so are all the True Fae. The problem is, we're supposed to think for ourselves, to not trust authorities. The reason my Master is my Master is because I helped build him, I made decisions of what I stood for and believed in, I engraved a moral code into my head. I believe in choice over one's own body, for everyone. That's why I'm different from the other Changelings. There's others like me but it looks like I'm the first one to understand why. We're supposed to be flawed, limited and unable to defend ourselves. The True Fae made humanity, of course they wanted to ensure we have no choice but to let them do as they please, so they made us the most harmless things we could be. I would know, the Master liked making it literal. I've been held in the palm of his hand like I'm a miniature living toy of myself. I have plastic skin and my joints are mechanical, just because I wanted to be a real boy too early. It's not nice, but they really are fair. They find those among us who are best at hiding their flaws and show us what that really means. Most people who are good at hiding their flaws don't pass the test. I was an exception because I wasn't trying to get away with it. I was scared what people would think of my soul, that they'd say I wasn't fit to be a person."
"The scary part is, I was right. People, their souls, are petty and small by design, so that submitting to our creators is the only logical choice. That doesn't mean we're slaves though. It means we were made to be criminals no matter how good we try to be, because the Fair Folk only pull one punch, killing blows. They'll hurt you if they think you deserve it, because most of us think of other people that way, as someone who - with the right excuse - they can get away with hurting. That's the scary part. We don't realize it, but what a changeling becomes is determined by how wonderful or terrible the soul is. We deserve it. We actually deserve what they do to us."
"Some of us come out ugly but only on the outside, others never change their ways and never return, a few of us become who we actually want to be. All of us, though, are Borrowers in the world of the Fae. Thieves. We get greedy on a pile of treasure, not realizing that one Fae coin is a solid gold manhole cover and you are too small to do anything but be caught. That coin is how valuable your very life is to them after that, you're a slave because you're really just part of the giant's horde of wealth if you try to obtain gold the same way the giant is implied to. It's not fair that we can't be more because they started out with an advantage, but that was never the point behind things secretly being fair. If we were equals, we'd be just like them, pointless. The reason we deserve it isn't always easy to define, but for me... I think if it didn't happen, I'd never have realized that. Maybe nobody would have."
"The Fae weren't just experimenting mindlessly. Like your organization, they didn't understand us but they wanted to, and their chosen lab rats were criminals who trespassed. I think they might finally have cracked the code, as horrible as the method is. What they didn't understand is how we're alive. How meat puppets contain the real us. How something that should be just a monkey thinks like the gods despite having no way to back our view up. I think that's why they always spare kids but not always teenagers. Kids feel small and powerless already. Teenagers think they're invincible. What you believe actually matters if you're a Fae, even a Changeling. The Fae don't understand how something, that knows what being small and powerless - and aware of it - feels like, can immediately just decide that they're hot spit and start bullying people. We're just mice living in their walls, so why is it all too common for us to turn evil the moment we feel like giants among mortals? You'd think more people would realize what they become when they justify taking a life."
"The Master, as those eyes, was someone I could legitimately negotiate with. I tried the best I could to get my freedom, I couldn't do it. He was right, I owed him myself not because he remade me but because he gave me everything I'd ever cared about. My existence depended on that agreement. But I wouldn't let him just push me around. I can admit to willingly being submissive around him, but I can't let him force me to hurt people, not because I'd get in trouble, but because that's an unspeakable evil. That's why I'm not a loyalist. I'm not loyal to him, he's loyal to me. I trust him with owning my very self because of that. Unfortunately, trust has never been common in people who need someone to fix their broken moral code. For me it was, until I realized just how horrifyingly true Black Dog's setting was, and the only parts that seemed unanswered were how bad it was at its worst. The Master didn't leave me to die terrified that it was at least partially true, he kept me alive, and explained what all this was about. When I was ready, he showed me how to be everything I wanted to be, and over time he let me know something I never thought he'd know or let me know. Well, two things, but my real name is the less interesting one. It's the one my parents gave me, but turns out it's also a person's capital-T True Name. Blame the 20th Century for stigmatizing nicknames in adulthood up until the 1970s, or something, I wasn't born yet then, but discovering Wikipedia has been the best information source and resource list ever, and the 70s? That was when truckers' handles were super cool-sounding. Then came usernames, and the Fae have been trying to get us to return to the old-fashioned true names because - as much as they love us, even in tough love - they're scared of us too. Nuclear armageddon would destroy every 'toy' they'd ever enjoyed."
"The other thing wasn't my true name, but his names. Both of them. I can't tell you his true name, but that's why I just call him Budi. Yes, an elder god TOLD me his true name. It probably won't do any good for you, though. Budi warned me the reason not to say it is because that gives him free reign to claim YOU as his own, and that's not something I wish on someone trying to save lives. Choice matters. Our lives matter. Not because we're people, but in spite of it. The Fae remake us to be special once they're done testing us because to them, a toy is the most wonderful thing that can possibly exist. That's why they have to treat us like entertainment, make us into their possessions. In Budi's eyes, I'm not 'just' his toy, I'm the most important thing a Fae can own... A moral compass to find your way home. You can't actually escape from the Fae, if you were meant to leave they've already arranged how they'll follow you home. Everything else is just the Backrooms but with a montage of David Bowie singing Dance Magic Dance playing the whole time."
"I don't expect anyone to simply trust the Fae. The opposite, in fact. Don't trust them. If there is anyone nearby you, think to yourself about what you are doing. If a god who enjoys tormenting the wicked were to suddenly decide what I'm about to do is something he, or she, or they, or it, or whatever, wants to do to me, and instead of telling me the real reason why, they say it's for some other reason that feels cruel and unfair and based purely on some privileged 'divine' status... What will I have to endure to appease that being instead of assuming I'm right?"
"But that's the important part. That we deserve it. Bad things still happen to people for no reason, sure. They aren't turned into the playthings of the elder gods. You know why I didn't get changed until the Master found me in the snow? Because those Witches weren't his doing. They weren't Fae, not True Fae and not Changelings. There's other groups out there than just the ones you know, and unlike the tabletop cover story, they're mostly aware of each other already."
"I don't know who the Witches were. They seemed like Fae, but I came here for an information exchange. So. I want to point you to something. Here. This weird manhole cover on a piece of undeveloped land was the spot. I found this there."
Subject passes interviewer a large book containing strange symbols, including symbols on the cover. Analysis reveals them to be based on, if not identical, to the D'ni alphabet.
"Now, I told you everything I know, you've already explained what I need to know, and I'm hoping you'll keep your word. Changeling Freeholds don't like when their members get imprisoned. I definitely don't think they'd put up with finding out about the existence of the Jailors-"
The door to the containment chamber opens.
"Thanks. Don't worry about leaks from us, Changelings have every reason to hide the existence of ourselves and our keepers from the public eye."