Entry #2

[rosswood]

[This gets posted at around 4 A.M. and it's a video feed, which, if anyone's been contacted by Alex recently, is a little unusual. It's a clear visual on the inside of Alex's room - scandalous - which isn't terribly different from your typical college dorm room, with one notable exception.

It is liberally covered in weird, hastily-scribbled, ink-and-charcoal drawings. The long shot of one of the walls might give people enough time to read the most visible ones:

SEES ME

LEAVE ME ALONE

OPERATOR

Accompanied by several rough illustrations of pine trees and frequently punctuated with an odd symbol: a circle with an X slashed through it.

Ⓧ

Distortion abruptly ripples across the screen, and the angle changes. Now the network will be treated to a clear shot of the floor of Alex's room, which is similarly carpeted in page after scrawled page of cryptic warnings and oblique messages, along with what looks to be a laundry list of crossed-out names - names like BRIAN and SARAH, JAY and TIM and SETH, any of which might be visible to the eagle-eyed.

With a flutter of static and an unpleasant, high-pitched screeching sound, the picture shifts one last time. Now someone's hands are in view, streaked with ink as they carve out yet another circle-and-x symbol into another sheet of paper with single-minded resolve. Then the feed buzzes, frames flickering, and switches off.]

((ooc: Alex won't respond until next morning since he's not doing any of this consciously - he's currently asleep. Feel free to respond with an action post, though you might have to wake him up first.))

Comments

[Text]

[mypartnerintime]

[Why the hell can't she sleep at night and just skip all this crazy-scary crap for once? For the hundredth time (no - more than that by now) she wishes Chloe was here. She would be all "let's just go to his room and kick the fucking door down" and Max would feel the confidence and just go. But she's not here, and Max has to put up with this stuff alone.]

[In this case, that means just sending a text and going out of her room to walk around: not to Alex' room, but in a random direction, trying to keep her mind on other things.]

Hey Alex! You ok?

[She doesn't realize it will take him ages to reply. She basically just spends the whole night wandering around, sitting sometimes and thinking about things. By the morning she's starving, so she ends up in the dining room, munching on waffles.]

[text]

[rosswood]

[Sure enough, the reply comes a few hours later one the sun's up. And it's not very coherent.]

shit shitgodda mnit
fuck

[mypartnerintime]

[She hears the notification on her phone and pauses in her waffle-munching to check it.]

[Yup. That's exactly how she would react, too.]

I guess you weren't supposed to show that.

[rosswood]

no
my camera shouldn't even be working
fuck

would you believe me if i said that wasn't me

[It's...not the most convincing of lies, sure. But he can't think of what else to say.]

[mypartnerintime]

No, Alex, I would not believe you. [Seriously, that was some nuts stuff on that video, and she kind of wants an explanation.] Were you high?

[SPOT ON.]

action;

[krmvgivv]

[Dipper actually isn't awake to view this initially--turns out being dead for a little while makes you a) tired and b) unlikely to do anything that might cause your sister to wake up in the middle of the night to you not being there. But in the morning, Dipper sees the post, and rather than, say, contacting him and asking about it directly where he can lie about it, he just goes straight to Alex's room and knocks on the door.]

action;

[rosswood]

[Alex actually did the overdramatic thing that roughly equates to a high school breakup in a bad indie film: he literally burned every page of scribbled-up bullshit in his room. It feels like he barely even slept. He is tired. And he is sick of his brain's shit.

And he opens the door and oh good. This. This is exactly what he needs.]

What now.

[What a warm and friendly welcome, truly.]

action;

[krmvgivv]

[Dipper doesn't wait for an introduction, just tries to squeeze past Alex into the room. The... way too empty room.]

Where'd all the stuff go?

action;

[rosswood]

[Well jesus kid have at it then. Alex doesn't even care. Look how much he doesn't care. He steps back and lets it happen because he's way too tired to deal with this right now.]

Uh, I got rid of it? It was creepy, and I like my choice of wallpaper better.

action;

[krmvgivv]

[Dipper had thought it was like his room, which only has two bulletin boards covered in strange texts and drawings, but maybe this isn't a mystery board thing. Maybe it's something else. Either way, he's glad he at least has images of it, even if he was hoping to get a look at the originals.]

Seriously? How do you expect to figure out what it means if you just get rid of it?

video

[therapize]

That's one hell of a choice when it comes to room decorations.

[It's late enough into the morning that Cami's already had coffee, thank goodness for them all, but she's making a habit of going through the posts that go up during the night. She's been plagued by nightmares and an inability to sleep herself, so those late posts are likely pretty telling.

She has to say, this one has her a bit concerned.]

text

[rosswood]

what can i say i'm an artist

[gdi at least his face didn't show in the video. He can take some comfort in relative anonymity.]

video

[therapize]

Are you? I like art. [She's long been an admirer of it, though not talented in creating it herself. Still, Cami has other gifts. She thinks back to the images she'd seen, hastily written words, desperate scrawling, and what it might mean of the person who created it.]

Specifically, I like figuring out the story behind it. Like yours. [Since he had put it in those terms, Cami would take advantage of it.] I'd say it was done by someone who was desperate, and afraid. They're trying to accomplish something but they can't, and each time they fail things they feel like they're pulled deeper and deeper into an abyss that might swallow them whole. There's something dangerous in their world, or maybe in their head that they just can't get out. But they're going to keep trying regardless.

[And that determination might not be a good thing. Because there's a list of names that have been scratched though, and busy hands still leaving that mark.]

text

[rosswood]

oh i get it
your the shrink aren't you

are you gonna tell me i secretly wanna fuck my mom or something

[Class. Alex has got it.]

video

[therapize]

Guilty as charged. Cami.

[She's dealt with worse grammar and temperament. Unfortunately for Alex, Cami isn't going to be put off so easily.]

Sorry; Oedipal complexes have never really been my thing. I do, however, have experience dealing with paranoid personalities, anger issues, and even classic narcissists.

And I'm good enough to know the signs of someone needing help. Not that I expect you to admit it, but I'd like to skip the part where you try and feed me a bunch of lines about how the manic scribbles don't mean anything, and that you're actually okay in spite of the late-night foray into paranoia land.

[Text]

[vampdetective]

[Angel figures the broadcast isn't a conscious one, given the time of night and the fact that there had been no actual message to go along with it, but it's still more than enough to pique his curiosity, and so his response to it comes mid-morning the next day as he sits at the front desk in his office with a mug of blood and a yellow legal pad.]

I'm interested in the notes on your walls, if you feel like talking.

[Text]

[rosswood]

you and everyone else
what's it to you

[He's come to expect poking from someone like Dipper, maybe, but he doesn't know this contact. Who knows what stake someone else might have in this.]

[Text]

[vampdetective]

I'm a detective. Call me curious.
Name's Angel.

[Text]

[rosswood]

[OH GOOD A DETECTIVE

this is fine.]

spend lots of time dancing on heads of pins do you

there's tons of drawings buddy your gonna have to be more specific

[Text]

[vampdetective]

Something like that.

[look he knows the name is dumb]

All of it. It looks like you're tracking something? [Or that something is following him, maybe.] Or someone. Are you worried that whatever it is is here?

[video]

[punful]

[Sans doesn't see this until the following morning. Boy is that something to wake up to. And it's awfully reminiscent of...]

[Well.]

[He'd kind of liked this guy the few times they'd talked, so he figures he should ask.]

everything, uh. alright over there?

[text]

[rosswood]

peachy
my hand slipped is all

[Prepare for Six Billion Tons of Bullshit.]

[audio]

[punful]

it kinda looked like it slipped a few hundred times.

[audio]

[rosswood]

what you've never written crazy shit just to write crazy shit
sleepwalking is a real pain in the ass what can i say

[audio forever]

[punful]

i mean, i don't make a habit of it.

you must have some pretty intense dreams if that's what you do in your sleep.