Top 10 Reasons SotF is the show YOU should be watching! ✓✓✓

[Yugikun]

((Jeremy Frasier, continued from Mass Destruction. Also, references to V3 events have been approved by MurderWeasel and MK Kilmarnock))

It was 7 PM; 17th of February, 2015. Jeremy Frasier looked out of the window of his room, wondering whether the colour of the sky actually changed or if it was just him thinking that it changed. His memory just kinda fuzzed out on those sorts of things; not to his annoyance, though. Although he wanted to know if the sky was actually darker now he imagined that always remembering what the sky colour was during random times of random days would be more trouble than it was worth. Nope. His memory was reserved for actually important things, such as... Jesus Christ he could probably recite every Survivor Final Four right now if he felt like it. He snorted, kinda in an upbeat way. And to think that he had only gotten into the show a year ago. Oh well, even if his interest was only recent didn't mean he wasn't a real fan, or anything like that. Serena had seriously given him some gold when she recommended it to him.

Shit, wait, off topic. Jeremy turned back to the homework he was doing. Or rather, the homework he had just done. There was a Social Studies assignment that he had to do before tomorrow where he had to write a couple of paragraphs about his micro and meso world. It had taken him multiple days, not helped by the fact that he had misremembered the due date as being a week after it was actually due. Still, now it was done, and he could go to the Beale Library tomorrow to print it out and hand it in. It also meant that he could relax for a bit. Not for long, since he still had to do a couple things for Chem, but he could listen to music for around half an hour without wasting too much time procrastinating.

So he opened up two new tabs, closed the GDoc containing his Social Studies assignment. For the first tab he opened, he pressed y, then enter, and then watched as the familiar YouTube homepage came up. He scrolled down until he saw the "Watch it again" playlist and checked over what happened to be on the list. Uma Thurman, Act A Fool, Love Runs Out, Romeo And Juliet (the Dire Straits version, as much as he preferred the Killers' cover of it), and I Can't Decide. All pretty good choices, even the Lil Jon song, which was at the very least ironically good. He wasn't sure which one he'd pick. Oh well, he had time to think about it. He turned to the other tab, entered w. Turned out that none of the w results had anything he wanted so he typed out the full thing. "Wikipedia Wolf's Bane." He pressed enter.

The work that he had to do for Chem wasn't much. He just had to research a poison and know some stuff about it for tomorrow, nothing big. As soon as he got home he checked into one of his Horrible Science books (Painful Poison, one of the ones that had been partially chewed up by his cat), and looked through it to see which of the poisons mentioned in the book had the coolest name. Wolf's Bane had won that competition by a landslide, and while the book he had had a little information about it he likely needed to know more about it for tomorrow. He clicked the first result and... goddammit no this wasn't the poison. He clicked the link at the top to go to the disambiguation page. Should have known that there was going to be some D&D supernerd thing considering the name.

But anyway, few clicks later and he found the flower he was looking for. Aconitum. Also known as Wolf's Bane, aconite, monkshood, Leopard's Bane, and... oh wow a whole bunch of other names. He scrolled down the page, briefly checking what it had and- goddammit his laptop decided to click on something. That was something it kept doing, to his annoyance. His hand wasn't even on the mousepad this time, so there was clearly something wrong with it. Oh well, it wasn't too much of a problem. If it kept happening to the point where it became annoying he could just ask one of his IPT friends what the problem was and what he could do to fix it. Simple as that.

Besides, the thing he clicked on was something related to Wolf's Bane. Might as well check it out. Aconitine, the toxin that the plant produced. Also apparently used as a... whatever that word was in China. Given what he read from the previous page, probably meant something medicinal. He started scrolling down the page again, making sure to move the mouse to the side of the page so that it didn't click on anything. He wasn't really planning on doing anything further than a skim before going back to YouTube, but there was something that caught his eye near the bottom of the page that made him stop, and read further.

"An ida laced with aconitine poison was assigned as Nathanial Harris' weapon during the 2007 Survival of the Fittest attacks. The poison was used to kill Corbin Arlen, who was stabbed by the blade moments before Harris himself was killed by Neil Sinclair."

Jeremy just stared at the screen for a couple of seconds, rereading the little statement over and over again. The 2007 attack... That was the one Rizzolo won, right? He remembered hearing something about that. A news story or Wikipedia article saying how the dude with the most kills won before getting killed a year later. Yeah, that was right. Rizzolo was super prominent in the media for around a year until somebody snuck into his apartment and shot him. Nobody knew who did it. Even after over half a decade. Whichever family member or extreme human rights activist who decided to take revenge did a fairly good job of covering their tracks. He wasn't entirely sure if the police were still investigating or not but he doubted that if they were they'd get anything else. It was likely that the question of "Who Shot J.R?" would forever go unsolved.

So Jeremy turned his focus back to the statement on the page again, this time focusing on the words "Survival of the Fittest." No, not the Social Darwinist saying, the terrorist attacks that had happened mid-2012, and a couple years before that. The giant publicised thunderdome in which a high school class fought tooth and nail until only one was left standing. Jeremy's opinions on it tended to lie with what he imagined (and hoped) was the majority opinion; i.e a fucked up, terrible affront to all humanity which he hoped would eventually be stopped at some point. He had to admit though, it interested him, in a totally morbid way. He knew that he shouldn't watch it. He knew that he shouldn't give them the publicity that they most likely wanted.

And he didn't. Jeremy could honestly say that he had never even watched a single second of footage. He knew about what happened, of course. Kinda hard not to, given how much information was about it in the media; but other than that, he was totally pure when it came to SotF.

But he didn't know. There was just... something about the concept of it that intrigued him. He tended to read the plot summaries of horror movies when there was one he was interested in, and he imagined that his interest in SotF was kinda like that. Of course, he had never actually looked at it (horror wasn't fun when real people were getting killed, after all), but the interest remained in the back of his mind, tingling itself every once in a while.

He was still staring at the page, reading through the sentence. His mind now turned to the end, a blue little number 23. He clicked on it, wondering what it was. "SotF V3: Day 6 Recap - A View to Fury." It was from one of those 20000 news sites that just kinda blended in his mind. That wasn't really important, though. What was important was that Jeremy wasn't interested in reading it. He was just interested in where the source was coming from, that was all. He moved his mouse up so he could get rid of the bubble and-

Fuck. The mouse clicked.

Jeremy was taken away from the familiar black and white background and within seconds was shown somewhere completely different. A slight shade of red had entered itself into the black and white background, and the text was bigger, but not a lot had changed. Of course, there was the giant fuckass logo and the autoplaying ads, but those weren't worth mentioning. He scrolled down, slightly, to get the ads to shut up, and saw an blanked out image which he scrolled ov- goddammit he really needed to fix this clicking problem. Luckily for him,the image that came up wasn't anything bad. It was an overhead shot of a group of buildings, with a rocky path splitting them apart. It was early morning, and the gold sun shining on the ground Jeremy had to admit created a good looking shot. There was a man - tanned, slightly bloodied, with golden hair - standing and holding a gun up against a group of people, with one of the other group's members doing the same.

Jeremy just stared at the picture for a bit. Let himself take it in for a bit. It was wrong. He knew that. SotF was twisted and fucked up and shouldn't be happening. He knew that. If he scrolled down, he'd be giving the people who wrote this and the people who did this what they wanted.

He knew that.

But still, it interested him. The little thing tingling at the back of his head wasn't quite tingling anymore, it was thrashing itself around, ramming itself into the walls of his skull in an attempt to get him to scroll down. The image he was looking at right now, the image of the lone gunman standing against a group, it interested him. He wanted to know what the story was. He wanted to know why this was happening, how this was happening. He wanted to know the story of the gunman and how he came to be like this, bloodied and outnumbered. He wanted to know if he survived, if he made it out of this situation alive.

Besides, if it was too much for him, he could back out. The x at the top of the tab was right up there, and it wasn't like he was going to be on some government watch list if he read it. People probably did this all the time. The media ate these things up and the people ate the media up. It was okay, he could do this. Part of him wanted to do it, and it wasn't like he wasn't going to become a bad person just by doing it. Do it. It'll be okay.

He scrolled down.

It wasn't that bad, in all honesty. As Jeremy kept reading down, it became clear that this was an article that told the reader what happened during the days events. No flavour, no tone, no humour. He was happy for that; he probably would have quit out of disgust if the writer of this cracked a shitty pun over one of these people actually dying. It turned out that the gunman's name was Bobby Jacks, who had apparently killed a couple of people beforehand. The group was called S.A.D.D, and had apparently gotten in trouble earlier that day for destroying cameras. Bobby had walked in on the group at a rendezvous point, and a shootout occurred, with Jacks killing three people.

It was surprisingly okay. Jeremy could read this. There was a twinge of guilt in the back of his head, but he could ignore it, push it back for a bit. He didn't really find it compelling, no emotion or tone in the text helped that. He wouldn't read this again tomorrow, but at least he wasn't compelled to watch the show. Maybe that was the intended purpose of it. To let the people know what was happening in the game without them having to watch it themself. To let people who were interested in it to read about it without having to compromise their morality. You could read it, you could be okay with it, but you didn't have to read more.

He reached the end of the article. Below lay three more. V3 Day 8, V3 Day 4, V4 Day 5. V4 was the one with a whole bunch of survivors, right? Maybe. He didn't know.

It wouldn't hurt to check, at least. He clicked the V4 link. Saw the blacked out image. Figured that since the first image wasn't that bad this image wouldn't be too bad either. He clicked.

The image that came up was that of a man covered in blood, staring at the camera. Several bloodstained corpses laid behind him, arranged in a makeshift garden.

What the fuck?

What the fuck?

He moved the mouse to the top of the tab, clicking wildly, just trying to get the image off of his screen as soon as possible. This wasn't right and he knew that now and he didn't know what compelled him to look at it and he didn't want to look at it anymore. Eventually he clicked the right place and the image disappeared, eventually replacing itself with the familiar YouTube homepage. He breathed out, releasing the air that he had been too surprised to release earlier. Thank God, it was gone. He didn't know what that was, and he wasn't going to go back and find out anytime soon. What he just saw was... wrong. Totally, undeniably, fucking wrong on so many levels. It was like one of those things you saw in slasher movies. The big, menacing killer who you could take a look at and just know that they weren't going to be nice.

But those were the movies, and the person he just saw, the thing he just saw was real.

And horror wasn't fun when it was happening to real people. He knew that now. If he looked at those pages, reading through them as if it was akin to reading an article about a horror movie... he didn't know how to word it but it wasn't good. It'd just perpetuate the attacks. Give the terrorists the publicity that they wanted. The whole argument he gave to himself the moment he accidently clicked on that page.

Fuck, he just needed to take his mind off it. Get the image out of his head. He looked at the list of songs in front of him, looked for which one was the longest. Romeo & Juliet was that by far. Six minutes. He'd listen to the song, and it'd help him blank out for a bit. It wouldn't allow him to listen to the song deeply but it could help him unsee the picture. Good plan?

Yeah, good plan. He checked his headphones, clicked the video, and laid the back of his head on his pillow as the music started to play.

((Jeremy Frasier, continued in Not My Tempo))