Chapter Text
On March 25th, at 9:03 PM, Ranboo is officially declared missing. His disappearance is soon followed by the disappearance of ten other equally prolific content creators.
There’s no sign of struggle, but nothing to indicate that the victims may have voluntarily left, either. Their homes are untouched. CCTV footage shows them going about their days as normal. For all the searching the police do, the twelve might as well have vanished into thin air.
Twitter goes down in flames. News outlets jump on the story, and within days, everyone and their pet dog knows what’s happening. Internet celebrities offer their condolences for the missing. Some set up check-in systems to make sure nobody else disappears.
By mid-April, however, the panic is dying down. Investigation has proved unfruitful, and with no new information to report, the media moves onto better, fresher stories. Fans and friends of the victims continue to follow the fruitless investigation, but the general public loses interest.
Then on May 25th, at 6:00 PM, Ranboo goes live.
Twitter once again goes down in flames. Internet sleuths and conspiracy theorists alike flood Reddit with (mostly false) information about the mysterious “Showfall Media” apparently responsible for the stream. The police scramble to trace the origin of the broadcast, but are ultimately unsuccessful. Multiple governmental agencies are called in to assist, and the media has a field day.
All across the world, people tune in to watch the show unfold.
Sapnap doesn’t know what’s happening.
He nearly panics when he sees Ranboo lying on the couch, but then he sits up and—
Ranboo…doesn’t look hurt. He doesn’t look scared. He doesn’t look like someone who’s been missing for two months.
Sapnap pulls open the chat on the stream, only to be met with a blank rectangle. Baffled, he tries again. Then again.
More nothing. Somehow, the chat has been disabled.
Unease rises in Sapnap’s gut, but before he can sink too deep into it, his Discord rings. A quick tab-over shows that Dream is calling him. He joins, and is instantly blasted by fervent cursing from George and equally fervent demands of “You’re seeing this too, right? That’s actually Ranboo?” from Dream.
“That’s Ranboo,” Sapnap answers. He watches as Ranboo gets to his feet. The cabin he’s in feels…fake. Like a set in a show, almost. It’s eerie. “Where the fuck is he?”
Neither Dream nor George answer. They watch in silence as Ranboo tries a door, only to find it locked. Sapnap finds himself chewing on the inside of his cheek, fearing the moment when Ranboo realizes that he’s well and truly trapped within the room.
Then Ranboo tries another door. And it fucking opens.
“Holy shit!” Dream cheers. “Holy shit, yes, get out of there right now, Ranboo, run—”
“Where the fuck did the cabin go?” George asks, and now Sapnap realizes that the cabin has completely disappeared, leaving Ranboo with an open doorframe in the middle of what looks like a forest.
“What the fuck,” he mutters. The only way that would be feasibly possible is if this is a prerecorded video, but—that would imply that Ranboo willingly participated in the creation of this livestream. Which then throws his whole disappearance, and the disappearances of those after him, into question.
The leaves in the forest rustle as though a beast is approaching, and Ranboo hastily ducks back inside the door. Dream makes a vague noise of worry, but when Ranboo remains in front of the cabin door and nothing attempts to break through the wall, he falls silent.
Ranboo begins to wander around the cabin, apparently inspecting it. Unexpectedly, a button pops up on screen—a gray circle, with the word “Haunt” contained in it.
“Haunt,” George reads aloud. “Are we…supposed to do something with it?”
Sapnap clicks on the “Haunt”, curious. The icon doesn’t visibly react beneath his cursor, but even as he watches, the little percentage bar rolls up to 100%. The button disappears.
Then the jar tips over and breaks in an explosion of what Sapnap really hopes isn’t human ash. He flinches back, startled, then curses.
“What the fuck was that?” he demands. “Did we just—”
“I don’t know,” George says, sounding panicked. “Just—don’t click anything, we don’t know—”
He’s interrupted by a loud BANG when Dream slams his hands down on his desk. “Wait! Wait, we can use this to communicate with him!”
“How?” Sapnap asks, then promptly forgets the question when Ranboo’s mask lights up. “Woah—wait, what the fuck is that? Why—”
“No,” Ranboo whispers. Sapnap jolts, suddenly aware that this is the first time they’re hearing him speak. “No, no, nonono! N—”
And then he calmly stands, looks around, and wonders aloud where he is.
“…We all agree that was weird, right?”
Dream and George make noises of vague assent, but they’re too focused on the stream—on seeing Ranboo alive and apparently unharmed after fearing the worst for months on end.
Then four “Explore” buttons pop up.
Sapnap doesn’t panic, but it’s a close thing. “Uh—do we—click them? Not click them?” He tests the chat again. “Fuck, there’s no chat—Twitter’s still down—what the fuck do we do?”
“I’m—I checked the news. The, uh, the people in charge of the investigation just released a statement.” The click-click-click of a computer mouse filters through Dream’s side of the call. “Um, they haven’t gotten a location of the stream yet, but they’re saying the votes—for the buttons—are all being routed through an isolated darkweb server. They can’t shut it down either, for some reason, so, uh, they said not to click anything. But also that the buttons probably don’t, um, respond to us. So. Someone else is making the choices.”
“Who?”
“Doesn’t say. I don’t think they know.”
“Wonderful,” is George’s bitter comment. “How exactly do they make Ranboo explore a specific place?”
Chilling silence descends across the call as the poll decides on examining the bookshelf. Like clockwork, Ranboo turns and shuffles over to it.
“…Maybe this is all an act?” Sapnap offers feebly. “He’s getting a report of the poll results and doing what the viewers want?”
“He’s been gone for two months, Sapnap.”
Sapnap has no answer to that.
They watch as Ranboo collects the keys one by one, then collectively jump when the locked door is kicked open. “BOOM, BITCH!” a green-clad figure shouts as smoke filters in through the now-broken doorframe.
“CHARLIE?”
“Holy shit,” Sapnap breathes, unable to stop the smile from spreading across his face. “Charlie. Charlie. That’s—that’s Charlie.”
Charlie, perfectly alive and well—and now shouting at Ranboo for messing up his cabin. “That’s another one of the—the missing,” Dream says, his voice tight. “Do you think—?”
Neither Sapnap nor George answer. If the others that went missing are involved in this, then…
Safe to say, there’s something very strange going on.
Ranboo and Charlie act like they’re playing out a bit in a normal stream, bantering back and forth just like they usually do. There’s something just a bit stilted about the way they talk, though, as though they’re not really—present, for lack of a better word. Like they’re acting out a script. Nothing alarming happens throughout the duration of the “cooking challenge”, save for christian hell (“How are they doing that with the door?” “I’ve got no fucking clue, man—”), the bit where Charlie ingests questionable substances, and the appearance of people (“ghouls”?) Sapnap doesn’t recognize. Their faces are covered—something that has unease stirring behind Sapnap’s ribs—but they don’t seem to be malicious. It’s like they’re hired actors, sort of, in this strange production. In fact, they’re almost like comedic relief—the one “ghoul” that seems like it’ll actually attack Ranboo just strolls right past.
Sapnap sinks back in his chair as Ranboo slides the VHS tape he’s acquired into the player—then bolts back upright when the screen grows grainy like a bad camera feed and the lights on Ranboo’s mask begin flashing. His heart drops when a shadowy figure appears on the TV screen. Ranboo seems—panicked, almost, when he demands to know where he is.
Something is terribly, horribly, wrong here.
“What was that?”
Nobody answers George’s question. Nobody knows. They watch in silence as Ranboo stands, abruptly calm, and turns towards the door.
Sapnap is just beginning to relax a little when Ranboo enters the basement. And then the fear is back full force because—
"That's Sneeg," Sapnap says. "That's Sneeg, that's three out of eleven of the missing people—"
He doesn’t say what they're all thinking. That the other missing might pop up. That somehow, this whole “Showfall Media” thing might be responsible.
“That’s…not a real skeleton, right?” George sounds vaguely nauseous. “It can’t be—”
“No, that’s definitely not real,” Dream says, but he doesn’t sound too sure. “Do you think—they were taken? For this—for this show, or something?”
Sapnap closes his eyes and tries to tamp down the dread rising in his gut. “I don’t know,” he whispers. “I don’t know.”
“I don’t understand,” Tubbo says for the tenth time that hour.
Tommy doesn’t blame him. After all, it’s not every day that your missing-and-possibly-kidnapped friend starts an absolutely hilarious livestream after two months of being literally MIA. If it weren’t for the circumstances, he’d absolutely have laughed himself silly. As it is, though, Tommy is confused. And pissed, but mostly confused because what the fuck? Did Ranboo and Charlie and Sneeg and all the others just up and fucking disappear on them for two months as a joke? A grab for attention? Because if so, Tommy is going to murder them when they get back.
Still, that explanation doesn’t quite sit right with Tommy. His friends wouldn’t do that—nor would the police and like three different world governments be involved if it was all just a publicity stunt. Besides, none of the twelve missing need publicity stunts—they’ve got plenty of funding and a big enough following of their own already. Not to mention that they all just disappeared without a trace.
He sets aside his anxiety and listens to Tubbo’s babbling through the phone call. His friend is taking it about as well as he is, all things considered—worried, a little frightened, and very, very confused. It doesn’t stop them from laughing a couple of times at the bits their three friends pull on-screen, though—it’s just such a Charlie thing to do, messing with Ranboo and Sneeg like that. Overall, it’s a funny show. In fact, it’s funny enough that Tommy almost manages to convince himself it's all a bit. Just a joke their friends played on them, however improbable it might be.
Then the VHS tapes make a return appearance, and it isn’t funny anymore. Tommy is suddenly struck with the notion that the Ranboo cracking jokes with Charlie and cooking terrible meals might not be the real Ranboo. That Ranboo is being controlled, somehow, because he’s suddenly so confused and alarmed whenever the lights on the mask start blinking. That certainty is only reinforced when the mysterious figure on the screen declares that he’s trying to get Ranboo “out of there”, wherever “there” is.
It’s fucking terrifying. And by the time Ranboo steps into the warehouse and the livestream switches to a screen announcing a thirty-minute intermission, Tommy is afraid—very, very afraid—that he might watch his friends die.
It’s past midnight, but Phil can’t give a fuck about his sleep schedule. Not when Ranboo is fucking live on Twitch after disappearing for two months.
He wants answers, but more importantly, he wants reassurance. Reassurance that Ranboo and Charlie and Sneeg are alive, safe, and healthy. And he gets it, even if he’s so confused about—well, everything, really.
Twelve people went missing for two months. Just disappeared into thin air with no warning. And now one of them is livestreaming some kind of comedy bit with two of the others?
Or at least, something that attempts to be horror and falls short in nearly every way imaginable. The “threats” presented are surprising at worst and laughable at best, and Phil doesn’t know why or how their disappearance is connected to this. The only mildly disturbing part is the whole thing with the VHS tapes, which Phil frankly doesn’t understand but also doesn’t dare to examine too closely for fear of what he’ll find. All he knows is that Ranboo likely isn’t streaming this voluntarily—may not even be aware that he’s being watched, in fact—and that things are about to get a lot, lot worse.
It begins with the warehouse. It's the first time that Phil begins to feel like Ranboo may actually be in danger, and then he's seeing the little bar in the corner of the screen go up and Ranboo's screaming—
Phil’s heart nearly stops when Ranboo slumps over, unmoving. Blood roars in his ears, drowning out the Puzzler’s tinny voice. He’s distantly aware that his nails are digging into his palms, sending sharp spikes of pain up his wrist, but he can hardly care less when he might have just watched Ranboo die.
Then Ranboo gasps and jolts upright, and now Phil is pretty sure that his heart has given out. “Fuck—” he chokes out, then mutes the stream and turns away just as the Puzzler begins speaking again. Kristin rubs his back in silent support. He sits there for a moment, just breathing, then steels himself and turns back to the screen.
“You don’t have to watch this,” his wife murmurs. Phil grits his teeth and shakes his head. He needs to know. Needs to know what’s happening to the missing—maybe even what happened to them, for them to disappear for two months. This is the first lead anyone’s gotten since the disappearance. And fuck if he’s not going to watch it, even if it means sitting through agonizing “intermissions” and watching this sick, twisted gameshow.
It quickly becomes clear that the tone of the show has shifted dramatically after the first intermission. Oh, the humor is still there with how very incompetent the Puzzler is, but—
Phil goes very, very still when the camera pans out in the next room to reveal a person laid out, unmoving, on an operating table. “Charlie,” he mutters unconsciously.
Thankfully, it quickly becomes clear that Charlie is still alive. But then the Puzzler gives his instructions, and everything in Philza’s stomach just fucking drops.
“No,” he hears himself say through ten feet of water. On screen, Ranboo pulls out a pair of surgical scissors. “No, Ranboo, oh my god—”
He slams his eyes shut when the cutting begins. “It’s okay,” Kristin says. Her voice is shaking, but there’s an undertone of relief that has Phil’s hands relaxing slightly from their death grip on her arm. “It’s fake. It’s not real. No blood, Phil. It isn’t real.”
Slowly, Phil peels one eye open. Charlie’s “guts” appear to actually be a tub of slime, and though the skin surrounding it looks horrifyingly realistic, Charlie himself isn’t making any indication of being in pain. In fact, the entire situation is almost absurd— Ranboo is digging toy cars out of Charlie, who apparently makes a point of swallowing the randomest shit possible (if the things he says are to be believed).
Then the edges of the screen darken. The slime on Ranboo’s hands fades into deep red viscera, and suddenly the camera is all up close and personal with Charlie’s exposed guts. Charlie himself is screaming and thrashing, throwing his head back against the table but apparently paralyzed from the neck down. The toy car—now something fleshy and red like an organ, oh fuck— slips from Ranboo’s fingers and lands on Charlie’s hospital gown with a sick squelch and—
Phil can’t process what he’s seeing. Charlie’s screams echo in his ears, bouncing off the inside of his skull and dragging him down into a spiral of absolute horror. Kristin’s trying to talk to him, but he’s too deep in his own mind to hear her.
The screaming stops a few seconds later and Charlie’s insides return to looking like slime. Phil remains frozen to his chair, unable to move. He doesn’t protest when Kristin carefully reaches past him and closes the stream.
“I think,” she says quietly, then stops and takes a moment to gather herself. “I think we should stop…stop watching.”
Phil swallows bile and manages a jerky nod of his head. He lets Kristin gently guide him out of his chair, and the two of them stagger to their living room, leaning on each other. They sink into the couch and just breathe for a moment.
Cheerful music cuts through the heavy silence. Phil flinches violently, then scrambles for his ringing phone. It’s a bit of a struggle to get it out of his pocket due to the trembling in his fingers, but he eventually manages.
It’s Quackity. He flashes the screen at Kristin, who nods and rises to grab a glass of water from the kitchen to give him some semblance of privacy.
Phil accepts the call. “Hello?” he croaks, trying to keep the lingering horror out of his voice.
There’s silence on the other end. Phil presses the phone closer to his ear.
“…Quackity?”
“Phil,” Quackity says. His voice is wavering at the edges, rougher than Phil’s. “You've seen the stream, yeah?”
Phil swallows, blinking back the burning in his eyes. “Yeah. I…yeah. I did.”
“He was…” Quackity takes a shaky breath. “He was—fucking cutting him apart.”
“I—yeah. He. He really was.”
“Really cutting him apart.”
“Y-yeah.”
“Maybe it’s CGI, something—I—fuck, I dunno—the blood couldn’t have been real, right? There’s nothing that can just—censor all of that. Make it look like slime. That can't be real. It can't. Right?”
“Right,” Phil echoes, but the wavering of his voice weakens it. Quackity goes quiet for a bit.
“What if it’s real?” he finally asks. “What if the stream is—if they’re somehow—” He breaks off with a choked noise, then takes in another shaky breath. “I’m worried, Phil,” he admits. "I'm fucking terrified for them."
Phil closes his eyes. “I am too, Quackity. I am too.”
“Well,” Tubbo says with a high, nervous giggle. “Now we know where the others are.”
Seeing the remaining kidnapping victims strapped to some fucked-up carousel of death is no laughing matter, but the note of hysteria in Tubbo’s voice kills any indignation Tommy might’ve felt. It’s official now: seven of the eleven people who went missing are connected, all taken by the same person, and all now trapped in this nightmare of a gameshow. The likelihood of the remaining four missing not being involved is now pretty much nil.
That likelihood drops from nil to the negatives when the Puzzler reveals himself. His face is unfamiliar, but the shape of his eyes—the rhythm of his words—feel…familiar.
“Is that—” Tommy begins, then cuts himself off and scrambles for his phone. Twitter is back online, and from the looks of it, is poised to dive right back into the flames. Jerma’s fans and acquaintances alike are embroiled in bitter confusion—some insist that it can’t actually be Jerma, not with a face like that, while others point out his Missing status and his similarities to the Puzzler. Even more people are going wild over the brief clip of the rats speaking and oh shit those are two of the last three missing people, Rae and Sykkuno.
Is it all an act, then? Is this nightmare just a show that Ranboo and the others cooked up and are now acting out together? Or is it something darker?
Oh look, the authorities have released another statement. Tommy skims it as quickly as he can, eyes catching on phrases like “coercion” and “hostages”. A commotion from the stream distracts him before he can read further—Sneeg, having apparently made a break for it, is now being dragged back into the room. Tommy’s stomach twists as he begs to be let go, then abruptly goes silent when the mask is pressed over his face.
“Is—” Tubbo starts, breaking the eerie silence that has fallen over the call. “Is that…are they mind controlling them, somehow?”
Tommy’s mind races. The pieces line up—Ranboo’s sudden confusion when the lights on his mask go dark, Jerma and Rae and Sykkuno’s seemingly-willing involvement in the horrific show, and now Sneeg’s sudden complacency. If the people onscreen aren’t acting of their own accord—
“Fuck,” he whispers. “Fuck, it makes sense.”
“But mind control isn’t…real.”
“Yeah, well, a fucking livestreamed death game shouldn’t be real either.”
Tubbo’s silence speaks volumes. Tommy grits his teeth and sighs.
“…Sorry. I shouldn’t’ve snapped.”
“No, no, it’s okay. We’re all stressed right now.”
“Stressed” is an understatement, but Tommy doesn’t really feel like pointing that out. Instead, he squeezes his eyes shut, curls into his chair, and listens to the people on screen beg for their lives.
Phil can’t sleep.
Kristin understands. She can’t sleep either. Neither of them want to sleep. So they sit in the living room together in silence and try not to think too much.
His phone sits on the coffee table, untouched. He’s tempted—so tempted to grab it, to look at the news and see what’s happening. The lack of knowledge makes him physically ache with fear, but he isn’t sure if he actually wants to know.
In the end, the fear wins out. Phil grabs his phone before he can regret it, turns it on, and comes face to face with his Twitter timeline.
“Phil,” Kristin says in warning, but Phil doesn’t answer. His eyes are glued to his screen.
Cold numbness spreads up from the bottom of his stomach and eats away at his ribs. He can’t feel his heartbeat, but the blood pounding in his ears is louder than the choked noise clawing its way out of his throat.
LITERALLY SCREAMING @incati
holy fuck he just shot niki what the fuck is she really dead?? They wouldn’t really kill her right??? right????
Through the burning haze clouding his vision, he sees more tweets scroll by.
wat @SeeYesnt
VINNY ISNT DEADF HE CANT BE DEAD WAHT THE FUCJKS
THIS ISNT FUCKING REAL
tia is not having a good day @Tialog1
WE DDINTF SEE ETHAN ACTUALLY DIE ITS OK GUYS ITS OK ITS ALL FAKE THE BLOOD IS FAKE
“Phil?”
The phone slips from Phil’s trembling fingers. He grasps at empty air until Kristin folds his hands into her own.
“Phil, what’s wrong?”
Phil’s only answer is a weak, stuttering wheeze. A moment later, it transforms into a dry sob. Kristin gathers him into a hug and he falls into it, shaking under a tidal wave of grief.
When the first tear slips from his eye, Phil doesn’t try to stop it.
The call is completely, utterly silent.
“…So,” Sapnap croaks, barely aware that he’s breaking a delicate balance. His head pounds as he grasps desperately for anything he can use to drown out the mantra of they’re-dead-they’re-dead-they’re-dead rattling around inside his skull. “Can he—can he see us now? Is that what this is?”
“I don’t know,” Dream says. His voice is rough with grief and exhaustion. “I don’t fucking know, okay? I don’t give a fuck if he can see us or not—if he can just make it out of this alive—”
He chokes on the last word. Unlike the others hangs unsaid in the stillness.
“—sorry, I shouldn’t have snapped—I’m just—fuck. FUCK.”
Dream mutes himself. George has been muted since Niki died. Sapnap stares at the two red icons floating on his screen, then follows suit and looks back over to the stream.
He’d silenced it when the intermission began; the cheery, soulless music after watching so many people just die had been unbearable. Now, as the timer ticks down to zero, he turns the volume up. The music—light and bland and so fucking unaffected by all the suffering Showfall has caused —has bile rising in his throat. He hunches forward and presses his face into his hands, breathing raggedly as he waits for the stream to resume.
He doesn’t want to keep watching. But he has to. Ranboo knows, now, knows that he’s in a show—knows what’s happening to him. Surely, surely, he’ll find a way out of this. Sapnap has to watch. Sapnap needs to see Ranboo get out alive.
The music stops. Slowly, Sapnap raises his head. Ranboo is no longer standing in the foyer the last stream had ended in—instead, the camera follows him through the halls of what is clearly a repurposed mall. He’s talking to someone offscreen who’s introduced themselves as “Hetch”, but the voice is recognizable as Criken’s.
The last of the Missing. Who, given his tendency to refer to himself by a different name, probably can’t be trusted.
Sapnap exhales, curling and uncurling his hands. His eyes are stinging again, so he blinks furiously and tries not to think. He just stares at the stream. Doesn’t really focus on any one thing and lets the tears fill his vision until it’s all just a big gray blur.
Then a spot of bright red has him sitting up, his heart pounding in his chest. It’s an exit sign over a door. Ranboo found an exit. Ranboo found an exit. He’s going to get out. He’s going to get out alive—
“They’re all still alive,” Hetch says, and Sapnap finds himself reeling back under the combined weight of jubilation and horror. Jubilation, because if Hetch—Criken—is to be believed, then the others are alive. Horror, because he knows Ranboo’s going to go after them.
“No,” he mutters. “No, no, Ranboo, let the police handle it—come on, man—”
Ranboo can’t hear him. He walks away from the exit.
Sapnap isn’t sure what the noise he makes sounds like, but he knows it’s guttural and nonsensical and burns on the way up. He’s feeling so many things at once that it’s become a big jumbled mess of numbness swelling behind his ribcage. He wants to cry. He wants to scream. He wants to laugh until he runs out of air and passes out.
Instead, Sapnap sits in his chair and does nothing.
As the truth of the facility is revealed piece by piece, his chest grows tighter and tighter. He should probably look away from the stream and check if the police have made any progress with the new information. In the end, he doesn’t need to, because George unmutes and says flatly, “Charlie’s live on Twitch. They tried tracing it too but the investigation is still going nowhere.”
The haze clears abruptly, catapulting Sapnap headfirst into blinding, painful reality. He hastily clicks on the Twitch link George has sent in the chat, and—
Oh.
Charlie’s there in the flesh, talking and laughing and…commentating on colors. Okay. Odd, and he doesn’t seem to react to anything the chat is saying, but at he’s alive. Hetch, however untrustworthy, was telling the truth—so the others must be alive as well.
Somehow, Snowfall can bring their actors back to life. Sapnap should feel relieved, but all he feels is dread.
Dream unmutes. “That’s—his background, that’s his old setup,” he says, alarm seeping into his voice. “Why—"
“He’s not at his house,” George says. “They just checked.”
Which means Charlie is somewhere else, trapped in a place designed to emulate his previous setup. It’s just one more invasion of privacy on top of a whole heaping of other atrocities committed by Showfall Media, but that doesn’t make it better.
And then the Showfall stream reveals the various streamers set up in the facility, seemingly unable to hear or see Ranboo. Charlie is among them, and when Ranboo rips Charlie’s headphones off and Charlie looks up in shock like he’s seeing the world for the first time—
“YES!” Sapnap whoops, energized by a sort of manic relief. He can hear Dream and George reacting similarly, shouting at Ranboo and Charlie to get the fuck out of there, get free, call for help!
For all of ten minutes, they’re cheering, shouting, pushing the two survivors onwards as they run for their lives. For all of ten minutes, they hope, because it truly seems like they might make it out.
Except the way out has been blocked off, covered in wood and metal. Sapnap feels the moment the hope drains from his chest, soon replaced by cold terror.
“Shit,” someone hisses, and he’s too far gone to decipher whether it was George or Dream or himself. His terror only doubles as Hetch reveals the truth with his dying breath—that Ranboo and Charlie don’t remember their lives before Showfall. That none of them remember anything, and if they escaped—they would no longer be the Ranboo and Charlie that their friends had known.
Sapnap tells himself that it’s better than physical death. And it’s true, in a sense, but watching Ranboo lose himself to his rage—watching him gut a man or something resembling a man with no remorse—
It doesn’t make it any less devastating.
The look on Charlie’s face when he realizes the cabin he supposedly grew up in is all a set piece nearly has Sapnap closing out of the stream then and there, but—he can’t. Ranboo and Charlie are almost free now, they just have to shut down the operation and—
“No,” Sapnap breathes when he sees Security crawling out from behind the cabin wall. But it’s already too late, and Charlie’s screaming and now Ranboo’s running for the button and those fucking drones are running after him and Sapnap’s aware that he’s shouting, praying that Ranboo gets to the button before Showfall gets to him—
Ranboo hits the button. For five painful seconds, both he and the audience hang in suspense—and then the lights flicker off and the drones go still.
Sapnap bursts into tears. It’s loud and ugly and makes his headache ten times worse, but he can’t bring himself to really give a fuck at the moment. Ranboo did it. Ranboo won. Ranboo can get out and get help for Charlie and the others.
He’s so caught up in his relief that he almost misses it when George says, “Wait—we’re still seeing this.” It takes him a moment to understand, but when he does—
“No,” Dream whispers, just as Ranboo takes a bow. The lights in the room behind him flicker on, revealing the figure waiting in the shadows.
When Ranboo rises, the lights on his mask shine bright, scarlet red.
"LET ME DIE," Ranboo howls. "PLEASE, JUST LET ME DIE, I DON’T WANT TO KEEP DOING THIS—I DON’T WANT TO KEEP DOING THIS—”
Tommy shuts the stream so violently he nearly cracks his mouse in half. Then he scrambles out of his chair, just barely making it to the trashcan before he throws up.
Through the phone, he hears Tubbo sobbing. The stream must still be playing on his end, because Ranboo's screams filter through the grainy speakers. Tommy hunches back over the trashcan and throws up some more.
"Tubbo," he manages to choke out between gasps, too quietly for Tubbo to hear. He raises his voice. "Tubbo! Tubbo—shit, turn the fucking stream off, Tubbo you don't—"
“NO!” Tubbo screams, startling Tommy bad enough to knock over the trashcan. He doesn’t even give it a second glance as he lunges for the phone, some visceral part of him wrenching as his friend begins crying anew. “Nononono—you can’t, you can’t—RANBOO!”
“TURN IT OFF,” Tommy shouts into the phone. “FUCKING TURN THE FUCKING STREAM OFF, TUBBO, I SWEAR TO—”
“STOP!” Tubbo shrieks, but he’s not talking to Tommy. “STOPSTOPSTOP IT NO FUCK NO—”
Hetch’s voice filters through the phone, muffled and indistinct. Tommy hesitates, torn between reopening the stream on his end or demanding that Tubbo turn it off again when—
There's a sickening shrrk from Tubbo's side of the call. Tubbo stops shouting.
For a moment, all is silent.
And then music filters through the phone, dark and ominous. Tubbo makes little noises like there's something trying to claw its way out of his chest, and then he screams.
At that moment, Tommy knows. Ranboo is dead.
The camera remains focused on the body as it twitches once, twice, and sags into stillness.
Sapnap can hear the blood roaring in his ears. He can't think. He can’t move. He just stares at the screen, paralyzed by the horror creeping up his spine.
“F-fuck,” he hears George whisper. Hysteria creeps into his voice. “That’s not—that can’t be real. They wouldn’t—”
The ominous music stutters before cutting off with a loud crash. The camera shakes, then zooms out abruptly, revealing Ranboo’s entire figure. It’s somehow worse like this, seeing him strung up like some sacrificial lamb and slumped against the wires.
Sapnap wants to throw up. He can’t move.
Muffled shouting filters through the speakers—Hetch’s voice, then Charlie’s. Sapnap nearly bursts into tears again at the realization that Charlie is still fucking alive. While unclear, the words are tinged with anger, and are soon followed up by a series of sharp thwacks followed by a heavy thud.
"Ranboo! Ranboo! Fuck, man, I just punched the fucking daylights out of that Hetch dude—he’s bad, right? He was using the big control board thing so I just fuckin’ attacked him, man, you should’ve seen it—and oh fuck I’m rambling again, we gotta get out a here! I stole a phone off of one of the office dudes and called the police - they're gonna be here any second now! Where the fuck are you, man?! Where—”
Charlie staggers onto the screen. His shirt is absolutely soaked through with blood and his leg doesn't seem quite able to carry his weight, but he’s alive.
“—oh shit, there you are—Ranboo?”
Sapnap’s heart plunges into his stomach as Charlie stares at the corpse. From this camera angle, they can’t see his face, but the way his spine goes ramrod straight says enough.
"R-Ranboo?" His voice is quiet, tremulous. "Say—say something. Come on, man, this isn't—this isn't funny."
The only answer is the drip-drip-drip of Ranboo's blood hitting the floor.
Charlie sinks to his knees, staring up at the body pinned to the wall in some mockery of the crucifixion. The stream flickers. Once, twice, the image hops and distorts, before it cuts out altogether.
The last thing the viewers hear is Charlie's howl of grief.