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The Entity realm was a scary place. His grandfather and brothers were nowhere to be found - it was pretty unsettling, especially when he first stepped through the fog and had no clue where he was. Bubba Sawyer had never been very far from his family - he hadn’t even been outside of Texas, at least not for very long. At least the vast corn fields around a few particular areas were familiar. It was a small comfort, but a comfort nonetheless.
As he wandered the grounds near a house, he noticed somebody standing in the doorway watching him and nearly rushed off with an apologetic sound. Before he could get much of anywhere, though, the person waved him over, the motion a little awkward. A little nervously, Bubba came closer, recognizing the distinct silhouette of the Hillbilly as he approached the front door.
He’d been a little too scared to approach any of the other killers in the few days he’d been in the Entity realm, but Max Thompson, Jr. always seemed like the least intimidating of all of them. They had a lot in common, from the chainsaw to the appearance that seemed to frighten everybody that saw them without a mask (although Bubba’s certainly was a lot less dramatic.)
Max stepped further into the house as Bubba came up to the porch and gestured for the newer killer to follow him, which Bubba did. He had always been taught to be afraid of strangers, but he was a little grateful for the guidance. If he was going to be stuck here without his family, he couldn’t just be lonely the entire time, could he? And Max seemed nice enough.
As he stepped into the kitchen, he blinked in surprise at the freshly cooked pig roast sitting on the kitchen table. There was a bit of a scattered mess of meat and broken furniture throughout the rest of the room, but it wasn’t anything more dramatic than his own family home after a fresh catch, so he wasn’t about to complain. Max patted one of the empty chairs around the table before taking a seat opposite it, and Bubba hurried over to sit down.
Silently, Max used his chainsaw with surprising delicacy to cut a piece of meat from the pig and pass it over, giving the cannibal something that resembled a smile. He’d made a new friend! Bubba thanked the Hillbilly as best he could with an excited noise, and flapped a hand to the side as he grabbed his fork with the other.
Maybe this place wasn’t so scary after all.
The Entity was displeased with his performance in his first trial; something Bubba was having a hard time understanding. He killed all the survivors, and he was pretty sure that was what he was supposed to do. Was he supposed to cook them? If he was, he’d been pulled back to the killers’ campfire well before he could even start a fire.
He was given a warning - do it right next time or else - and was left to wander the realm again, confused and a little scared. The Entity wasn’t exactly a warm and comforting presence, and it was hard to be at ease knowing that it wasn’t happy with him.
Bubba found himself wandering around MacMillan Estate, thinking that being where the trial was would help him figure it out. He was so distracted, absentmindedly revving his chainsaw every so often and tapping his hammer against the occasional hard surface, that he nearly ran into the Trapper. He must have come out to see who was walking around his realm.
Much like Max, Evan MacMillan didn’t really seem like a bad guy. He was a little intimidating, but that was mainly because he was quiet, walked around with bear traps in hand and generally avoided interacting with any other killers. He wasn’t the friendly type, but he didn’t seem to be outwardly malevolent right now, so Bubba just looked at him instead of running off.
“You don’t know how to do trials, do you?” Evan asked, his voice gruff, and Bubba blinked before shaking his head. The Trapper sighed. “Alright. You can’t just kill the survivors right off the bat. The Entity feeds off our emotions, and it wants a good show more than anything. If you just eliminate all four of them really quickly, it’s disappointing. Not any fun.”
Killing people wasn’t that fun. Nubbins thought it was a hoot and a half, but to Bubba, it was for food and for his family. He tilted his head, a little confused.
“You have to sacrifice them.” Evan gestured for Bubba to follow, and so he did. He walked over to a nearby meat hook, and tapped on the base with his machete. “After you knock them down, don’t kill them. Pick them up and carry them to one of these. String them up like you’re drying them out for their meat. Usually, you need to do it three times, but if the other survivors leave them for a while or they try to get away on their own, you might only need to hook them once or twice.”
Bubba perked up and nodded, a little eagerly. He knew how to string people up on hooks! That was one of his jobs at home. If that was all he needed to do differently, he was sure he would do fine.
“You can kill people directly sometimes. The Entity will leave some of these around.” Evan reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked to Bubba like some kind of tiny, brittle skull. “Throw it into the campfire at the beginning and you can kill them after they’ve been hooked once or twice.”
Trials were complicated, but with Evan explaining, they didn’t seem all that difficult. He just needed the instructions - he didn’t know why the Entity just threw him in without offering any sort of guidance at all, but he knew complaining wouldn’t get him much of anywhere.
“Do you get all of this?” Evan asked, and Bubba nodded eagerly. He didn’t even realize until the Trapper led him to a small shack to show him the basement that he had made his second friend.
The Hag was nice enough, Bubba thought.
There wasn’t much humanity left in her. He didn’t know what happened to her, but it made her more like a swamp monster than a person. He would be too polite to ask even if he were verbal, and he was pretty sure she couldn’t form sentences very well either given the guttural growling noises she made in response to just about everything. He learned her name was Lisa from Evan.
Much like him, though, she was a cannibal. And also like him, she had other ways of communicating. Like when she growled and gestured for him to follow her to the swamp.
She led him up a hill and to one of the little piles of bones that he sometimes caught survivors messing with during the trials. Lisa gestured for him to come closer and watch, so Bubba did, crouching as close as he could to the totem without getting in the way or blocking off the light.
Lisa drew a little symbol at the base of the totem, then held her hands over the skulls that made up its top. Bubba’s eyes widened as a small fire lit at its base, the very atmosphere of the swamp around them changing. It felt heavier, and yet somehow more exciting.
He had seen a few of Lisa’s trials out of the corner of his eye, and he had seen the way she could make the totems work for her - the way they made repairing the generators more difficult for survivors, or how they could expose them after a certain point to make them more vulnerable. It clicked that she was trying to teach him how to do that, and Bubba let out an excited squeal.
She made a guttural noise and pointed at the nearest generator; this was the one that would make repairing harder, he guessed. Lisa got to her feet from the totem and gestured for Bubba to follow, going inside of the nearby building and pointing at a totem in the corner before looking at him expectantly.
Bubba hesitated for a moment. He had only just seen her draw the symbol once; he wasn’t sure if he could imitate it. It was worth a try, though, so he crouched in front of it and drew the symbol she showed him. Luckily, it was simple enough to recreate.
He hovered his hands over the top skulls, and laughed happily when the fire at the bottom lit, clapping his hands together. That wasn’t so hard! He thought for sure that hexing the totems would be an entire complicated process.
When he looked back at Lisa, he could swear he saw something that looked like a smile on her face. This made three friends - in the back of his mind, he thought that he’d never get to do any of this back in Texas.
His days weren’t so boring or scary now. He had gotten good at the trials, and the other killers were friendly with him now. Including the Spirit, who had startled him the first handful of times he met her, but he found out after not too long that she wasn’t so bad. It seemed to him like she didn’t really belong with the rest of the killers - she had not, apparently, killed anybody before she came to the realm. She was just angry, that was all, and after what he learned about her father, he didn’t blame her.
Bubba’s family was all he had in the world back home. His brothers weren’t perfect, but they were a tight knight bunch. He couldn’t imagine them hurting him, not that severely.
“Come… with me,” she’d requested of him when he got done with a trial one day, and so he did, following her to the Yamaoka Estate where she and her grandfather lived. It was a nice house. Different from any he’d ever seen, but nice.
He sat across from her on one of the cushions in her common room; she rested on her knees. “You know how… in every trial… there is one survivor… who you think about… constantly…?” she asked, the eerie quality of her voice almost like a breath in Bubba’s ear and the halting rasps making it sound like it was difficult for her. He wished he could easily communicate with her that she didn’t have to, but he didn’t want her to think he was telling her to be quiet. So he just nodded.
“When the exit gates… have powered…” she used her right hand to adjust her left arm; the pieces had started drifting apart. He wondered if it hurt. “If you focus on… your anger… your rage… how much they wronged you… how much you’ve missed your family… you can… get them vulnerable… you can kill them… get your revenge… even if they haven’t been put on a… hook yet…”
His eyes widened. That felt like it shouldn’t be allowed, to be honest, but if Rin did it, it had to be okay, right? The Entity seemed to like her just fine - she was one of the tougher killers, got some of the better results. So he nodded eagerly. In the back of his mind, he thought that he should try it sometime.
Rin nodded in return, and gave him a faint smile. She got to her feet then, rolling her joints and bones back into place with subtle cracking noises. “Would you like… some tea…?” she asked, and once more Bubba nodded.
If there was one thing Bubba wanted the Wraith to show him, it was how to become invisible. The fact that Killers couldn’t share their powers was one of the most disappointing things he knew of in the realm; he wanted to teach people how to use his chainsaw, and he wanted to move between realms like the more ghostly Killers could.
He liked learning whatever he could, though, and he supposed that seeing blood a little clearer than usual would be helpful in some circumstances. So he fidgeted with the hem of his apron, watching the way Phillip observed the wrecked cars around Autohaven. He seemed so intently focused.
“Once you can see what’s different about the blood, you can spot it from anywhere,” Phillip told him, and Bubba wasn’t sure how much he believed that. He had seen plenty of blood in his life; there wasn’t anything special about it, other than it coming from living things. It was just blood.
Still, he tried to concentrate on the nearest pool of blood. The gas station had been used for a recent trial; it had yet to be thoroughly cleaned up for the next one, which was most of the reason Phillip thought it was a good place to practice this specific skill.
The more he looked at it, though, the more he noticed about it. The color that seemed to belong to blood and blood alone, the way it splattered in a way he didn’t see blood or any other liquid doing, the way he could almost smell how metallic it was. The more he noticed about it, the brighter it seemed to stick out against the dark greys of the realm surrounding them.
Phillip must have noticed him perk up and bounce slightly, because a smile crossed his face. “Do you see it?” he asked, and Bubba nodded eagerly. “You should be able to see it a little longer than usual, too. Tracking injured survivors is often the easiest way to hook and kill them.”
It was much easier when they were only one hit of his hammer away from collapsing on the ground - they usually slipped away and healed up before Bubba could catch up to them, though, hiding and making sure that their sounds of pain were concealed. It did make sense to look out for their blood; they certainly did spill a lot of it while they were hobbling around the trial.
“We don’t have any survivors to test it on here, but why don’t you try following the blood trails?” Phillip asked, and even though Bubba knew that they most likely only led to the hooks or exit gates, he was more than ready to try out his new skill.
Bubba knew that the Nurse was probably one of the Killers he should be the most afraid of. She was strong, and she was fast, and he learned from eavesdropping on a conversation between some of the others that she was a nurse that had killed all of her patients. Still, none of the Killers had made a move to hurt each other in the time he’d been here, and the Nurse was hard to be scared of. She gave off a very comforting and welcoming energy - almost like a mother, though Bubba didn’t remember his own very well. She always seemed so sad, too, wandering around the Disturbed Ward with a sad expression, wheezing as she breathed like she was in pain. He felt more sorry for her than anything.
Sally didn’t seem to mind it very much when she hung around Crotus Prenn, so he did it often. With so many new friends, it was hard for him to imagine letting somebody be lonely in such an unpleasant place. He’d seen the Wraith come and go a couple of times, so at least she had somebody to talk to, but she still seemed to need some more company.
She didn’t say very much to him when he hung around, so he usually stuck to the circus, sitting next to Maurice and waiting to see if she came to take him up on his offer to hang out a little bit. He was starting to think she never would, so he nearly jumped out of his skin when she blinked to him with a pained screech.
Bubba waited patiently for her to recover, and when she lifted her head again she drifted over. He perked up expectantly as she looked toward him, then placed a hand against Maurice’s head before speaking up. The horse neighed in response to the touch.
“You have a kind heart,” Sally told him, her voice quiet and soft. “You can use that to your advantage. If you really focus on the survivors that need help… you can locate them more easily. Listen for the sounds of their friends bandaging them up.”
She sounded more sad than anything else when she said that; using her empathy to hurt others probably wasn’t a terribly pleasant experience for her.
“Thank you… for coming by here so often. I would rather be alone most of the time, but you’re a pleasant person, Bubba.” She gave him a pained smile, and moved to sit beside him. “I know I must not be the best company, but I appreciate yours nonetheless.”
Ghostface was probably the most overwhelming of his fellow Killers. Danny Johnson liked to talk about himself a lot - his achievements, his murders, his journalist career before he came to the Entity realm. The one thing he liked to talk about more than himself, though, was movies. Scary movies. Apparently, Bubba was in one wherever Danny came from, called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
It was sort of a… blunt name, but Bubba supposed it wasn’t incorrect. He didn’t like some stranger having such intimate knowledge of his family and their business, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He just wondered if Drayton and Chop-Top were okay. If people knew that much, then had the police come to arrest them? Were they in prison? His grandfather had told them so many horrible stories about what people outside their family were like, but especially the police.
“Can you teach me how you do that?” Danny asked him one day, excited after all but grabbing Bubba and pulling him in to take a picture. “How do you figure out where the survivors are right after you hooked them? It would help so much in trials. And it’d be so cool to use tactics cooked up by Leatherface himself to kill people. Your movie was one of my favorites, you know.”
He definitely was kind of an overwhelming presence, and Bubba didn’t know how to explain his methods. Not without words, anyway. He just had to listen for them over the sound of the hooked survivor screaming, see if he could feel them - it came naturally to him.
Bubba gestured for Danny to follow him over to the hook, and pointed to it. He then rapped on his chest twice with his fist, and made a sweeping motion with his hand. Danny nodded along, and he hoped that meant the other killer was understanding what he was trying to say.
“Just… feel for it? That doesn’t make a lot of sense.” The Ghostface sighed, crossing his arms over his chest and shaking his head. “I’ll try it, though. I do something similar when they vault a window quickly near me, but that’s more listening than feeling .”
In the back of his mind, Bubba thought that it would probably be a good idea to try that himself. He’d never been very good at listening closely, but learning would help him find the survivors easier.
“Do you mind if I hang around for a little while?” Danny asked, sounding delighted with himself, and Bubba shrugged. Coldwind wasn’t his, so he couldn’t exactly make anybody leave - and now that he was getting a little less horrified with the idea of being in movies, it was nice to have someone that thought he was so interesting around.
Bubba was spending time at Max’s house again when he noticed somebody standing outside the window. It didn’t frighten him, though - he was more than familiar with the Shape by now. Michael mostly seemed to keep to himself when it came to the other Killers, watching from afar and waiting for his next trials, seemingly more interested in learning about others from observing.
He opened the front door and waved to Michael, making a short sound to get his attention. The other Killer looked to him quickly, and then pointed to behind the house. It took Bubba a few moments to remember that there was a pumpkin patch back there between trials. He could remember seeing a jack-o-lantern on the porch of one of the houses in Haddonfield - maybe it had been broken in a recent trial and Michael was in need of a substitute?
He gestured for the other Killer to follow, and quickly led him through the house and out the back. Bubba looked out over the pumpkins; it didn’t take him very long to spot the biggest one, which he quickly brought Michael over to. The Shape nodded at him, and crouched down to cut the stem with his massive knife.
Bubba watched, a little fascinated, as Michael carved a circle into the top of the pumpkin and pulled it off. The Shape made quick work of the innards of the pumpkin, discarding them in a pile to the side before neatly and efficiently carving a face into the front of the fruit. It looked surprisingly good for something crafted in such a short period of time - Michael must have had a lot of practice.
Once he was done, the other Killer looked to Bubba with a slightly tilted head, and gestured to one of the other big pumpkins with his knife. He then offered the weapon to him, and it took a moment for Bubba to realize that he was suggesting carving a pumpkin himself.
Eagerly, Bubba took the knife and cut one of the nicer pumpkins free from its stem before trying his best to mimic the way he’d watched Michael open and gut his a few minutes ago. His motions were a little clumsier, but he had to admit that this was pretty fun. Maybe he’d get some practice and invite Michael back later to carve some more!
The face that he created on the front of the pumpkin was lopsided, a little messy, and Bubba was a little self conscious about it, but when he looked up at Michael the other Killer nodded and held out his hand. The cannibal was quick to return the knife to its rightful owner, delighted that his new friend seemed pleased with his work.
Michael nodded once more before turning around and walking back the way they came with his pumpkin in hand. Bubba followed close after him, stopping once they passed through the front door and waving an excited goodbye.
It crossed his mind as he watched Michael make his way back to Haddonfield that the Entity realm, despite everything, had turned out to be a pretty nice place after all.