Chapter Text
“P….Please, Marcy! Please!”
Marcy looked down at the little fairy, kneeling in a pleading position at her feet, looking straight up at her with tearful eyes. He looked particularly small right next to her foot. He clapped his hands together in a begging gesture.
“...I’m sorry,” said Marcy.
Thistle yelled dramatically and bent over as though struck, laying down on the floor. “But Maaaaaaarcyyyyyyyyy…”
“If you’d said something earlier, I could have made arrangements to work from home today, but I have to go in for sure today.”
“I can’t believe you’d do this to me. This is cruel and inhumane.”
“Thistle.”
“If no one is home to sign for my package, then it will go back to the post office! And then I can’t get it until someone can drive to the post office when it’s open, and who knows when that will be! It could be as late as tomorrow! Marcy!”
Marcy very gently used her foot to scoot Thistle out of the way so she could put her shoes on. “I’m sure you’ll survive if you can’t get your package until tomorrow.”
A stormy look on his face, Thistle lay there splayed out. “I will.”
“What did you order, anyway? I’m positive you’re not making enough money through Teddy’s Etsy shop to afford anything expensive enough that it needs to be signed for.”
Looking offended, Thistle rose off the floor like a vampire from a coffin. “Ha! Shows what you know! Humans can’t get enough of my very tiny carved animals!”
Marcy’s eyes went to his little workstation in the living room, where several of his works were in the process of being painted. Marcy had read the Etsy reviews; everyone who bought them was amazed at how tiny the details on them were. Teddy had to pretend that she made them, of course, but she gave Thistle all the money from them. “Geez, start paying rent then.”
Thistle leapt up, beating his wings and scrabbling up onto the banister. “It does not need to be signed for because it is expensive. It needs it because it is live.”
“....Thistle, what did you order?!”
The front door banged open as Colin, who’d just walked out the door for work, came right back in. “Hey, T, I caught this guy with a package for you on my way out. I signed for it.”
Thistle clapped, vibrating with excitement. “They are here already! Oh!”
He rocketed past Marcy and smacked into Colin’s chest, tumbling down onto the top of the white parcel the human was now carrying. “Woah, bud! Slow down there.”
Colin walked over and set the package on the table. Thistle righted himself and started tearing madly at the tape sealing the package. “Colin! Colin, get some scissors!”
“Sheesh!” Colin walked over to Teddy’s desk and opened the drawer, pawing through it. “What did you order?”
“I’m also very curious to hear this,” said Marcy darkly.
“Gimme!” he said, frantically making grabby hands. “Gimme gimme gimme!”
Marcy came over and scooped Thistle up. “All right, let Colin open it. You know what happened the last time you tried to use full-size scissors.”
Thistle righted himself and peered over Marcy’s hand, watching as Colin slid the scissors through the tape. “Be careful! Don’t hurt them!”
As soon as the box was open, Thistle jumped into it, his bare feet tapping on something plastic. He pushed the padding aside, tossing it out, and emerged with a deli container with some long, writhing shapes inside.
“Woah, what are those?” said Colin.
Thistle snapped the lid open excitedly, climbing into it. “Silkworms!”
“Oh?” said Marcy.
“Bombyx mori.” He wrapped his hands around one worm’s fat body, holding it aloft. “One of the few truly domesticated insect species.”
“Oh, that’s great,” said Marcy. “Er…are you going to eat them?”
“No!” he said. “I am a farmer, and this is my livestock. I cannot eat them until their numbers are higher.”
“...Right. Uh. You’re going to breed them?”
Marcy watched as he draped the silkworm around his shoulders, tossing its butt over one side like it was a fashionable scarf. The worm’s head bumbled forward absently, snuffling around in confusion. “They produce the finest silk, no battling spiders required. They’re soft! They’re squishy! They’re tasty! And just look at them! They are so cute! Look at their little hands!”
“I guess they’re kind of cute,” said Colin. “Just don’t put them on Teddy’s desk. I’ll see you guys later, all right?”
Marcy said goodbye to his back as he left again, this time not assaulted by any UPS carriers. Then she turned, kneeling down next to the coffee table. “Thistle, I kind of wish you had talked to me about this before ordering them. Aren’t you going to need us to help you with this?”
“No!” He gently set the worm back down, then stepped out of the container. “I can order their food, and it’s inexpensive. It will be very simple.”
“And where are you going to keep them? What are you going to put them in?”
He scratched his head. “Oh, um…I guess I hadn’t really thought about that. They move very slowly. It does not need to be very secure. I’m sure there’s something in the house we can use. Everyone on the forums said they are very easy to take care of, and you can put their eggs in the fridge to simulate winter–”
“The forums?” Marcy said, flabbergasted. She had removed the parental controls on his phone a while back–he came to her one day to admit he’d discovered a glitch, a tortured, labyrinthine route through various menus and submenus that eventually allowed him to access Google Chrome outside of the parental controls, so she figured he was probably ready to take the training wheels off anyway.
She’d spent an entire day making sure he was ready for it, priming him on internet safety, making sure he understood the finer points of human culture and language and how they manifested online, making sure he understood how money worked and how to avoid scams, and telling him how to identify misinformation before turning him loose. She’d been relieved that at first, it’d seemed like he thought most of the internet was boring and didn’t find it engaging enough to comment on anything or make penpals.
But recently he’d been spending more and more time on it. He was practically glued to it. Marcy hadn’t been monitoring his activity very closely, just answering all his questions as he brought them up, so he could have some privacy. And because she did need some time to herself to get her work done. Maybe that’d been a mistake. He was on forums? He was ordering things to the house that he wasn’t fully prepared to deal with?
That freaked her out a little. She’d assumed he’d mostly been doing more reading, watching more mature television, not…participating in online communities necessarily. He’d grown astronomically in his understanding of how everything in this new world worked, but it would still be so easy for something to happen…all it’d take would be a simple, easily-avoidable misunderstanding and…
And…
Well, she couldn’t think of what would happen, but surely something, right?
Marcy frowned. Thistle’s excitement dimmed a little, noting her shift in attitude. Marcy tried to think of what to say. “Um…Hey, I think we need to talk about your internet usage.”
Thistle blanched, then skittered off the table and stood in front of his phone. “No! You can’t look at my internet history!”
“...Well, that’s not what I meant, but now I’m worried about that.”
He quickly tapped the button to turn the screen off, looking very nervous. “Uh…It’s, well–it’s, it’s nothing to be worried about, I’m sure!”
Marcy knelt down in front of him. “Sweetheart, I’m not mad at you. I’m just concerned. I’ve made the mistake before of thinking you understood things better than you actually did, because you’re such a smart guy and pick things up so fast. But it’s my responsibility to make sure you stay safe. There are some really bad people on the internet.”
He sagged. “R-right.”
“So when I get home tonight, why don’t we go through your phone together, just so that I can spot anything that looks like it might be a danger you don’t recognize. Okay?”
He nodded morosely. “Okay.”
Marcy’s looming hand reached over Thistle’s head and unplugged his phone, lifting it into her purse. “I’ll hold onto this until then, all right? Just to take a break until we know–”
“No!” said Thistle. His face went beet red, eyes wide, ears twitching. “You–You have to let me delete some items from my browser history first!”
Marcy stared at him for a moment. His ears went back, pinned against his head.
“I–I mean–” said Thistle, backpedaling, “I promised someone I would message them today and–”
“It’ll just be for a little while, okay? You have nothing to worry about. I’ll see if I can come home a little early.” She stood, zipping her purse closed. “Okay?”
“Okay,” said Thistle, sounding far away.
“I’ll see you tonight.”
Thistle watched her back dejectedly as she closed the door behind her. “Well….This isn’t very poggers.”
***
Thistle sat morosely on the couch most of the day, sitting on the very edge and kicking his heels on the cushions. His glazed-over eyes stared at the TV inattentively.
From the end table, the lid of the fish tank flipped up, and Jewel appeared, resting his elbow on the lip of the tank. He squirted a jet of water out, almost but not quite managing to splash onto Thistle. “Hey, bug man.”
Thistle’s eyebrows raised, and he used his whole hand to push the rubberized keys on the remote to turn the TV volume down. “Hm?”
“Can’t we watch something else? Downton Abbey is so boring.”
Thistle frowned. “I need to understand it to be a better friend to Teddy. No one else in the house watches it to listen to her opinions on it.”
Jewel groaned. “Can’t you just read a summary of it online? I’m sure it’s a much faster way to understand it anyway.”
Thistle stood, looking harried, and snapped, “You saw Marcy take my phone! We’re watching Downton Abbey!”
“Geez,” said Jewel, slapping his tail on the water. “Cranky because you can’t check social media?”
Thistle turned and crossed his arms indignantly. “No.”
“Fixing for a dopamine hit?”
“Did you just call me a dope?”
Jewel put a hand to his temple. “Forget it. It bothers you that you don’t have it, though. You’ve gone native.”
“Native to what?”
“It’s a–It’s an expression.”
“Hmph. Well I can’t look it up, because I don’t have my phone.”
“It just means you’ve moved somewhere else and started acting like the people who live there.” He extended and contracted his fins. “Why’d she take it, anyway? She trying to punish you?”
“No,” said Thistle. “Apparently I went too far into the internet too fast, and it scared her.”
“Oooh,” said Jewel devilishly. “Playing with fire?”
“I’m not really even sure what sorts of bad stuff can happen to you on the internet.”
“You can get hacked,” Jewel said helpfully. “Someone on the other side of the internet on another computer will type very fast on their keyboard, and if they type faster than you, they win and get control of your computer. It’s in all their movies.”
“How does that even work?”
Jewel put a hand to his puffed up chest. “It’s called a malware virus.”
Thistle sat down, drawing his knees up to his chest. “Well, that’s not really what I’m worried about. I’m more worried about what Marcy will think when she sees my internet search history.”
“Been looking at embarrassing things were we?”
Thistle blushed.
“You should spend less time on that thing anyway,” said Jewel. “It rots your brain. All the humans on TV talk about how bad it is to watch TV and look at your phone or computer all day. It gives you a bad back. It makes your vision worse. It gives you carpool tunnel sin dome.”
Thistle furrowed his brows. “You mean carpal tunnel syndrome?”
Jewel looked caught off-guard. “Erhm, right, of course. It’s technically called that too.”
Thistle stared at him. Previously it’d seemed like Jewel had been so unreachably more knowledgeable about human affairs than him, but now Thistle realized he was limited to just whatever he got from the TV, and the three humans’ conversations–and even then, only the ones they had in the living room. It’d probably taken him years to reach this point, and Thistle had already surpassed him. It was shocking, and a little sad. Why did Jewel imprison himself like that? When he could come out and do a fuller range of activities?
“You’re one to talk about me needing to spend less time on my phone,” said Thistle. “You watch TV all day.”
“Well yeah, that’s cuz I’m in the fish tank right next to the TV. It’s not like I have much else to do.”
“You could pick up a hobby.”
“What, draw like you do? Underwater? Knit something out of fish food? Carve something out of aquarium gravel to sell on Etsy?”
Thistle shrugged. "If you introduced yourself to the humans, I'm sure they'd help you find stuff to do. They might even give you a phone of your own."
"I don't want a phone. It's weird that you want one."
"It's not weird."
"They’re not made for you! The thing is the same size as you are!"
“Your anemone is the same size as you are.”
“An anemone and a phone are very different!”
“How so?”
“What? One is a phone and one is an anemone! I’m sure you could get some clues as to how they’re different if you use the miraculous investigative devices you have access to called eyes!”
"Why do you only ever come out of the fish tank to say mean things to me? Or to ask me for a favor?"
Jewel suddenly looked guilty. "Erm. I'm just teasing you, you know."
Thistle crossed his arms. "But there are days when we're the only ones home all day and we don't even talk to each other!"
Jewel observed his watery, lonely eyes. "Erm. Well it's not like I have anything particularly interesting to say. Do you want me to fill you in on fishtank drama? The blue tang and the goby are going at it again. Normally Dory is the dominant one, but I think Goober might really have her this time."
Thistle scuffed the couch cushion. "We could at least play a game or something."
"If you think of a game we can play with me in a fishtank, and that won't alert the humans that I'm here, I'm all for it."
"How about twenty questions?"
Jewel's face creased. "That’s hardly a game. A real game. Games are supposed to be fun.”
Thistle sat there morosely.
"Hey, come on, cheer up, pal. You've got plenty of things to do. You were in the middle of knitting something, weren't you?"
He sadly dragged his knitting back over. "...yeah, I guess I'll work on that."
"Great! See, nothing to be sad about." He flicked his fins. "So…no chance I can convince you to flip over to HBO?"
Thistle turned the volume on the TV back up. "I think I hear Colin on the porch. Better go hide before he sees you. Then you'd have to have a genuine conversation, and suffer the horror of being emotionally vulnerable!"
Jewel scowled at him. "When did you learn how to be sarcastic?"
Nevertheless, he dropped back into the water and flipped the tank shut.
Colin came home with cut grass stuck all throughout his leg hair. He stepped inside and went to brush it all off, remembered the huge fuss Teddy had made about grass in the entryway the last time he’d done that, stepped back outside and did it. Then he came in and almost sat on the couch with his grass-stained pants, but remembered just in time to take them off.
“Ugh,” he said upon coming in. “Downton Abbey huh?”
Thistle looked at him sullenly, hunching over and kicking his feet.
“Hey, surely it’s not that bad.”
“I’m not sad about watching Downton Abbey. Marcy took my phone this morning.”
“Oh no!”
“She’s going to look through my internet history.”
Colin’s eyes widened. “There’s nothing more sacred than a man’s internet history.”
Thistle hid his face in his hands. “She’s going to kick me out.”
“What! No, I’m sure she won’t.”
“You haven’t seen the things I’ve been Googling.”
“Surely it can’t be anything that bad.”
Thistle looked up at him darkly.
“...that bad huh?”
***
As the hours at work passed, Marcy started feeling increasingly guilty. She had Thistle's phone on her desk next to her own, the screen occasionally flashing with a notification sliding over the background photo, which was of a game night they had had a while back. It was focused on Marcy and Thistle, both of them looking happy.
She was starting to question everything. Had he shared this photo with anyone online? Was it even safe for there to be photos of him in existence at all? She’d been gradually loosening her supervision of him as he grew to understand more and more, but maybe that’d been a mistake. Maybe she needed to do more to keep him safe.
But the guilt still gnawed at her for taking his device. Was she his parent? No. Right? If not, then what was she? His friend? Roommate? Guardian? Caretaker? Something else?
Thistle was probably also struggling to figure out the nature of their relationship. Marcy still wasn’t entirely sure what sort of relationships people like Thistle even formed. Neither of them had any frame of reference for what to expect from the kind of relationship they had–because no one had ever had their kind of relationship before, as far as they knew. It would be easy to say she had the right to take his phone if she were his parent, and easy to say she didn’t have the right if he were her significant other.
Did she have the right to take it, and to violate his privacy? She had the responsibility of keeping him safe, so surely she had the right to do things that she needed to do to make that happen.
…right?
She started to send him a message apologizing for taking his device to work, only to remember halfway through why that wouldn’t work.
By the time 4PM rolled around, she hadn’t finished the work she needed done to leave early, but she left anyway. When she got home, Colin accosted her at the door.
“Marcy, you can’t look through someone’s internet history. That’s private. That’s just between a man and God. And Google.”
Marcy pushed Colin out of the way. “All right, why don’t you let me and Thistle talk about this. Since it’s his phone and all.”
Thistle came pattering out of the living room, leaping up onto a side table and accidentally knocking into a picture frame, both of them tumbling over with an oof. As Marcy bent down to ask if he was okay, he righted himself and shouted up at her. “Marcy, you’re not going to like what you see in there! You’re–You can’t be exposed to that! You’ll think of me differently!”
Marcy got a wry smile on her face. “Thistle, I promise you I’ve seen weird shit online before. I won’t judge you. Come on, let’s go talk about this upstairs, okay?”
Colin watched resignedly as Marcy scooped Thistle up, mounting the stairs. She went into her room and shut the door behind her, then plopped her purse onto the desk. Thistle climbed into it and clung to his device. “Marcy! You can’t! You can’t look at it! You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Marcy reached in and lifted the device out with her pointer finger and thumb, moving both it and Thistle bodily out and onto the desk. “You don’t have to be embarrassed.”
“Yes I do!”
Marcy sat at the chair, scooting it in. She sighed. “If you really, really don’t want me to, then I won’t…But it would make me feel a lot better.”
Thistle averted his eyes.
“I know you’re an adult, but you’re still on new territory here. You don’t have the same instinctual understanding of humans as a human would. Even experienced humans need some guidance on how to use technology sometimes. You don’t think it would be useful?”
He folded himself up, sitting on the desk with his knees drawn up to his chest. “I…Well…I will admit there are still a lot of things I don’t understand.”
“Can we just go through your phone together and you can show me some of the stuff you’ve been doing? You’ve been on it so much lately. I feel like we haven’t been as connected lately. It’d be nice to see what you’ve been doing.”
Thistle bit his lip. “I…Okay. Okay, go ahead.”
Marcy turned the screen towards him, and he punched in the code to unlock it.
The screen opened onto a Google Chrome tab. It was open to the wikipedia page for Bombyx mori. “See?” said Marcy. “Nothing to be embarrassed about.”
Thistle was wearing a miniature replica of one of Marcy’s hoodies that he’d sewn for himself; he flipped the hood up over his head and pulled the strings tight to draw the sides in and hide his face with a moan.
Marcy tapped the tabs icon to see what else he had open. The browser had run out of room to display the number of tabs that were open, and as she scrolled up an uncountable number of windows flew by. “Uh…”
“It’s research. It’s all research. It’s just research. My tabs are for research.”
They were mostly tabs of Google search results. Marcy started with the ones at the top and read down.
Spider silk
Can you buy spider silk online?
What other bugs make silk?
Can I make silk?
Can I buy silk?
Marcy turned towards him. “Thistle, if you wanted silk, you could have asked me to help you get some. I know that’s something you’d probably love to make clothes out of.”
“I wanted to do it on my own!”
She nodded. “Okay. That’s fine. I’m not mad at you. I just want to make sure you feel like you can ask me for help.” She returned to the phone.
Silkworms
Bombyx mori
Silkmoth
Moth
What to silkworms taste like?
Breeding silkmoths ?
Silkmoths for sale
Silkmothmreproduction
Silkmoth genitalia
Human genitalia
Human vs insect genitalia
Cloaca
Cloaca vs vagina
Cloaca vs anus
Do I have a cloaca?
Do I have vagina?
Am I transgender?
Do i have a penis?
aedeagus
aedeagus vs penis
Intersexual
Transexual
Penis diagram
Human penis diagram
Human breast diagram
Nipple diagram
What are nipples for?
Boob picture
Big boob picture
Tits pornhub
Marcy’s face grew red and her belly started to shake with laughter. She had made such a huge deal about reassuring Thistle he didn’t need to be embarrassed that she could not make him feel embarrassed, but she was having a damn hard time keeping a straight face. Beside her hand, Thistle curled more tightly into a ball, not even tracking her progress, having already given up the ghost.
What is triple X?
XXX?
What is bbw?
There was a pause in the timestamps for a few hours. Then:
What is crypto?
What is cryptocurrency?
NFT
NFT meaning
NFT purchase
Why would someone pay that much money for a picture of an ape?
Systemic wealth inequality in the United States
Capitalism
Socialism
It went on like this for a while. It was like reading a train of thought writing exercise. Marcy cleared her throat. Thistle peered out from under his hood, like an explosion survivor looking out from under a bomb shelter.
“It’s okay to be curious,” said Marcy. “You don’t have to be ashamed.”
Thistle hid his face with his hoodie sleeves.
“Let’s just maybe see if we can get some antivirus on here. You haven’t been clicking on ads, have you?”
“No!” Thistle insisted, shooting up. “I know there aren’t any horny MILFs in my area! I know I didn’t win a giveaway! I won’t get the malware virus!”
Marcy finally let herself burst into laughter. Thistle grew red, standing rigid.
“I’m sorry,” Marcy. “You’re fine, it’s nothing wrong.”
A message popped up in the notification pane, from an instant messaging service. The body of the message just read:
Is everything okay? It didn’t upset you that I asked that, did it?
“Who’s this?” said Marcy.
Thistle sheepishly tucked his limbs close to his body, rubbing his arm. “Oh that’s…that’s a friend I was talking to online.”
“Can I read the messages they sent you?”
He hesitated, then nodded.
Marcy swiped up to see the conversation. There was a series of messages from this morning, just before Thistle had begged her to stay home from work, which Marcy had to read in reverse order and piece together.
My silkworms are coming today! I am SO EXCITED!!!
YES WORM TIME!!!!
They are sooo much bigger than the beetle larvae i already have!
I still can’t believe you eat those. Gross /j How big tho???
Three inches!! Massive!!
Woah!!! How big are the beetle ones?
Almost an inch at biggest!!
Can i see a pic of one in your hand?
No!! Sorry!
?
Is everything okay? It didn’t upset you that I asked that, did it?
As Marcy read, the typing icon popped up and the conversation continued: You normally reply pretty fast, I know you have things going on but I just wanted to make sure
“Do you want to reply?” said Marcy, turning the phone towards him.
Ears pinned back against his head, as though he were caught doing something wrong, he bit his lip and stepped forward, trepidatiously swiping on the screen. He paused for a moment, then looked up at her. “You can look at it.”
She turned it towards herself to see a few new lines had been added:
Sorry, I was busy with Marcy. She is here reading my messages
OMG!!! Hi Marcy!!! Tell her I said hi!!!
“They seem nice,” said Marcy. “Where did you meet?”
“We were talking about bugs online,” said Thistle, then very quickly added, “I didn’t tell her I’m not human or anything. She doesn’t have any information she can use to hurt me.”
“Good,” said Marcy. “I’m glad you’re having fun talking to people online. Just be safe. Can I maybe see her profile? Is there anyone else you’ve been talking to? I can look through any messages you want to share to see if I spot anything you might have missed.”
Thistle fidgeted. “You–You want to see her profile?”
“Yeah, what sites are you active on now?”
Thistle went between her hands and sat cross-legged, navigating the phone like it were the control panel of a giant spaceship. He navigated to various trendy social media sites to show her. (The author will decline to specify which sites for fear of guessing incorrectly and revealing a profound ignorance of internet trends.)
“This is her profile,” said Thistle, again sounding like he was admitting to a shameful crime. “Her username is Snoofae, but she told me to call her Sierra.”
Marcy felt her heart sinking as she read the profile. This was clearly a roleplaying account of some sort; the page was filled with posts about fairies, pretending to be a fairy, and fairy aesthetic.
Marcy had heard of the concept of otherkin briefly in passing, but never really took any closer look into it. She’d always thought it was a little weird, and she made the nebulous connection when she saw a lot of “Sierra’s” posts about being a fairy were tagged with the words faekin and fairycore
Marcy suddenly panicked, imagining Thistle talking to mentally unstable weirdos online. This person seemed to genuinely believe she was a fairy…and it looked like Thistle had been talking to her as though she were one, too. That could be dangerous.
But how to explain this….It would probably upset him to learn this person wasn’t an actual fairy, when he was so starved for connections.
“Um,” she said. She gently wrapped her hand around him. “I–Well, this is hard to explain, but…This person isn’t actually a fairy. Sometimes people will go online and pretend to be fantasy creatures like fairies. Sometimes they believe it so hard they talk about it like it’s true–”
Thistle’s face scrunched up, and he turned away from her.
“I’m sorry,” said Marcy. “I know you were probably excited to–Well, you’re probably the only actual fairy on the internet, and it’s important you keep in mind–”
“Marcy,” said Thistle, voice wobbling.
“I know it must be disappointing, but I just want to make sure you know–”
“I know!” He turned back towards her, eyes misty. “I know she’s not a fairy, Marcy. It’s obvious just by the way she talks she’s not actually a fairy. Why can’t you just let me pretend?”
Marcy was gobsmacked. “You…know already?”
“I’m inexperienced, Marcy, I’m not stupid.”
He pushed at her hand. She withdrew it. “Oh…I’m sorry. Are you…Are you really that lonely?”
Thistle’s lip wobbled. “I just–”
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“You three are nice and all, but–”
“You don’t have to explain, it makes perfect sense.”
His ears drooped. “It’s just–it’s difficult spending all my time around people who are so much bigger than me.”
Marcy got down on her knees, chin on her hand on the desk. “If I knew anyone else the same size as you, I’d bring them over.”
Thistle bit his lip. “Maybe there’s–Er, a fi-fish, um, no, I mean…Er, well–well if they wanted to come, of course.”
Marcy’s eyebrows shot up. “Er–right, of course.”
They stood there staring awkwardly at each other. A notification dinged on Thistle’s phone.
“Oh no,” said Marcy, reading it. “Have you been talking to people in YouTube comments?”
He rubbed his foot against the floor. “A-a little bit.”
“YouTube comments are a cesspool.” She clicked the notification. “Can I look at what you were watching?”
He nodded.
The video loaded. Marcy’s eyes widened, her blood turned to ice as it resumed.
It was the employee from the electronics store who’d seen Thistle. He was being interviewed by somebody.
“What–What is this?”
The microphone briefly pulled away from the employee, and the camera panned towards the interviewer. “What’s up, Truth-seekers, it’s me, the Investigator, here for another–”
Marcy paused the video, dumbfounded, frozen to the spot. “Thistle…?”
Thistle wrung his hands.
“Did you…comment on this video?”
“Maybe once or twice. Or three times. Or a few…”
Marcy scrolled down to find that Thistle, under the username TinyGuy42069, had left a series of dozens of insulting and rage-filled comments on the video. Multiple users who were apparently fans of the man who made the video had ganged up on him, arguing with him through equally hostile comments. And the most recent one, which had been posted while Marcy had his phone at work, read, chillingly:
Lol this dude’s IP address puts him in the town where this was filmed, what are you hiding?