Archive of Our Own ^beta

1977

Marvin Mark knocked on the door, shifting his weight on the wood of the front porch as nervous excitement was welling in his chest while anticipating the girl who would answer it. The young boy who was born and raised in the rural side of Connecticut had grown a deep affection for a pair of sisters that lived down the street from his house. He had first met them at school, when he had stood up for Lina Leskowitz, the younger of the two, who was being relentlessly teased about her facial features. The poor girl never grew eyebrows, which attracted attention from a lot of the jerks that roamed the second-grade who found amusement in belittling those that were different. Marvin couldn’t exactly explain why, but ever since he had first seen Lina there was something intoxicating about her; although he was merely nine years old (almost ten, a fact he always made sure was known when discussing his age), Marvin knew that what he felt towards her went beyond friendship. He found her face to be beautiful, the idea that the lack of eyebrows was a flaw never even crossing his mind. He remembered staring at her from across the room, daydreaming about her beauty before he had even said a word to her. 

One day, a group of young boys had ganged up on her on the playground during recess, hurling insults about her ‘deformity’ and calling her every synonym for ugly they could muster. When Lina had begun crying as a result of their cruelty, Marvin had felt a boiling anger well up inside of him. He had marched over to them, giving one boy a violent shove and shouting cries of opposition to their insults. This had resulted in Marvin getting substantially shoved about, now the target of the group of bullies' wrath, until the herd of them were broken up by an adult monitor who had decided the situation had escalated too far.  Marvin hadn’t been embarrassed to receive just as much punishment as the other’s did in the slightest; they deserved what they got for how they had been treating Lina, and all Marvin cared about was restoring her sense of self-worth. Ever since that moment Lina had sort of latched on to Marvin, the young boy becoming her best friend in the world, right next to her slightly older sister, Anna. Marvin had of course been happy to take this role in her life, his social endeavors becoming completely focused on the Leskowitz family. His obsession with them had only strengthened when he discovered they lived a walkable distance away from his house, and he would frequently show up to hang out with the two sisters, although Lina was always the primary girl on his mind. He wasn’t quite sure if she shared his feelings, this strange sensation in his chest that he knew extended beyond friendship, but still a feeling that his young mind couldn’t quite understand in its entirety. In any case, the Leskowitz sisters had become like family to him over the past couple of years, and today was especially special. 

Marvin gave the door another knock, fearing that his first one had not been heard when no one came to answer the door. As he waited, Marvin tapped his foot to an imaginary beat; from a young age he had been fascinated with music, and he generally kept a rhythm wherever he went. Leaning to the right to see his reflection in a small rectangular window that was placed in parallel to the front door on the light-blue house, Marvin gave his outward appearance a nervous analysis. He was wearing the outfit that he basically lived in, a pair of worn-out blue jeans and a dark green turtle-neck, a pair of brown shoes clinging to their last breaths of life on his feet. He was primarily concerned with his face; his floppy brown hair never seemed to style in a satisfying manner, and his smile never seemed to be as charming as he wished. Marvin was nearly never self-conscious, but for whatever reason, when he was about to see Lina, he suddenly became very concerned with his presentation. 

At last, Marvin heard footsteps thudding for the door, and his heart fluttered with excitement as he anxiously rubbed his fingers against an object held firmly behind his back. To his momentary disappointment, it was Anna who opened the door. 

“Hi Marvin!” the young girl said excitedly, giving him a wide smile and a fast-paced wave. 

Anna was wearing a loose light-blue shirt and a pair of brown shorts, her dark hair cut short and resting at her shoulders. 

“Hey, Anna,” Marvin said, immediately looking past her and into the house for her sister. 

Marvin was always nice to Anna- she seemed specifically interested in him, and he wasn’t out to offend her, but at the end of the day, it was her sister Lina that he really cared about seeing. His heart gave a little skip as he finally spotted Lina within the house, emerging from a different room and making her way over to the door. She was wearing a simplistic pink dress, the color being her absolute favorite, the ends billowing slightly as she twirled around. 

Marvin gave a small chuckle of affection as he watched her rather unique form of travel. Lina loved spinning and twirling about. Marvin would often find her doing it under nearly any circumstance, the young girl sometimes even beginning her dance of rotation mid-conversation or activity. 

“Lina!” Marvin called as she came closer, tightening his grip on the object he held firmly behind his back, preparing to present it to his special friend. “Happy birthday!”

“I’m nine now!” Lina shouted back playfully, stumbling into her sister at the doorway, her eyes clearly dizzy. “You’re not older than me anymore, Marvin!”

“I’m almost ten,” Marvin protested, smiling as Lina made eye contact with him. “I’ll always be older!”

Lina stuck her tongue out at him as Anna laughed, her eyes switching from Marvin to Lina and back again. Marvin’s heart was fluttering at the fun they were having together; seeing the sister’s side by side, they really did look incredibly similar, their hair color and style being the same as well as their overall facial structure. The major difference, of course, was the fact that Lina lacked eyebrows, and as always, when Marvin gazed at her he couldn’t help but think of how special and unique she looked compared to everyone else he knew. 

“Well, anyway,” Marvin said bashfully, rapidly swinging his arms out in front of him and revealing Lina’s present. “Happy birthday! I hope you like it!”

To Marvin’s relief, Lina’s eyes lit up when she saw the pinwheel he had gotten for her. It was a small hand-held one, the white stick about the length of a forearm, topped off with a vibrantly yellow petal-shaped wheel that rotated softly in the light breeze.

“I don’t have that color!” Lina said excitedly, swiping it out of Marvin’s hands and clutching it close to her chest. “Thank you, Marvin!” 

“Yeah, you’re welcome,” Marvin said, freezing up and blushing furiously as Lina wrapped him in a short-lived hug. 

“I’m gonna go put it with my collection!” Lina said gleefully, pulling away from Marvin and dashing back into the house.

Marvin smiled wide at the success of his small gift; he knew Lina had a strong affinity for pinwheels, and that she enjoyed adding new ones to her collection, specifically of colors she didn’t yet possess. During the spring and summer months Lina would proudly stand them all in her backyard, watching as they endlessly spun in the wind. Marvin’s theory was that she enjoyed the simple objects so much because they joined her in one of her favorite activities: spinning around, and around, and around.

“Do you want to come in, Marvin?” Anna asked sweetly, stepping to the side and gesturing for him to join her in the house. 

“I’m good,” Marvin replied, and Anna looked slightly disappointed at his apathetic response to her invite. “Actually, I was hoping when Lina comes back, that you guys would want to go play out in the field with me.”

Marvin was practically wiggling in anticipation at the trip he had planned for Lina’s birthday. The pinwheel was a fine gift, but he wanted to make sure that Lina remembered him as doing something really special with her. It was hard to admit to himself, but Marvin craved her approval, and he believed that he had come up with just the adventure that would ensure Lina would never forget about him. 

“The field?” Anna echoed him, sounding a bit apprehensive. “I don’t know… mom doesn’t like us going that far…”

“Do you guys smell my cake?!” Lina shouted from the house, once again twirling back into view. “Mom just put it in the oven- she says it has to cook a while, but I wish I could eat it now.”

“There’s something we can do in the meantime,” Marvin said eagerly. “In the field, the big one a little ways from my house, I found a windmill!”

Lina stopped as a quizzical look washed over her face. 

“What’s a windmill, again?” She asked.

“It’s like a giant pinwheel!” Marvin hyped it up, using his arms to place emphasis on how big it was, happiness surging through him at how amazed Lina looked at this description. “It’s down a long ways in the field, and I saw a door on the back of it- we might even be able to go inside!”

“Oh, we have to go!” Lina exclaimed, bouncing slightly as Anna’s brow creased with uncertainty. 

“I don’t know…” Anna began, but Lina pushed her playfully.

“Come on, sis, it’ll be an adventure,” Lina said persuasively. “Besides, it’ll be a great chance to use your new camera!”

“Oh, yeah!” Anna’s eyes lit up at the mention of her prized possession, a gift that she had received on her last birthday. Anna had been obsessed with photography ever since, and Marvin knew that bringing it up was a great persuasion tactic. “You two standing by a windmill would make a great birthday photo…”

“See?” Lina said, grabbing Anna’s arm and dragging her inside. “Go find it, and Marvin can show us!”

“Ok,” Anna said at last, disappearing inside the house as her sister gave her a shove. 

Marvin couldn’t help but be amused at Anna’s enthusiasm towards her camera; in a way, she reminded him of his own sister, Jill, who was typically deeply fascinated by modern gadgets as well. He didn’t see Jill a whole lot, as she was considerably older than him (legend had it Marvin was an accidental pregnancy for his parents later in life), in her early twenties and off with her husband, Thomas Hammond, raising their toddler son.

“Mom, is it okay if we go play outside?!” Lina shouted, as Anna’s footsteps pounded up a flight of stairs somewhere within the house.   

“Is Marvin with you guys?” An adult female voice called back, muffled from the distance and walls. 

“Yes!”

“Alright then, just be back in forty-five minutes- your cake is going to be done by then!”

“Okay!” Lina turned back to face Marvin and gave him an energetic double thumbs-up. 

Marvin returned the gesture with an equal amount of charisma, as Anna returned with a small black camera clutched carefully in her hands. 

“Alright, let’s go!” Marvin said, turning away from the house, and opting to jump down from the front porch instead of using the two steps that led to the ground. “If we walk fast, we should be able to make it back just in time!”

“I wonder what a giant pinwheel looks like,” Lina said, falling in lockstep beside Marvin as they carefully crossed the street that was luckily devoid of traveling vehicles, and began walking down a sidewalk that led to his house. 

“It looks super cool!” Marvin promised. “It has to be pretty old, too.”

They soon arrived at Marvin’s house, from where the directions to the field would be quite simple. Leading the two girls over one more crosswalk and past a small farm, the trio finally arrived at a flat grassy field. With the absence of buildings or trees, the area felt far windier than the surrounding area, something Marvin recalled from his previous visit when he had gone off exploring on his own. The sky was overcast with puffy gray clouds, creating a dull atmosphere that accentuated the shades of green dominating the field. 

“See, you can see it over there!” Marvin said, pointing to the near-distance at the small shape of a stone structure with rotating sails.

“Ooh,” Lina cooed, squinting her eyes a bit. “Let’s go see it!”

“Are we sure, guys?” Anna asked, as they began to walk into the long grass. She was clearly still unsure about traveling outside of her mother’s comfort range. 

“We’ll be fine,” Marvin said, elbowing her in the side, and Anna scowled at him when it made her fumble with her camera. “We’ll just check it out, come back, and then I’ll eat all of Lina’s cake!”

“Hey!” Lina said with mock rage, shoving Marvin and causing him to stumble, although her playful action put a big smile on his face. “It’s my birthday cake! It’s strawberry flavored too- that means it’s pink on the inside!” Lina’s eyes grew wistful as she described the delicious feast that was waiting for her. “I can’t wait to eat my cake!”

Marvin laughed at Lina’s sweet tooth, while Anna looked carefully down at her camera, pressing buttons as she readied it for photo-taking. As they walked across the field, the windmill getting ever closer, Marvin made every effort he could to brush against Lina. He hoped she didn’t notice how closely he was walking next to her and think it was weird, but for some reason, Marvin relished every time that their hands ‘accidentally’ touched, no matter how brief the moment was. 

“Wow, look at it!” Lina said, snapping Marvin out of the confusing thoughts and feelings he had towards his friend.

Marvin looked up and realized they were now standing at the foot of the windmill, the structure looking just as mysteriously intriguing as the first time he had found it. The base was made of old stone bricks, dull and cracked with age, leading up to the light-brown wooden cap, the long rectangular wooden sails rotating softly to the right with the wind. 

“It is like a giant pinwheel,” Lina said in amazement, Marvin’s chest swelling with pleasure at the fact that his plan was paying off.

“Here, I’ll take a photo!” Anna said excitedly, taking a few steps back and putting the camera up to her eyes. “Stand in front of it, you two!”

Marvin quickly stood next to Lina, making sure that their shoulders were touching as they turned their backs to the windmill and their eyes towards the lens of Anna’s camera. 

“Come on Marvin, don’t be shy, we’re best friends,” Lina said, throwing an arm around his shoulder. 

Marvin’s entire body seemed to tingle with a mixture of excitement and nervousness as he slowly wrapped an arm around her shoulders as well, soaking in the precious few seconds of being so close to her. 

“Oh- okay,” Anna said in a weird tone, a look that Marvin could only classify as jealousy crossing her face. “Um… say happy birthday!”

“Happy birthday, Lina!” Marvin shouted, his words turning into a broad smile as Anna’s camera flashed.

“Can I try it?!” Lina said, disappointment flashing through Marvin as she left his side. 

“No, but I’m gonna get all the pictures printed later and you can see all the ones that I took,” Anna said defiantly, holding the camera close to her chest.

“Okay,” Lina said with a little irritancy, taking the refusal in stride and turning back around to the windmill. “Marvin, you said we could go inside?”

“I think so!” Marvin replied, gesturing for the two sisters to follow him as he began to circumvent the windmill.

Lina performed a couple of small twirls as they made their way to the backside of the windmill, where an old wooden door was waiting within the stone that constructed the cylindrical base. 

“I didn’t try opening it before,” Marvin admitted, approaching the door and putting his hands on the rough surface. “But I think if I just give it a push-”

Marvin pooled all of his strength into a short shove, and the door groaned as it swiveled inward to reveal the guts of the windmill.

“It worked!” He said triumphantly, pushing it open a little more as the three of them took their first steps inside. 

Lina gasped in astonishment as she gazed at the inner workings, Marvin almost equally intrigued as the fresh outdoor air changed over into an old, musty scent. Large sections of the middle were filled with twisting and turning gears of varying shapes and sizes, some made of metal and some made of a similar wood as the sails, many connecting with poles that led to what appeared to be an upper level accessible by a ladder to the left. 

“Wow,” Lina said, her eyes widening as she studied the mechanisms. “Is this what the inside of pinwheels look like too?”

“No, silly,” Anna said, rolling her eyes as she playfully pushed her sister. 

“Hey, do you guys wanna go up there?” Marvin said, pointing towards the wooden ladder that led up to a platform above their heads. 

A sense of adventure was taking over the young boy, and he couldn’t but desire to explore every bit of this windmill.

“I don’t know…” Lina said, eyeing it uncertainly. “Seems a little scary…”

“I bet I could get a cool photo up there!” Anna said, looking at Marvin.

There was a hopeful look in her eyes as she said it, as though she was wishing that Marvin would be impressed by her enthusiasm.

“Yeah, come on Lina, it’s gonna be awesome!” Marvin said, heading to the ladder and climbing up it. 

The old wood threatened to splinter his hands as he gripped onto the sides, but he quickly adjusted his hold to be more careful in order to avoid the threat. When he got to the top, he carefully stepped onto the wooden platform, and once he was certain of its stability, put his full weight onto it.

“See, it’s fine!” he called down to the girls. 

Anna was the first to climb up, soon joining him on the platform, Lina reluctantly following her sister. Once the three of them were all up, Marvin began to walk to the other side of the platform, gazing down through the many gaps and openings within it at the churning gears below. A main connection of the poles and a few more strategically incorporated gears that connected to the center of the sails outside dominated the center of the cylindrical area, the constant sound of the metal and wood turning a low hum in his ears. 

“I guess this is pretty cool,” Lina said, as she looked down through one of the gaps, her eyes portraying a mixture of fear and intrigue as her gaze slowly moved up to the parts on their level.

As though a force of habit, or perhaps a comforting mechanism, Lina made a soft twirl, lightly bumping into Anna as she did so.

“Careful,” Anna complained, holding Lina’s shoulders in place.

Lina laughed shyly, as she shrugged.

“Hey, Marvin, let’s take a photo of… this!” Anna said, recovering her sentence as she must have realized she had no idea what to call the mess of gears and poles.

Anna made her way up close to Marvin, leaning into him as she pointed her camera towards the place in the stone wall that a central cylindrical wood beam connected the inner workings to the sails outside. Marvin didn’t feel the same magical sensation that he had when Lina had been up close to him, and a bit of annoyance surged through him at Anna’s insistence to get in his personal space when it was her sister that he preferred to take that position. 

“See, Marvin, look how the camera works,” Anna said, clearly eager to make Marvin be interested in what she liked to do.

Marvin had to admit, her camera was a fascinating little device. He concentrated on the varying buttons and the overall shape, his mind puzzling over how it worked while Anna talked, although Marvin wasn’t entirely sure what she was saying.

“Hey, did you hear something?” Anna suddenly asked, breaking both her and Marvin’s attention away from the camera.

“Uh- maybe,” Marvin couldn’t be sure; the rumbling of the spinning gears had been a consistent drone ever since they first entered the windmill, but perhaps he had detected some kind of disturbance in the monotonous hum.

“Hm. Lina, what about you?” Anna looked around curiously when there wasn’t an answer.

Marvin followed her eyes as they darted around the second level, but Lina was nowhere to be found.

“Lina?” Anna called out, but once again, there was no answer. 

“She didn’t like it up here,” Marvin said, making his way over to the ladder. “She probably went back down while we were looking at the camera.”

Marvin was beginning to feel worried that he had taken the adventure too far; if Lina was going to be scared of the upper level, he hoped it didn’t ruin the experience of the overall trip. When Marvin finished descending the ladder and his feet hit the dirt ground, he briefly scanned the cylindrical space for Lina, but to no avail. He did catch notice that the door to the outside remained open, and he assumed Lina had wandered back out for some fresh air.

“Anna, I think she went outside,” Marvin said, as Anna finished climbing down the ladder, wobbling slightly as she was using only one hand while the other tightly gripped her precious camera. 

“By herself?” Anna questioned, as they headed for the exit. “That doesn’t sound like her.”

“I think she didn’t really like it up there,” Marvin said, getting increasingly worried that he had spooked Lina a bit too much by pressuring her to explore the windmill. “She probably just wanted to be back outside, with the fresh air.” Marvin laughed a bit as they walked out of the windmill. “I bet she’s twirling around out here…”

Marvin trailed off as the two of them realized Lina was nowhere to be seen. Now that they were outside of the windmill the constant rumbling had died down, replaced with the quiet whistling of the wind. 

“Lina?” Anna called out once again, and once again, no answer.

“Maybe she went around back to the front?” Marvin suggested, his heart rate quickening as his breathing began to catch in his throat.

A strange feeling descended over Marvin, like a premonition that they weren’t going to find his beloved friend as they rounded the edges of the windmill. As he had feared, they were met with only an empty field, no Lina anywhere in sight.

“Lina?!” Marvin called out into the emptiness, hoping against hope that she was somewhere just out of sight and would respond.

“Marvin, where is she?” Anna asked, her voice hurried and filled with great concern.

Marvin didn’t answer her, his heart now pounding in his chest as a terrifyingly strong horror gripped his soul, panic overwhelming him entirely. 

“Lina!” He was shouting her name now, running out into the field. “Lina! LINA!”

All he heard back were the hollow echoes of his own voice. Defeated and out of breath, Marvin slowly and dejectedly turned around to make eye contact with Anna. The young girl was just standing there, the windmill in its majestic and foreboding presence looming behind her. She still had the camera in her hands, a look of fear and bewilderment etched onto her face. As they held each other’s unsure and frightened gazes, she raised the camera upward, slowly moving it to her left eye with the lens pointed towards Marvin, an action seemingly spawned from complete helplessness and unknowing of what to do next. 

Last time Anna had flashed the camera, the picture had been to commemorate a day of joy, of three friends celebrating the birthday of the person they cared about most. This picture was a very different picture. This time, there was no windmill and there was no Lina. 

Just Marvin, alone and confused. 

1995

Daniel Hammond adjusted his glasses as he continued to stare at the monitor before him, the rounded screen contained within a gray bulky casing lit up with an assortment of bright and childish colors. As he frequently found himself doing on the weekends, he was sitting in his boss’ garage, dutifully putting in more hours towards the videogame that he and her company, an up and rising game development studio called Garalina, was creating for the newly released PlayStation One console. While he worked away in front of a glowing computer screen and an old keyboard, always accompanied by the shadows of the garage and distinct ‘car smell,’ Daniel’s little brother Michael, who was very nearly seven, played with his best friend Carrie, his boss’ two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. Despite the fact that there was a sizable age difference between them, Mike enjoyed her company, and Daniel theorized the reason was because he got to be the older one in the room for once.

Daniel and his boss, a woman named Anna who also happened to be his aunt through marriage (which helped him easily land an interview), had grown to be quite close despite their work relationship, largely due to how good of friends Carrie and Michael had become over the past year. Daniel remembered how when Anna had first hired him, impressed with his extensive background with coding specifically aimed at game development (Daniel had always felt like an extreme nerd throughout high school; while other people were out being social, he was always studying up on the latest developments in the world of technology and programming), he had felt that they would work well together. Anna displayed a love for technology that rivaled his own, claiming that her interest began all the way back in her childhood, when she had been gifted a simple camera. 

Daniel himself had been just a baby in the 70s, and it was fun to meet someone who had been delving into the world of technological advancement even longer than he had. Her company, Garalina (apparently partly named after a sister of hers that wasn’t around anymore… Daniel didn’t ask her about it much, because she clearly didn’t like talking about whatever had happened), was a small studio that was made up of a core group of people, their main place of work consisting of cheap office spaces downtown. They were all hoping to make a big splash in the world of gaming when they finally released their ‘magnum opus,’ a game called Petscop . 

The general theme and concept of the game had been born from the minds of Daniel and Anna, during a conversation they were having about creating a game that young children could enjoy. Anna had been busy raising Carrie, and Michael was of course a big element in Daniel’s life, so the two of them got to work brainstorming ideas for a game that the two kids would both like. They had soon decided on what they believed was a simple yet enticing precedent; a colorful world where young players could solve puzzles to catch wacky pets. The puzzle element would encourage developing problem-solving skills, while the aspect of catching pets would simulate an experience of being a good caregiver, something both Anna and Daniel agreed was a very important quality for a person to have, should they ever produce their own offspring in the future. 

Daniel and Anna were by far the two that put the most effort into the game, the limited number of other employees in Garalina mostly focusing on visual design or small debugging tasks. Realistically, the game had evolved to become Daniel’s artistic vision. He had quickly proven his prowess for game development and earned utmost trust from Anna with handling Petscop’s creation; hence, why he was diligently working on it in her garage. 

Daniel had recently developed a sort of feverish obsession with Petscop , mostly due to the fact that he wanted to have the first level fully playable in time for his brother’s birthday, which was coming up relatively soon. The beta testing for the game had gone very well thus far, Michael and Carrie getting to try some of the earliest generations of the game, and the Garalina team had just recently hosted a very successful ‘mass testing’ among children from local elementary school systems. Not only did they get to hear feedback from many different players of their target audience (Daniel had even figured out how to seamlessly incorporate a recording system that would store the controller inputs of the different players, allowing him to look back at the assorted children’s play styles later on), but the publicity from hosting a fun event for some of Connecticut’s younger children turned out amazing for gaining awareness about the upcoming release. 

Although still rough and far from complete, Petscop had been a big hit among the kids. While many struggled with some of the puzzles, there was one kid that Daniel remembered in particular who had been incredibly adept at solving them: a young foster-child girl, pale-skinned and soft spoken, named Belle. She had displayed wonderful deductive reasoning and critical thinking skills, and Daniel couldn’t really describe her as anything other than ‘smart.’ 

“Daniel!” Michael’s voice and the swinging of the garage door snapped Daniel out of his daydream about Garalina’s past. 

“Hey, buddy!” Daniel said enthusiastically, smiling as his younger brother ran up to him, a piece of paper clutched in his hand. 

Michael was a scrawny little guy, about an average height for his age with short blonde hair that contrasted with Daniel’s long, often unkempt mop of dark brown. He was wearing a gray t-shirt and light-blue jeans, stains of different colors splotched on his arms and parts of his abdomen. A pair of thin rectangular glasses rested on his face.

“Look what I did,” Michael said, proudly presenting the paper to Daniel.

It was filled with swirls of different colors, clearly finger painted by a child that cared not for making a coherent image, but for assembling the most diverse amount of colorful swirls as possible. 

“Whoa, look at this!” Daniel feigned being impressed, although it wasn’t hard to put genuine positive emotion into his voice. 

Seeing his brother’s smile automatically filled Daniel’s heart with joy, the young boy never failing to brighten even the dullest of days. Much of Petscop was indirectly inspired by Michael, and in many ways, his little brother was his reason for living.

“Nah, it’s terrible!” Michael said, falling into a fit of laughter. “Carrie wanted to help me, but she’s no good at it!”

“Hey!” the voice of a young girl shouted indignantly, Daniel casting his gaze over to see Carrie standing in the doorway, her arms crossed. Her voice sounded babyish compared to Michael, their nearly four-year age gap quite noticeable in their speech. “Don’t be mean, Mike.”

Carrie was wearing her signature outfit of brown tights and a brown long-sleeved shirt that was far too big for her. Her mother was always trying to get her to wear more colors, but she insisted on the same clothes every day. Her short dark hair always made her face resemble that of her mother’s, with one detail missing: her eyebrows just didn’t seem to be growing in, even though she was almost three.

“Well, if I had painted it myself,” Michael said, his voice swelling with pride. “I would’ve made something cool. Like, a superhero!”

Carrie gave a squeal of playful frustration and stumbled out of the doorway to run into Michael, colliding with him and causing them both to stumble forward. 

“Whoa, careful,” Daniel said, trying to diffuse their energy before they had a chance to bump into any of the computer parts. “Hey, guys, wanna see something cool in the game?”

“In Pet-shop?” Carrie asked, her eyes widening.

“Pet- scop,” Michael corrected her, giving an eyeroll as though his genius could not be matched; Mike had been obsessed with the game of Petscop ever since the Garalina office had incorporated the game into an easter-egg hunt last Easter, and he prided himself on the fact that his older brother was the lead developer.

Daniel just shook his head in amusement as he pulled up the model for a pet he had been perfecting, a cute little red bird he had named Toneth. 

“See guys, look here,” Daniel said, pointing to the screen as Carrie and Michael crowded on either side of him to see. “This is Toneth- he’s a bird!”

“It’s a funny stupid blob monster, that’s what it is,” Michael said teasingly, upon looking at the feathery lump of red on the screen. 

“I guess so,” Daniel laughed, quickly understanding how his brother had seen the ridiculousness in the design. “I guess I forgot what birds look like, huh?”

“Carrie, Mike- are you bothering Daniel again?” Anna had now appeared in the garage as well, lightly scolding the two children for interrupting his session of game design. 

Anna had an aura of professional beauty that Daniel would have been very attracted to, had she been ten years younger, unmarried, and not technically related to him. She wore simple clothing, tight black pants and a fuzzy blue sweater that complimented her gray-ish eyes. She commonly didn’t wear much for make-up, but she was regularly seen with two small golden orbs for earrings and a thin silver necklace draped across her neck for jewelry. 

“No!” Carrie and Michael claimed in unison, flinching as though they wanted to hide, but ultimately making no move to do so.

“It’s alright,” Daniel said, ensuring that his work was properly saved and backed up before beginning to close things down. “I was just finishing up for the day, anyways.”

Daniel bent down below the table he was working at and pressed the power-off button on the computer terminal. As always, he looked at the device with a sense of pride; it was a cutting-edge computer known as a Tarnacop Machine, the best in the business when it came to large-scale projects such as game design. It was proving to be incredibly useful for him and Garalina as a whole.

“How’s it coming, Mr. Rainer?” Anna asked, as Daniel stood up from the chair, the monitor going dark as the computer powered down. 

“Rainer” was a name that Daniel had quickly come to be known by in the Garalina offices. It was his online username and a general pen name of sorts, having been stolen from the German word that meant ‘deciding warrior,’ a concept that Daniel rather liked.

“Not bad,” Daniel replied. “Mike here didn’t seem to appreciate my bird-design very much, but otherwise, things are coming along slowly but surely, as usual. How are things on your end?”

“Good, good,” Anna sighed, and Daniel could easily detect that something was on her mind. 

“Hm?” Daniel gave her a quizzical look, wondering if the matter was too personal for her to dispense or if she would indulge his curiosity. 

“Oh, it’s nothing really,” Anna lowered her voice to a whisper, furtively glancing at Carrie and Michael to ensure that they were preoccupied with themselves. “Just… I don’t know, he’s been acting weird lately.”

“Your husband?” Daniel guessed.

Daniel didn’t know much about Marvin, but from his limited interactions he could tell that the guy was rather withdrawn. He recalled that Marvin had been a music teacher at a local school, but for reasons Daniel was unsure of, the school had shut down and he had no idea how Anna’s husband now spent his days.

“Mm,” Anna nodded, her face dawning a strange look that Daniel couldn’t quite place what emotion was behind. “Hey, have you seen Lina at all?”

Daniel shifted in the office-chair uncomfortably. Anna had asked this before, and he hadn’t been sure how to answer. It seemed that Anna’s company Garalina was named after her sister, whom he had assumed wasn’t alive anymore given that she was never around, and yet… Anna would ask people if they had seen her, even at times citing her as a large contributor to the creation of the Garalina company. It was strange, and when Daniel had asked her about it after the first time all Anna had said was ‘not everyone can see her.’ It was an odd quirk about her for sure, but Anna was perfectly normal otherwise, so Daniel didn’t pry into that can of worms. At the end of the day, he was an employee and she was the boss.

“Here, you can keep this,” Michael said suddenly, interrupting them before Daniel could respond and carelessly tossing the paper of abstract finger-painting onto the garage floor. 

“Michael,” Daniel scolded, but Anna had already picked it up as though she had been expecting as much. 

She gave an exasperated smile, then walked across the room and opened the garage door, sunlight and fresh air flooding into the space. 

“Have a safe journey home, you two,” Anna said pleasantly, herding Carrie back to the doorway that led inside the house.

“Thanks,” Daniel grabbed Michael by the hand and began leading him towards the outside. He decided to drop the strange subject with Anna; their flow of conversation had been broken, and it did seem to be something rather personal. “Hey, Carrie, say hi to your brother for me!”

“Ok!” Carrie called back as she ran into the house, energy clearly still buzzing around her.

“I can’t wait for my birthday,” Michael proclaimed, the two of them emerging into the suburban outdoors. “I want a dog so bad!”

“Who said anything about a dog?” Daniel said, trying to nip Michael’s hopes in the bud. “Besides, in Petscop you can catch all kinds of pets.”

“But I want a real pet,” Michael insisted. “I want a dog! Wouldn’t that be awesome?!”

“I suppose so, buddy,” Daniel said, resigning to the fact that Michael wasn’t going to let this go. “But for now, let’s get you home. Bedtime always comes faster than you expect.”

2017

Paul groggily woke up, the rays of the morning sun piercing through his blinds enough to stimulate his vision. He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes, brushing his straight brown hair that was probably getting a bit too long out of his face. A pleasant meow alerted him to the fact that it was his cat he could thank for his awakening; the orange and fluffy creature lovingly rubbed its face against his leg as Paul gave it a loving pet.

“Hey, cat,” he mumbled, pulling back his covers and swiftly sliding out of his bed, his cat instantly taking off running at the slight disturbance.

 Paul yawned as he grabbed the gray t-shirt that was draped over the edge of his bed, next opening the blinds of his window to let some natural light flood in through the glass. His room almost glowed with a purple hue, the color being the defining stylistic choice of the simple square space. Paul found it to be calming, although there wasn’t all that much in his life to be stressed about; he was still chronically unemployed, something that wasn’t too attractive of a twenty-four-year-old, but at the end of the day, his generally overprotective mother enabled his lethargy towards life. 

In short, he was the polar opposite of his stepsister, Belle. Paul had always looked up to her, as she was always slightly older and vastly smarter, the only real ‘quirk’ she had being that she always behaved oddly around her name. It was as though she was uncomfortable in her own skin, and Paul suspected that was partially why she was happy to stay away from home for long periods of time. Personally, he was excited to have her return home in about a month’s time, but he wasn’t sure that Belle would share his enthusiasm. 

In any case, Paul had the house to himself today; that meant he would spend his time with some good old-fashioned gaming. Paul couldn’t quite explain why, but he had an affinity for the more retro consoles, specifically the PlayStation One. There was some unknowable charm about the older games that he couldn’t quite place his finger on, but he loved the simplicity of the graphics and the uniqueness of the controls. It probably helped that his mother, Anna, seemed to be a PlayStation One fanatic; their house had a large library of games belonging to the console of the 90s, most of which were left to collect dust these days.

After a lazy breakfast of cereal, Paul sluggishly made his way over to the rack of PlaystationOne game-cases, placed to the right of the living room television, and browsed through the options. He was dissatisfied with most of the collection that was available, he played through a lot of these games at least once throughout his life. It was difficult to replicate the excitement and sense of explorative adventure that a new game offered, and none of these games were enticing him at the moment. 

Resigning to the fact that he wasn’t gonna find the entertainment he desired in the game rack, Paul headed into his garage as an idea descended upon him, spawned from the combined factors of his current boredom and the fact that he had complete dominion over the house.

 His mother had always kept her romantic past a closely guarded secret; Paul felt as though he had whispers of memories of some sort of father figure, but they were blurred and muddled, further pushed down by the fact his mother was insistent that he shouldn’t look to the past. Between his mother’s secrecy about his father, and Belle’s general aura of a constant identity crisis, Paul felt as though he were always on the outside of an inside joke- or, more accurately, woefully misinformed on some family secret. He hadn’t even seen any of his fathers’ side of the family in forever… the last time he recalled having any interaction with family outside of his mother’s side was around 1999, when he had been merely a small kid. 

It was this constant feeling of being an outsider amongst his own kin that he blamed his apathetic, borderline cowardly approach to life. Paul was well aware that he was an easily intimidated fellow, capable of being instructed or manipulated as long as someone exerted enough assertiveness over him. He had generally carried this timid nature throughout his entire life, but he had especially felt like a wall-flower personality during his high-school years. Thankfully, Belle, no matter how quirky, had always been a friend for him, saving him from nearly complete social isolation. Ever since high-school graduation, Paul had been stuck in a loop of hopping between short-lived jobs without ever taking steps towards a stable career, and he was beginning to feel as though he had screwed his life over by not being proactive enough when it came to, well, generally everything, but especially the matter of college or some form of higher education. Luckily, his mother seemed perfectly fine with enabling his life-apathy, consistently maintaining a slight overprotectiveness even into his adult years.

Whatever the source of his family’s general oddness, Paul knew that his mother was off doing who knows what today, and he was left to explore uninhibitedly. Paul had at some point (he couldn’t quite remember exactly when, it was within the window of a couple years) discovered that his mother kept a stash of objects that potentially in some way related to his father, or at the very least, matters that correlated to the side of the family he had become all but excommunicated from, in a drawer beside an oddly placed table within the garage. He hadn’t bothered to investigate it before, as he knew how vehemently his mother insisted that he stay far away from the subject of his father, but he couldn’t deny the fact that his curiosity had been gradually growing. Now, he saw an opportunity to finally see what was contained within.

The temperature shifted ever so slightly lower as he emerged into the garage, entering the space from a door placed into the wall across from the kitchen. The dimly lit den of cement flooring and dirty smell was made interesting only by the oddly placed table and chair on the far-right side, a small compact-drawer resting underneath the table. Paul swiftly made his way over to it, the loose folds of his blue pajama-pants brushing against each other as his bare feet felt cold against the hard cement surface. Rolling the office chair out of the way, Paul crouched down and dragged the drawer out into the open. 

A part of him felt lame at the fact that he was getting a sense of excitement from something as mundane as exploring a stash of old objects, most of which would probably be completely irrelevant to his life. Upon pulling out the drawer and giving its contents a first look over, Paul felt the entire thing to be a little underwhelming; within it rested a yellow pinwheel, a retro-looking camera, an awl for piano tuning along with some sheet music, a dog collar, and a box of half-spilled crayons. However, inconspicuously placed among the other objects was something that he recognized nearly immediately: a cartridge of a familiar shape and size, being none other than a PlaystationOne game. 

Paul swiped the game from the drawer, a small sense of disbelief taking over him as he eagerly surveyed the casing. The wrapping within the case boasted a colorful and childish aesthetic, proudly advertising a game called Petscop. Upon first glance, Paul found that it was developed by a studio called Garalina, having been copyrighted in 1997. Interestingly, he had never heard of the game nor the development company, which meant it must have been a considerably small business. Upon flipping the cartridge over for further inspection, Paul found that there was reason to be excited beyond simply having a new game to try; attached to the backside of the case was an enigmatic note with a rather cryptic, if not slightly goofy message.

The first line of the note was written in all capital letters, boldly declaring that: “I WALKED DOWNSTAIRS AND WHEN I GOT TO THE BOTTOM, INSTEAD OF PROCEEDING, I TURNED THE RIGHT AND BECAME A SHADOW MONSTER MAN.” Below that was a date and a different message: June 13th, 1997. “For you: please go to my website on the sticker, and also go to Roneth’s room and press start, and press down, down, down, down, down, right, start.”

Paul was initially taken aback by its strangeness, reading it a couple of more times to make sure it made as little sense as he thought. Still holding the mysterious Petscop cartridge in his hands, Paul smiled; the day just got really interesting.

1983

Marvin trudged through the puddles that adorned the sidewalk, a black raincoat protecting him from the light drizzle that constantly fell from the covering of gray clouds above. In his hands he held a strawberry birthday cake, as he always did at least once a month; it was Lina’s birthday, the one that would have been her fifteenth celebration had she not disappeared. Marvin himself was very nearly sixteen, and just like all the other years since that fateful trip to the windmill, his life felt like a living hell.

Instead of the wound left in Lina’s absence healing over time, it only got worse, like an infectious scar. As he got older Marvin began to understand more clearly the gravity of what he had done, and his depression seemed to deepen with every passing day. Under no circumstances had he ever accepted the fact that Lina might be dead. In order to even function correctly Marvin had to believe she was still alive, and was just out there, lost somewhere, waiting for him to find her and bring her home. 

The memory of the fallout from Lina’s ninth birthday was forever seared into his brain. The panicked explanation Anna gave to her mother, the look of utter anger and disbelief that the grown woman had given him. There was crying and screaming and searching, the police even quickly getting involved; Marvin had been quick to tell them what he knew, how Lina had left the windmill after getting scared and seemingly disappeared into thin air. The field and the surrounding area were scoured, but even after a couple days, there was no trace of Lina. Marvin had never felt so awful as he had when he saw how terribly distraught Lina’s parents were, how it emotionally destroyed the entire family, including her sister Anna. 

It had been his idea to go to the windmill, a place that was farther from home than they were supposed to venture, and Marvin was eternally racked by guilt. He had heard so many terrifying options of what could have happened to his friend, whispers of possible kidnappers or predatory wildlife haunting the halls of his school in the wake of Lina’s untimely disappearance. Marvin had been nearly exiled from the Leskowitz family, as Lina’s parents hated him ever since he had caused their little girl to vanish, but Anna very purposefully interacted with him throughout middle school, and now even high school as well. 

Marvin had to admit he liked the fact that she tried to find comfort in conversing with him; in a way, she was all that he had left of Lina. That being said, whenever he looked at Anna’s face, he couldn’t help but imagine her without eyebrows, and before long, in his imagination he would be talking with his beloved friend. However, whenever he was forced back into reality, all the hurt came crashing down on him even worse than before. 

Marvin’s headspace had been strange ever since the windmill incident; his refusal to believe that Lina was dead, long after everyone else had accepted this to be the case, had prompted him to make an effort to get her to come home. He had started this endeavor merely days after she went missing, his young mind finding it rational that she was simply lost and needed some guidance to come home. So, while everyone else went off searching the town and putting up missing-person papers, Marvin instead hung-up birthday-girl flyers, promising Lina the cake she had never gotten to eat if only she would come home. To make it easier for her to find him, Marvin would even bring a strawberry cake out to a bench just outside of their old elementary school, patiently waiting with it upon his lap for Lina to come find him. To his grand disappointment, this never happened. 

Initially Marvin had done this ritual every day, but as the weeks passed he was gradually forced to do it less and less by the demands of other areas of life. Soon it dwindled down to once a week, and for the past few years Marvin had made it a once-a-month activity to refresh the birthday-girl signs and sit out on that bench with the birthday cake. Now that he was into the middle of his teenage years, the more educated side of his brain always subconsciously razzed him for clinging to such a ridiculous hope that this would in some way help Lina come home; but nevertheless, Marvin could not bring himself to stop this no matter how foolish it seemed to everyone around him.

Just as Anna had become a sort of last connection to Lina, so did this habit. Ever since 1977 Marvin had been all but a social outcast at school, not only being shunned for his strange behavior, but he also found no desire to attempt to make a connection with anyone, as he knew he could never replicate as strong of feelings as he once had for Lina. Even his own sister had been displaying a sort of enmity towards the attitude he had adopted ever since Lina’s disappearance, his persona becoming absorbed by a dark, gothic cloud. His inability to move on was even bleeding into other areas of his life, Marvin struggling with his driver’s permit due to inevitably slipping into his dark thoughts and losing sight of what was in front of him. In place of a part-time job, Marvin delved himself into music, becoming particularly obsessed with the piano, playing out his sorrows on the sad tunes the instrument was capable of producing. For six years he had been miserable, guilty, and alone.

Marvin gave a grunt of frustration as a passing car washed a wave of rainwater onto his legs, his jeans becoming wet. The cake he was holding was getting substantially ruined from the weather conditions, but Marvin didn’t care. He had to fulfill his ritual; they could call it a mental illness, they could call it whatever they wanted, but he had to sit on that bench with this cake today.

As he trudged ever closer to his old elementary school, Marvin saw one of his birthday-girl signs plastered to a nearby telephone pole, wet and blurry. Somewhere along the way he had stopped replacing them, and a lot of them had begun to look withered with age, the ink of the pink letters specifically designed to catch Lina’s eye bleeding together as though reflecting the perpetual state of his mind. 

Finally approaching the front of the elementary school, Marvin was caught by surprise as a female figure was already waiting for him on the bench, an umbrella held over her head. For a heart stopping moment Marvin nearly tricked himself into hoping it was Lina, finally returning to him, but he immediately dashed that fantastical hope. The girl was dressed in blue and she had brown eyebrows; this was Anna.

“Anna,” Marvin said weakly as he approached the bench, the birthday cake still increasing in deformity from the relentless rain. “What are you doing here?”

“Marvin,” Anna acknowledged him, standing up with a sad look in her eyes as she came close enough so he could share the protection of her umbrella. “Listen- you know I care about you, right?”

Marvin was momentarily speechless as he held Anna’s gaze, tears welling up in his eyes. She hadn’t even wanted to go to the windmill, she was the one who had told them it was a bad idea. Marvin was responsible for Lina’s disappearance and he hated himself for it; how could her sister not hate him too?

“I… I-” Marvin mumbled, shifting his weight on his feet as stared down at the sad, drenched cake in his hands. “I guess…”

“I don’t blame you, Marvin,” Anna said soothingly, as though she had read his mind. “We were kids. All of us were and all of us went there together. Whatever happened to Lina… wherever she is… we have to move on.”

Marvin suddenly became guarded, unsure of where Anna was going with this. How could they move on? Wouldn’t that be disrespectful to Lina?

“I can’t,” Marvin confessed, now fighting back tears. 

“Marvin, this has to stop,” Anna continued, placing a hand on top of one of his beside the base of the cake. “Don’t you think all this hurts me just as much as it hurts you? She was my sister. We did everything together.”

Marvin couldn’t possibly imagine anyone feeling more pain over Lina’s disappearance than him, but in that moment, he felt a connection with Anna that he hadn’t necessarily been aware of before; they were kindred spirits, bonded by the shared grief of a vanished loved one.

“Hey!” Marvin protested, as Anna swiftly knocked the cake from his hands, the already decrepit desert completely falling apart as it splashed pathetically into the wet ground below. 

Marvin felt as though anger should well up inside of him, but he found that it never came. Instead, a cold understanding dawned over him as he realized what the message of Anna’s action was meant to be. 

“Oh, Marvin,” Anna cried, breaking down into tears as she suddenly and unexpectedly threw her arms around him, bringing them together into a tight hug as she buried her face into his shoulders, the pole of the umbrella in her hands boring against his back. “She’s gone Marvin… we have to accept it… she’s gone…”

Marvin found that he could not hold the floodgates any longer, tears of his own streaming down his face as he slowly placed his arms around Anna, her body feeling warm amongst the cold of the rainy day. Despite his inherent obsession with Lina trying to fight against it, Marvin had to admit that holding Anna, someone who had always been there for him even after he caused her sister to disappear, invoked the same feeling that being close to Lina all those years ago had. Now that he was older, he better understood what that feeling was; romantic affection danced with teenage libido as Anna remained pressed tightly against him for a few more seconds. 

Anna pulled away slightly but kept her arms around his neck, the two of them looking intensely into each other’s eyes. In that moment, Marvin felt as though they had both been placed under a trance. A silent understanding seemed to wash over them as they said nothing, continuing to just stare at each other in complicated and emotional tension. Then, as if both were entranced in unison, Marvin met Anna’s lips halfway as she parted them and tilted her head upward, their embrace turning into a fierce kiss.

It was Marvin’s first kiss, and yet, it felt so natural and right in this moment, like he had been subconsciously waiting to kiss Anna for years. The two of them became locked in a sudden passion, Anna at some point even dropping her umbrella onto the ground in order to more fiercely grasp the back of Marvin’s neck. The kiss had escalated now, their mouths open wide and their tongues fully involved. Marvin didn’t care that this was happening so suddenly, a romantic blaze of proportions unlike anything he had even remotely neared before, and it seemed neither did Anna. For the first time in years, Marvin felt a bit of happiness, some semblance of the child-like magic he had lost returning. 

The two of them remained there for what felt like forever, making out in the pouring rain by the bench in front of their old elementary school, beside a fallen cake that represented the tragedy of a love they had both lost. 

Although he would never say it to Anna, and although he had realistically not even fully articulated it to himself within his own mind, Marvin was still painfully aware that deep within, underneath all of the comfort and magic of the moment, that he would still rather it be Lina in his arms.

And if by some miracle he ever had the chance, Marvin knew he wouldn’t hesitate to get her back.

1995

Michael Hammond had snuck away from home. 

It was quite the foreign sensation for him, silently slipping out of the house while his older brother wasn’t looking. An aura of danger and excitement swirled around him as he wandered the gradually darkening outdoors; this was the first time he had roamed the extended outside without the presence of a parent or guardian. Luckily, as evening was dawning over the small town there was nearly nobody traversing the road or sidewalks along with him.

It had been a couple of days since he had visited Carrie’s house, and watching her pitiful attempts to paint had encouraged his ego that he was indeed, as his family always told him, a good painter. Unfortunately, he had not been very economical with his paint supplies and he was completely out of the color red, something he desperately needed for the recreation of Daniel’s funny bird in Petscop that he wanted to paint. 

Upon being turned down on his request to be taken to the store to buy more, Michael had promptly decided he would take matters into his own hands and walk to the store himself. His young mind had woefully neglected to think nearly any of this plan through; he had no money on him (not that his need for currency had even crossed his mind), and he quickly discovered that he had no idea how to actually get to the store on foot. These rather important complications to his endeavor didn’t fully dawn on him until he was a couple streets away from home. At this point he wasn’t necessarily lost, but it did take him a moment to get his bearings and decide which direction home was from his current position. The new idea was to return and hang out in an old wooden shed nearby his house, a place that Michael had loved using as a ‘fort’ of sorts throughout his childhood. 

Upon turning around, Michael felt his entire body jump in shock as he found a man standing right behind him. Michael hadn’t heard his footsteps or been at all aware that the stranger had been following him for a few minutes, but his sudden appearance sent chills down every inch of Michael’s skin. Before the boy could shout, run, or even see his stalker clearly, he felt himself being swiftly pulled into the stranger’s arms. Michael was roughly spun so that his back was crammed into the man’s abdomen, one of his assailant’s arms winding tightly around his waist while a large hand was placed firmly over his mouth. Michael instinctively tried to struggle and yell, but the adult was exceedingly stronger than him, and he felt himself being swiftly dragged away. 

“Don’t scream,” the man whispered fiercely into his ear, with such malice that Michael felt he had no choice but to comply, as terrified tears began streaming down his face.

Michael’s vision was blurred through his crying, the world moving fast and unsteadily as the stranger carried him away with haste. Michael didn’t know what the horrible smell on the man’s breath was and he could barely even process what was happening to him as he soon felt himself being shoved through a doorway and dragged into a building. He heard the sound of a door slamming roughly behind him as he was shoved into a dirty enclosed space that appeared to have been abandoned for weeks; a variety of garbage was scattered about the floor along with excessive amounts of dirt. Empty bottles and cans also littered the space, all of which carried the same bad smell that the man had on his breath. A singular dim lamp in the far-left corner was the only source of light, casting foreboding shadows over everything.

Michael stumbled, nearly falling over as his abductor finally let him go. 

“Help!” Michael immediately screamed, every nerve in his little body racked with terror. “Hel-!”

“Stop!” the man growled, once again forcibly covering Michael’s mouth with what felt like giant hands. “Stop, dammit- I’m trying to help you, kid. I’m- I’m trying to-”

The man’s speech was slurred and off-putting, and as Michael craned his head upward, trying to see his attacker, he found that the tall man’s face was obscured by the shadows in the room. 

“Look!” the stranger spat, throwing Michael in front of a cracked, rectangular mirror that rested against one of the walls. Michael could barely see in the dimly-lit room, the numerous cracks on the mirror distorting what little of his reflection he could actually make out. “Look at you- look how disgusting you are- how- how-”

The stranger wobbled a little, quickly catching himself and tightening his hold on Michael as he kept the boy planted firmly in front of the mirror. 

“Why-” Michael couldn’t say anything else, his speech broken into hysterical cries of terror. 

“Don’t you want- don’t you want to look better?” the stranger continued, tapping the lens of Michael’s glasses as the boy shivered. “Look at these, hideous, hideous things- these… uh, the- these glasses, they’re so ugly- they make you look so- so- ugly-”

Beneath all of the sheer terror of being kidnapped, these horrendous insults were affecting Michael deeply; some of the kids at school would tease him for his glasses and he would occasionally get very self-conscious about them. Being told that he was hideous, even by a deranged kidnapper made him feel horrible on a personal level. 

“I need my glasses!” Michael sobbed, his mind all but shutting down in the stress of the situation.

“You know- you know what makes you really ugly,” the stranger carried on his slurred and broken-up rant. He talked as though he could barely think straight and his movements were unsteady and erratic, as he swiftly bent down and took one hand off of Michael to grab the top of a glass bottle that was sitting nearby on the floor, raising it to his lips downing what little of whatever liquid it was that remained inside. “These- these, the-” Michael squirmed in disgust as the stranger rubbed his thumbs against his eyebrows. “Look at this- the, the hair on your face, it makes you so ugly. No one- no, nobody wants to see you like this.”

“I don’t wanna be ugly!” Michael cried, his fragile psyche breaking down completely. 

“I can help you,” the stranger repeated what he had said earlier, sliding a small pair of metal tweezers from his pocket and raising it to Michael’s face. “Don’t you- you don’t wanna be this way. You- you wanna be somebody else, don’t you? Here, I can- I’ll take the ugliness away.”

Michael screamed in pain as the stranger began to mercilessly pluck his eyebrows off of his face, sharp pinches erupting throughout his facial skin as drops of blood began to appear above his eyes. Michael kicked and struggled against his kidnapper, trying to make as loud of a noise as he could, finally seeming to cause the stranger inconvenience as he tried to continue plucking his eyebrows, his pair of tweezers unable to be held steady against Michael’s desperate flurry of movement. 

“Daniel, help me!” Michael wailed, calling out to his beloved older brother as every part of his being desired to be with him in this terrible, horrifying moment. 

“Daniel?” the stranger suddenly stopped and seemed to peer at Michael for a couple of seconds. “No- oh, no…”

The man let go of Michael and stumbled backward, briefly disturbing some of the bottles on the floor. The stranger began mumbling to himself, muttering a collection of curses and obscenities as he said phrases that insulted his own intelligence. 

“...stupid, drunken idiot,” Michael was able to make out through the hurried and slurred speech. “Not even the right- not even a girl-”

“I want to go home!” Michael cried confused tears as he collapsed onto his bottom.

His kidnapper briskly scooped him up, once again roughly carrying him over a small distance until he heard the sound of a door opening and felt the fresh night air wafting in.

“Go, get out of here!” the man shouted, carelessly dropping Michael onto the ground and quickly retreating back into the shadows of the room. 

Michael didn’t have the emotional stability to feel relieved or contemplate why he had been let go as he ran out of wherever the stranger had brought him, pumping his small legs faster than he ever had before. Michael wasn’t sure how far he had run or where he was running to, his face aching with pain as his vision was still blurred by his seemingly unending tears. By sheer luck, Michael began to recognize his surroundings after carelessly running the streets for a couple of minutes and he was able to successfully wander back to the road that led to his house. 

Now that the immediate danger of the situation was over, Michael began to feel the dark weight of what the stranger had told him. He was ugly, he was hideous. Michael couldn’t bear to go home without first seeing if this was true, and he ended up stumbling into the shed that he had planned on going in before he had been abducted to be alone. Now in the quiet shed and catching the scent of the dark musty wood that it was made of, the sheer overwhelming terror consuming Michael began to subside. He slowly made his way over to a solitary window in the right wall, standing on his toes to get a good look at his reflection in the glass. Michael saw his frazzled hair, the tear drops on the lenses of his glasses, but most of all, the small bits of eyebrows that had been ripped out and the tiny pools of blood that now dotted his face. 

Michael slumped to the ground and buried his head in his knees as fresh waves of tears overcame him. He really was ugly. 

Michael wasn’t sure how long he stayed in that shed, crying to himself as the night got ever-darker outside. At one point he had heard his family shouting his name, panicked cries from his brother and parents, trying to figure out where he was. Eventually those had subsided, and Michael even heard a car squeal across the road, probably his father or mother rushing off to search for him. He didn’t care about being found; he didn’t want his family to see him while he was so ugly, lest they stop caring for him.

Michael had no idea how much time had passed when the old door to the shed slowly creaked open, and he heard someone hesitantly step inside. 

“Michael!” Daniel’s jubilant voice shouted. “Oh, thank God- guys, I found him!” 

Daniel laughed with joy as he ran over to Michael, placing his hands under his armpits and lifting him up off the ground. Michael normally would have been elated to see his big-brother at a time like this… but now that he knew he was ugly, he didn’t want to be seen.

“No, don’t look at me!” Michael said, squirming away from Daniel and covering his face with his hands. 

“What- buddy, why?” Daniel asked with concern, gently removing Michaels hands from his face.

Daniel’s expression contorted from relief to anger as he saw the blood that was trickling from his eyebrows. 

“How did this happen?” Daniel asked immediately, intense seriousness taking over his voice as his hands gripped Michael’s shoulders protectively. 

“I- I- someone, he took me!” Michael answered, his voice quivering at the recent memory. 

“Who did this?” An aura of anger had descended upon Daniel’s very being, his words and expression becoming taken over by a rage spawned from brotherly-love at this news. 

“I dunno, he… he was…” 

Michael stammered for a moment, as he recalled the foreboding stranger looming over him in that dirty room, whose face had been concealed by darkness. 

“He was a shadow monster man!”

2017

Paul had quickly discovered that the Petscop game was a vault of secrets. For starters, it gave him a distant feeling of familiarity… not so much deja vu, but more like he had encountered the game in some faraway dream. Furthermore, the surface level of the game was merely the tip of the massive iceberg that was hidden below the colorful exterior and child-oriented graphics, all an abstraction for something greater and far darker.

The first indication that something about the game wasn’t quite right was the blatantly obvious fact that it was unfinished. The only level available was a place called Even Care, to the right of it was nothing but an empty white void that really felt as though something were meant to populate it. However, it would quickly become apparent that this cheery world that the game called “The Gift Plane” was just a doorway into a realm of puzzling darkness.

Paul had first accessed this side of the game after putting in the code that the note attached to the game was very obviously conveying to him; pressing start, five pushes of the down arrow, followed by one right, and then pressing start once again. The note had instructed him to perform this sequence in Roneth’s room, and Paul had to admittedly try it out on a couple of the areas that pets were available to catch before discovering where that space was. As it turned out, Roneth was the tall floating pole with a red bird’s head placed on top, constantly looking both ways. The bizarre creature was seemingly uncatchable, as it would always float away from him when he approached with his equally weird-looking avatar (seriously, Paul was questioning the visual designer of this game- his playable character looked like a yellow butt attached to a green body without arms and large disembodied feet). 

The minute Paul entered the code in the frustratingly elusive pet’s room, the cheery background music instantly stopped, which had unnerved Paul more than he would like to admit. He wandered Even Care for a bit, trying to find if anything else of interest had changed. When he tried to re-enter the Gift Plane, he found himself in a whole new world entirely. 

Gone were the fun graphics, gone was the happy music; what now lay before him was a crude brick building and an endless expanse of shadowy green grass. The entire location looked ominous, a completely different tone than what the game had displayed thus far. Paul tentatively walked around, trying not to lose his starting position with the brick building, but that quickly became impossible as he discovered that there were absolutely zero landmarks to judge his position by. A strong curiosity overtaking him, Paul had decided to shut the game down for the day and return to it the next; he needed time to consider what he was going to do about exploring that unforgiving expanse of green without any help from internet guides.

That was the other thing: as far as the internet was concerned, this game did not exist. The only shred of evidence that Paul could find for this game leaving any kind of digital footprint was the website that the note had told him about, but even then, the sticker that was supposed to lead him to what it called ‘Discovery Pages’ didn’t help him be able to find it through normal browsing methods. And besides that one hint, there was nothing about Petscop anywhere. Paul had checked everything, typed keywords in with different questions and relations to the Garalina company, but he still couldn’t find anything remotely close to what he was talking about. Heck, Paul had even turned to Reddit, figuring that if any consortium of nerds would know what this was it would be them, but once again, this effort was to no avail. Petscop was the videogame equivalent of a ghost, which meant Paul would have no help in solving any of the puzzles it was already subtly presenting to him.

And that’s when it hit him. Belle had always been exquisite at solving puzzles. His stepsister was far smarter than him and she was what Paul had come to think of as a ‘puzzle-solving genius.’ If anyone could help him dive deeper into this game it would be her. Unfortunately, he still had a month to wait before she returned home, so he was on his own for at least a little while. 

Unable to contain his excitement, Paul had immediately grabbed his phone in order to text Belle about the game. Oddly, she acted highly skeptical around the entire thing with her responses. Paul wasn’t historically one for making up lies or fantasies and Belle seemed borderline dismissive about the entire thing at first. Her replies gave him pause, but as he was considering sending her a photo of the cartridge as a means of proof, a YouTube notification popped up, displaying a thumbnail of his favorite let’s-player. 

Paul remained still for a few moments as an exciting idea ruminated within his mind. His eyes flicked back and forth from his phone to the PS1 console, a giddy feeling welling up within him. Not only would he prove the existence of Petscop to Belle, but he would finally ensure that it left some sort of mark on the internet. 

Paul was going to start a YouTube channel. 

1994

Marvin didn’t feel all that uncomfortable sitting in a stranger’s home, about to discuss matters of life and death and the boundaries thereof. He wasn’t even particularly unnerved that the stranger in question was an elderly lady named Tiara, a woman who many would consider to be a nutcase. The primary factor contributing to his state of relaxation amongst a strange situation came from the fact that nothing he encountered could possibly compare to the darkness that had been brewing inside of him for years. 

The scariest thing Marvin had to face was that which was inside of him, his own very soul. He lived with what he hated most every single day. Not a second went by that the ghost of Lina Leskowitz didn’t haunt his mind; every time he looked at his wife, he felt an inward repulsion at her eyebrows, the primary factor that reminded him she was merely a settlement in the wake of a love that was lost; anytime he saw a child that even remotely resembled Lina, Marvin felt a sinister compulsion to stalk them, to take photos of them, to use them as a means to visually channel his mind back to the days when he and Lina were together. Marvin was well aware that he was one sick individual, the only cure for his misery being the seemingly impossible return of Lina. 

Somewhere along the way, Marvin’s mental spiral even began affecting Anna. She was for the most part a voice of reason and was for a long time a main proponent in trying to convince him to move on from her absence. However, during a stint Marvin went through while suffering from a particularly rough mental breakdown, he began hallucinating Lina where she was not. This resulted in him talking to her imaginary form and even trying to convince Anna that she was there with them. He remembered Anna crying, even getting angry at him, ranting about how he had lied about getting better. When Marvin continued his delusional fantasy, Anna soon caved in completely and indulged him in it. 

She played along until it seemed she began to believe it, going so far as to talk about her sister as though she were alive. A large part of it probably stemmed from the fact that their young daughter, Carrie, resembled Lina so closely. The similarities between her daughter and her lost sister were no doubt messing with Anna’s mind; she was getting just a taste of what Marvin had been suffering through for years.

Marvin, however, eventually moved on from this idea, instead latching onto an obsession with resurrecting Lina Leskowitz from the dead. 

Marvin had come to terms with the fact that his beloved childhood friend must be dead. Furthermore, the more he contemplated it, the surer he became of how she had died, the very beginnings of the thought sickening him. While he couldn’t stomach the thought of contemplating too much on what had actually happened to her, Marvin couldn’t deny the fact that she was surely no longer walking this earth after all these years. A deep-rooted hatred for life itself had been growing in Marvin twice as fast ever since he had accepted that harsh reality. If she had died by some cosmic accident on their trip to the windmill, then Marvin only had himself to blame and it was up to him to find a way to remedy his actions. If she had somehow been kidnapped, well… Marvin had dark fantasies of horribly torturing the hypothetical perpetrators he created within his imagination. 

In any case, Marvin knew it was up to him to avenge Lina’s untimely disappearance and death. Not only was she robbed of life at such a young age, but her absence had turned Marvin into a monster. He had crossed into a territory that was, for all intents and purposes, sociopathic. He often felt nothing for the world around him, turning to alcohol to replace his numbness with drunkenness, a desperate gambit that only ever resulted in immense post-mortem depression or rage. He felt next to no true love for Anna anymore… every once in a while, a moment would break through where he would see a bit of her sister in her and he would go a couple days in a near hallucination induced frenzy of convincing himself that she was Lina. These were always short-lived episodes that he did a relatively good job of keeping to himself. He used to feel dirty afterwards; the only recollection of Lina he had was when she was nine, and applying a child’s face to his adult wife felt like a sick fantasy indeed. But as time relentlessly marched forward, Marvin’s scars only festering more and more despite all of the therapy that Anna had forced him into, his morality compass began to fade. Now, Marvin indulged in any sick fantasy of his mind, whether it be romantic moments with his childhood crush or violent acts of revenge against a world that clearly despised him.

Marvin of course fought his inner demons in order to maintain whatever semblance of normality he could muster. He did his best to hide the true depths of his depravity from Anna, and subdued his dark impulses enough to maintain a job as a music teacher at the elementary school he attended a lifetime ago. The same school where he had met Lina…

Marvin did a good enough job at hiding it, but he would always carefully analyze the students that were in his classes, always looking for a child that might share similar traits as Lina. Although nobody could be exactly her, finding someone that was close in appearance and persona gave Marvin the tiniest shred of capability to take himself back to the happy memories he shared with her. The music job had come rather naturally, as the only real hobby Marvin had kept over the years was playing instruments. He had transitioned from the peppy and steady beats and rhythms he used to carry around as a child to melancholy wallows, primarily provided to him through his favorite musical outlet, the piano. 

Marvin hadn’t clued Anna in on it yet, but the elementary school was struggling. The building wasn’t up to the modern-day construction codes of the town and their overall funding had taken a couple of hits that resulted in difficult cuts. He was honestly surprised that he still had a job at all, but given the current state of affairs, he projected that the school would close down in the next few years. Marvin could feel it like a preemptive itch under his skin. The only thin cord that was tying him to any sort of sanity was the constant need for repetition of a mundane life. 

Go to work, go home, see the wife, go to sleep. 

These basic human activities tethered him to the world, gave him the only blips of distraction from his unrelenting heartache that only worsened with every passing year. If he lost his job, he was sure that he and Anna could recover financially. She had become an up-and-rising software developer over at some techy place she was always boasting or complaining about. The real blow from such an event would be to Marvin’s psyche. Without the job, without one of the key components to a normal lifestyle, he would fall deeper into his realm of mental depravity. 

But, then again, he had just walked into the house of an old woman named Tiara to discuss forcibly induced reincarnation; perhaps the bridge to insanity had already been crossed. 

Marvin sat in an old, cushioned rocking chair, within a cozy living area that was floored with curly red carpet and adorned with dark-brown wooden shelves that displayed assorted collectible antiques upon the wallpapered walls. Tiara sat on a small light-blue love-couch across from him, holding a steaming cup of coffee. She was thin and pale, dressed comfortably in loose pants and a fuzzy purple sweater. Her short-cut hair was a blend of black and gray, a headband that matched the color of her sweater resting on her head. There was a small coffee-table placed between them, a record-player sitting atop it and playing soft instrumental music. 

“You like it?” Tiara inquired, nodding towards the record-player. “It’s Stravinsky's Septet. I find it to be a brilliant performance in its entirety, although personally, I’ve always had a particularly strong attraction to the second movement.”

“I suppose,” Marvin replied. 

The instrumental piece did in fact cater to his personal preferences. The music somehow allowed him to channel his chronic grief into the very essence of the sound.

“Hm. Your lack of enthusiasm is noted. We aren’t together to talk about music though, are we?” Marvin held Tiara’s knowing gaze; there was a bite to her stare, as though she held some forbidden knowledge behind her crystal-blue eyes. “No, we are here to discuss matters of death and rebirth.”

Marvin felt a chill run along his skin at the seriousness present in her tone. Towards the end of high school, after he had discovered that a romantic relationship with Anna was not properly bandaging the lasting wounds from Lina’s disappearance, Marvin had begun dabbling in religion. Despite coming from a rather skeptical family, he dove himself head-first into a plethora of different ideologies and beliefs that centered around life and death, specifically ideas of what became of a person post-mortem. Marvin had decided he couldn’t accept that Lina was gone forever; her life had been too short, she had been robbed of every single good or bad experience that life had to offer her. Surely, the universe couldn’t be that cruel, especially not to someone as innocent as her.

The main issue Marvin had with these oftentimes vastly different belief systems, most of which contradicted one another in the core set of beliefs, was that they were nearly always centered around a soul or a spirit, making a reunion with the deceased impossible until after death. Marvin had gone through a brief stint of experiencing suicidal feelings after considering this for too long, but ultimately, there was a burning resolve and lingering doubt that prevented him from ever ending his own days. Anna should perhaps earn some credit for whatever sanity he was able to cling onto over the years. Afterall, she was the main source of any kind of positive emotion in his life, even his own sister constantly criticizing him for his inability to move on from Lina. 

During his quest for answers, Marvin studied beliefs that involved reincarnation, the reemergence of a being or soul into the physical world beyond death. This had piqued his interest greatly, as all he had ever wanted since he was ten was to have Lina back in the world with him. While he couldn’t quite place his finger on why, Marvin couldn’t get behind believing in the traditional interpretations of reincarnation, however, he strongly felt that he was onto something. Then, just a few weeks ago, he became aware of a relative of Anna’s that had just what he was looking for.

Tiara was a Leskowitz, of what relation to his wife Marvin was unsure, but she clearly wasn’t a very popular family member as Marvin didn’t recall seeing her at any gatherings nor did he ever hear people mention her. Despite this, he had caught wind of a woman on Anna’s side that believed in strange teachings that involved a return from the dead. In desperation for any possibility for Lina to come back to the world of the living, Marvin sleuthed out a way to contact her and set up the meeting they were currently having.

“Yes,” Marvin replied after a short pause. “I- there was a girl. She didn’t deserve to die. She deserved all the life she had ahead of her.” As always, the windmill loomed over him, casting a shadow of doom over every other memory he possessed. “She deserves it more than any living person. If it’s possible… if there’s any way to bring her back, that responsibility falls on me.”

“Then you’ve come to the right place, Marvin Mark,” Tiara said, leaning back in her chair and crossing her legs. “I’ve studied it for years, in the various forms that it has appeared in across history. I myself believe I am a reborn iteration of a woman who walked the earth long ago. But, in many cases, one needs to… push out the person that is hiding within. It’s called the rebirthing process.”

1995

Michael hadn’t been the same since his kidnapping, and Daniel was hoping that his big seventh birthday-party would get him out of his rut once and for all. It had been a couple of months, but Michael was still terrified of being alone for even a second, which Daniel was honestly okay with, as after the incident he had a hard time letting his little brother out of his sight, but the real tragedy was that Michael had lost all sense of adventure. His previous energy and enthusiasm for exploration and the outdoors had been completely sapped out of him, and the kid now spent his days painting inside or playing video games. 

Daniel had done a good bit of research into child psychology and therapeutic steps to help overcome trauma, but for every example of a successful recovery he also found people talking about how their child had never quite been their old selves ever again. Daniel truly hoped that the old Michael wasn’t gone forever, that the ‘Michael A’ hadn’t been lost for this ‘Michael B’ that now walked among them. 

Daniel himself had struggled for a while after the incident as well. A deep rage had burned within him when he found how scared and shaken Michael was in that shed, not to mention the small bits of blood that were trickling from the top of his face. Daniel had no idea who had taken his little brother or why, and even more curious was how Michael had managed to escape on his own. He didn’t like to talk about it and would regress into crying fits when Daniel tried to broach the subject, so naturally, he didn’t try to drag Michael into conversations that upset him.

Due to their being absolutely no eye witnesses, combined with the fact that Michael wouldn’t give any descriptions of the location he had been brought to and would only vehemently claim that his abductor had been a ‘shadow monster man’ when questioned on the identity of the stranger that had done this to him, police had nothing to go off of, and thus, whoever did this was never caught. It made Daniel’s blood boil, knowing that some adult who desired to hurt children was lurking somewhere in their own hometown, and that Michael had been a victim of his depravity. 

Thankfully, there hadn’t been any more incidents or crimes related to kidnapped children over the past couple of months, and Daniel was slowly beginning to relax. All that mattered now was making sure that Michael fully recovered from the event and that he had the best seventh birthday party in the world. 

Anna Mark had volunteered her house to be the location of the party, an offer that Daniel was happy to accept. Michael was very comfortable in the space, given his frequent visits to playact ‘older brother’ with Carrie and her twin-brother, Paul. The only real reservation Daniel had towards the Mark family was Uncle Marvin… despite being the one Daniel was actually blood-related to, the guy just seemed a little off, although he hadn’t done anything in particular to earn Daniel’s distrust. It was similar to Anna’s quirky behavior around her absent sister: something off-putting when it occurred, but ultimately, a far and in-between oddity. Particularly, Daniel’s general distrust for Marvin stemmed from his mother Jill; she always acted suspicious and furtively distrustful towards her brother, although she never really elaborated on why.

 As a way to try and mend the stress that Michael had gone through over the last couple of months, Daniel’s boss had collaborated with him to give Michael a truly special gift, something the little guy had wanted for a long time; Carrie and Anna had picked out a dog from a local shelter to present to Michael, even finding a safe black box that would act as something Michael could open to receive his gift. Daniel was getting giddy just imagining the smile that would erupt on his little brother’s face when he met his new pet.

Not only had Anna coordinated adopting the dog, but Daniel had set up a version of Petscop that could be played by Michael and all his friends, the goal for them to catch all the pets in Even Care and access the credits where Michael would find his hidden digital birthday card, written by his auntie Anna. It was going to be a fun day for Michael, and Daniel had been looking forward to it as well. 

Luckily, the party was pulled off spectacularly; Anna had gone all out in setting up her house with party decorations, a heap of presents was wrapped in colorful paper on the living-room floor, and nearly all of the kids from Michael’s class were able to make it. They had all excitedly flocked to the basement to play Petscop without the adults, Carrie even going down to join everyone despite the fact that she was considerably younger. However, her twin-brother Paul was being significantly more shy about the whole thing. 

“You don’t wanna go down with Daniel?” Anna asked him, holding his hand at the foot of the stairs. “The older kids aren’t mean.”

Daniel gave Paul a smile and a small wave, but the young boy who had earlier refused to change out of his red pajamas just silently nodded, standing close to his mother. 

“Did you know we call him Rainer?” Anna said sweetly, no doubt trying to get Paul to laugh. “Isn’t that a silly name? Sounds like ‘rain’ from outside, huh? Rainer makes video games for us to play- you like games, right?”

Paul just crowded closer to his mom, prompting Anna to roll her eyes with a small laugh. 

“He’ll stay up here with us then,” Anna said in playful resignation. 

Daniel snapped his fingers in the gesture of defeat, then gave Paul one last smile before joining Michael and his friends in the basement. They were all having a blast with Petscop , passing around the controller a few times but letting Michael play the majority of it; it was his birthday, after all. Daniel’s heart was warmed at seeing Michael have genuine fun with his friends; the young boy was smiling and laughing amongst a group of his peers, seemingly no longer having a care in the world. 

The group occasionally required assistance from Daniel on some of the harder puzzles, but they eventually beat the content that was currently available and Michael was ecstatic to read his birthday card from Anna. Daniel had been a little perturbed that she had included a line about how he should ‘also thank his other auntie for making all this possible,’ but that ‘not everyone can see her.’ It unsettled him that Anna was deep enough into whatever private delusion she had to let it slip into a kid’s birthday card… but ultimately, Michael had glossed over it and was far more intent on figuring out what his present would be. 

Upon reading the section of his digital birthday card that talked about the black box that he shouldn’t shake, Michael had lost all interest in the game and went pounding up the stairs. Daniel and the other kids were quick to follow, intrigued as Anna placed a black box with a lid on top and holes in the side onto the floor. Shuffling and panting could be heard from within, and Michael screamed with delight as he threw off the cover and a small chocolate-brown dog leapt out. 

All the other kids were squealing with laughter as they all contended for a chance to pet the dog that Michael was now proudly hugging, smiling wide as the affectionate creature started licking his face. Daniel felt his heart warm immensely as he watched his little brother play with his new pet, meeting the eyes of their parents, Jill and Thomas Hammond, and seeing that they too were grateful to see their young boy so happy and carefree after what he had experienced earlier in the year. 

While all the kids were messing around with the dog, Daniel made his way over to Anna and stood beside her.

“Thanks for your help with all this,” Daniel said sincerely. “For the party, and with Petscop - Michael’s having a great time.”

“Of course,” Anna replied pleasantly. “You guys are family! Lina also had a hand in all this- you should thank her, too.” 

“Uh- right,” Daniel said hesitantly, trying to think of a natural way to ask Anna what the heck she meant with all this nonexistent sister stuff.

“Marvin never showed up, though,” Anna sighed with irritancy laced with deep emotion before Daniel could say anything. “He said he might be a little late, but it’s been a while… I think he and I need to have a big talk about… things. He’s been unemployed since the school shut down, and I have no idea what he’s out there doing all day. I try not to bother him, cause…”

Anna trailed off as if she didn’t wish to continue.

Daniel was getting a little uncomfortable now that Anna was opening up so much to him; he didn’t want to pry into her personal life, nor did he want to get mixed up in any drama between her and her husband, who was his own uncle. As he was contemplating what his next words would be, Daniel suddenly became aware that he could feel a gust of wind brush against him and the sound of a couple of vehicles passing by outside. He snapped his head to the source of the air and sound, to see that Anna’s front door was open; either a kid or one of their parents must have gone out for whatever reason and left it ajar. 

Concern immediately washed over Daniel as he saw the dog break away from the kids and dash towards the open door that led into the outside. 

“Hey!” Daniel started to shout but it was too late; the dog had darted out of the door and into the front yard. 

“Hey, come back!” Michael called after the dog, wasting no time in jumping to his feet and running out the door as well.

“Michael, no!” Daniel and both his parents cried in unison, but their command fell on deaf ears as Michael determinedly chased after his new beloved pet. 

Daniel repeatedly called out Michael’s name as he ran out the door as well, leaving the inside for the brightly lit day and fresh air. There was a road directly in front of Anna’s house and Daniel didn’t know if Michael had the sense to not chase the dog into it if the creature decided to run that way; as he emerged into the driveway, all of his worst fears were confirmed. 

The next few seconds were the longest, most fearful, most utterly terrible seconds of Daniel’s life. They stretched out before him, as though a series of pictures were sliding in front of his eyes instead of a fluidly moving moment. The little brown dog was a few feet ahead of Michael, well into the road, Daniel’s little brother crossing onto pavement in hot pursuit of his pet. An orange car was speeding down the roadway, the brake lights on but not slowing down in nearly enough time. 

A sickening thump echoed into Daniel’s ears and resounded in his very soul as though a gong of pure dread had been banged in the center of his heart. The squealing of tires, the screeching of a dog, the horrified gasps of and screams of the people around him; all of these sounds clambered around Daniel’s brain like incoherent mush as he felt the very processing power of his mind snap at the sight he was forced to behold. 

The dog had managed to get far enough away so that the car’s left-tire had only ran over one of its back legs; the poor creature cried like it was being burned alive, it’s small hind leg horribly mangled and undoubtedly useless for the rest of its life, more than like needing to be immediately amputated by a veterinarian. However, the damages done to this innocent creature were nothing compared to what Daniel witnessed become of his beloved little brother.

The front of the car collided with Michael head-on, throwing his tiny body forward with sickening velocity. Michael crashed down into the unforgiving pavement, his head smacking against the hard ground and his limbs flailing like a rag doll as he tumbled over himself twice. When he stopped, he lay still on one side, motionless, his arms tangled around his abdomen while one of his legs was twisted horrendously out of shape, small bits of white bone visible on his lower limbs as copious amounts of blood leaked from his fractured skull. The worst sight of all this though, were his eyes; Michael had landed so that his lifeless gaze was directed towards Daniel, the boy’s hollow expression and empty stare boring right through him. 

The dog continued to whimper and howl as all of the adults screamed in horror, a cacophony of agonized wails erupting from his parents as they rushed forward towards the mutilated body of their little boy. Daniel couldn’t move, frozen in place as his brain refused to fully comprehend the moment. He was only half-aware of everything that was going on around him, his vision blurry as his perception of sound felt as though he had been plunged underwater. 

Daniel was only a little bit sure that Anna had immediately taken charge of rounding up the children and herding them indoors to protect them from the grisly sight, closing the door behind her as tears rushed down her face. Thomas and Jill were in the road, hunched over their younger son and crying in unmitigated anguish as they checked him for any sign of life, finding none as Daniel had expected. 

For as heart wrenching and unspeakably horrible as this moment was, it was not protected from getting worse. As cognitive ability slowly began to return to Daniel, the door to the orange car flew open and the man behind the wheel stepped out onto the road, looking dumbfounded and aghast.

The driver was Uncle Marvin. 

2017

Paul could never have guessed what he had gotten himself into when he had discovered that Petscop cartridge a few months ago. Deep beneath the starting plane of the game was a dark realm of secrets and echoes of the past, some of which seemed to be directly tied to himself, or at least, members of his family. He hadn’t been sure at first, the idea that this old game would be connected to his bloodline initially feeling completely absurd. But as he began to discover more and more clues, such as a room that looked suspiciously similar to his own in a place called the Child Library, or mentions of a man named Rainer, a name that he hadn’t been relevant to his life for years , but nonetheless, one that stirred up a dusty memory of a birthday party held long ago… Paul couldn’t deny that this game was definitely in some way connected to his family, more than likely his father’s side of the family, a group of people he hadn’t seen in what felt like forever. Considering where he found the game in the first place, Paul supposed it made sense.

Not only were these disturbing discoveries catching him off-guard, but the reactions of both the people around him and the people of the internet were quite a whirlwind to deal with as well. His first couple of videos, where he had been primarily documenting his early discoveries to Belle, had gained unexpected traction on the YouTube platform. The first few garnered tens of thousands of views and were still growing, hundreds of comments flooding in about the strange nature of the unreleased PlaystationOne game he had discovered.

Paul had initially been cautious about revealing the fact that he found Petscop to his mother, as it obviously involved a confession that he had been snooping, but he couldn’t exactly continue recording his YouTube videos with complete secrecy, so Paul felt that he had to come clean about his discovery, something that triggered a rather unprecedented level of concern from his mother.

“Paul,” Anna had said, her face instantly creasing with worry. “That game… those things with it… I should have gotten rid of them a long time ago. How… how much have you seen?”

Anna was always an overprotective and doting mother towards Paul, but it was rare to see this kind of sincere concern over something seemingly as simple as a video game; although, signs were beginning to point towards a darker reason for the game existing. It seemed very much like Petscop was created for someone specific to see, and with the imagery of graves and distressed children, perhaps there really was a sinister backstory to why the game existed. Paul remembered getting specifically uncomfortable when he had stumbled upon a digital gravestone labeled “Michael Hammond, 1988-1995: Mike was a gift.” The stone very clearly marked the grave of a seven-year-old boy.

What Paul found to be the strangest and by far the most unnerving aspect about the game was the subtle connections it had to his family line. And now that his mother was reacting this way, it seems Petscop might be more important than he had anticipated. 

“Not a lot…” Paul answered her question. He had actually found far more than he had ever anticipated after entering the dark side of the game, but it was so cryptic and confusing that he hadn’t gleaned a whole lot out of it as of yet. “Well, I mean, there’s this whole underground part with like, um, notes and things…”

Anna had sighed in frustration and briefly rubbed her eyes. 

“Does anyone else know about this?” She asked in exasperation.

“Oh…” Paul had gotten a sinking feeling within him. “Well, I sorta… made a YouTube channel documenting it, um, publicly. Like… thousands of people have, uh, have seen it.”

Anna had been severely distressed at this news. 

“Paul, there’s a reason we don’t ever see your father’s side of the family anymore,” she scolded him as if he were a child. “There’s a reason that game was put away and left to be forgotten.”

“I wish you would tell me why,” Paul replied, more defensively than he had expected. 

“And there’s a reason I don’t,” Anna sighed, the exhale feeling as though it contained years' worth of stress. She began massaging her temples, her face lost in thought. “All these people that are watching your videos… what have they been saying?”

“Well, it’s the internet. They, uh, they like to… to theorize.”

Paul had visited the comment sections of his own videos to see what people were saying (oftentimes muting the video, he hated how nasally his voice sounded in the recordings), and the people down there loved to speculate as to what the game meant and how to solve its secrets. Paul got the feeling that many of them were treating it as some sort of fictional narrative, trying to solve the storyline as one does in an alternate reality game or work of unfiction. 

“Of course. And it's the internet,” Anna echoed Paul’s statement. “There’s bound to be lunatics who won’t stop looking into this. What you’ve already put out is probably documented somewhere, and there’s more than likely a group of people who will do whatever they can to determine the truth of all this.”

Paul was feeling increasingly bad as his mother continued to look more and more defeated. She looked tired, almost as though she had been holding back some sort of floodgate for years, and then Paul had come in and thrown it open. 

“If- if it helps,” Paul said, his affection for his mother overruling the feeling that he deserved to know exactly what this was all about. “A lot of people are treating this like some kinda story… some are even relating to those ‘creepypastas’ that were pretty popular for a while…”

“Hm.” Anna tilted her head in consideration. “That might be to our advantage…” she sighed once again and rubbed her eyes with her fists as she began to mutter under her breath. “Perhaps he had to find out eventually…”

“What?”

“Nothing, dear. If they think this is all merely a story, then we need to give them a journey and a conclusion so they will stop thinking about it. Play the game, upload your videos, find the credits. Hopefully that will satisfy the internet and keep them from finding… us.”

“Alright…” Paul got more confused the more he learned about the game, but at the very least his mother was allowing him to continue playing it; he didn’t think his curiosity could bear to let this mystery he had stumbled into go unfinished. 

“Just… one thing, Paul,” Anna continued, looking at him seriously. “Run your videos by me… there’s certain… things that could show up in the game that we don’t exactly want the public seeing. Some editing might need to be done every now and again.”

“Ok-”

“Oh,” Anna cut him off as if an important thought had just dawned on her. “It’s possible you might start getting some phone calls from certain… family members. Please, please tell me if you do and let me know who they are.”

“Yeah, okay, I guess,” Paul assured her, now thoroughly unnerved. “Mom, what is this game? How long have we had this?”

Anna’s eyes grew distant as she cast them to the floor, appearing like she was gazing into memories that occurred lifetimes ago.

“That game has had an incredibly interesting journey, Paul,” Anna said quietly, tears dancing at the edges of her eyes. “Discs, generations… that one, that version, must be since, what, 2004? I…” 

Anna trailed off, looking at Paul apologetically as she silently communicated with her eyes that she didn’t want to tell him anymore about it. The elements of unknown were torturing Paul now, crawling around under his skin like embedded bugs, but still, he didn’t have the fortitude to be assertive with his mother, especially when she appeared emotional. 

Whatever this game was, whatever ties it had to his family, they were deeply rooted. And although he wasn’t about to fully admit this to his mother, Paul’s new life mission was to get to the bottom of it.

1996

A dark cloud of guilty anguish swirled around Daniel as he approached the dimly lit staircase that descended into even darker depths, what he was about to do already weighing on his conscience, yet not enough to prevent him from completing the act. 

Ever since Michael had been killed in the accident, Daniel’s entire perception of life had changed for the darker. Nothing seemed bright anymore, nothing seemed to matter. All color might as well have been gray and all food might as well have been flavorless sludge. The little joys in life were empty and meaningless; nothing could ease his pain or help him escape, not even his work. Petscop had always been a gift for Michael in Daniel’s mind, and just looking at the game made him sick. With Daniel being the lead developer of the project, and also being completely useless for the past few months, Anna had been forced to shut it down, much to the financial detriment of Garalina as a whole. 

Daniel’s feelings towards Anna were complicated. On the one hand, he never wanted to have anything to do with Marks ever again; the memory of their house, of their collaborative gift to Mike that had ended up spelling his doom, they all triggered vivid recollections of the mangled body of his brother lying on the pavement. On the other hand, he knew that Anna and Carrie had also loved Michael, and that Anna was being very good to him in the wake of the tragedy. She had been very understanding of his inability to work due to his severe mental anguish and had even gone so far as to give him total access and control over Petscop … in the event that he ever felt he wanted to finish it.

 Daniel doubted he ever would. Things, objects, places that reminded him of happy memories cut through his soul even worse than those that brought him back to Michael’s death directly. 

Then, there was Uncle Marvin.

The driver.

The man behind the wheel of the car that had murdered his little brother.

Daniel had flown into a frenzied rage at first. He had screamed at Marvin, even lashed out physically, throwing punches towards him, cursing and proclaiming vile phrases all the while. His parents had been too sad to be angry; while Daniel was attacking the bewildered Marvin who did very little to defend himself, Jill and Thomas had remained crouched beside Michael, crying tears that only parents who have lost a child can cry. 

Marvin himself seemed to be in a state of shock. Normally, he looked very masculine, tall with a stocky build and a mustache on his face, but now he resembled more of a scared little boy than anything else. Upon exiting the car and seeing what he had done to Michael, Marvin’s face had become pale and disbelieving, and all he could utter whilst Daniel was throwing his flurry of weak assaults towards him was fragmented syllables of unfinished words. What struck Daniel as particularly odd when thinking about it later, was the fact that Marvin almost appeared to be reliving something in the aftermath of Michael’s death, something that Anna was seemingly very aware of and therefore would try to cautiously comfort Marvin, although Daniel wasn’t exactly sure if he had picked up on that correctly. 

Marvin hadn’t been drinking or under the influence of any other substance during his drive (Daniel honestly might have killed him where he stood if that were the case), and given that there wasn’t any road or traffic laws violated during the incident, Marvin wasn’t charged with any sort of manslaughter; the entire event was truly a tragic accident, spawned from the dog that was meant to bring Michael renewed joy.

The dog. 

Michael’s special birthday present that ended up killing him. 

The creature had survived the accident, although his leg was broken beyond repair and had to ultimately be amputated. Daniel couldn’t bring himself to hate the dog. The thing had by no means intentionally led Michael to his doom. However, Daniel still had a severe detachment to it, as whenever he saw it, the death of Michael was the only thing that would come to his mind. That probably contributed to why Daniel was so firmly rooted in the camp of putting the dog down due to its broken leg; watching the creature limp around on three legs made him feel sorry for it, knowing that the dog was doomed to have this impairment for the rest of its life, and he certainly felt no special attachment to the thing. Nobody else had been on board, though. His parents had even begun to treat the dog like some sort of ‘last connection’ to Michael. 

The weeks following Michael’s death had been pure agony for Daniel, and if he was honest, the pain never dulled. He spent hours just brooding, thinking about the sheer enormity of how unfair the universe was. His thoughts would wander back to whoever had assaulted Mike earlier in the year, casting a shadow over his last few months of life. If Daniel ever got his hands on that person, he didn’t know what he would do…

Dark thoughts often swirled around his head, of how Michael had never been the same since he had been assaulted, how the dog would never be able to walk on four legs again, how even Daniel himself felt as though he would never be the same person he once was in the wake of these traumatic events. A part of him wondered if someone could ever truly overcome trauma… or if once they were tainted by the evils of the world, they could never go back. Especially if it was something as momentous as the loss of a loved one.

Uncle Marvin seemed to think there was a way to undo loss. 

Daniel had retreated into relative isolation after Michael’s funeral, wanting nothing to do with anyone for a while, least of all Marvin. His parents seemed to now hate his uncle even more than he did, his mother Jill having an especially vengeful enmity towards her brother. But one day, Marvin came knocking, and when Daniel reluctantly answered, he was greeted with a proposition: a way to bring Michael back from the dead. 

Perhaps it was because Daniel had been festering in his depressed state for so long, or perhaps the death of his brother had snapped more things in his brain than he initially thought, but as Marvin began to explain a process known as ‘rebirthing,’ a way to forcefully reincarnate someone, Daniel felt as though it were a godsend. 

He had thought to himself plenty of times that he would do anything to bring his brother back, and the idea that there was some cosmic experiment that could was too good to pass up.

Daniel had of course been skeptical and naturally inclined to be dismissive towards Marvin, the man who, accidentally or not, had killed his brother. But something about Marvin, the way he had a truly hopeful and energetic aura about him, a certain charisma that showed he was excited at the possibility of reversing a wrong and helping Daniel bring back the boy, was alluring. 

“A woman named Tiara taught me the process,” Marvin had said, after convincing Daniel to take a walk with him down the cloudy streets. Or maybe the sun had been out, Daniel didn’t remember; dreary days and beautiful days all blended together for him now. “She has spent a lifetime studying cosmic experiments, blending science with the unknown. She swears by this procedure. If there’s a way to bring Li-” Marvin would occasionally trip over his words for a second, something that Daniel had casually overlooked. “Michael back, this would be it. Trust me, Daniel, this weighs on me too… anoth- a death on my conscience, I… I need to rectify it. For he- for him.”

Daniel wasn’t entirely sure if he was thinking straight, but eventually, he was able to shove down any lingering inhibitions. Reason made way for faith and hope as this concept of rebirthing began to sound better and better…

And now, Daniel found himself holding the hand of a little girl, guiding her into a dark room, ready to put her into the machine. 

“What’s in here?” Belle asked, sounding shy as Daniel walked her into the windowless space.

Daniel knew Belle would be the optimal choice for an attempt at rebirthing Tiara; Marvin had described her as wise and studious, and Belle was certainly smart beyond her years. She was a good starting point to rebirthing the one person who seemed to know everything about this rebirthing process, Daniel’s only hope of getting his beloved little brother back. 

It had been a difficult lie to orchestrate, especially getting into a position where it was possible to be alone with Belle without suspicion, but Belle and her current foster-parents were under the impression that she was visiting for another Petscop trial session. Daniel had even set up his little rebirthing chamber in the underbelly of the building that hosted the Garalina offices, constructing the isolation machine just as Marvin had described it based on Tiara’s suggestions in a little-known room hidden away in the basement.

Daniel had to admit, Marvin was the last person he wanted to talk to after the man had been driving the car that collided with and killed Michael. But Daniel was so broken without his little brother, so utterly desperate, that he had latched onto this wild idea of rebirthing that Marvin had presented him way quicker than he had anticipated. Carrying out the deed was a decision that he had become scarily alright with as well… Daniel would have never thought he was capable of mentally manipulating a child and trying to literally turn them into someone else, yet, here he was. 

"We're going in a room to see a special machine,” Daniel said, as he led her down the staircase. “You’re interested in machines, right Belle?”

Daniel was trying to coax her into a position where she would be alright with this; compliance of the child was key, after all. 

Although the staircase was short, the shadows that coalesced around it in the dim light created an incredibly eerie atmosphere. Inhibitions stormed within Daniel as he and Belle descended, acutely aware of her hand tightly clutching his. An inner war was raging in Daniel’s chest, as his last moments to change his mind came to pass.

He was so absorbed in the moment that every action felt as though it were of utmost importance. He was aware of every breath he took, every step down the small staircase, coming to the mere count of five despite the journey feeling as though it were an eternity of fighting against his torn mind. 

When he and Belle stepped into the equally poorly lit hallway that the staircase connected to, Daniel looked straight ahead of him for a brief moment. At the end of the hall, there was a way out. A doorway back into the outside world, an entrance into the sunny day that awaited outside. He could let go of this insane plan, he could proceed down the hall and return Belle to where she was supposed to be.

A flood of memories of Michael overcame his mind, further squelching his last lifeline to morality with every mental still-frame of when he and his brother had been happy together. Briefly closing his eyes tight and taking a deep breath, Daniel turned the right and creaked open the door to what was meant to be a small storage room, flicking on the light-switch as he led Belle into the musty space. 

The light revealed the contents of the room, those being only the isolation machine to the far back wall, and a small piano facing towards the left. The isolation machine itself was a relatively simple construct; it consisted of a metal oval container, large enough for a small child, the half facing them being an opening to step into. The gray container was capable of swiveling between two boards that extended to the ceiling. Securing the materials hadn’t been a problem for Daniel, but trusting that it would work was another thing entirely. In any case, Daniel couldn’t go back now. He had to believe that rebirthing worked if he was to hold out any hope to see Michael again. 

“Yes…” Belle said meekly, eyeing the machine before her with a tint of fear in her eyes. “Well, I liked what we played Petscop on…”

“I know, I know, this isn’t a PlayStation, and we can’t play Petscop right now,” Daniel said lightly, dreading the turn this conversation was going to have to take. “But this machine might be even better for you… Belle, do you remember being born?”

Belle looked up at Daniel with confused eyes, gripping onto his hand with progressively waning trust.

“No…?”

She looked so little and innocent, dressed in her light-purple jeans and white jacket, everything about her so kid-ish , that it took everything in Daniel’s power to steel over his emotions for what he had to say next.

“Well,” Daniel began, crouching down so that they were eye-level. “You were meant to be someone else, Belle. You were meant to be Tiara.” 

Belle just continued staring up at him, looking completely bewildered.

“That’s why they don’t love you,” Daniel continued, hating himself more with every syllable he uttered. “Because you aren’t who you’re meant to be. And they won’t love you until you become Tiara.”

“Wh- what?” Belle was crying now, looking at him through watery, betrayed eyes. “Nobody loves me?”

Daniel hadn’t said that exactly… in his mind, he was thinking about the parents that Belle couldn’t be with. Either way, it was a horrible inclination to put onto a child, but Belle had to be motivated for the rebirthing. Daniel had come too far; he couldn’t back out now.

“They will if you are reborn into who you are supposed to be,” Daniel said, standing up and placing his palm on the small of her back, lightly pushing her towards the machine. “Do you have the courage to do that, Belle? To become Tiara?”

Belle still had tears running down her cheeks and was wiping them on her sleeve.

“I want people to love me…” she said quietly, her voice still sounding entirely confused at the situation. 

“Then get in the machine,” Daniel said, bringing her to the foot of the contraption. “Get in the machine and listen to the music I will play for you.”

“It’s scary!” Belle suddenly wailed, becoming frantic, but Daniel held her shoulders firmly in place. “I don’t wanna go in there!”

“Do you want them to love you?” Daniel asked her, maintaining his ambiguous usage of the word ‘them.’ 

Belle nodded, sniffling. 

“Then you have to do this, Belle. Trust me- you need to become Tiara.”

Daniel expected more opposition, more pushback from the girl. He hadn’t fully thought through what he would do in the event of failure; surely, there would be hell to pay in legal consequences if Belle ran around telling people about this. But none of that mattered to him at this moment. The only thing he allowed himself to think about was the eventual possibility of resurrecting Mike, and he was forced to shut down any other feelings he might have in order to carry through with this procedure.

“Okay,” Belle said quietly, and much to Daniel’s surprise, stepped into the cylindrical metal container.

“Great- you’re very brave Belle,” Daniel encouraged her, as he began to swivel the container around so that it faced the wall, completely trapping Belle in darkness.

“Hey, wait!” she cried, sounding terrified. “This is scary!”

“I just have to play you the music,” Daniel said, hurrying over to the piano and sitting down on the stool before it.

Daniel was acutely aware of Belle crying inside the machine, but he did his best to ignore it and start playing the second movement of Stravinsky’s Septet on the piano. Daniel was by no means a skilled musical artist, and what little he did know of piano he had begrudgingly picked up from Marvin when grilling him for specifics on rebirthing. He played the melody to the best of his ability, but he was well aware that the quality of music was not good at all.

When he was about halfway through playing, Belle began to freak out for real. She screamed and cried and banged against her metal entrapment, pleading to be let out. 

“Dammit,” Daniel grumbled under his breath, cutting short his playing and rushing over to the machine.

There was a part of his heart that he couldn’t shut off, and apparently that part was the section that told him outright torturing children was wrong. He swiveled the container to face the outside world again and Belle stumbled out, crying softly. 

“Belle, you gave up!” Daniel said irritably, something that was entirely unfair given what he was doing to this poor girl. 

“I’m… I’m sorry I quit,” Belle said, wiping her face on her sleeves. She looked up at Daniel with an eerie calm etched onto her face. “But I’m not Belle anymore…”

“Yes, you are,” Daniel said, anxiously leaning against the wall and running his fingers through his hair. “You quit before it was finished- you’re still Belle.”

“No,” she insisted, looking Daniel in the eyes with an increasingly icy calm that made her look far older than she was. “I’m Tiara. People will love me now.”

1996

“Carrie’s not growing eyebrows,” Anna said to Marvin quietly, her eyes displaying a mixture of concern and thoughtfulness 

She was sitting on the living room sofa, watching their three-year-old daughter wander into her bedroom. Marvin had a towel slung over his shoulder as he was heading off to the bathroom, preparing for his nightly ritual of brooding in the water of a hot bath.

Marvin’s heart skipped a beat at his wife’s news, an involuntary wave of pure excitement running through him. It had been so long since he had felt any kind of true hope; he had been very intrigued by Tiara’s blend of psychology and cosmic reincarnation that could bring a dead loved one back from the dead, pouring tons of research into the practice and regularly running ‘trial sessions’ with Tiara. 

The old woman had explained the entire rebirthing process to him, which was apparently a practice that had been largely forgotten over the course of history, but was one that was a rather ancient idea nonetheless. 

What it entailed was securing a child that wasn’t too old, with a young enough mind so that they could be mentally reshaped adequately. It was then necessary to break down the child’s sense of identity, to make them desire to be a new person. Any given child selected for the process had to be semi-complicit in order for it to succeed; if they quit before the process was finished the rebirthing would be a failure. Thus, it was common that an adult would have to psychologically manipulate the child into thinking they were unloved as they currently existed.

“Careful, though,” Tiara had warned him. “Young people can be psychologically damaged beyond rebirthing. If their trauma is too great, it will persist after the rebirthing process, resulting in a failure.” 

 It was also preferable that the child already in some way resembled the person that they were being attempted to be reborn into, such as being the same gender and possessing similar personality and physical traits as the deceased person in question. When Marvin had foolishly kidnapped Michael Hammond in his drunken frenzy, he had violated many of these parameters, as Michael was a boy that didn’t look much like Lina at all. If anything, he more-so resembled Marvin’s son Paul. 

Once a child was secured, the person who was facilitating the rebirthing (Tiara called them a ‘Newmaker’), was to put the kid in an isolated space where they had no access to the outside world, a machine that was meant to simulate a return to the womb. The Newmaker would then play music that corresponded to the deceased person, a favorite song, or tune that otherwise encapsulated their persona. 

“The quality of the music playing isn’t the most crucial part of the process,” Tiara had mentioned. “But the better the music played, the higher the chance of success. Personally, I play quite bad music. What mustn't happen is a completely irrelevant melody be played, or one that would be better suited to a different person. For instance, if I were to ever be reborn, the second movement of Stravinsky's Septet had better be played.”

 Marvin had been happy to hear that one of the major components was music; his only real talent was a natural inclination towards musical instruments, and ever since the elementary school had been shut down, his job going away with it, he had been sinking many solitary practice hours into his needles-piano. 

The rebirthing process was then carried out by having the child stay within the sensory deprivation machine, playing the correct musical melody, then allowing them to re-emerge into the world, having hopefully taken on a new life and identity. It was also imperative that any trace of their former life be invisible upon re-emergence into the world, so it wasn’t possible for them to be reminded in any way of their previous identity. From there, it is helpful to leave a ‘new life letter’ from their ‘parent’, whoever that was meant to be. 

“How is this possible?” Marvin had asked at one point. “Do they just forget their past? Does it change their past?”

“Answer me this, Marvin,” Tiara had said, her crystal blue eyes becoming pools of mystery as she stared intently into his own. “Do you remember being born?”

Marvin had shook his head, initially taken aback by the strangeness of the question. Of course, he didn’t remember being born- no one did. The realization had dawned over him just as Tiara continued her explanation.

“Well, neither do they. In a sense, none of us were really there when we were born. Who can say for certain the specifics of their own birth? Who can say that they weren’t meant to be born as someone else.”

This was all the explanation Marvin needed. He was so desperate for some sort of hope, some sort of lifeline in which he could bring Lina back from the grave, that he knew he could go through with trying this. Any inhibitions in his mind snapped away quickly; he didn’t care if it required hurting some other child, essentially killing their old self in order to resurrect her. All Marvin cared about was Lina and getting her back.

However, for so long it seemed there weren't any real signs, no tangible inclination towards which child he should attempt to rebirth. He had of course carefully eyed children around town, loosely stalking some of the young girls he thought could be potential candidates. He tried to find ones that he felt he could easily persuade to become someone else; he had once considered a rather overweight girl, intending to use her size as a means to induce self-loathing, spent some time analyzing a grief stricken girl, even briefly paying attention towards a deaf girl, but that one had quickly been discarded, as since she couldn’t hear, it was more than likely that the musical part of the rebirthing process would take no effect. In the end, none of these potential candidates seemed to be the ‘right’ child to risk abducting and rebirthing… and unfortunately, Tiara had grown sick shortly after their visit and had passed away, so Marvin couldn’t exactly go and ask her for further advice. 

Daniel seemed to think that rebirthing Tiara before anyone else was a good idea, given that they already knew which song to play, and could then ask the ‘new’ Tiara for clarity. Marvin was hesitant with this plan, as he doubted the child would literally inherit the knowledge they once had, but rather, would grow up to be who they once were. However, he certainly wasn’t going to stop Daniel from doing whatever he thought he had to do; reviving Michael was his quest, while all of Marvin’s efforts were focused on Lina. 

Lina, Lina, Lina. 

Like they had always been, ever since the trip to the windmill, ever since he had lost her.

Marvin kept up this sick cycle of child-stalking for months, even bringing with him a camera to take pictures of the children he found to be particularly plausible candidates. He was always very careful so as to not be caught and tactfully kept his inner thoughts from his wife.

Anna was mentally troubled as well of course, falling into phases of insisting her sister was there among them despite the fact that Lina obviously wasn’t. However, at the end of the day, she still clearly had significantly less ‘crazy’ in her than Marvin did, and he could sense that. Her symptoms of prolonged grief manifested themselves as playing an odd game of pretend, denying the fact that Lina was truly gone, while Marvin was actively trying to use everything in his power to return Lina to the realm of the living. He had a feeling that if Anna caught wind of his schemes, she would be in severe opposition to them. Especially due to the fact that they involved tampering with the minds of children.

“That’s a puzzle,” Marvin responded to his wife, stifling his inner excitement from becoming outwardly evident. 

The lack of eyebrows was perhaps Lina’s greatest defining trait; it couldn’t be a coincidence that now that his journey into rebirthing had begun it was becoming clear that Carrie, his own daughter, also lacked eyebrows.

Carrie was meant to be Lina’s reincarnation. He was sure of it. 

For so long, Marvin had felt as though a massive weight had been hanging from his neck, an enormous gray cloud following him everywhere he went as success constantly seemed impossible. Accidentally killing poor Michael Hammond hadn’t helped with that at all; his sister Jill had been distant and critical towards him ever since he had let his grief completely overtake his life, and now that he was the face she associated with the death of her youngest son, Marvin was quite sure that she legitimately hated him. 

Marvin himself had retreated into a protective sociopathy after hitting Michael with his car. It was as though his emotions had shut down entirely; he wasn’t sure he could physically operate anymore if he had the deaths of two children hanging over his head, not to mention the fact that Michael’s death had emotionally destroyed his sister, a feeling he could relate to all too well. Eventually his feelings of self-hatred won out, and Marvin recruited Daniel into the rebirthing process, the only avenue of redemption that Marvin could see. 

But now, those feelings were finally shedding and giving way to giddy plan-making as he slipped into the hot water filled up within his bathtub, thoughts of his eyebrow-less daughter dominating his mind.

2017

Paul’s Petscop investigation continued with no end in sight.

Belle had been a good help in further exploration when she returned home for the first time in what felt like forever, but she had acted even more strangely than she normally did whilst being around the game. A strange detail about Petscop is that it seemed to genuinely not care if the player saw all there was to see or not; random events would just happen, such as the door to the sublevel opening on its own, strange cutscenes or events following a musical tune seemingly triggering out of nowhere after the game was left on for hours, or other character sprites and avatars appearing and operating seemingly at random. Because of all this, Paul had been catering to his console for a long time, ensuring that it was never turned off, as Petscop had no clear way to save and Paul was terrified of losing all of his progress which had been primarily achieved through luck. He hadn’t been able to replicate prior events in the other two file slots that the game allowed, after all. Belle was being instrumental in suggesting ways to navigate a game that hid its secrets so well, and Paul was doing his best to have her ‘puzzle genius’ rub off on him.

On top of all this, he had begun receiving calls from a woman named Jill, a relatively older woman and an aunt of his that he hadn’t seen in years, who was relentless in asking questions about the game. Paul had no idea how she had gotten his number, nor why she had only chosen to contact him after all this time upon finding his YouTube channel about Petscop , but her constant intensity felt as though she were interrogating him, which made Paul rather intimidated. 

Furthermore, she appeared to know a ton about the game, asking hyper-specific questions about how much he had seen and how much he had put out onto YouTube. Like his mother, Jill seemed very concerned about censoring certain aspects of the game from the public, and the two of them insisted that there be two channels, a private one just for the family to view, and the public one, which Paul was to continue uploading to in order to satiate the hordes of arm-chair investigators he had semi-accidentally summoned. Anna and Jill would view the uncut footage that was posted to the private channel, edit it as they saw fit, then give it back to Paul to add to his public YouTube collection, documenting their quest to access the credits. 

With Jill being the aunt on his enigmatic father’s side, Paul supposed it made sense that the game would be so connected to her, and thus by extension, himself as well. Paul assumed Belle wasn’t as involved given that she wasn’t family, and she had gotten a little offended when Paul made a comment saying as much. He had backtracked quickly, assuring her that his only point was that she probably didn’t have a room in the game Child Library; clearly, Belle wanted to be considered family, which was what she was as far as Paul was concerned. She had been his stepsister for his entire life, after all. 

He had refrained from mentioning her to Jill for as long as possible. If he could help it he wanted to keep her off of Jill’s radar, as Paul had discovered the hard way that once Jill knew how to contact you, there was no escaping her. The woman was persistent and intimidating, and given that Paul was quite the submissive type, she could always bully almost any information she wanted out of him. This included Belle’s involvement, as it would turn out, as when she wouldn’t drop the question about who Paul was talking to in his early videos, he felt he had no choice but to relinquish the fact that it was Belle who he was talking to. Thankfully, Jill had seemed satisfied with this answer and Paul hoped she wouldn’t plague Belle with calls as she regularly did to him.

Today was an especially exciting journey in the quest to unravel Petscop’s secrets, as Paul believed he was hot on the trail of an exciting lead. After discovering that Petscop placed a lot of emphasis on a supposedly missing windmill, Paul inputted the question ‘Where was the windmill?’ into a mysterious device within the Petscop game called ‘The Tool’ (a red awl-shaped thing that allowed the user to type in questions and would respond if the question was valid), and was met with a set of numbers that he quickly recognized as coordinates. Upon consulting Belle about the Tool’s response and finding that she agreed with him, and after finding the location where the windmill had once stood, a crazy plan had formulated within his mind.

What if, instead of randomly roaming around Petscop’s endless plane, waiting for stuff to happen or hoping they stumbled upon something, they could use the real world to find things within the game. It was a crazy idea, but Belle had been on board with it. The plan was to travel to the location where the windmill had once been and measure the stone that served as its replacement, then use the relative size compared to the in-game windmill in order to calculate how big a ground-tile was. From there, they would map out the directions they took to get back to the house and use the same travel method in Petscop. 

Paul was very excited at the potential of his plan; it was currently a brisk Friday afternoon, and he and Belle had taken off on their journey to the large grassy field that was thankfully within walking distance of home. Belle was still acting even more awkward than usual, but she carried a spark in her eye, a sure sign that she was also deeply intrigued by this plan they had concocted. 

“There it is!” Paul announced triumphantly, as the two of them spotted the small stone sticking out of the ground, running across a portion of the field to get to it quicker. 

“If this works, I’ll be amazed,” Belle said, giving Paul a smile. She was dressed in a puffy purple jacket to protect her from the windy atmosphere, her short, curly hair billowing. Paul wished he had also opted to wear something warmer, rather than a simple gray sweatshirt. “I guess I’m not the only puzzle solver around here, huh?”

“You’re still way smarter than me,” Paul admitted the simple truth as he bent down to the stone, whipping out some measuring tape to get its dimensions. “I’ve just played this game way too ****ing much.”

A smile crept along Paul’s face as he stood back up and recorded the size of the stone on a small notepad he had brought along. 

“I still think they are withholding a lot of information from me,” Paul said, as he returned the pencil and pad into his deep pockets. “But I don’t think Jill and mom and whoever else is in on this knows much more about the game than we do now.”

“No, we’re making it farther than ever,” Belle said with strange confidence. “I’m just glad I can do anything at all, now.”

Strangely, Belle’s face immediately formed an expression that suggested she had said something she shouldn’t have.

“The **** does that mean?” Paul asked playfully, slightly confused.

“Just that you were showing me your progress in those videos,” Belle replied casually. “And now, I’m actually in on the action.”

“Yeah, well, I probably wouldn’t have gotten this far without your help, Belle,” Paul still didn’t understand why she nearly flinched whenever he said her name. 

The best he could figure was that the price of being smart was also possessing a few quirks. 

“Alright, so we’ll find the quickest way to the staircase, and you’ll make a drawing based on our paths,” Belle said, clearly anxious to initiate the next phase of the plan. “And hopefully, we can use it to find our way somewhere interesting in Petscop .”

“Yeah,” Paul agreed, beginning the trek back, careful to log the directions to memory. “I think mom and Jill, all them guys, I think they know some secrets about the game… some of that information should be able to help us.”

“Paul…” Belle said suddenly, her voice falling from friendly to concerned as she lightly placed a hand on Paul’s elbow to stop him. “Are you sure you want to keep going with this, with Petscop and unraveling its secrets?”

Paul was taken aback by Belle’s hesitancy. Normally, he was the apprehensive one. 

“Yeah, of course, I can’t stop now,” Paul said with a laugh. “C’mon, Belle, it’s a video game about the side of my family mom has always sheltered me from… ‘course I’m seeing it through.”

“Okay,” Belle sighed, falling in lockstep with him as they began their return journey. “Just… I don’t know, some things if you don’t turn back soon enough, they… don’t let you go, I guess.”

“Well, Jill certainly won’t give me a break,” Paul said this lightly, but he was inwardly unnerved by Belle’s sudden shift in attitude. “It’s alright, though, she and mom have been very helpful with strange clues about the game I never would’ve known otherwise. They still act pretty… clandestine about the whole thing, though. Gets me feeling weird.”

Belle just nodded quietly, a faraway look on her face. 

“Hey, why do you suppose the windmill’s gone, and there’s that stone there?” Paul asked to break the silence.

“Weird, huh?” Belle replied, looking back at the small, rounded stone. “I don’t know.”

1996

Daniel could practically feel his mental stability deteriorating with every passing day. He had begun to hate life itself, all but loathe his own existence as the pain never seemed to go away… and now, in addition to his constant grief, he carried the guilt of possibly permanently damaging a child on a psychological level. Belle had agreed not to tell anyone about the rebirthing incident, as she was insistent that she was grateful for his help in becoming Tiara; the poor girl was convinced that her ‘new’ persona was her ticket to being loved. Daniel wondered what problems her belief that she was Tiara would bring to light… he had at least semi-convinced her to continue using the name Belle around ‘normal’ people.

Seeing how much he had hurt this girl only for the rebirthing process to be a failure led to countless sleepless nights; his faith that rebirthing could exist wasn’t completely shaken, as Belle had given up before the ritual could be completed. Still, Daniel didn’t think he could do something so horrible to a child again. 

Amongst the storm of emotions that had become a part of his everyday life, a renewed hatred for Marvin began to brew within him. Daniel’s bitterness over the car accident had been slowly growing for months, and now that Marvin had also been the one to introduce him to this sick rebirthing practice, knocked over the domino that led to Daniel emotionally scarring an innocent girl, that bitterness was growing with twice the speed. A thought that hadn’t mattered to him in his crazed mental state following Mike’s death had become predominant in his mind: why did Marvin know about rebirthing in the first place? What had prompted his uncle to search out Tiara and gather knowledge on this ritual?

This thought had led to Daniel asking questions, primarily to his mother, who he figured might know stuff as Marvin’s sister. Daniel would have liked to ask Anna some things, but he really didn’t want to run into Marvin during a visit, so he initially confined his inquiries to Jill. 

She was perhaps even more jaded towards Marvin than he was and was also clearly reluctant to say much about his past. Eventually, Daniel was able to coax out of her just the kind of story he wanted to hear.

“Your uncle’s wife used to have a sister,” Jill had said, which Daniel instantly assumed was Lina, whom Anna occasionally pretended was still among them. During his long hours of consideration he had begun to suspect if this non-existent sister had something to do with Marvin. “She was a big part of both their lives… but Marvin had a huge and very obvious crush on her. One day she just… disappeared. Everyone was devastated, but Marvin let it affect him on a mental level. Instead of putting up ‘missing girl’ signs he went around town putting up ‘birthday girl’ signs. He used to make a cake and sit out on the bench in front of their school, hoping it would somehow entice her to come home. Obviously, this didn’t work, and Marvin was never the same person after all that.” Jill’s face had never grown sympathetic, instead remaining cold and heartless as she spoke of her brother. “And now he’s killed our little Michael… he’s always so utterly lost in his own pity… I just, I wonder if- if he was self-absorbed again on that drive. He’s always lost in thoughts about Lina. If he wasn’t so fixated, if he would just let himself heal, then maybe he would’ve been able to react fast enough.” Jill had put her face into her hands in an obvious effort to prevent a torrent of tears. “Lina, Michael… accidents or not, kids seem to die around Marvin. I- I wish…” this part seemed hard for Jill to say, yet she did. “I wish he’d never been born.”

The bizarreness of the story had stuck with Daniel for reasons he couldn’t fully explain, but he was hopelessly invested by the intrigue of it all. Anna had a missing sister that she pretended was still around, while Marvin was apparently looking for ways to bring her back from the dead. A family forever haunted by a lost loved one, all of them mentally scarred in the aftermath. 

And the idea that Marvin’s grief-stricken obsession could have contributed to his brother's death filled him with an undying rage.

All of this was just reaffirming Daniel’s suspicion about the world, which he was finding to be a crueler and crueler place everyday… once you were traumatized, you were never quite the same again. He felt as though he could see it everywhere now… Marvin and Anna in the aftermath of Lina’s vanishing, Michael in the wake of his kidnapping, the dog and its broken leg after the crash, and even himself… Daniel knew he could never go back to the person he once was. Somedays, he remembered how he had vouched for putting the dog down and fantasized about applying the same philosophy to his own life.

However, he was kept going by the fact that he desired to know more. Marvin’s history had at this point become something of an obsession for him, partly out of a burning curiosity, but mostly out of the seething enmity he held against his uncle. 

Uncovering all of Marvin’s secrets felt, in some weird way, as though Daniel was getting his own type of revenge. 

One day, under the guise of ‘visiting’ Anna and her twins when Marvin was away doing who knows what, Daniel had managed to rummage through his things, even getting away with looking in the drawers of his bedside table. In there he found two pictures from 1977 that immediately blasted him with intrigue.

One showed Marvin as a kid, looking no more than ten years old, standing in front of an old windmill with a young girl, who notably lacked eyebrows. Daniel was taken aback by how strikingly similar the girl looked to Carrie Mark; if Daniel had ever seen evidence for rebirthing, this was certainly it. 

The next photo displayed Marvin standing alone, both the windmill and Lina seemingly vanished into thin air. Daniel looked at the photos for a long while, puzzling over the striking dichotomy between them. Daniel had then quickly shoved the photos into his pocket, ending his visit shortly after the discovery. 

Being in that house still made him nauseous; even Anna, who had shown nothing but love towards him and Michael, was difficult to be around. It seemed anything and everything related to the Mark family reminded him of his brother’s dead body lying in the road. Daniel tried his best to not let his hatred towards Marvin extend to the rest of the family, though. Anna may have some lasting mental issues over her sister’s disappearance, perhaps propagated and made worse by Marvin’s obsession, but she had always shown nothing but love towards Michael, so Daniel still had some lasting affection towards her. Carrie and Paul were of course the most innocent in all this. 

The pictures had given Daniel a more focused purpose: his mission was to now find out what happened to the windmill and that girl. After some light research, it became clear that there had been a windmill within a close vicinity of their town, located in the midst of a large grassy field. Daniel had visited the location to find that the windmill was in fact gone. 

When he first walked the field, roaming the area that the windmill had once stood, he couldn’t get one idea out of his head: Lina didn’t just go missing, she had died. He didn’t have any tangible evidence contributing to why he was so sure, but he could sort of just feel it as he walked the field. And when he found a small, rounded stone jutting from the ground, he became sure.

He had no idea why Lina’s body wouldn’t have been recovered or recognized or given some sort of burial that wasn’t in the immediate vicinity of the windmill, but nonetheless, he was sure her remains were buried beneath his feet. When Daniel had stood there alone in the field, his shirt flapping in the strong wind and his eyes downcast, a decision snapped into place within his mind: he was going to go digging.

He was going to find whatever remained of Lina’s body in order to discover what really had happened to her. 

Digging up the ground alone with nothing but a shovel was grueling and arduous work, not to mention exhausting as Daniel did it in the darkest hours of the night to lessen the chances of being caught, but it gave Daniel a mission, something to channel all of his mental energy into. Clearly the stone wasn’t perfectly indicative as to where Lina had been unceremoniously laid to rest, as his first attempts at finding anything yielded absolutely nothing. Nonetheless, Daniel was obsessed now, and returning to the field every night to go grave digging became a regular occurrence. 

It took many long hours to dig a hole deep and wide enough that he felt satisfied the body wouldn’t be just a little bit away, which left him drained and miserable during the days. Not all that different from before this madness, but his physical body certainly cried out in pain as well now. 

One day, while Daniel lay on the floor as he often did, letting all of his anguish gather within him, his Tarnacop machine caught his eyes, a prototype version of the planned Petscop cartridge resting against it. An idea began formulating within his mind, the advanced computer and his once precious project feeling as though they were consuming the entirety of his vision.

Petscop . 

His unfinished video game, the passion project dedicated to his brother.

 Ever since Michael’s death, the bright colors and cheery music had sickened him. Even with this being the case, he didn’t feel that his ‘itch’ for game development had been satiated, and as his idea became more fleshed out in his mind, he knew he had to once again begin working on the game of Petscop .

This time, not for his brother or other little kids to play and enjoy. No. This time, Petscop would be meant for someone to see… for Marvin to see. He would add another plane to the game, a dark realm to show Marvin how much he was directly connected to all of Daniel’s suffering.

This became his daytime obsession: he was an unemployed game developer by day and a graverobber by night. 

This lasted for a couple of weeks, his mental and physical health rapidly draining away. All these thoughts, all these memories, they crowded around him like evil spirits clinging to his soul as he drove into the night, his trusty shovel in the backseat. It was pouring rain and occasionally thundering outside, but that didn’t stop him. Daniel was beyond the point of no return; he was practically numb inside and out. Besides, tonight could be the night he finally found something. 

Parking his small blue car on the side of the road nearby the field, Daniel pulled the shovel from his backseat with one hand and activated a flashlight in the other, then trudged out into the muddied field. Daniel was wearing a black raincoat that was fitted tightly against him, a hood over his head, yet his face was still plastered by water as the raging wind pelted the raindrops diagonally. Thunder softly rumbled in the distance as he approached the small stone, patches of grass now existing as wet overturned dirt, remains of his previous digging excursions.

Daniel felt as though he would find her tonight. Given the position of his other digging spots, if Lina’s body was anywhere within the vicinity of the unmarked gravestone, then he should find her directly under where he stood. He remained still for a moment, cold water soaking into his clothes and dampening his skin, preparing himself for what he was about to do, for real this time.

Daniel took a deep breath and raised his shovel into the air, ready to dig up a dead child’s grave. 

He plunged the shovel into the wet ground, throwing the dirt behind him with strong and efficient swings of the shovel; Daniel had gotten rather adept at this over the past couple of weeks. With every plunge of the shovel into the dirt, a different aspect of his personal tragedy appeared in his mind, fueling his strength and endurance with grief, guilt, and rage.

Dig.

Michael getting abducted, his face bleeding.

Dig.

Michael dying in front his eyes at the hands of Marvin.

Dig.

Letting Marvin convince him on the concept rebirthing.

Dig.

Degrading Belle and forcing her into the machine.

Dig.

The trauma-induced Mark family.

Dig.

Every miserable day of his existence after those events.

Daniel lost all track of time, shivering from the cold and utterly waterlogged. For all he was aware, he could have been digging for one hour, or several.

Finally, as lightning flashed in his peripherals and the crack of thunder rolled over the field, his shovel struck something. 

A tingle of morbid excitement jolted through Daniel's spine. The collision felt different from the occasional rock he had run into; this could finally be her. 

Now anxious and impatient, Daniel dug like a crazed dog, in a thoughtless frenzy as he hurled as much soaked dirt away from the object as he could. Retrieving his flashlight from the ground, where it offered a meek beam of light for slight visibility in the darkness, the grass now eye-level with himself, Daniel shone it at his feet to see the bits of dirtied white he stood upon.

He had done it. He had found Lina’s corpse.

With a renewed burst of adrenaline, Daniel finished clearing out her body enough so that he could see it in its entirety. 

Occasionally a strong bolt of lightning would illuminate the area enough for Daniel to get a good look at the remains, a horrifying child-sized skeleton in tattered clothing, nothing else surviving the past twenty years of decay. 

Once it was fully excavated, Daniel searched the cadaver up and down with the flashlight, his stomach twisting into nauseous knots as he laid his eyes on what he had uncovered. 

The small skeleton was horrendously twisted, as if it had been wound and tightened to all of its breaking points. The sickening image of a child falling into the large, spinning gears within the innards of the windmill dominated his mind, the lighting, thunder, and torrential downpour around him fading into the background as his imagination was forced into playing out the grisly scene of Lina being swiftly twisted to death in vivid detail. Whoever found her must have just buried her remains here due to her being completely unrecognizable, probably barely even as human; facial bones were caved in, limbs were wrenched completely out of place, everything was indicative of the body being spun and twisted, mangulated in a specific and horrific manner.

Now completely disgusted, both with the harrowing discovery and with his actions spawned from dark obsession, Daniel climbed out of his hole, every muscle and bone aching as he did so. His heart beat with unprecedented speed as he shakily filled in Lina’s resting place, now acutely aware of and flinching at every flash of lightning and crack of thunder. 

He knew now. He knew how she died. Somehow, she had fallen into the mechanisms of the windmill, and somehow, they didn’t see her.

Daniel felt as if the weight of death itself was pressing against his shoulders as he slowly trudged back to his car, dazed and disturbed. He paid no attention to cleanliness as he tossed his mud-ridden shovel into the back seats and plopped his soaked figure into the driver’s seat. He was barely aware of the road before him, barely aware of his journey home.

The only thing that was on his mind were the quick flashes of the relentless tragedies that had plagued both his and Marvin’s existence, as well as the children around them. He thought of Lina, how her death twenty years ago had forever altered Marvin, how Michael’s death had forever changed himself.

His suspicions had been right.

If someone suffered greatly enough, they really could never be the same again. And so many people suffered at such a young age. All of them, himself included, cursed to forever be lost, always aimlessly wandering a dark plane of suffering. 

And now, that’s what Petscop would become as well.

1997

The new year had just recently begun, and Daniel felt as though Petscop was successfully becoming a fitting sarcophagus to his pain. He had been very solitary for a while, pouring most of the daylight hours into further development of Petscop , dreaming of the day Marvin would see it and be presented with the full extent of both their combined misery. 

This being the case, the last place he wanted to be right now was the Mark family household, yet his seemingly unshakeable affection for Anna and Carrie didn’t allow him to refuse his former boss’ personal request for help. Apparently, Marvin had been rapidly degrading in sanity over the past few months, making Anna feel not only as though she didn’t have a husband anymore, but also that his delusions could be potentially harmful to their children, specifically Carrie. 

Daniel wasn’t surprised, and while Anna was discrete about the specifics, he had a hunch that it was closely if not directly connected to the fact that Marvin thought Carrie was the reincarnation of Lina.

The pictures Daniel had seen were admittedly quite damning if you had already crossed the bridge in your mind that rebirthing was possible. Lina and Carrie were so very alike, right down to the lack of eyebrows. Daniel assumed Marvin had become vocal about his beliefs to an extent, which had prompted Anna to finally have had enough of his lunacy. She had kicked him out of the house and was currently fighting for full custody of the kids. Right now, Marvin got to have them every other day, but that was apparently soon to be changed to weekends-only. 

Normally, hearing about this collapse in the family would have saddened Daniel. This divorce would be a stain on Carrie’s and Paul’s lives, the lingering effects of which could be any number of detrimental things. However, Daniel did not feel this way in this specific instance.

No, in a way he felt vindicated. He felt a tiny spark of success, albeit a success he had nothing to do with. His hatred towards Marvin had only become more direct the more he worked on Petscop , the more he constantly brooded about his life in front of the computer screen. Hearing about Marvin losing his marriage, his house, and general custody of his kids soon enough… that felt like a victory in some sick, twisted way.

In any case, with the divorce having been finalized and Marvin fully kicked out of the house, Anna was now intent on doing some ‘redecorating,’ and had reached out to Daniel for help with repainting the walls in her bedroom. She had mentioned something about ‘covering the stencils,’ which Daniel could only guess what that meant exactly. 

He had been surprised upon entering the house, as after Anna had greeted him (she still spoke to him with this detectable ‘overly nice’ tone; Daniel understood that it came from a place of well-meaning, but for some reason it annoyed him), Carrie did the same, to which he realized that the young girl had finally begun growing eyebrows. They were faint, less noticeable than most people, but still, they were there. 

This unsettled Daniel greatly, as just moments ago he had been contemplating how that shared prominent facial feature between Carrie and Lina was very alluring to the idea of rebirthing, but now that it had simply gone away…

Daniel internally sighed, trying not to let his face display his inner struggle with self-loathing.

Who was he kidding? How much had he ever believed in the rebirthing process? When he looked at Marvin, he saw a grief-stricken and depraved man latching on to whatever idea might offer some sort of theoretical hope of regaining what he had lost… and when he looked in the mirror, he saw the exact same thing.

It all kept coming back down to the potential fact about the lowest moment in his entire life: he had more than likely mentally scarred Belle for nothing.

As a radio softly played music in the background, Daniel absentmindedly made small talk with Anna, trying to humor her obvious hope that he was some resemblance of okay. Despite his internal aversion to anything associated with the Marks, he admired the fact that Anna remained a loving mother to her children despite also being in the radius of destruction of the family tragedies. She was clearly looking out for Carrie, and Daniel sensed while spending time with her that she was being very sheltering to Paul.

Paul was a timid, introverted little guy, and despite being exactly the same age as Carrie he was not as interested in being involved with many people. Anna catered to his preferences and did her best to keep him in the dark about everything that was going on around him, as the poor fellow was easily disturbed. Daniel supposed that ignorance was bliss, and if Anna could preserve that in Paul, it was a good thing. One less ‘A’ version of a child tainted into a ‘B’ version of themselves.

Soon the main event of the visit started, and Daniel entered Anna’s bedroom to help her paint over the walls. He instantly noticed that the room had two separate beds in it; clearly, Marvin’s and Anna’s marriage had been in shambles for a long time before the actual divorce. 

It appeared that Anna’s bed was closest to the doorway they had entered through, as the bedside table to the left of the mattress had several discs resting on top of it. 

“Older CD-Rs of Petscop ,” Daniel guessed, half-talking and half-mumbling, as he studied them. 

“Yes,” Anna said with a sigh. “They remind me of the… better days. I’m afraid Garalina is all but over now…” There was genuine hurt and loss in Anna’s voice. “I started that company as a tribute to my sister. I hope she wouldn’t be too disappointed in my inability to maintain it.”

Daniel didn’t say anything as he studied Anna’s face. She had referred to her sister in the past-tense. She must have noticed what he was thinking, as she quickly followed up her statement. 

“I’m better now… or, starting to get better. A part of me always knew she was gone. That’s even what I told Marvin when we first… that’s what I told Marvin a long time ago. But he didn’t listen, and I think… I think he got to me. I thought I really loved him, hell, I had a crush on him since we were little… but dealing with his kind of headspace, his kind of mental problems everyday… I think I just kind of adapted, you know? If I can't fix the crazy, maybe I should just become the crazy. So, I started seeing her. Just like he would never let go of the thought that there was a way to bring her home, I manifested and held onto the thought that she was never really gone… that she was still here…” 

Anna paused and took a moment to wipe her eyes. 

Daniel was stunned, as he hadn’t seen Anna this emotionally vulnerable since Michael had died. Hearing her talk like this, he almost began to think of her as another victim of Marvin.

“I’m taking the steps to move on with my life, though,” Anna said, collecting herself. “Detaching from Marvin was the first step. Now I have my two beautiful children to focus on.”

Daniel gave her a nod and a forced smile, a position his mouth hadn’t shaped for months. It amazed him that she felt that she could move on. Daniel didn’t believe he could ever recover from the events of his past. 

Anna directed him to start over on the walls by Marvin’s bed, and sketched into the light green paint on the walls behind the bed frame were the stencils Anna had been talking about. They appeared to have been scribbled onto the wall by a sharp pencil, and Daniel had to lean in close in order to even tell what they were supposed to be. They were messy and cryptic, but Daniel’s best guess was that they resembled designs for the ‘machine’ that was involved with the rebirthing process. 

Daniel could practically feel the weirdness of the situation; he imagined Anna trying to go to sleep in her bed, while Marvin had his desk lamp on, sketching the designs of a madman onto their wall. 

Anna directed his attention to two cans of black paint sitting on the floor by the bed, accompanied by a roller. The paint was jet-black, a rather dreary color for a bedroom, and Daniel supposed that Anna had picked it due to its ability to entirely cover anything else on the walls… a small way to ‘cover’ the past, to begin a new life.

“I got a new life!” Daniel heard Carrie shout from the living room, and for a brief moment he half-wondered if the child was psychic and had somehow read his thoughts. “You would hardly…”

Carrie trailed off and mumbled for a bit as though trying to remember what to say, when Daniel heard music playing softly in the background. Carrie was clearly singing along to a song, one she really liked, as she was gleefully attempting to sing along with the female performer. Daniel couldn’t help but acknowledge it was cute as he bent down and picked up a roller, beginning the painting job alongside Anna.

“Care for you!” Carried said loudly and clearly, happy to arrive at a part she knew again. 

Carrie stumbled over the words for a moment once again, then enthusiastically joined in on a harmonizing “oooooh!”

 As the chorus arrived, Daniel recognized the song; it was “The Sign,” a song by a mainstream pop-band known as Ace of Base. Daniel himself wasn’t very up to date on the ‘current’ music… he had only listened to brooding instrumental pieces for a long while, but it certainly appeared to be Carrie’s favorite song. Daniel leaned back to peek out the bedroom door, having a slight view of parts of the living area, trying to get a glimpse of Carrie as he heard her thumping around, probably dancing along to the music. 

His hunch had been right; out in the main area, Carrie was blissfully twirling around on the hardwood floor.

“I saw the sign!” She sang along with the chorus, beginning to spin. “And it opened up my eyes, I saw the sign!”

Daniel was tempted to be momentarily relieved of a fraction of his burden, to genuinely find some joy in his cousin, to feel hope at the fact that she could be so carefree amongst the darkness and tragedy that had been consuming her family for years. But even a fleeting moment such as this was robbed from him.

As Daniel watched her spin, turning to an increasingly greater number of degrees, he felt pure horror and disgust wash over him. Even with her faint eyebrows, she still very much resembled her late aunt Lina; watching her spin and twirl like this only gave Daniel a much more lucid vision of Lina’s fate in the belly of that windmill. Suddenly his thoughts were crowded with images of Carrie being amongst those gears, his brain unable to avert itself from the morbid recreation within his mind, every gruesome detail of what the scenario could have looked like making his fingers tingle and his legs tremble. His hands suddenly felt dirty, his mind not only coating them with imaginary mud leftover from that storm-ridden night, but also condemning him in a metaphorical sense, the depravity of digging up a child’s grave haunting him with renewed intensity. 

Daniel ripped his sight away, doing everything in his power to focus on his physical surroundings, nausea nearly overtaking him. With one stroke at a time he began to hide Marvin’s demonic-looking sketches with thick black paint, his forehead feeling hot as every dark thought he ever had seemed to gather and swirl within him.

I’m a piece of ****, the phrase coursed through his thoughts as if looped without a termination condition. I’m a ****ing piece of ****.

Daniel couldn’t even find happiness in a little girl having fun now. This startling realization brought a thought that had been festering for a long time to the forefront of his mind.

Just like what he had believed to be the best thing to do with the dog, maybe he needed to be put down.

2018

The strange situation Paul found himself in was steadily growing more concerning with every passing day, and now he feared that he had stumbled into a conspiracy that there was no easy way out of. 

All throughout the rest of 2017 his aunt Jill had been relentless in her phone calls and strict direction and guidance around his continued uploading of Petscop recordings. His mother got steadily more involved as well, and Paul was well aware that certain parts of his gameplay were being edited and censored by the two of them before getting published on the public YouTube. In addition to this, Anna seemed to be perpetually in a state of emotional distress, as though some tragic inevitable event was on the horizon. 

Paul wasn’t quite sure what to make of everything, especially with the fact that Belle had grown strangely distant over the course of the past few months. The two of them didn’t communicate as much over the phone as of late, and Belle had been absent from home for another prolonged period of time. Paul highly doubted that she was purposely avoiding him, he knew she had much more of a life than he did, but still. Something about her near radio-silence didn’t sit right with him, which ended up being just another factor contributing to his regular feelings of anxiety. 

One thing that had become apparent to him was that both his mother and Jill had some level of personal and emotional attachment to this enigmatic game of Petscop . One thing that they made very clear was something that Paul had discovered about the game himself: the console needed to stay running in order for Paul to keep his progress and further explore the secrets hidden within the coding of the game.

Neither one of them would be fully transparent with him, but Paul could definitely detect some sort of underlying anger or sadness in Jill. The lack of openness from the older members of his family was beginning to irritate him greatly, and things really began to escalate when Jill showed up for his birthday party. 

It had been November 12th, the beginning of Paul’s twenty-fifth year, when Jill had shown up at their door. Paul had been totally caught off guard, and Anna had also appeared to be uncomfortable in Jill’s presence. Jill herself carried an icy cold persona that greatly intimidated Paul, projecting a surprisingly foreboding presence for a somewhat elderly woman. Her arrival heralded a request to get Paul to work with her more directly when it came to Petscop. Apparently, she was in league with a few other family members that were somehow facilitating multiple Petscop sessions across separate PlayStation One consoles.

Paul had been very averse to the idea. He got more than enough stress from Jill simply by talking over the phone. Jill’s prompts had derailed him into a relatively heated conversation in which he had demanded to know what other discs of Petscop were out there, and where they even were, along with how he could access the elusive ‘discovery pages’ on the clandestine Petscop webpage that was supposed to exist. Jill had ignored his pleas for information and instead took Anna into the master bedroom to have a private conversation. 

Paul had a natural inclination towards eavesdropping, but he soon realized that his mother and aunt were too adept at talking in a hushed manner for him to make out anything meaningful by loitering outside the door. To pass the uncomfortable moments of time, Paul had tended to his PlayStation console, ensuring that it continued to run the save file that he had by far made the most interesting progress on.

When Anna and Jill eventually emerged, Paul immediately detected an exhausted resignation in his mother’s eyes. Her somber facial expression had given off subtle vibes of heartbreak mixed with determination, a mood that instantly unnerved Paul. 

He was rather demandingly informed that Jill would be escorting him to a different location in order to finish their ‘investigation into Petscop .’ Paul wanted to fight back against the idea, and he had initially made a rather bold effort (well, at least for his non-assertive personality) to stand against it, but there wasn’t much he could do when his own mother began pressuring him into it as well. 

At this point, Paul was genuinely beginning to wonder if his curiosity outweighed his concern about everything that surrounded the once unassuming game of Petscop , but it appeared he had already unknowingly dived in too deep to back out anyway. 

Jill had given him until just after Christmas to get prepared, and then he would be brought to the ‘expanded Petscop operation,’ which Paul had no idea what exactly that meant at the time. 

The relationship between him and his mother hadn’t exactly been strained during the following few weeks, but there certainly was a noticeable divide between them. Anna was keeping secrets from Paul and now he was well aware of it. That dynamic occasionally made for an awkward conversation or moment of silence during their interactions. 

Eventually the day arrived when Paul was meant to be taken to the location where he would apparently focus solely on completing Petscop once and for all, in pursuit of satisfying whatever obsession his family had with the game. They had been so adamant that his console not be turned off that they had made arrangements for him to be capable of running Petscop during the car ride over. If everything up to this point hadn’t clued him in on just how deep of a rabbit hole he had unearthed, the events that followed certainly did.

Paul had been brought to an old brick building that had appeared to once upon a time be an elementary school, led inside its abandoned hallways and brought up a staircase and into a large hallway that boasted four doors on each side. Suddenly, the school felt very alive.

Placed to the side of each door was a table containing retro-looking terminals accompanied by large white computers plastered with the words ‘Tarnacop Machine.’ They were all creating that light buzzing hum of technology, clearly interconnected to some sort of larger purpose and running some virtual creation. Black cords of all varieties littered the floors, neatly leading to their main plug-ins without entanglement. Curiously, in the center of the hallway was a rolling cart with a rounded television set resting on top of it, displaying what appeared to be a monitoring system or recording replay of Petscop . Other various technology or pieces of equipment were present in the area as well, many of which carried the Garalina logo, the same company that had trademarked Petscop .

Additionally, a few people had been milling about the hallway, monitoring the technology and seemingly ensuring everything was in proper working order. They were a small group, and Paul felt as though he vaguely recognized most of them as being on some branch of the family tree. Strangely, his mother appeared to carry a certain significance or importance among them. Upon their arrival, Anna and Jill striding confidently in as Paul sheepishly held onto his console, a couple of the people had given Anna a firm nod of respect, and Paul could swear he heard someone mumble: “Welcome back, boss.”

Paul felt as though his senses had been assaulted as he struggled to make sense of everything that was happening. Before he could properly process it all, he was being ushered into one of the rooms to the left. It looked as though it had once been a classroom, but had been repurposed to be a gaming and living space. To the back left wall was a bed, to the front of it a chair sitting before a television that was waiting for Paul to hook his console up to. Oddly enough, a needles-piano was placed facing the right-wall, a PlayStation One controller nestled in two grooves put into the wood.

Paul had gotten a sudden rush of claustrophobic panic as Anna informed him that this room would be his near permanent living arrangement until Petscop was fully completed. This had prompted a second wave of rebellion towards the entire idea, but somehow he let himself be bullied into becoming a key accessory in this crazed obsession with Petscop once again.

And so, the days began to pass by. Paul could barely tell the difference between day and night in this windowless room, a room that he had quickly come to find out was purposely designed to disorient and isolate him. After he had been locked in it didn’t take long to figure out it was all but impossible to tell where the door was… the walls were all coated with a bright and solid orange color and there was no handle or gaps anywhere, making it incredibly hard to determine where the door was, and it certainly wasn’t capable of being opened from the inside. 

At first Paul had felt hopelessly trapped and a little betrayed by his own mother; what on earth were they all so worried about that they had to ensure he wouldn’t quit on this endeavor by employing measures to make sure he couldn’t leave the room? Paul had quickly become a prisoner whose only provided activity was playing an old video game. 

The intense feelings of entrapment and isolation waned a little bit as the dull routine began to take shape; his mother would deliver meals to the room for him, and he was given time to go to the bathroom three times a day. If anyone was right for the lifestyle, Paul supposed it would have to be him. At home he enjoyed days that he did nothing but curl up in a comfy chair and play video games. Now, that was everyday.

Despite the rather dreary conditions, there were certain advantages to being stuck in the room. He was given complete concentration on thinking about and puzzling through Petscop, as no one could walk through the front door as used to be the case in his house, nor did his mother or anyone else try to strike up conversation with him. Paul was sure that if he was an extrovert this would be torture, but luckily, he was practically already adapted to this kind of daily life. 

The main thing he missed about being home was his cat. The little guy would like to join him when he played video games, and Paul wished they had allowed his pet to hang out in the room with him. The other annoying thing was the sleeping situation. 

It was constantly reiterated to him that he could not let the PlayStation turn off. This point was so important that someone had even managed to put a burn-in into the monitor that triggered when the console was in danger of shutting down. It was accompanied by the most stress-inducing beep Paul had ever heard and given that his sleeping hours were what took him away from the game for the longest, that usually meant he was being startled out of sleep and forced to cater to the console to ensure that it wouldn’t lose his precious Petscop progress. 

Clearly, when Rainer or whoever else had designed that game, their objective was to make the player work to uncover everything hidden within the complicated digital beast. Paul always thought that Belle would have been a much better candidate for the job, given that she was incredibly good at sleuthing out solutions and making the right connections to the puzzles that riddled Petscop , but alas, Paul was left to puzzle over everything himself which was beginning to drive him mad. 

What had really been eating away at him as of recently was the communication that had begun between himself and the Marvin avatar, whom Paul could only assume was being played by Marvin himself. There were many hints and clues within Petscop that unsettled Paul, but none more than the potential inclination as to who Marvin really was. Paul couldn’t be sure, but with the game’s constant references to familiar settings and names, and his mother’s nearly life-long preventative measures to keep Paul from discovering his father’s true identity, well, Paul didn’t like the way things were adding up in his mind…

The real wrench came in the form of a little girl that Petscop called ‘Care.’ She had been somewhat of a central character and was very evidently meant to be tied directly to his family, but Paul didn’t have any recollection of even meeting her. He and her in-game model shared a strong resemblance and Jill had told Paul that they were exactly the same age, right down to sharing a birthdate. Paul had no idea what this could mean, but the idea that there were people in his family that he didn’t even know existed unsettled him greatly. Wondering about Marvin and his father as well as Care and the apparent secrets of his family at least added some drive and emotion to an otherwise consistently monotonous routine. 

Every single day consisted of the same thing: play Petscop for hours, think about Petscop for hours. Paul feared that if this lasted too long, his mental sanity would slip away entirely until all he could see in his mind were the goofy graphics of a 90s video game. 

Apparently, it had already creeped into his dreams, as one night Paul was in the midst of experiencing a rather triumphant dream where he had finally discovered how to access the Petscop credits… only to be awoken by a constant panicked and blaring beep, screaming for him to keep the console on. Paul sighed dramatically as he rolled over in bed, prying his eyes open as he groggily slothed over to his chair and tended to the all-consuming device. 

This was it; Petscop was his life now.

1997

Carrie’s life had gotten significantly more demanding as of recently, the worst part about it all being the fact that the young girl didn’t really understand any of it.

She lay on her belly across her yellow sheets, her body just barely sinking into the soft mattress of her bed, humming the tune of ‘The Sign’ as she contentedly colored on a blank page of paper, using her favorite assortment of colored crayons. The clock droned on with a consistent tick, blending into the background noise of the constant hum of the air conditioner placed in the window above her head, pumping cool air into the room during the warmth of a summer night.

Carrie loved to escape to her room and relax with calming activities such as coloring; the household had been so tense ever since mommy and daddy had started fighting that she had come to value peace and quiet far more than she used to. 

Although she couldn’t fully explain the sudden change, it all started when her daddy had started acting strangely around her. Carrie didn't know how to really explain it, but he would stare at her for long periods of time with this unsettling look on his face or talk about strange subjects that greatly unsettled her. Not long after this had started, the fighting had begun.

Mommy would yell at daddy and he would retaliate, mommy oftentimes falling into tears. Seeing her mother sad cut through Carrie’s heart, but she also loved her father… she didn’t know whose side to pick, and instead of trying to puzzle through this confusing situation, she would just collapse into emotional distress. 

She wasn’t sure at all how much her twin-brother Paul was affected by all this. He kept to himself a lot… hiding away in his room wasn’t anything new for him, as it was his normal place of residency even during the good times. 

Mommy would regularly try to comfort her after she heard or witnessed them quarreling, but her daddy would usually not be long behind her, and the puzzling things he said would always upset Carrie all over again. She couldn’t be sure, but there seemed to be a much greater emphasis placed on her than Paul from both her parents, which just contributed to her turmoil.

Was this somehow her fault? Were mommy and daddy always angry because of something she did? Carrie couldn’t imagine what it could be if that was true, and to take her mind off of the cycle of gloom and doom she would often play her pop-music and color on her blank sheets of paper. Within the last few months though, the fights between her parents had escalated and her father had moved out of the house, which presented Carrie with a whole new set of challenges.

At first it was super disorienting. Carrie would be with her father one day, then with her mother the next, never seeing them at the same time. This eventually transitioned into a pattern of living with daddy on the weekends and with mommy during the school week, which meant she saw her father significantly less than she was with her mother. Even so, mommy would always fervently check on her when she got back on Sunday evenings, acting as though her daddy posed some kind of threat to her. 

Carrie wasn’t as scared of daddy as mommy seemed to be, but she certainly didn’t care for staying with him very much. Where he lived was small and cramped, always feeling dirty and smelling weird. He would also behave obsessively possessive around her, closely scrutinizing her face and not letting her out of his sight. He always seemed agitated that she had to return home for the school week, but weirdly enough, it seemed as though he paid little to no attention to Paul. Daddy didn’t take him with her on the weekends, and Carrie wondered if he loved her more for some reason. Was she special? She didn’t feel special in the wake of her parents' separation.

Carrie had been living with this new family-dynamic for a little while now, but she didn’t feel as though she was ever going to get used to it. She missed when mommy and daddy had lived together, when she didn’t always have to switch locations or miss her friends’ birthday parties because daddy wouldn’t let her go anywhere. She hadn’t liked it when mommy and daddy were fighting, and now she didn’t like it that they weren’t together; it seemed no matter which way she thought about the scenario, she got sad. 

Tonight, neither mommy or daddy were around. Daniel was supposed to be their babysitter for the night, but he was off in the garage on that computer of his like he always was. Her older cousin was obsessed with making that Petshop game, or whatever he called it, and would rarely talk or interact with Carrie or her brother. Daniel had been pretty distant in attitude ever since his brother Mike had ‘gone away to heaven,’ and Carrie wasn’t exactly sure he was living up to the babysitting standards that her mother would prefer while she was away. 

Carrie missed Michael a lot. He had been a nice cousin that was only a little bit older than her so they could still play together, and he had been much more into actually having adventurous fun than her lame brother Paul was. Carrie didn’t know why Michael had to go away after his birthday party… mommy said he had gone away to a better place called heaven. Carrie wished she could go visit him there. Some days, she would visit the old shed he had once shown her and just cry because she missed him so much. 

Honestly, she would cry about lots of other things, too. She would cry because mommy and daddy didn’t love each other anymore, she would cry because sometimes she wasn’t sure that they even loved her anymore. Everything was confusing and nothing made sense anymore. 

Carrie fended off these depressing thoughts by focusing on her coloring, softly maintaining a cheerful hum of a small assortment of songs from Ace of Base in an attempt to keep her spirits up. 

Carrie lifted her head as she thought she heard a light clunk come from outside the wall. She instinctively listened closely for a second, wondering what it had been, but quickly lost interest and redirected her focus back to coloring. 

Her heart nearly leapt out of her chest when a few seconds later her air conditioner was smashed off of its position in the window and plummeted down into her pillows just inches away from her feet, bouncing the box of crayons and spilling them. 

Carrie began to scream but was briskly silenced as the grown man that had come barreling in after the air conditioner deftly swiped her close to him and placed a hand firmly over her mouth. Carrie tried to kick or struggle as she was roughly dragged off of her bed and scooped up into the man’s arms, but soon stopped in bewildered confusion.

Although she hadn’t gotten a chance to get a good look at him, she recognized the scent of him instantly. Her home had been broken into by her father. She was being kidnapped by Dad.

This startling revelation was enough to stun her as daddy ran out of the house with her wrapped in his arms, jogging towards the orange vehicle he always arrived in to pick her up on the weekends. She was quickly shoved into the backseat, and without even waiting for her to put on a seatbelt, daddy rushed into the driver's seat and sped down the road, racing away from the house.

“Daddy, what’s going on!?” Carrie half-cried half-screamed, her terror now manifesting into tears streaming down her face. 

Conflicting feelings raged within her; she wanted to feel safe around her father, but everything about this situation felt pointedly wrong.

“I’m taking you somewhere, honey,” her dad said, sounding out of breath as he nervously looked out the windows. “We’re gonna go somewhere together for a long time, just you and me. Alright? How does that sound?” 

“I want mom!” Carrie sobbed.

“Mom isn’t going to be there!” Her father sounded irritated at what she had said. “It’s gonna be you and me. We’re going to my old school, Carrie. We’re gonna study together. You like to learn, right?”

Carrie had no idea what to say, or how to react. She just curled her knees up to her chest and tried to calm her beating heart as the car bumped along the road. Soon, daddy pulled over to the side of the road and stopped it, smoothly exiting the car and opening her door to grab her hand and pull her out. 

“Where are we?” Carrie asked softly, disoriented and confused. 

They appeared to have stopped on the side of the road next to some rundown houses, a poor part of town that she rarely visited.

“We have to walk the rest of the way to the school,” her dad said as if it made sense. “Here, hold my hand, we’ll find the way together.”

Carrie tentatively grasped her father’s outstretched hand in her own, letting him guide her down some side streets, everything getting cast in shadow as the sun slowly sank deeper below the horizon. She felt like they were being purposefully sneaky, weaving behind buildings and sticking to dark areas. It took a while, but eventually, they arrived behind an old brick building that her dad was calling ‘the school.’ 

“I- I don’t wanna go in there,” Carrie protested, fear welling up inside her as she surveyed the lowly-maintenanced building that seemed to stand with a foreboding presence. 

“Carrie, listen,” her father took a moment to crouch down and meet her eye-level. “Carrie… I love you, alright? Daddy loves you.”

Carrie looked into her father’s eyes as opposite instincts clashed within her mind. The words were what she wanted to hear, but there was something undeniably un-authentic about the way he said them that troubled her.

“Really?” was all she ended up being able to say, sniffling slightly as she rubbed her nose. 

“Of course,” her father stood up and pulled her arm, guiding her towards the doors of the school. “But you need to learn some things. I need to teach you how to become who you were always meant to be.”

Carrie’s desire for approval from her father mixed with a lack of any other real option as she resigned to following his lead, clutching his hand tightly as they entered the abandoned school building together.

1997

Marvin knew what everyone else must think about him.

‘The depraved maniac.’

‘The delusional madman.’

‘The guy who kidnapped his own daughter.’

Marvin didn’t give a **** about any of that. Everything bad that happened around him was an accident; for some reason, the universe had deemed him as a magnet for tragedy. He may have prompted the visit to the windmill, but he never in a million years would have hurt Lina. He may have killed Michael in the crash, but the boy practically leapt out in front of him.

The only thing Marvin was guilty of was trying to rectify the grand cosmic wrong that occurred in 1977. And the universe finally smiled upon him when Carrie was born.

Carrie was meant to be Lina, Marvin knew it with every fiber of his being. It didn’t matter that her eyebrows had finally begun to grow in- the universe had already communicated its sign to him. His friend’s soul was hiding within the child known as Carrie Mark, and it was up to Marvin to rebirth her into Lina Leskowitz.

To undo the wrong. To rectify her death. To bring her back.

Anna would never admit this was true, even Daniel and his shattered mind barely believed him, which meant Marvin was completely alone in this. Anna had even kicked him out of the house months ago, forced him to live alone in that crappy trailer he could barely even afford. She had done everything in her power to take the kids away from him, to prevent him from being close to his daughter- no, to be close to Lina.

His ex-wife had been gatekeeping her own sister from returning to the life she deserved. So, Marvin took matters into his own hands.

He had been spying on the family for weeks. He memorized Carrie’s/Lina’s every routine, he had Anna’s schedule on lockdown in his mind. In a way, he knew them even better than when he had been welcome in the household. 

Once upon a time, he may have been heartbroken that he had lost Anna. There was an era where he had felt the closest thing to the feelings he had for Lina towards her, after all. But not now. She was acting in direct opposition to resurrecting Lina, and besides, Marvin was so close to achieving his goal for the past twenty years. He was standing on the precipice now, on the cusp of success. His old feelings for Lina had stirred up within him once again; he didn’t need Anna if he could bring Lina back. 

It didn’t matter to him that Lina would return to him in his daughter’s five-year-old body. His love for her transcended that of any sort of sexual nature; he and Lina were simply meant to be together, even if that meant no longer being romantically inclined. Their bond was special, sacred and cosmic, and absolutely nothing would stop Marvin from doing everything conceivable to bring her back to him.

This overpowering motivation was what kept him going through every miserable day of the next five months. No one had found him in the utterly abandoned basement of the old elementary school, no authorities or family members of any kind. He had adequately evaded detection through crafty disguises during outings for food and other bare-bones essentials and was already used to the long stretches of little to no stimulation; he had spent many hours with nothing but his thoughts over the years.

 Marvin was admittedly worried that Daniel or Anna would quickly catch on to where he might have taken Carrie; Daniel had a distinct ‘sleuth’ aura about him, and Anna knew Marvin better than anyone else on earth. But luckily, he had been able to be alone with Carrie largely undisturbed as he prepared her for the big rebirthing. 

Marvin had decided he needed to take a more strategic approach after the disaster Daniel had reported in the aftermath of Belle’s attempted rebirth into Tiara. It was a miracle that the kid wasn’t exposing Daniel as some sort of child abuser, and the rebirthing was definitely a miserable failure if she quit halfway through, despite whatever Belle now believed. Clearly the rebirthing process was an intricate and complicated blend of psychological manipulation and divine destiny… Marvin wanted to be sure he had all the time he needed to properly execute the ritual.

 It was likely he would only have one real shot at success; both he and Carrie needed to be fully primed for the rebirthing. 

And so, once he believed the time was most opportune, Marvin kidnapped his own daughter and brought her to his hiding place below the school he grew up in.

The school where he had met Lina. The place that would now become where he brought Lina back. 

Marvin had overcome the hill of strict moral principal ages ago, and keeping his daughter locked away from the rest of the world in a dirty school basement was no exception to his ‘means to an end’ mentality. Even when he tied her to chairs during their ‘study’ sessions, where Marvin would teach her everything there was to know about Lina and how Carrie needed to change over into her, or when he locked her in a dark closet during off-hours, Marvin was able to comfortably justify these actions in his mind.

What admittedly interfered with his selective sociopathy were the moments where he had to convince Carrie that she was unloved, that her existence in its current state was wrong. No matter how far he had fallen since the tragedy at the windmill, Marvin was still looking at the face of his daughter when he uttered these unspeakable things. Her emotional and psychological turmoil in the aftermath of their study sessions always came close to getting a little too far under Marvin’s skin… but whenever he recalled how similar her face looked to Lina’s, the last shreds of fatherly instinct were replaced by ruthless resolve. 

Marvin had been diligently keeping up on removing her eyebrows, just to ensure that her face forever resembled Lina as much as it possibly could. They were nearly identical without the accursed bit of facial hair, Marvin heartlessly plucking them away from Carrie with his pair of tweezers despite her screams of protest. 

To bully her into submission, Marvin would hold a red-glass flower vase up to her face, showing Carrie her warped and misshapen reflection in the crappy lighting that surrounded them. 

“Do you see that?” he would say, forcing her to look upon the grisly deformities that he would convince her existed. “Look how ugly you are now. Nobody wants to see you like this.”

Carrie would cry and sob as her sense of self-worth got more and more crushed, but once Marvin could get her to keep her hands from covering her face, she would be compliant enough to let him pluck her eyebrows away. To let him remove part of her ‘disgusting qualities’.

He had used the same pair of tweezers on Michael Hammond a couple years ago, during his idiotic period of drunken frenzy. There were so many things wrong with choosing Daniel of all children, the poor boy merely being the first child in his sights after he set out to kidnap whoever he could in his inebriated state. The abundance of alcohol he had once used in desperate attempts to dull his constant pain had stripped him of all logical reasoning, and it was a miracle he hadn’t been identified by the boy. Ever since then, Marvin had carefully stayed away from the bottle; if he was going to pull this off, he needed to be sharp and strategic.

No more substances, no more wife, no more inhibiting emotion.

Letting his heart get too involved had already more than likely spawned a threat in the form of his nephew, Daniel Hammond. He never should have introduced the young man to the rebirthing concept, all it had probably done was create an enemy that had a better chance of dredging up his secrets. The deed had been done in a prolonged moment of weakness spawned from the fact that Marvin had unintentionally killed Michael. 

The parallel between the incident at the windmill and the car accident had been so gut wrenchingly obvious that it was as though Marvin was reliving Lina’s disappearance all over again- only this time, there was a child’s corpse lying right there in front of him. Seeing everyone’s devastation, being racked with old and new guilt, the idea that Marvin’s very existence spelled the death of innocent children… it had been too much for him. He had caved into a part of him that was inherently human, an empathetic nature taking over as he decided that he had to provide Daniel with the one avenue of hope that Marvin himself was clinging onto. 

But not anymore; no longer would he let his heart cloud his better judgment. He had a job to do and a job to finish. The universe had taken Lina away from him all those years ago, and now he would take her back from the universe at all costs.

Marvin would supplement these beliefs and strengthen his emotional detachment by viewing Carrie as a prison that Lina needed to be freed from. Carrie was merely a vessel, a shell, a covering. She was nothing but a facsimile of Lina. Lina was the one Marvin loved and Lina was the one he was doing all this for. It didn’t matter if Carrie hated him, it didn’t matter if she thought that everyone hated her. 

Afterall, by the end of all this she would no longer be Carrie. 

The plan had been going more or less as good as it could have. Carrie’s sense of identity was successfully being whittled away and replaced by the idyllic form of Lina that lived in Marvin’s mind. Carrie would have undoubtedly tried to escape by now, the select few early days of Marvin successfully convincing her to stay upon her own will having ended fast, the young girl now despising everything about the school. Thus, extensive cautionary measures had to be taken, such as tying her to the remaining classroom chairs or securely locking her designated closet from the outside. 

Sometimes Marvin feared he was broaching upon psychologically damaging her ‘beyond rebirthing’ as Tiara had warned him about; Carrie had virtually no freedom in life anymore, and what she did experience was focused upon creating a self-loathing within her and propagating her transition into a new identity. She had long since abandoned treating him as her ‘father,’ and instead appeared to view him as some sort of boogeyman, a monster from the shadows.

 But despite all of this, Carrie seemed to have a way of carrying on, a will to live that was admirable. It reminded Marvin even more of Lina, how the young girl managed to find a way to have fun in every scenario, a quality she carried with her right until the very end, a trait that had led to her tripping, falling, and resulting in her becoming… lost.

Carrie would often tiredly hum the tunes of the songs she had enjoyed back home as a means of comforting herself, which always reminded Marvin that he also needed to have the tune he would play during the rebirthing down perfectly. Whenever he wasn’t ‘studying’ with Carrie or tending to their continued survival, he would practice that melody on the piano he had once used to teach children how to play back when he had been a teacher. 

Marvin had created an entire little life for the two of them down in that school basement, albeit a dark and twisted life full of young tears and withered misery. As more time began to pass, and his time alone with Carrie passed the mark of multiple months, a rather obvious idea hit Marvin: he should rebirth Carrie on her birthday. 

That gave him plenty of time to ensure success, and it worked perfectly with the thematic nature of the ritualistic process as a whole. Tiara hadn’t specifically mentioned a birthdate requirement, but surely it would be nothing but a factor that would contribute to success.

November 12th. That was Carrie’s birthday. In a couple more months, it would become Lina’s new birthday. 

Now that he was thinking about it, Marvin’s body began to tingle with excitement. Strange jolts of unbridled anticipation raced through his body, nauseating his gut and triggering a feeling of lightness in his chest. Marvin could do nothing but lie on the dirtied floor of the abandoned school that had become his daughter’s prison of torment, the episodic waves of euphoria coursing through him during his lucid daydreams of Lina’s imminent return contrasting with the gentle, hopeless cries escaping from the closed doors of a dark closet.

2018

Tiara had escaped her digital ‘Quitter’s Room’ just to find herself locked within one of the various ‘ghost rooms’ that Paul’s family had set up on the second floor of the old school building.

Well, it was her family too. Although none of them really knew (or believed) that she had been reborn and shed away her previous identity of Belle, which in turn made her a literal family member, she was Anna’s adopted daughter. In her mind, that should make her family enough, but as Daniel or ‘Rainer’ would so crassly put it within his notes in the game of Petscop, she didn’t have a room in the Child Library because she wasn’t really a family member. 

Tiara still couldn’t understand how the person who had facilitated her rebirthing process didn’t see that it had worked. She was Tiara, and it pained her that she had to keep living life under the facade of Belle. At first, she had said nothing in order to protect Daniel from trouble as he had requested of her, but he had disappeared for nearly twenty years now. Tiara had tried bringing up the subject to her adoptive mother Anna once, only to be met with nearly frantic pleas to keep anything related to rebirthing to herself and never speak of it again. As Tiara got older, she began to piece some things together and realize what was really going on: the Mark and Hammond family had a lot of dark secrets that Anna was holding back like a floodgate, doing everything in her power to maintain the innocent ignorance of her biological son, Paul.

Poor Paul was a sweet and sensitive soul, and it really felt like he didn’t belong in the twisted past that his bloodline possessed, so Tiara complied with Anna’s demands for secrecy even when she was old enough to understand some of what was going on. For Paul’s sake, she continued living her life as Belle, despite the fact that she wholeheartedly believed she was Tiara. She had the privilege that not many other people did: she got to remember being born, emerging from the machine as a new person coming into the world. 

Tiara had eventually learned that Daniel made a version of Petscop specifically personalized for her, where her character was perpetually trapped within a room called the ‘Quitter’s Room.’ It took a while for Tiara to understand the why of many things, but with slight assistance from Anna, a woman named Jill had been secretly overseeing that console for years, constantly keeping the Petscop game running in hopes that they could one day figure out a way for her avatar to escape. This followed Tiara into her adult years, even after she had left home in pursuit of a college degree, Anna occasionally asking her if she had thought of any way to fix the current situation. 

Tiara honestly had no idea, she honestly thought it was just Daniel’s way of reminding her that the rebirthing had been a ‘failure,’ as he believed. There were many things about the entire scenario that Tiara didn’t understand: why was it so important to Jill that any sort of progression be made in the old game? Why was it imperative to Anna that Paul never know about the game’s existence?

Recently, things had begun to become a lot clearer. Paul had boasted about a new, ‘nonexistent’ game that he had discovered over the phone, and Petscop instantly raced to Tiara’s mind. She had feigned disbelief at first, not wanting to incur her stepmother’s wrath if she revealed the game to Paul if it wasn’t definitely what he was talking about… but then, he had started that YouTube channel to prove it to her. 

Things began to move fast ever since then.

Curious to see what other places Petscop possessed besides the Quitter’s Room, Tiara began to help Paul solve the various puzzles scattered around the game. When Paul had found the Quitter’s Room himself, entering a mirrored and reversed version of it, an important revelation was made: her avatar was forced to mimic the actions of Paul while he was in the room.

This had greatly interested Tiara, as it told her two things: somehow, the different versions and discs of Petscop that apparently existed were all connected, and Paul’s copy might be the key to her escape from the Quitter’s Room. For better or for worse, it had also greatly interested Anna and Jill. 

Tiara had been approached by Anna and was gently asked to participate in some sort of facility that she and Jill were starting in order to ‘finally put an end to all this Petscop madness.’ Tiara didn’t want to get involved with Jill and the shadier side of the family more than she had to, especially once Paul began talking about how they wanted to monitor and censor his videos, essentially taking over the channel he had started to document the Petscop investigation. Paul still didn’t understand the full extent of what was at play, and Tiara no longer had any clue what was or wasn’t being hidden from his knowledge anymore. The game of Petscop seemed to exist as a virtual void of secrets, being Daniel’s way of revealing everything he knew about the family, and Paul was getting deeper and deeper into the thick of it.

That’s when Anna revealed something to her that shifted her perspective: Anna said that she had been reborn herself, and similar to Tiara, had been keeping it a secret all these years. Anna, somewhere along the way, had become the returned version of her dead sister, a girl named Lina, and now she was doing all this in order to find her ex-husband, a man named Marvin who was a key figure in the events that led to two deaths and a kidnapping, and incarcerate him for his crimes against the family.

Lina had revived the company she once oversaw, a game-development studio from the 90s called Garalina in the upper level of an abandoned school building in order to discover all of the secrets hidden within Petscop, and ultimately entice Marvin to come find them by luring him through communication via the copy of Petscop that the enigmatic man apparently possessed. From there, they would ensure that he was captured so that he was unable to hurt any more children. 

What shocked Tiara was that Lina was okay with using Paul as a form of ‘bait’ in this conspiracy, after she had been obsessively protective of him for twenty-five years. Apparently, she believed that Marvin would be interested in rebirthing Paul, and that desire would be enough to prompt him to come looking for him. To ensure his safety, Lina and Jill had set up Paul in one of the ‘ghost rooms’ as well, the operation becoming a sort of large-scale trap for Marvin. 

Tiara wasn’t an idiot, and she had caught on to the fact that there seemed to be something more at play. It really seemed like the family was intent on not only capturing Marvin, but discovering some ‘truth’ the games of Petscop might hold. Whatever the true motivations of Jill and the reformed rag-tag team that represented the new Garalina , it was at least evident that they were obsessed with fully completing Petscop . All Paul and Tiara could do (Tiara didn’t think that Paul was even aware that she was trapped in a ghost room mere feet away from him) was play Petscop for hours on end, searching for clues and answers. 

Tiara had stumbled upon Marvin’s avatar relatively early and was initially quite unnerved that he could communicate with her so freely if he really was the dangerous madman that Lina and Jill made him out to be. Tiara had quickly decided that it was in her best interest to somewhat align herself with him in order to hopefully help accelerate the plan. What had really shaken her was how Marvin had instantly realized she was ‘Belle’ (even he didn’t believe she was Tiara); clearly, he and Daniel must have been partners in rebirthing to some extent. 

Whilst communicating with Marvin (who seemed to have his own agenda that involved progressing forward in the Petscop game…) Tiara soon figured out how to operate the dialogue table, and even a hidden texture editor that she occasionally used in attempts to subtly communicate with Paul through pink writing. She wasn’t exactly sure how much Paul had been getting out of it, but she had begun trying to ‘warn’ him, in a sense. 

She didn’t like where everything was going with this whole ‘family conspiracy’ and ‘Marvin agenda,’ and she was beginning to think it would be in Paul’s best interest to just turn the PlayStation off. To lose his progress and do what he could to walk away from all of this. But alas, Paul had not picked up on her inadvertent messages through tampering with the ‘Tool,’ and he had quickly become too deeply embedded with everything to escape, just like her.

It was ironic really; Paul had wanted to make sure that Jill wasn’t ‘calling her’ or harassing her. Little did he know Tiara had been down the rabbit hole for far longer than he had. 

After Paul was regularly coming face-to-face with Marvin (well, virtually), Marvin had introduced her to him as ‘Belle,’ which is what she believed finally got Paul to understand that he was playing the game with her. She had protested by clarifying that she was in fact, Tiara; whatever conclusion Paul would derive from that was no longer a concern for her. With all the revelations he was making through playing this game, it was time he figured out the truth of everything. Besides, Tiara was very tired of constantly pretending to be someone she wasn’t.

Currently, this was her life: navigating a complicated web of agendas whilst trying to understand how exactly she and her step-brother fit into it all. All the while being trapped in a doorless room by her own family, supposedly because it was ‘for the greater good.’ 

Tiara wasn’t so keen on being trapped and she had done her due diligence to discover where the ‘hidden door’ was located… she couldn’t open it from the inside, but she figured knowing exactly where it was could potentially be useful.  

Tiara just hoped that her and Paul could get on the other side of all this okay and put it behind them forever.

1997

The emergency had spiraled the Mark family into crisis. 

Anna was frantically doing everything in her power to find Carrie, or Marvin, or someone that might know where they were. She had enlisted Daniel’s mother to help with the search, who was emphatically against her brother and almost appeared to be on a quest for revenge; her mood semi-matched Daniel’s own at times.

The only difference was Daniel carried the unbearable weight of guilt on his shoulders. 

Anna had asked him to stay over at the house past 6PM specifically for this specific reason… but he had been so focused on Petscop, so absorbed with his digital creation against Marvin that he had missed him entirely…

Anna was far more forgiving and understanding than Daniel ever could be. She didn’t blame him for Carrie’s kidnapping, only her husband. But Daniel knew the truth. He was a useless sack of nothing, a keeper of secrets that were not his own, a holder of dark knowledge that did nothing but let more tragedies unfold around him. 

He had helped the family with their search, but wherever Marvin had gotten off to was elusive. Eventually, after a couple long weeks, the frenzy died down into sorrow. Anna was understandably an emotional wreck, and she was doing everything she could to prevent Paul from understanding what was going on with everyone. 

Daniel tortured himself by imagining what Marvin was doing or saying to Carrie; the poor girl was probably going to be past the point of no return when she got back from whatever chamber she was undoubtedly suffering in. 

During the following months, Daniel fully threw himself into his work on Petscop . He bled every bit of his guilt and rage into the virtual realm, draining every bit of fury towards Marvin into it. It gave Daniel some sort of sick satisfaction, creating a game that called Marvin out for his crimes in Marvin's own garage.

 One day, as he was once again surveying all of the dirty secrets he had dredged up on Marvin, a revelation hit him.

It was around five months after Carrie had been kidnapped, he was far too late to prevent the majority of the psychological damage undoubtedly done to Carrie, but he could perhaps still rescue her.

His grand realization was the school. Marvin’s old elementary school, and the one he used to teach at. It was run down, abandoned. Marvin knew it very well and probably had ways to get in. The place probably held an emotional attachment to him as well. Now that Daniel thought about it, it really did seem like the perfect place for Marvin to hide out with Carrie.

Daniel didn’t prepare much or take all that many precautionary measures; he would try to save Carrie, but if Marvin was crazy enough to kill, Daniel didn’t mind the idea of death all that much. 

Daniel’s mind was in a constant state of buzz as he pulled into the empty parking lot of the old school building, canvasing the outside to find a way that might allow him within its walls. Eventually he discovered that he could roughly force a pair of doors open, the fact that they weren’t locked by anything meaningful suggesting to him that Marvin was perhaps using them to get in and out. 

The school was dark and musty, thin and altered stream of light finding their way in through the dirtied or boarded up windows. Daniel slowly scoured the space, traveling its eerie empty halls and quietly ascending staircases that groaned with age. Every classroom, every corridor, all of them were coated with a distinct feeling of neglect. 

Daniel was becoming discouraged when he could not detect a single sound or other evidence of human life besides his own, when he discovered a door on the first level that he had not yet checked. He opened it to see that it revealed a dark staircase.

A dark staircase. 

Daniel was instantly reminded of the day he had tried to rebirth Tiara, and as he slowly descended each step, all he could imagine was getting to the bottom and turning to the right. There wasn’t a passage to the right at the bottom of this staircase, but there might as well have been, Daniel’s mind was practically hallucinating as his most shameful moment mentally replayed in vivid detail. 

Daniel continued down the dark corridor, stepping into a larger space that was largely empty… 

Save a piano, an isolation machine model, and human trash.

Daniel had done it, he had found it. Marvin’s hideout. The boogeyman’s lair. 

Soft whimpers that cut through Daniel's soul came from a locked door to the left of the room, his heart beating with apprehension as he became sure it was Carrie locked behind that door. 

Marvin was nowhere to be seen, and for a moment, Daniel was concerned he was hiding in the same space Carrie was trapped in. His stomach twisted as his heart threatened to overwork its pumping system, his hand trembling as he undid the lock and slowly twisted open the handle.

The dim light from the larger room sliced into the closet as the door opened wider. It landed on the small figure of Carrie, crouched alone in the back corner, looking small and pathetic as she clutched her knees to her chest. As the light fell onto her face, revealing the small splotches of dried blood that rested where her tiny eyebrows used to be, Daniel was paralyzed in shock and horror. 

During his prolonged momentary glitch, all working functions seemingly escaping his body, Carrie stood up and ran. 

Daniel was ashamed that he didn’t do anything, didn’t grab her, didn’t chase after her. He just let her run.

Another failure by the scumbag that was Daniel Hammond. 

He was just too overcome with raw understanding that he could do nothing to make any sort of move. 

Carrie’s face had looked almost like Michael’s when he had found him years ago.

Daniel couldn’t believe he didn’t figure it out earlier. 

Marvin was the one who had kidnapped Michael. Marvin was the one who had put such a damper on Michael’s last few months of life. Marvin was the shadow monster man. 

Michael must have been an early test of rebirthing, some sort of bizarre trial or something. The realization was both gut-wrenching and vindicating. Marvin had always been the villain. He had always been the sick monster from the shadows that let his mental illness hurt everyone around them, even those that were young and innocent. 

Unbridled rage surged through every fiber of Daniel’s being, igniting his veins with vengeful fire. As nearly all emotions did though, they soon looped back towards intense self-hatred. 

Daniel had done essentially the same thing to Belle. He had become that which he had always hated the most…

Daniel had also become the shadow monster man.

2000

Daniel approached the door to the Mark household, a gift box in his hand, a bottle of pills in his pocket. 

Tonight was big. 

His last bow. 

The final curtain.

As Daniel knocked on the door, his mind drifted to what it must have been like for Carrie when she had walked into her home for the first time in months.

Miraculously, back in 1997, Carrie had found her way home.

There had been a horrifying lull where Daniel thought he had released the little girl only for to get lost out in the wilds, almost rescued only to be damned by his ineptitude. But somehow, after being completely missing for nearly three days, Carrie bravely made it back to her house on November 12th, her birthday. Anna had even grief-strickenly prepared a birthday party for her… to her overjoyed astonishment, her little girl got to attend that party. 

The family was naturally absurdly curious as to where she was on November 11th, when her whereabouts had been completely and utterly unknown. Carrie refused to talk about anything that had transpired before arriving back home, so nobody could get any information from her. It was her own little mystery.

Marvin had been caught by police when he returned to the school, Daniel having tipped them off on the location. There was enough evidence of both Carrie’s and his presence in the school to convict him, and he got the, in Daniel’s mind, woefully small prison sentence of three years for parental kidnapping. 

Anna had become hyper paranoid about Marvin’s release, very concerned that he would return and kidnap Carrie. She wasn’t exactly in any sort of financial position to move away, so she did what Daniel thought would have been unthinkable for her: she sent Carrie off to live with some relatives a distance away, to keep her safe from her crazed father. 

Even Daniel had no idea who she now lived with, but he felt bad that the little girl had to endure yet another huge transition in her life. She had been predictably mentally scarred upon her return from Marvin’s captivity; she would cover her face when people looked at her, run into doors that were closed in her self-inflicted blindness. It was tragic what her father had done to her.

Just like it was tragic what Daniel had done to Belle. 

The parallel between Carrie and Belle had gotten Daniel thinking, and the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to make sure it happened. He felt that he owed an unpayable debt to Belle, and he felt that he needed to provide some sort of good deed for her before he got out of her hair forever. He had spent a while contemplating where the safest place to put her would be and… his former boss came to mind. So, he had prompted Anna to adopt her.

Anna was very concerned about how Paul would handle the sudden disappearance of his sister, as she had largely succeeded in convincing him that she had been of ‘visiting family’ for those months that she was gone. She found it to be a great idea to sort of ‘replace’ Carrie with Belle for Paul’s sake. Besides, Belle was a fan-favorite from the Petscop testing days, and Anna was used to having two children around the house. 

Long story short, Anna ended up successfully adopting Belle and quietly shipping Carrie off to live… wherever she was and whoever she was living with. Anna had been a teary wreck for a while after Carrie left, but Daniel felt as though the presence of Belle and the knowledge that Carrie was finally assuredly safe from Marvin was enough to set her on a path of partial healing.

None of them had come out of this in a position to ever be fully healed though, Daniel was sure of that much. Least of all him. His likeness to the dog kept resurfacing in his mind, how it had seemed like nothing by a mercy to put it down; and the dog had been innocent.

Daniel was hopelessly damaged and far from innocent. It was best for both himself and the world that his story came to an end.

But not without leaving a legacy. He would live on indefinitely through Petscop, as Rainer, the warrior of judgment. He had been giving a lot of thought to the nature of recordings lately; how, when he looked back at Michael's trial runs on the early generations of Petscop it was almost as though his brother was back with him, once again playing Petscop by his side. In that sense, recordings had the power to raise the dead. It was a scary thought.

In the wake of Marvin’s recent release from prison, Daniel had found a way to ensure that he received his own personalized edition of Petscop … after all, Daniel had started the entire dark part of the game with him in mind. He hoped the game served as a constant reminder to Marvin of his sins, forever haunting him just as the sins of the past haunted Daniel. 

In fact, Daniel had made a personalized copy of Petscop for every major player in this web: one for Marvin, one for Carrie, and one for Belle. That was in addition to the many other discs and generations that had exchanged hands over the years, of course, but these special versions he would make sure got to the right people. All except Carrie, who was off in some faraway land with a new life… hopefully, when he ‘gifted’ Anna with the version meant for Belle and the version meant for Carrie, she would do as he desired with them. After tonight, he would no longer be around to facilitate such things. 

Anna soon answered the door in response to his knocking, Daniel feeling the warmth of the indoors on the front of his skin contrast with the cold snowy weather outside. 

“Daniel?” Anna said in shock, her facial expression clearly indicating she had not been expecting him.

“Hi, Anna,” Daniel mumbled, stepping into the house.

It was decorated for Christmas, a large tree with all the typical trimming in the living room, wrapped presents placed beneath it. Anna always loved the holidays. There had been a time when Daniel did too. Now they just made him sick, like every other joyous thing. 

“Where have you been? Why have you been gone for such a long time?” Anna spoke the words Daniel had predicted her to say nearly to a tee. 

Daniel had all but disappeared off the face of the earth for the past couple of years, living in deserving solitude as he completed Petscop, his dark sarcophagus, his legacy.

Daniel said nothing, hardly able to look Anna in the eyes as he handed her the gift box he had been holding. Daniel knew she didn’t deserve anything else horrible, that she didn’t need any more traumatic events happening around her. Still, it felt right to do it here. In the home that housed the family that was the source of his eternal misery. 

“Is this a present?” Anna asked, her happy tone slicing what was left of Daniel’s capability to feel emotion. “Who is it for?”

“Can I use the bathroom?” Daniel mumbled.

“Of course,” Anna had the voice of a kind hostess, but her eyes betrayed the fact that she was confused as to the nature of Daniel’s sudden visit on December 25th of all days. 

Daniel turned and left her there, holding the box that contained the two Petscop discs. It was dreadful that a simple, mundane question like that would be his last words, but Daniel convinced himself that they weren’t, not really. 

His last words, his final goodbye to the Marks, those would be read in a note within Petscop. 

“**** you all, and **** me as well. Merry Christmas.”

A fitting farewell to this entire messed up family that had ruined his life. 

Daniel entered his tomb, closing the door behind him. It was a small, simple bathroom. Nothing special, besides the fact that it was placed in the former home of Marvin.

The Leskwoitzs, the Marks, the Hammonds. They were all tied together, all bonded through loss and suffering. 

Daniel was finally going to escape. 

He fished the bottle of pills from his deep jacket pockets and took a moment to take one final look at himself in the mirror.

There was no sudden change of heart, no instinctive will to live. Daniel hated the man that stared back at him.

In one smooth motion, Daniel poured the bottle of pills in his mouth, quickly swallowing them with some water from the sink. The specific combination would act quickly and painlessly.

Daniel gently nestled himself down in the bathtub, draping his right arm over the side and closing his eyes as he rested his neck against the wall. Thoughts became images in his mind as his life culminated into one final mental slideshow.

His mother and father, Anna and Garalina, Carrie and Belle, Marvin and Lina. And finally… his little brother, Michael. 

As darkness gradually overtook him, like a peaceful drift into sleep, Daniel’s pain finally ceased. All he left behind were his final gifts: the game of Petscop and his body in the bathtub.

2018

It was almost over; this long era of the dark cloud that had ominously hung over Anna for years was almost over.

She had done so much to keep Paul from knowing the truth, to protect his bubble of happiness. She had gaslit his young mind after she sent Carrie away, manipulated him into thinking Belle had always been his sister; she had explained away the five-month absence as Belle visiting other family faraway, and Paul was too young to grapple with the fact that Belle looked different than Carrie and had a different name than her when his mother was straight up telling him that this girl had always been his adopted sister.

Anna was initially worried that managing Belle would be a little more difficult than it ended up being, when it became clear that she believed her real identity was Tiara, a woman that was a relative of hers who had become distant due to her… general craziness. Looking at everything that was being revealed in the Petscop game, it became clear this whole idea stemmed from her husband and Daniel, who had enacted the rebirthing process on her, mentally disturbing the poor girl in the process. Luckily, Belle was smart and understood the value of complying to the rules of the adults around her… chief among them being that she kept all of this rebirthing nonsense away from Paul. 

Unfortunately, Anna had to entertain this idea of rebirthing in an attempt to gain Belle’s complete trust, and potentially lure her husband back to the school. Marvin wanted Lina so bad? Fine. She would parade herself as the girl he had really wanted to be with throughout their entire marriage. The plan was that if Belle believed she was Lina, then she would say something to Marvin over the connected Petscop realm that was shared between their consoles. 

This had sort of worked, but it soon became clear that the game output the controller inputs that should have spelt ‘Lina’ as ‘Boss.’ It was no doubt one of Daniel’s thematic callouts he inserted into the functions of the game… calling Lina the ‘boss,’ as in the final piece of the puzzle, the presiding force over everything else. Her death was what had started all of this after all, what sent Marvin into his downward spiral of insanity that eventually prompted Daniel to make this dark reflection of Petscop . 

What was a nuisance was all Marvin would see when he questioned her about who was behind the continued facilitation of Petscop, who was updating and changing the game, who was presiding over the YouTube channel… instead of seeing Lina, all Marvin would see was ‘Boss.’ He would probably guess it was his ex-wife revitalizing her old company of Garalina … and that wasn’t going to bring him home. 

That wasn’t going to force him into violating the restraining orders and attempting another abduction that would get him plenty of more time behind bars. The ultimate plan Anna and Jill had concocted was to lure Marvin back, getting him to believe ‘Lina’ was back through Belle believing that Anna, was in fact, her. In order to verify the rebirthing, Marvin would no doubt return and assault them in some fashion, which would be enough to put him away for a while this time. 

It had also become a strong obsession of Jill’s to discover everything hidden within Petscop ; it seemed to be a way for her to collect all the last remnants of her son who had killed himself years ago. Anna was fine with this, as at the moment it aligned with her interests, but Jill’s motivations seemed much more revenge-oriented. Jill hated her younger brother and blamed him for the deaths of both her children.

Jill’s suffering weighed heavily on Anna; Michael’s tragic death followed by Daniel’s suicide, both connected to her former husband. Not a day went by that Anna didn’t torture herself just thinking about it. Especially poor Daniel… she had never known how deeply he was fighting his own demons until that horrible Christmas when she found his dead body in her bathtub… and then later explored the videogame he had left for them. 

It also pained Anna that they were practically imprisoning Paul and Belle in a couple of the rooms they had set up the working Petscop consoles in. She understood the value of isolating them, putting them in a position where their only responsibility was to focus on beating Petscop, but still, Jill seemed a lot more okay with treating them like prisoners rather than members of the team. She had even insisted on the installment of a needles piano into every room, so they could practice their tune playing in preparation for a likely segment of Petscop that would require them to simulate a rebirthing. Jill had even used the uniquely capable Tarnacop Machines and her technical expertise to alter certain parts of Petscop , trying to ‘put Paul into Carrie’s shoes’ in order to play some psychological game that would result in discovering how to find every corner of the game.

All of it seemed far too close to the ‘sacrificing morality in pursuit of a goal’ mentality that Marvin had, Jill’s alterations of the game at times feeling like she was trying to rebirth Paul into Carrie; but at the same time, Anna also wanted answers.

She wanted to see if Petscop could somehow tell her where Carrie had gone on November 11th of 1997, she wanted to see if it could reveal to her some other unknown secrets about her family that Daniel had collected in his lifetime. That’s what he had become in the end; the keeper of secrets, only revealing them through the cryptic clues in his painstakingly well-designed game of Petscop. 

This was a lot to juggle for Anna, as she was once again getting used to being the ‘boss’ of what was like a miniature company operation at this point, and all the while they were continuing to upload to the public YouTube channel in order to satiate the appetites of all the curious ‘armchair investigators’ out there that would be tempted to look too far into this and cause more trouble for them. They needed to find out how to access the credits to convince the hundreds of thousands of viewers that the game of Petscop had been completed and documented, that it had been a fictional story experience the entire time, discouraging them to dig any deeper.

Anna could feel herself being stretched thin as a result of all of this, but every time they watched Belle pull off an interaction with Marvin, she felt a renewed sense of purpose. They were slowly moving closer to their goal, and at this point, Anna just wanted to let go of her constant anxiety that Marvin would find Carrie once again and do more horrible things to her. 

When she and Jill had come to realize that Marvin was training Paul for an in-game rebirthing simulation a difficult decision arose. Jill wanted to adjust plans and utilize Paul as bait; after all, he was Carrie’s twin brother, and perhaps Marvin would want to come find him. This was in exact opposition to everything Anna had done for Paul for over twenty years, putting him directly in his father’s sights and therefore in harm’s way. It was already terrifying enough that Paul had arrived at the realization that Marvin was indeed his father, and that he now understood that he had a missing twin sister. There would be a lot of talking Paul would want to do on the other side of all this. 

Jill was insistent that they let things play out. As the days passed it did seem that Marvin was getting more and more enticed by the idea of Paul, and Anna was keeping an eye on the situation as best she could. Now, the day she had been dreading for years arrived. 

Marvin burst into the second floor of the school like a wild animal, looking crazed and unshaven. Having complete disregard for the tech set up Garalina had running in the hallway, Marvin had flown over to Paul’s room without hesitation. 

None of them had heard a car, or even his footsteps coming up the stairs; however Marvin had gotten here, he had been stealthy. Anna also wasn’t yet sure how he had instantly known where Paul’s room was, but thankfully, when he collided with and banged on the door, it appeared as though something were against the door, barring him from entrance. 

Two men that were assisting Anna and Jill in this operation reacted fast, tackling Marvin down on the ground as he screamed in protest.

“I’m his father!” Marvin roared, as they struggled with him on the ground. “Paul, I’m your father! Come out! Paul!”

The two men that had taken down her husband dragged him back up onto his feet, each one holding one of his arms back as he struggled against him.

Marvin locked eyes with Anna, and she found an anger in his gaze that easily surpassed any of the looks he had given her during the many fights leading up to their divorce. 

“Put him in a room,” Jill said with an icy calm, penetrating Marvin with hateful glare as the two men dragged him into a ‘ghost room.’

“Where is she!” Marvin was now bellowing as he was thrown into the room, the door quickly shut and locked as he stumbled onto the ground. “Where is Carrie!”

Marvin yelled and screamed some more, pounding against the wall, the intensity of his voice sending shivers down Anna’s spine. It had been years since she had last seen her husband and encountering him like this was more than enough to send her to a state of quivering. 

“Marvin, you sick son of a *****,” Jill shouted to the door that Marvin was trapped behind, the tenacity in her voice surpassing what seemed natural for her age. “We have you, you hear me? You’re done. Now, if you want us to prolong the inevitable a little, to hold off on alerting the police on your little outburst here… you’ll tell us exactly where the console you run Petscop on is. And you’ll help us finish the damn thing once and for all.”

“Wait, what?” Anna began to protest, caught off guard. 

This hadn’t been part of the plan.

“We are finishing what we started,” Jill said firmly. “And I think Daniel made the game with the intention that Marvin and Carrie, or Paul as it turns out, are needed to beat it. We need one-thousand pieces to activate the machine beyond the school stairway? It’s only possible for a single player to collect five-hundred. Two people are needed. So, Marvin, where is it? Tell us, and you get to play your little game a bit longer.”

Apparently, Marvin had been playing in a car with tinted windows just a bit aways from the school building, having earlier guessed that’s where Paul was being kept, and ready to strike the moment he discovered what room he was in. They were able to successfully retrieve the console and keep it running, carefully giving it to Marvin in his ‘ghost-room.’ From there, Marvin was to pick up where he left off and help Paul and Belle beat the game. 

Anna could barely breathe as the time slowly passed, starved by anticipation to view the recordings of what was transpiring in Petscop , to see if they could really find the ending after all these years. After a period of time that somehow felt simultaneously as though it took forever and happened in a flash, Marvin could be heard through the walls, shouting obscenities. 

“****! Paul!” Anna heard Marvin’s muffled voice as he fell into a fit of rage. “****, ****, ****!”

Whatever was going on in Petscop was not to Marvin’s liking, and Anna instinctively felt as though that were a good thing. 

A strange reaction fell over her as she stood in the center of the school hallway, surrounded by computer terminals and Tarnacop Machines, hearing the shouts of Marvin and the stunned silence of the former Garalina employees and family members that had agreed to participate in this plot. 

It was in that moment that Anna truly realized how insane this conspiracy had gotten; within the classrooms of an abandoned school, she and her sister in-law along with a sort of ‘revival’ of the Garalina company had imprisoned three of her family members of various relation and were forcing them to complete a video game created by her nephew who had spent his final days gathering their secrets. Anna’s goal was to send her ex-husband back to jail, and Jill’s goal was to see everything her deceased son had hidden within his video game.

The family was nowhere near back together, but certainly, whether they were here or not, whether they were alive or dead, everyone of their presences could be felt in the air.

Most of all, the girl who all of this had revolved around since the very beginning; in some strange, existential way, Anna felt as though they were all being looked down on with pity by her sister, Lina Leskowitz.

And Now:

The most terrifying moment in Paul’s life was definitely the few minutes of panic that overwhelmed him after he stupidly revealed his exact location to his father, someone that everything about Petscop and his current scenario screamed was a dangerous madman. Belle, or whoever was on the other side of that Tiara avatar, had saved him with a brief message that flashed across his screen: ‘push bed against hidden door,’ written in the pink style of the texture editor that she had previously shown him. 

Paul had acted fast, shoving his bed where the drawn arrow on the screen had shown him just in time; Marvin had flown into the door on the other side with great force a mere second later, shouting at him and relentlessly pounding it. A struggle ensued, and before Paul could fully come to terms with what was happening, he was being instructed by Jill to return to Petscop and finish the game alongside Marvin. 

As was the case ever since he gotten himself wrapped up in this family conspiracy, Paul couldn’t even pretend to understand everything that was going on. Thus, he was forced to comply.

Everything about Petscop had become starkly unsettling now. The entire digital rendition of the school environment, where he and his father Marvin did the most interacting, was straight up horrifying in atmosphere, but that was certainly the least contributing factor to the sheer existential crisis Paul had been going through over the past few weeks. So many world-shattering revelations about himself and his family had been uncovered so quickly that Paul could barely process it all, barely comprehend what it all meant for him in the bigger picture. 

What he did know was that this cycle needed to come to an end. Paul openly admitted to the fact that he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but through playing Petscop it had become abundantly clear that his family was trapped in a cycle of generational tragedy. 

It had to come to an end, for all of their sakes.

So, when Paul was finally confronted with the machine beyond the school’s basement stairway, when he put the in-game model of his lost sister Carrie into the machine, Paul didn’t play the melody that Marvin had spent so long teaching him in other areas of the game.

It was time for something new; time to close the loop.

Paul played his own tune, one that he had created using the piano in his room. It was an upbeat and hopeful tune in his opinion, representing the new day he was trying to summon for the family. 

Marvin had been livid about this, cursing at him multiple times through the in-game dialogue system, and Paul could swear he heard him shouting from somewhere else in the physical building. A part of Paul had a mind to wonder exactly what Marvin thought would happen that would be better for him if Paul played the melody he had been instructed to play… maybe Marvin was after some specific ending it would trigger, or some perceived knowledge that the game might give him as a reward.

The machine rotated to reveal that the model of Carrie had been turned into a yellow and red striped egg, with a description that prompted Paul to put it somewhere safe. For once, Paul’s puzzle-solving skills were on high alert; he supposed he had both Petscop and Belle to thank for teaching him the ways of critical thinking. 

Marvin’s avatar walked away, while the Belle/Tiara avatar stayed behind during Paul’s next course of action; he wasn’t exactly sure what was running through either of their minds at the moment, as all he was focused on was completing his goal.

He brought the egg over to a locked school locker he had encountered a while ago, inserting the combination that Belle/Tiara had used the texture editor to write out on a chalkboard just a few minutes before. Upon opening the locker, it was revealed that a purple egg was already inside, along with something called a ‘new life letter,’ supposedly written from a mother to a girl named Tiara Leskowitz. 

Paul placed his egg alongside it, then exited the school building, approaching the bench that awaited him outside of it in the endless dark void that the game called the ‘Newmaker Plane’. 

Unexpectedly, the game brightened, the dark surroundings becoming a brilliant light-blue, a flash of pure white transitioning into a loading screen of an open garage. Paul was then kicking back to the start-up screen. A jolt of… something coursed through Paul. He couldn’t quite tell if it was joy, fear, triumph, or confusion, all his emotions were far too jumbled. 

Praying that the strange occurrence was a good sign, Paul tentatively entered his save file once again.

He found his avatar standing amidst the now brightly lit Newmaker Plane. Hoping against hope that this meant what he thought it did, Paul triggered the pause menu then navigated to the section called the ‘Book of Baby Names,’ something he couldn’t access ever before but he was sure contained the credits. 

To his pure elation, it worked, and the credits to Petscop began to roll across the screen.

Tears sprung into his eyes as relief flooded his body. It was over. After nearly two years, his quest to beat Petscop was complete. He would’ve never guessed that when he discovered this game it would branch into a personal quest to uncover the dark secrets of his family, but somehow, he already knew he was a better person for it. 

He suspected that this moment marked a new day, not only for him, but for everyone. 

For Belle, for his mother, for his biological sister. 

When the credits finished rolling, ending with a birthday message from his mother to a kid named Michael Hammond, Paul found himself returned to the light-blue void. He could see something at the top of his screen, and he walked his character forward to check it out. 

Coming into view was a bench, no longer the one placed outside of and facing away from the school building, but a bench facing towards a window that revealed a look into a special place that Paul had found in the in-game Child Library what felt ages ago: Lina’s room, a light gray space that was set up for a birthday party.

Belle’s/Tiara’s character stood to the side of the bench, facing him with what he could only assume was expectancy. 

On the bench, looking through the window, was a large character model with short dark hair and a billowy pink dress. She sat beside a single yellow pinwheel, rotating in the digital breeze. 

Paul felt a deeply satisfying calm settle over him as he surveyed the scene. 

Petscop may be complete, but his journey wasn’t. He still had the outside world to face, a family to confront, and a lost sister to find. He didn’t dread the task that was left before him, though. He no longer felt scared of or trapped by the unknown; not every mystery was solved, but that was okay. He and Belle could investigate all this together, maybe Carrie could even join them. 

The events surrounding his family’s past may be horrible, but in this moment, Paul was overcome by a burning optimism that the future was hopeful. 

The cycle of grief could end, the loop of suffering could close. And it all started with Paul. 

After all, as Petscop had told him, he was the Newmaker.