Taliesin93
Condemned
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NEET Noir, by Taliesin93
- Thread starter Taliesin93
- Start date
Taliesin93
Condemned
NEET Noir 01
I knew the dame would be trouble as soon as I saw her avatar come up on my Patreon page. There hadn't been many takers - in fact, before now, there were no takers - for my online investigative service. Nevertheless, I always kept a tab open just in case. This was that case. I finished up my business at Xvideos and closed every tab but the Patreon. The whitish/grey webpage was the sole source of light in the basement. It filled up the place with a soft glare, illuminating my working space, leaving the rest in total blackness. The glow just faintly kissed the glass case I had for my mint condition He-Man action figures. All I had on were some jean shorts and a fedora.
Any way the dame only communicated in text, which was exactly how I liked it. Don’t like webcams; people don't need to see your face, just your avatar. You can find out a lot about a person through their avatar, their screen name. Her avatar was Fifi La Fume, the skunk from Tiny Toons, and she called herself AvaHayworth69. The dame wanted me to find an old main squeeze of hers, SnoopyDoo86, who had ghosted her and everyone else online about a month ago. They had known each other since forever, going back to the Yahoo Groups days. Christ, I thought, that is even older than Myspace. She had saved what she could of his digital footprint and sent it to me in an attachment through e-mail.
So, I went through the attachment. SnoopyDoo86 had been in the furry fandom for as long as some Tik Tok teens have been alive. While there were some mainstream places – Myspace, Facebook, Deviant Art, Twitter and Yahoo Groups, like I said – most of the meatier stuff was on furry specialty sites, some of them only accessible on the Wayback Machine. What I found was a mess of broken links and broken jpegs, broken lives and broken people. See this wasn’t just an average, ordinary furry. The man was a borderline Otherkin, saw himself more as a dog than a human being. A cartoon dog at that. In meat-space he was an accountant, that explains why he could shill out at least four grand for a custom-made fur suit -- a Snoopy inspired head, Scooby Doo from the neck down. That was his avatar, and, as far as he was concerned, his real face; that human on LinkedIn - Samuel Wordsworth - that was just a costume.
SnoopyDoo86 had been the moderator and/or admin for a bunch of furry accounts. There is a lot of drama in the furry fandom, a lot of toxicity. Might seem strange at first – these are supposed to be the gentle, accepting people, right? Maybe once, but the internet did to them what it does to every fandom -- and to everything, I guess - warp it. This World Wide Web we have weaved catches people like flies, petrifies them, forces them to wait for the spider. Even the most gentle, accepting of people can only handle so much. You stare into that darkness long enough, it starts to envelop you, starts to go through you and soon you become…
The light comes on.
Steven, I need you to take out the trash.
Uh, Mom, I’m on a case right now, I got my first patreon commission to investigate an internet mystery.
You’ll be investigating the mystery of the back of my hand if you don’t come up here and take out the garbage and put it to the curb. Besides, you need to get out, do a little exercise.
Part 2
I paced back and forth in the basement. The fluorescent ceiling lamp bathed my “office” in a bright yellowish-white glow. I was perturbed by the most basic question of what I had been hired to investigate – who would want to bump off SnoopyDoo86? Who would want to kill a furry? That’s a stupid question, I answered myself. Who wouldn’t want to kill a furry? Furries are at the absolute bottom of the internet fandom food chain. They are the mud-sill that holds everybody else up. Even Rick and Morty fans hate them. Could my client’s friend have been the victim of a random hate crime? It was worth checking out.
I switched off the light, and the basement was black again. I took a deep vape and exhaled. The smoke reflected ever so slightly the light from my monitor. I looked through AvaHayworth69’s attachment. One of SnoopyDoo86s last hang outs was a subreddit, r/furdom. It was invitation only. So, I contacted AvaHayworth69 and she got me a temporary pass. I immediately went to the monthly discussion thread.
“Does anyone here know anything about what happened to SnoopyDoo86?”
“Who wants to know?” a furry with a weasel avatar responded. On closer inspection I recognized it as Cheasel T. Weasel, from Foodfight! His humble screen name was GeorgeWashingtonWeasel.
“I’m a professional internet detective. And I've been hired to find out what happened to him. Did he have any enemies? Maybe someone in meat space didn’t take too well to his predilections...”
“Who hired ya?” the weasel responded, ignoring my question.
“Can’t say, that’s considered professional - client privilege.” I had no idea if that was true, either online or IRL but it didn’t matter so long as they thought it was real.
“It was AvaHayworth69, wasn’t it?”
“Can’t confirm or deny”
“Why don’t she just ask us herself, if she wants to know where SnoopyDoo is?”
“You’ll have to ask her.” Then a mod chimed in.
“The mans a guest, weasel. Let’s treat him like one.” The mod had a hippo avatar and called himself TheHungryOne. “SnoopyDoo86 was a mod here until about a month ago. Before he left, he had gotten some push back because he wanted to let the Bronies into the club; not just furries who are also Bronies, mind you, but any of them.”
“Bronies aren’t just a subset of furries?”
“No” GeorgeWashingtonWeasel interjected “Bronies are fans of only one franchise, only one generation at that. They might cosplay a little, but they don’t put in the time and effort we do, full body suits, that kinda thing. And now with MLP: FIM cancelled, they’ll just drift away. They might look like us, but they aren’t us. Not really.”
“There are many shades of being a furry,” TheHungryOne interjected. “We welcome scalies, featheries, casuals, lifestylers. But not everyone who wishes to get in can.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Some people just want to come here and gawk at us like freaks. They might say they are part of the fandom, but they’re really just trolls. Fake fans. Some are agent provocateurs, goons who just want to start problems, like what happened at Rainfurrest. Then some are just perverts. We have to keep them out. Make sure the undesirables don’t spoil the fun for the legitimate fans. All 18+ furries who just want to be furries, real furries, are welcome here, of course.”
“What about under-18s?” I didn’t get a response right away. I think the hippo and the weasel were DMing each other. Then, finally...
“Sure, there are teenage furs. Most of us got our start in the fandom in high school. But you have to be careful with our reputation. Kids being what they are, parents being who they are… and us being ... well, us it doesn’t always end well.”
“Then you got cases like RainbowDash2002,” another redditor interjected. It was a dame going by Mrs.Wolverine, and she had the appropriate avatar – a she-wolf protecting her pups.
“What happened with RainbowDash2002?”
“He was that kid who SnoopyDoo took under his wing. Guiding him through, you know, the same awkward experiences he did in Middle School, learning that you are a furry, finding your fursona, the community...,” Mrs.Wolverine was blocked without being able to finish her message.
“I think we have had enough time to talk things over. It’s time for our guest to leave.” TheHungryOne interjected.
“But I still haven’t learned what happened to SnoopyDoo”
“You’ve learned enough.” And I was blocked from the subreddit.
Back to square one. I had a little more information, but what did it all add up to? I knew SnoopyDoo86 was a long-time furry mod. I knew he was more open to letting Bronies in than other factions. But he had been in the fandom for decades - surely a mod would handle lots of drama, lots of controversies. Plenty of times when he could be bumped off, or bump himself off, why now? Then there was the kid – RainbowDash2002. Whatever his connection to Snoopy, it was enough for his former colleagues to block any mention of it. Sometimes an empty glass tells you more than a full one. It tells you someone’s been drinking here and is gone, someone who didn’t take his cup with him, someone… –
Steven, I need you to help me get some stuff out of the car. I just came home from Wal-Mart.
All right Mom, just let me finish up here, so I don’t lose any evidence.
Evidence? For what?
I told you Mom, I’m on a case, for my Patreon funded detective service.
Whatever Steven. I need you to take in the Cokes.
Part 3
I started going over the old reddit threads AvaHayworth69 sent me. One name stood out above the rest, JessicaRabbitRabbit. The thread listings were bare bones - all the pictures and text deleted, links 404, but the headings were always something sexual – “F4A yiff”, “Rabbit [f] hopping on your lap”, “I’m not bad, I just Yiff that way,” etc. Of course, Jessica Rabbit had been Rule34ed to hell and back, same as Chel and Slave Leia, but SnoopyDoo86 was a furry, why would he have a human waifu? Must be an anthro furry. I looked into it and, sure enough, there was an ero-cosplayer named JessicaRabbitRabbit and her shtick was that she cosplayed as Jessica with rabbit attributes – bunny ears, a cotton tail, some make up and whiskers, a glittery red Playboy Bunny suit. Appropriate. Her Onlyfans account was easily found on reddit, so I plugged my card numbers in and waited for the next livestream.
Finally, she came on. It’s one thing to see a dame like that in a thumb nail, quite another to see it live. Yeah, she was wearing the same Jessica-as-a-slightly-anthro-rabbit get up, but there was something else. Something in the way she moved. An energy. I can’t describe it. Anyway, she comes out on her little “stage” and lip-syncs the famous “Why don’t you do right” song while suggestively caressing the microphones long rod and head. The live chat is filling up with the usual creepiness. The video description invited it. “What would you do with this piece of rabbit meat? Please be as lewd and lascivious as possible!” Her commenters took her up on it. But I put in a very professional question-
“Do you know anything about SnoopyDoo86 or RainbowDash2002” When she glanced over to the live chat her face crumpled a bit. Was it one of the lewd comments that crossed a line, or was it my question? I’d have to wait to find out.
As soon as the song ended, she began the usual YouTube spiel. “All right ladies and gents. That will be enough for today. Thank you for your views, please like and subscribe, a special shout out to my patrons…” Didn’t look like I would get anything here, so I started to close the page and leave, but then I got a text.
“Why are you asking about SnoopyDoo86?”
“I’m a private dick and I want to know what happened.”
“Yes, well, most of my subs are private dicks – but do you mean you’re a detective, a private investigator?"
“Yes, I am”
“Can we talk on Skype?”
“Don’t like to show my face”
“I do.” Moments later we set up a Skype call. I could see her video feed, but she could only see my avatar. She was leaning next to a mirror, taking off her make up. “I knew Snoopy. He had been on my Onlyfans for years.”
“Ever communicate?”
“All the time.” She bent over her counter to take off her ears and wash her face. I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but she stuck up her rear end right at me. Probably was. “In this profession you get to know people, detective. Really know them. When they are showing you their deepest, most uninhibited, primal, one might almost say animalistic urges and kinks. And no bullshit about a relationship, either; no inhibitions on our side” She took off her top and turned to me. “Do you like my tits detective? I like it when men look at my tits.”
“They’re nice. But right now, I’m on a case.” She turned, leaving her naked upper back to me. “So what did you learn about SnoopyDoo86?"
“He liked girls, detective – women. And he liked them over 18.” Now it was my turn to crumple my face; this lady doeth protest too much, and so soon too. “He was never into things like schoolgirl uniforms, ageplay, ddlg, lolis...anything like that.”
“Maybe he just never brought it up with you"
“Listen – the oldest profession isn’t just about selling your body, or pics or livestreams. Its about being a therapist. I knew SnoopyDoo86 inside and out. Over years and years, he shared with me all of his desires, everything that turned him on. Every hidden thing he wouldn't reveal out in meat space. I knew what wouldn't turn him on and what did. If anything, he was more of a MILF guy... a cougar hunter, ” she laughed. "He wanted to lay in my lap as a stroked his hair and he called me mommy..."
“I get it - he went for the older stuff" I tried to think of a clever metaphor. "He went for the older stuff...in the same way a rabbit goes for carrots and... ignored the jailbaity stuff the way a rabbit ignores tomatoes,” She smiled back to me.
“A tortured analogy, if ever there was one, but accurate, I guess”
“So, what is all of this about the kid, RainbowDash2002? And why are you so insistent that Snoopy wasn’t a pedo?” She turned her face to me.
“Because he wasn’t. RainbowDash2002 was both a male and under-18. I know he would never be interested in him sexually. But people… people like to twist things... innocent things around for their own salacious reasons.”
“And what innocent things were ‘twisted’?”
“RainbowDash2002 was a young Bronie -furry. Snoopy took a shine to the boy. It was almost like a father-son relationship.”
“And this began when?”
“A few years ago.”
“And he told you about this even though it didn't have anything to do with your...professional relationship?”
“You would be surprised about how much clients tell you about their life. Like I said, being a sex worker is almost like being a therapist.”
“What was your last interaction with him?”
“’Bout a month ago. He told me he was finally going to meet RainbowDash2002 in meat space. I tried to tell him that that was a bad idea. Could be a Chris Hansen type sting operation. Never meet under-18s in meat space. And after that he just disappeared. All his social media, e-mail accounts, like he never existed. So, of course, everyone comes to the same conclusion – he was a predator and the police got him when he made contact with the kid IRL. But I know that's not what happened.” Her eyes looked directly into the camera; she gave a no-nonsense, I am not kidding look. “Because he didn’t close all of his accounts. He still has his LinkedIn page. Samuel Wordsworth is still very much alive and in the banking business.”
“You know his real name?”
“I know his other identity. Also, I know the banking business. I’d know the consequences if a man in that position was caught in a situation like that. I have an MBA and used to work at a bank. If a scandal like this happened, I'd know about it.”
“You used to work at a bank, and now you're on Onlyfans?”
“What can I say, this pays better and its more fun.” She through a towel over herself.
“Now, if you would please, detective, I have to take a shower. You’re welcome to watch it on livestream.”
“You put on another show in the shower?”
“No, it’s just my regular shower, but I thought I could make a few extra bucks by putting a camera in my bathroom and streaming it."
Taliesin93
Condemned
Part 4
I ordered some Ramen noodles and Mountain Dew from Grubhub and sat under my neon “Restaurant at the End of the Universe” sign at the other end of the basement. I like my Dew on the rocks, so I got out an orange commemorative He-Man glass and put some ice in it. As the soda bubbled up to the top, I held it up to the sign and the strange brew of neon, glass, ice and Mountain Dew gave off a weird orange/bronze glow. Through this lens, the room looked the same, but different. The same lay out, the same furniture and crap, yet seeing through other eyes makes even the most familiar setting alien.
I got back to my desk across the room, and ruminated on my case. The more I knew, the less I understood. I kept going over what I had so far: the package AvaHayworth69 had sent me; the Reddit thread from r/furdom; saved Skype conversation with JessicaRabbitRabbit. It seemed as if the answers to my questions were right in front of me, staring in my face, obvious to all who had eyes to see. I guess I didn’t have those eyes.
So SnoopyDoo86 was big in the furry community until about a month ago when all his accounts disappeared. From Ava’s package, I could trace his online presence in the fandom back a decade and a half and, frankly, it was unremarkable. Some pushback lately for letting the bronies in, but it’s not like he hadn’t gotten push back before. It’s the goddamn Internet, for Christ sake. You get push back all the time. Then there’s the kid, RainbowDash2002. How does he fit in? I kept looking through the package. This was all his online furry activity that Ava sent me…. this was all the online… furry activity…all of it that she could find…and then only parts she had decided to send me.
I looked again through the index of what was in the package and tried to locate something outside the fandom. All I could find was an old LinkedIn page three months old. Jessica said he still kept his LinkedIn and, sure enough, it was still online. Online, and had been updated just two weeks ago with a link to a Yelp page. I checked it out and it had a review of his, or rather, Samuel Wordsworth’s, work as an accountant. It was a three-star review of a seminar Wordsworth gave at a meeting in Nashville a month ago. The Yelp page gave a meatspace address for his office in Chattanooga – Google Maps link and everything. Handy old Google Maps showed me the place from street view. Just a normal little office in an outdoor mall, right next to a dentist office and a Subway.
Wordsworth and Partners Accounting Firm, LLC
1716 Cross St, Chattanooga, TN 37416
Open: 9AM-5PM (423) – 555 – 6190
All the Google reviews were pretty standard. Four star rating. And the same name was still printed in the window, as best as I could see. I leaned back in my chair. If a prominent banker or accountant – I really didn’t know the difference – had been busted on a pedophilia charge, wouldn’t there be news articles about it? I used my best Google Fu to see what I could find. And what I found was…nothing. Nothing from local newspapers or TV stations. Tried looking through Twitter, YouTube, even Bing. There were a couple of sex crime busts in the East Tennessee and Nashville area, but nothing about a man named Wordsworth. Maybe he went out of state? There are a lot of databases for sex offenders or people who have been arrested, but the last Samuel Wordsworth I could find was in California, and he died seven years ago.
JessicaRabbittRabbitt was right. I don’t know if was a case of absence of evidence or evidence of absence, but she was right. Samuel Wordsworth had not been arrested on a morals charge. But the people at the reddit club didn’t know that – all they knew was that SnoopyDoo86 disappeared when he went to meet RainbowDash2002. Must've not known his real name, so they assumed Snoopy had been caught with a minor.
So where would an older, professional man be on the internet? Facebook, of course. Looked up his name and there were a couple of dozen Samuel Wordsworths, and whatdayaknow, one was an accountant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. This was the first time I had actually seen a picture of the guy – the LinkedIn, Google and Yelp pages didn’t have one. He appeared to be a man in his late 40s, balding, wearing a light brown suit and black tie. According to the site, he had a BA from East Tennessee State University and an MBA from the University of Tennessee at Nashville. He was married with one son who went to Red Bank High. About to graduate this May. There were some vacation photos and vids, some posts about the Tennessee Titans and the East Tennessee State Buccaneers football team, and that was it. Reading through all this you would never have guessed that he was a furry.
Of course, that was only one way of looking at it. I mean, sure, these two shared the same body in meat-space, they were legally one individual, but in a more profound sense Samuel Wordsworth and SnoopyDoo86 were two very different people. And only one of them was still alive.
Part 5
I laid back in the water and took a whiff of my vape. The bathtub was showered in red from my curtain. It was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle curtain - red for Raphael. All the tiles and plastic in the bath were white, so it was as if I was bathing in a soft ruby glow. Back in the seventies they had these things called “isolation tanks”. New Agers would pay thousands of dollars to lie in a darkened tank with some water and Epson salt. The experience was supposed to produce … I dunno enlightenment or something. You can get the same experience in a bathtub, of course, but that wouldn’t be nearly as expensive. Or as trendy.
I thought over my case. My case. It was AvaHayworth69s case. For some reason she had paid me serious dough - 200 bitcoin per day, plus expenses - to find SnoopyDoo86. Now I knew where he was. It had been easy to track him down just from the LinkedIn profile she herself had sent me. I took another whiff of my vape. Too easy. Why did the dame hire me in the first place, when she could find out what happened with just a few Google searches?
I exhaled. My vape materialized as little red pebbles shooting through the aether. No, she couldn't. She – we - knew what had happened to Samuel Wordsworth. He was alive and well and working as an accountant in Chattanooga, TN. SnoopyDoo86, on the other hand, had disappeared entirely. He disappeared “about a month ago” as my sources were found of saying, when he met Rainbowdash2002 in meat space. One month ago...
I dried myself off, put on my fedora and jeans, and got back to the computer. I looked up Wordsworth’s Yelp profile and read carefully:
Mr. Wordsworth was very professional when he appeared at the Nashville Agile Alliance conference. His seminar on hidden tax deductions helped my business a great deal, as was his advice on avoiding the death tax by turning part of my inheritance over to my spouse. After his PowerPoint presentation he was good enough to speak with me personally about navigating Tennessee’s tax and incorporation laws. Likely will not be using his actual firm – I am based in Memphis and he works in Chattanooga, but do recommend.
About as plain a recommendation as you can get. Like something you would hear on a commercial. Well, what do expect would go on at an accountants convention, people cosplaying as W-2 forms? A brief smirk appeared, then left my face as an idea ricocheted around my brain, a series of associations that led inexorably to the same conclusion. Convention. Cosplaying. Furries. “About a month ago”. Everything aligned all too well.
I began to see what I could find out about cons in Tennessee. Furcons. There used to be an annual event in Nashville, but they had been exiled to Alabama. Likewise, the Memphis con to Olive Branch, Miss. Ironically, the Chattanooga con was still around and held the same week Wordsworth would be in Nashville. Alright, what about meet-ups, house parties, smaller scale events? Nothing. There were no furry events in Middle Tennessee during the appropriate time frame. None that had an internet presence.
Could he have met Rainbowdash2002 in Nashville privately? Meeting a minor in meatspace – at least not at a public event like a con - is a big no-no online, especially in the fandom. Even if it was completely innocent people had a tendency to “twist” things as JessicaRabbitRabbit said. If he had done that it would have led to all kinds of drama. I sat back in my chair. What do you think this case is, if not drama?
So that brought me back to AvaHayworth69. Perhaps if I started with her and worked my way backward I might be able to find something. Something maybe even she herself didn’t see. She had a barebones presence online – Wikifur, DeviantArt, Furaffinity and a few other places. She was a furry writer and artist, but mostly just a fan. She contributed only about two dozen items to DA. I didn’t read any of her stories, but her pics appeared innocuous enough. None of them were even listed as mature.
As for who she was in meat space, that was more mysterious. Didn’t give a powerword - smart move. From her profile descriptions I gleaned that she worked for the state government in Lexington, Kentucky, was an executive member of the Kentucky Anthro Society and helped organize the annual convention in Lexington. It was the only con in the state. I took some photos she had of her with SnoopyDoo86 in the package and started doing Google Reverse image searches. It wasn’t long until I found them again, but with a new context. She had neglected to say that each one of them had been at the Chattanooga furcon. There was one for each year, except this one.
So, that’s it. She became concerned when he was a no-show at the annual con. If she tried to contact him online through any of his old social media accounts, they were gone. If she knew his LinkedIn, why didn’t she just call him on the regular number? Or just use his Facebook? Those were Samuel Wordsworths accounts, his numbers. He and Snoopydoo86 were two different people, I reminded myself. AvaHayworth69 was Snoopydoo86’s friend and Samuel Wordsworth had no use for her. Any message she would leave was likely deleted, any call ignored. One day he just ghosted her and the whole furry community. And it was at the same time that he went to Nashville for the conference, which was at the same time he met with Rainbowdash2002.
And yet, there was nothing in Middle Tennessee during that whole period. If he met him in private, there was no evidence. No cons, no meet ups, no house parties. No furry events at all… Bronies aren’t furries. Bronies aren’t furries. It was a revelation that had been sitting in front of me this whole time – I was looking only where I expected to find my goal. I hurriedly started Googling to find a bronycon anywhere in Middle Tennessee in the last month. Nada. The fandom was dying and couldn’t support conventions. Maybe a local meet up? It was worth a shot. And whatdoyaknow – there was a small brony meet up the very weekend Wordsworth was the seminar. And it was held in the next hotel over from where Agile Alliance was held. I clicked on the home page and could not believe what I was seeing – it was a jpeg photo that showed people sitting around a table under a huge banner – “Happy 18th birthday Rainbowdash 2002”
Part 6
A purple haze filled the room as I pulled up Ponybooru, the biggest MLP imageboard in the world. What I saw there disgusted me, yet did not surprise me – the site was almost entirely hard core pornography or Nazi memes. Shook my head. My. Little. Pony. Friendship is Magic. This was the death rattle of the brony fandom, dying as it was born – an absurdity. Yet another thing warped by the internet.
The net ain’t a place for kids, but they’re all over the damned place. From the moment Mom puts a tablet in the cradle till you stream your 18th birthday on twitch. Whether you’re at school, home, in your car or laying on bed, you are always swimming in this giant pool of information. Sometimes, the current takes you to bad places. Sometimes, the current takes you down.
And this pool is deep – it would not be an exaggeration to say that all the books ever published, songs ever recorded, movies and TV shows ever filmed are right there at your fingertips, in front of your eyes (if that ain't literally true now, it will be in a decade - at most). And who is swimming in there with you? Everyone from that little tyke in his cradle to the super-centenarian on his death bed. You have to be as wise as a viper in this pool; but wisdom – usually – comes with experience and age, and some people just don’t have those. Yet.
RainbowDash2002. Who are you? Why did you get mixed up with SnoopyDoo86? How? From the best I gathered RainbowDash2002 had been online for a little less than nine years. His interests were typical of his generation – the usual pop music, the latest blockbusters. But his main fandom was My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. As far as internet fandoms go, I guess he could have done worse. At least he didn’t join the Sonic the Hedgehog, Five Nights at Freddy’s or Rick and Morty fandoms. Anyone who lives to 18 without falling in with that trash should count himself lucky in my book.
Anyway, he seemed to have gotten into the Brony fandom around the second season, when the show first became big, and stayed on and off until the present day. Interestingly, there were no pics of him before the 18th birthday jpeg, and even that didn’t point out which one was him. He had accounts on Ponybooru, Derpybooru and Equestria Daily, but they all seemed bone dry. More of a lurker. What really puzzled me was why there wasn’t much of a footprint about his relationship with SnoopyDoo86. There was nothing even in the package AvaHayworth69 sent me. Maybe something on the archives for those sites on the Wayback Machine? No dice.
I was about to leave WM, when something caught my eye – it was a page for finding MLP clubs in meat space. I clicked on it and found a depressing skeleton of the once mighty fandom – an outline of links for all fifty states and the MLP clubs they had on there. Most dead. I checked the clubs for Tennessee, and there were about 30 of them, most with generic geographical names – Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, no Chattanooga though. Some collegiate and school-based clubs – Rhodes U., University of Tennessee, Sewanee, Red Bank High, E. Tennessee State, Nashville Central High, Soddy Daisy High, Father Ryan High…
Then I stopped. Red Bank High School. That sounded familiar. Where did I read that name before? I looked through my notes – it was where Wordsworth's son was going to graduate in a few weeks. I found the last archived version of the Red Bank High School My Little Pony Society. After some digging, I found a members list and one name struck out at me like a dagger – Elliot Wordsworth. And the school was in a suburb of Chattanooga.
No. No, it couldn’t be, it was too obvious. Was Rainbowdash2002 the son of SnoopyDoo86? There were no pics of Elliot on the archived pages, despite there being pics of all the other club members. Maybe if I check the yearbook? There has to be a place where they are available online somewhere, right? There was! But it wasn’t free. Three dollars a month on classmates.com. Guess I’ll have to pony it up (eh, eh). It was too early for this year, but the last volume, when he would be a junior, was available. Just use the index and boom, there he was.
I took a good hard look at the person staring out at me from the scanned page and went back and forth between it and the 18th birthday party image. I wasn’t good at reading faces, but they looked like they could be the same person. Definitely a candidate. Same race, age, gender. But that ain’t everything.
For the sake of argument, I let myself assume they were the same guy - I thought through all the puzzle pieces of this mystery. Samuel Wordsworth goes to a seminar in Nashville a month ago. At the same time his son Elliot goes to a brony meet up. Even the same place. Wordsworth, as SnoopyDoo86 meets Rainbowdash2002, also known as Elliot. Then he deletes everything about his fursona from the web. He doesn’t talk with his old pals AvaHayworth69, JessicaRabbitRabbit or the people at the Reddit forum. The latter assume he has been vanned, the former two know he isn’t.
A bing soon interrupted my silent meditation. An ancient IM beckoned me to open it.
“I understand you are looking for SnoopyDoo86”
“Yes.”
“He is dead, sir, and I have killed him” The sender was named Samuel Wordsworth.
I ordered some Ramen noodles and Mountain Dew from Grubhub and sat under my neon “Restaurant at the End of the Universe” sign at the other end of the basement. I like my Dew on the rocks, so I got out an orange commemorative He-Man glass and put some ice in it. As the soda bubbled up to the top, I held it up to the sign and the strange brew of neon, glass, ice and Mountain Dew gave off a weird orange/bronze glow. Through this lens, the room looked the same, but different. The same lay out, the same furniture and crap, yet seeing through other eyes makes even the most familiar setting alien.
I got back to my desk across the room, and ruminated on my case. The more I knew, the less I understood. I kept going over what I had so far: the package AvaHayworth69 had sent me; the Reddit thread from r/furdom; saved Skype conversation with JessicaRabbitRabbit. It seemed as if the answers to my questions were right in front of me, staring in my face, obvious to all who had eyes to see. I guess I didn’t have those eyes.
So SnoopyDoo86 was big in the furry community until about a month ago when all his accounts disappeared. From Ava’s package, I could trace his online presence in the fandom back a decade and a half and, frankly, it was unremarkable. Some pushback lately for letting the bronies in, but it’s not like he hadn’t gotten push back before. It’s the goddamn Internet, for Christ sake. You get push back all the time. Then there’s the kid, RainbowDash2002. How does he fit in? I kept looking through the package. This was all his online furry activity that Ava sent me…. this was all the online… furry activity…all of it that she could find…and then only parts she had decided to send me.
I looked again through the index of what was in the package and tried to locate something outside the fandom. All I could find was an old LinkedIn page three months old. Jessica said he still kept his LinkedIn and, sure enough, it was still online. Online, and had been updated just two weeks ago with a link to a Yelp page. I checked it out and it had a review of his, or rather, Samuel Wordsworth’s, work as an accountant. It was a three-star review of a seminar Wordsworth gave at a meeting in Nashville a month ago. The Yelp page gave a meatspace address for his office in Chattanooga – Google Maps link and everything. Handy old Google Maps showed me the place from street view. Just a normal little office in an outdoor mall, right next to a dentist office and a Subway.
Wordsworth and Partners Accounting Firm, LLC
1716 Cross St, Chattanooga, TN 37416
Open: 9AM-5PM (423) – 555 – 6190
All the Google reviews were pretty standard. Four star rating. And the same name was still printed in the window, as best as I could see. I leaned back in my chair. If a prominent banker or accountant – I really didn’t know the difference – had been busted on a pedophilia charge, wouldn’t there be news articles about it? I used my best Google Fu to see what I could find. And what I found was…nothing. Nothing from local newspapers or TV stations. Tried looking through Twitter, YouTube, even Bing. There were a couple of sex crime busts in the East Tennessee and Nashville area, but nothing about a man named Wordsworth. Maybe he went out of state? There are a lot of databases for sex offenders or people who have been arrested, but the last Samuel Wordsworth I could find was in California, and he died seven years ago.
JessicaRabbittRabbitt was right. I don’t know if was a case of absence of evidence or evidence of absence, but she was right. Samuel Wordsworth had not been arrested on a morals charge. But the people at the reddit club didn’t know that – all they knew was that SnoopyDoo86 disappeared when he went to meet RainbowDash2002. Must've not known his real name, so they assumed Snoopy had been caught with a minor.
So where would an older, professional man be on the internet? Facebook, of course. Looked up his name and there were a couple of dozen Samuel Wordsworths, and whatdayaknow, one was an accountant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. This was the first time I had actually seen a picture of the guy – the LinkedIn, Google and Yelp pages didn’t have one. He appeared to be a man in his late 40s, balding, wearing a light brown suit and black tie. According to the site, he had a BA from East Tennessee State University and an MBA from the University of Tennessee at Nashville. He was married with one son who went to Red Bank High. About to graduate this May. There were some vacation photos and vids, some posts about the Tennessee Titans and the East Tennessee State Buccaneers football team, and that was it. Reading through all this you would never have guessed that he was a furry.
Of course, that was only one way of looking at it. I mean, sure, these two shared the same body in meat-space, they were legally one individual, but in a more profound sense Samuel Wordsworth and SnoopyDoo86 were two very different people. And only one of them was still alive.
Part 5
I laid back in the water and took a whiff of my vape. The bathtub was showered in red from my curtain. It was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle curtain - red for Raphael. All the tiles and plastic in the bath were white, so it was as if I was bathing in a soft ruby glow. Back in the seventies they had these things called “isolation tanks”. New Agers would pay thousands of dollars to lie in a darkened tank with some water and Epson salt. The experience was supposed to produce … I dunno enlightenment or something. You can get the same experience in a bathtub, of course, but that wouldn’t be nearly as expensive. Or as trendy.
I thought over my case. My case. It was AvaHayworth69s case. For some reason she had paid me serious dough - 200 bitcoin per day, plus expenses - to find SnoopyDoo86. Now I knew where he was. It had been easy to track him down just from the LinkedIn profile she herself had sent me. I took another whiff of my vape. Too easy. Why did the dame hire me in the first place, when she could find out what happened with just a few Google searches?
I exhaled. My vape materialized as little red pebbles shooting through the aether. No, she couldn't. She – we - knew what had happened to Samuel Wordsworth. He was alive and well and working as an accountant in Chattanooga, TN. SnoopyDoo86, on the other hand, had disappeared entirely. He disappeared “about a month ago” as my sources were found of saying, when he met Rainbowdash2002 in meat space. One month ago...
I dried myself off, put on my fedora and jeans, and got back to the computer. I looked up Wordsworth’s Yelp profile and read carefully:
Mr. Wordsworth was very professional when he appeared at the Nashville Agile Alliance conference. His seminar on hidden tax deductions helped my business a great deal, as was his advice on avoiding the death tax by turning part of my inheritance over to my spouse. After his PowerPoint presentation he was good enough to speak with me personally about navigating Tennessee’s tax and incorporation laws. Likely will not be using his actual firm – I am based in Memphis and he works in Chattanooga, but do recommend.
About as plain a recommendation as you can get. Like something you would hear on a commercial. Well, what do expect would go on at an accountants convention, people cosplaying as W-2 forms? A brief smirk appeared, then left my face as an idea ricocheted around my brain, a series of associations that led inexorably to the same conclusion. Convention. Cosplaying. Furries. “About a month ago”. Everything aligned all too well.
I began to see what I could find out about cons in Tennessee. Furcons. There used to be an annual event in Nashville, but they had been exiled to Alabama. Likewise, the Memphis con to Olive Branch, Miss. Ironically, the Chattanooga con was still around and held the same week Wordsworth would be in Nashville. Alright, what about meet-ups, house parties, smaller scale events? Nothing. There were no furry events in Middle Tennessee during the appropriate time frame. None that had an internet presence.
Could he have met Rainbowdash2002 in Nashville privately? Meeting a minor in meatspace – at least not at a public event like a con - is a big no-no online, especially in the fandom. Even if it was completely innocent people had a tendency to “twist” things as JessicaRabbitRabbit said. If he had done that it would have led to all kinds of drama. I sat back in my chair. What do you think this case is, if not drama?
So that brought me back to AvaHayworth69. Perhaps if I started with her and worked my way backward I might be able to find something. Something maybe even she herself didn’t see. She had a barebones presence online – Wikifur, DeviantArt, Furaffinity and a few other places. She was a furry writer and artist, but mostly just a fan. She contributed only about two dozen items to DA. I didn’t read any of her stories, but her pics appeared innocuous enough. None of them were even listed as mature.
As for who she was in meat space, that was more mysterious. Didn’t give a powerword - smart move. From her profile descriptions I gleaned that she worked for the state government in Lexington, Kentucky, was an executive member of the Kentucky Anthro Society and helped organize the annual convention in Lexington. It was the only con in the state. I took some photos she had of her with SnoopyDoo86 in the package and started doing Google Reverse image searches. It wasn’t long until I found them again, but with a new context. She had neglected to say that each one of them had been at the Chattanooga furcon. There was one for each year, except this one.
So, that’s it. She became concerned when he was a no-show at the annual con. If she tried to contact him online through any of his old social media accounts, they were gone. If she knew his LinkedIn, why didn’t she just call him on the regular number? Or just use his Facebook? Those were Samuel Wordsworths accounts, his numbers. He and Snoopydoo86 were two different people, I reminded myself. AvaHayworth69 was Snoopydoo86’s friend and Samuel Wordsworth had no use for her. Any message she would leave was likely deleted, any call ignored. One day he just ghosted her and the whole furry community. And it was at the same time that he went to Nashville for the conference, which was at the same time he met with Rainbowdash2002.
And yet, there was nothing in Middle Tennessee during that whole period. If he met him in private, there was no evidence. No cons, no meet ups, no house parties. No furry events at all… Bronies aren’t furries. Bronies aren’t furries. It was a revelation that had been sitting in front of me this whole time – I was looking only where I expected to find my goal. I hurriedly started Googling to find a bronycon anywhere in Middle Tennessee in the last month. Nada. The fandom was dying and couldn’t support conventions. Maybe a local meet up? It was worth a shot. And whatdoyaknow – there was a small brony meet up the very weekend Wordsworth was the seminar. And it was held in the next hotel over from where Agile Alliance was held. I clicked on the home page and could not believe what I was seeing – it was a jpeg photo that showed people sitting around a table under a huge banner – “Happy 18th birthday Rainbowdash 2002”
Part 6
A purple haze filled the room as I pulled up Ponybooru, the biggest MLP imageboard in the world. What I saw there disgusted me, yet did not surprise me – the site was almost entirely hard core pornography or Nazi memes. Shook my head. My. Little. Pony. Friendship is Magic. This was the death rattle of the brony fandom, dying as it was born – an absurdity. Yet another thing warped by the internet.
The net ain’t a place for kids, but they’re all over the damned place. From the moment Mom puts a tablet in the cradle till you stream your 18th birthday on twitch. Whether you’re at school, home, in your car or laying on bed, you are always swimming in this giant pool of information. Sometimes, the current takes you to bad places. Sometimes, the current takes you down.
And this pool is deep – it would not be an exaggeration to say that all the books ever published, songs ever recorded, movies and TV shows ever filmed are right there at your fingertips, in front of your eyes (if that ain't literally true now, it will be in a decade - at most). And who is swimming in there with you? Everyone from that little tyke in his cradle to the super-centenarian on his death bed. You have to be as wise as a viper in this pool; but wisdom – usually – comes with experience and age, and some people just don’t have those. Yet.
RainbowDash2002. Who are you? Why did you get mixed up with SnoopyDoo86? How? From the best I gathered RainbowDash2002 had been online for a little less than nine years. His interests were typical of his generation – the usual pop music, the latest blockbusters. But his main fandom was My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. As far as internet fandoms go, I guess he could have done worse. At least he didn’t join the Sonic the Hedgehog, Five Nights at Freddy’s or Rick and Morty fandoms. Anyone who lives to 18 without falling in with that trash should count himself lucky in my book.
Anyway, he seemed to have gotten into the Brony fandom around the second season, when the show first became big, and stayed on and off until the present day. Interestingly, there were no pics of him before the 18th birthday jpeg, and even that didn’t point out which one was him. He had accounts on Ponybooru, Derpybooru and Equestria Daily, but they all seemed bone dry. More of a lurker. What really puzzled me was why there wasn’t much of a footprint about his relationship with SnoopyDoo86. There was nothing even in the package AvaHayworth69 sent me. Maybe something on the archives for those sites on the Wayback Machine? No dice.
I was about to leave WM, when something caught my eye – it was a page for finding MLP clubs in meat space. I clicked on it and found a depressing skeleton of the once mighty fandom – an outline of links for all fifty states and the MLP clubs they had on there. Most dead. I checked the clubs for Tennessee, and there were about 30 of them, most with generic geographical names – Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, no Chattanooga though. Some collegiate and school-based clubs – Rhodes U., University of Tennessee, Sewanee, Red Bank High, E. Tennessee State, Nashville Central High, Soddy Daisy High, Father Ryan High…
Then I stopped. Red Bank High School. That sounded familiar. Where did I read that name before? I looked through my notes – it was where Wordsworth's son was going to graduate in a few weeks. I found the last archived version of the Red Bank High School My Little Pony Society. After some digging, I found a members list and one name struck out at me like a dagger – Elliot Wordsworth. And the school was in a suburb of Chattanooga.
No. No, it couldn’t be, it was too obvious. Was Rainbowdash2002 the son of SnoopyDoo86? There were no pics of Elliot on the archived pages, despite there being pics of all the other club members. Maybe if I check the yearbook? There has to be a place where they are available online somewhere, right? There was! But it wasn’t free. Three dollars a month on classmates.com. Guess I’ll have to pony it up (eh, eh). It was too early for this year, but the last volume, when he would be a junior, was available. Just use the index and boom, there he was.
I took a good hard look at the person staring out at me from the scanned page and went back and forth between it and the 18th birthday party image. I wasn’t good at reading faces, but they looked like they could be the same person. Definitely a candidate. Same race, age, gender. But that ain’t everything.
For the sake of argument, I let myself assume they were the same guy - I thought through all the puzzle pieces of this mystery. Samuel Wordsworth goes to a seminar in Nashville a month ago. At the same time his son Elliot goes to a brony meet up. Even the same place. Wordsworth, as SnoopyDoo86 meets Rainbowdash2002, also known as Elliot. Then he deletes everything about his fursona from the web. He doesn’t talk with his old pals AvaHayworth69, JessicaRabbitRabbit or the people at the Reddit forum. The latter assume he has been vanned, the former two know he isn’t.
A bing soon interrupted my silent meditation. An ancient IM beckoned me to open it.
“I understand you are looking for SnoopyDoo86”
“Yes.”
“He is dead, sir, and I have killed him” The sender was named Samuel Wordsworth.
Taliesin93
Condemned
Thanks for the likes and feed back, but the story here is incomplete. This is the finale:
Survival. Preservation of self. It is our most primal instinct. And not survival in just the physical sense. And yet, so long as we keep living, we keep killing ourselves. Adolescence kills the child you once were. Becoming a “Young adult” kills a teenager. And finally, that ultimate murderer - “maturity” - adulthood, kills the young man. Some have managed to preserve earlier versions of themselves; Mark Twain did this with his boyhood self in Tom Sawyer. Every time someone reads that book the 12-year-old Samuel Clemons is still alive. Is still preserved.
Was SnoopyDoo86 Samuel Wordsworth’s Tom Sawyer? It certainly seemed so. In the lead box, in the casket he had right before him, he was throwing everything from VHS tapes to CD-Rs to thumb drives. Some paper print outs were placed strategically among the rubbish, and I swear I saw a printed date in the 1990s.
“Who the hell are you?” an aged, wizened voice asked.
“I’m an internet detective, and I’ve been hired to find out what happened to SnoopyDoo86” He gave a contemptuous laugh.
“An internet detective? You’re probably just some guy in a dark room sitting in front of a computer.”
“So, uh, what is all this, if I may ask?” He turned the camera back to me and now I could tell that he was under a canopy on the side of an old RV.
“I’m killing SnoopyDoo86. What does it look like I’m doing.” It was raining outside, I could hear the tears dripping on the canopy. After a flash of lightning, I had the presence of mind the bookmark the YouTube video. It was only then that I noticed the metadata under the video: 8:45 PM at Fall Creek State Park, TN.
“Where's the fursuit?”
“Bottom of the river. That’s just a costume, though; what SnoopyDoo86 really was is in here – his thoughts, his loves, his fears and dreams, his failures and triumphs”
“I thought you were SnoopyDoo86?”
“SnoopyDoo86 is – was - who I am in the dark, when no one is looking. And on the internet, you are always who you are in the dark.” He turned his camera back to his litter, but didn’t stop his rambling. “Think about it – on the internet we are all together, but we are all alone, no one is watching us… we’re all just sitting in these darkened rooms. We are who we really are when no one is watching us. So what comes out? The monsters, my boy, the monsters from the id!”
“But SnoopyDoo96 didn’t exist outside the internet.” He turned the camera back to himself and a faint smile rippled on his face.
“You are young, aren’t you? I was present at the beginning – ARPANET, BBS, UseNet, early furryMUCK. You think you’ve seen strange, junior? You don’t know what strange is.” Another bolt of lightning melodramatically illuminated his face. “I should have known, even as a young man, what would happen – anyone would know. But the web skews young, and the older and more experienced are always outnumbered than the young and impetuous.” I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
“So what’s your story” I typed, not being able to come up with anything else. “My story is the story of a generation. A herd of people alone and yet not alone – all corralled together yet no one is watching us. Is it any wonder then that our worst impulses – our lust, our hate, our greed – all of this spilled out in an orgy of I don’t know what?!” He was raving. He was mad. But was he raving mad? The things he was saying made a weird kind of sense. “We’ve unleashed the monsters, young man, the monsters from the Id! And I intend on killing my monster, right here.”
“You can’t just kill a part of yourself, Mr. Wordsworth.” I tried to reason with him, “You can’t commit a half-suicide. Doctor Jeckel couldn’t kill Mr. Hyde. He just had to hide away the parts of himself he didn’t…wait hide-Hyde, I just now got that…” My thought was interrupted by lightning. It illuminated a splash of liquid over the carefully preserved remnants of SnoopyDoo86. I was confused for a moment, but as the lightnings’ thunder arrived, I saw the litter burst into flames, and I realized it was lighter fluid.
“So, it is done. All memory of SnoopyDoo86 is deleted, its physical form purified by fire.” The burning refuse of CDs, floppy discs and everything sent a grey fog into the air. For a moment I could almost smell it through the live stream.
“Mr. Wordsworth – I...I swear I’ll be out of your hair, it you just tell me why you killed SnoopyDoo86… so the dame who paid me, AvaHayworth69 can get her money's worth…”
“Ava, so it was Ava who sent you looking for me?” He laughed. “Tell her that I knew I must kill SnoopyDoo86 one month ago when I went to meet RainbowDash99. The moment I saw my son...wearing a costume I could have worn at his age... no... I've done this to myself, but I can’t let my heir travel down the same path I did …seeing that he would end up like me showed how I have failed as both a father and as a human being. So SnoopyDoo86 has been deleted - 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To be deleted, to sleep- To sleep--perchance to dream: that’s the thing, for in that sleep of deletion what dreams may come…when we have shuffled off this mortal coil…” And then the livestream turned off.
And I just sat there looking at the empty screen. And, for the first time during this case, I saw beyond the screen, its foreground and its background. The screen was just a space on a laptop framed by black plastic. It was pixels on a monitor. Millions of little lights in different colors, only when seen from this vantage point create an illusion of shapes and forms...pictures on a screen. Between this screen and my eyes was a filthy keyboard, coated with dandruff.
Keeping the computer company on were piles of books, a mouse, a mouse pad and nearly a dozen empty Mountain Dew bottles. The most obvious truth struck me – I’m just a guy, in a dark room, staring at lights on a screen.
Epilogue
I wrote up a short letter – an e-mail to Ava Hayworth69. I told her that SnoopyDoo86 had taken the delete, the Big Delete, and that he won’t be seeing her anymore. I debated if I should tell her the whole story but figured just a generic “he didn’t want to be in the fandom anymore after he saw his kid was going in it” would suffice.
I got up from my chair and I looked around the basement. With the lights on I could see everything in its true color. My orange sign, turned off, the red bathtub marker, just visible beyond the open door to my bathroom, the He-Man action figures in their glass house, my black computer on its desk. And two levers hanging down by the stairway. One was for the light up at the top of the stairs, and the other was for the basement. I walked over to the bottom of the stairway and pulled one lever. The basement now was in pitch blackness, save for the golden shaft of light illuminating the stairway.
“Mom, I’m coming up now” And so I did.
Survival. Preservation of self. It is our most primal instinct. And not survival in just the physical sense. And yet, so long as we keep living, we keep killing ourselves. Adolescence kills the child you once were. Becoming a “Young adult” kills a teenager. And finally, that ultimate murderer - “maturity” - adulthood, kills the young man. Some have managed to preserve earlier versions of themselves; Mark Twain did this with his boyhood self in Tom Sawyer. Every time someone reads that book the 12-year-old Samuel Clemons is still alive. Is still preserved.
Was SnoopyDoo86 Samuel Wordsworth’s Tom Sawyer? It certainly seemed so. In the lead box, in the casket he had right before him, he was throwing everything from VHS tapes to CD-Rs to thumb drives. Some paper print outs were placed strategically among the rubbish, and I swear I saw a printed date in the 1990s.
“Who the hell are you?” an aged, wizened voice asked.
“I’m an internet detective, and I’ve been hired to find out what happened to SnoopyDoo86” He gave a contemptuous laugh.
“An internet detective? You’re probably just some guy in a dark room sitting in front of a computer.”
“So, uh, what is all this, if I may ask?” He turned the camera back to me and now I could tell that he was under a canopy on the side of an old RV.
“I’m killing SnoopyDoo86. What does it look like I’m doing.” It was raining outside, I could hear the tears dripping on the canopy. After a flash of lightning, I had the presence of mind the bookmark the YouTube video. It was only then that I noticed the metadata under the video: 8:45 PM at Fall Creek State Park, TN.
“Where's the fursuit?”
“Bottom of the river. That’s just a costume, though; what SnoopyDoo86 really was is in here – his thoughts, his loves, his fears and dreams, his failures and triumphs”
“I thought you were SnoopyDoo86?”
“SnoopyDoo86 is – was - who I am in the dark, when no one is looking. And on the internet, you are always who you are in the dark.” He turned his camera back to his litter, but didn’t stop his rambling. “Think about it – on the internet we are all together, but we are all alone, no one is watching us… we’re all just sitting in these darkened rooms. We are who we really are when no one is watching us. So what comes out? The monsters, my boy, the monsters from the id!”
“But SnoopyDoo96 didn’t exist outside the internet.” He turned the camera back to himself and a faint smile rippled on his face.
“You are young, aren’t you? I was present at the beginning – ARPANET, BBS, UseNet, early furryMUCK. You think you’ve seen strange, junior? You don’t know what strange is.” Another bolt of lightning melodramatically illuminated his face. “I should have known, even as a young man, what would happen – anyone would know. But the web skews young, and the older and more experienced are always outnumbered than the young and impetuous.” I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
“So what’s your story” I typed, not being able to come up with anything else. “My story is the story of a generation. A herd of people alone and yet not alone – all corralled together yet no one is watching us. Is it any wonder then that our worst impulses – our lust, our hate, our greed – all of this spilled out in an orgy of I don’t know what?!” He was raving. He was mad. But was he raving mad? The things he was saying made a weird kind of sense. “We’ve unleashed the monsters, young man, the monsters from the Id! And I intend on killing my monster, right here.”
“You can’t just kill a part of yourself, Mr. Wordsworth.” I tried to reason with him, “You can’t commit a half-suicide. Doctor Jeckel couldn’t kill Mr. Hyde. He just had to hide away the parts of himself he didn’t…wait hide-Hyde, I just now got that…” My thought was interrupted by lightning. It illuminated a splash of liquid over the carefully preserved remnants of SnoopyDoo86. I was confused for a moment, but as the lightnings’ thunder arrived, I saw the litter burst into flames, and I realized it was lighter fluid.
“So, it is done. All memory of SnoopyDoo86 is deleted, its physical form purified by fire.” The burning refuse of CDs, floppy discs and everything sent a grey fog into the air. For a moment I could almost smell it through the live stream.
“Mr. Wordsworth – I...I swear I’ll be out of your hair, it you just tell me why you killed SnoopyDoo86… so the dame who paid me, AvaHayworth69 can get her money's worth…”
“Ava, so it was Ava who sent you looking for me?” He laughed. “Tell her that I knew I must kill SnoopyDoo86 one month ago when I went to meet RainbowDash99. The moment I saw my son...wearing a costume I could have worn at his age... no... I've done this to myself, but I can’t let my heir travel down the same path I did …seeing that he would end up like me showed how I have failed as both a father and as a human being. So SnoopyDoo86 has been deleted - 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To be deleted, to sleep- To sleep--perchance to dream: that’s the thing, for in that sleep of deletion what dreams may come…when we have shuffled off this mortal coil…” And then the livestream turned off.
And I just sat there looking at the empty screen. And, for the first time during this case, I saw beyond the screen, its foreground and its background. The screen was just a space on a laptop framed by black plastic. It was pixels on a monitor. Millions of little lights in different colors, only when seen from this vantage point create an illusion of shapes and forms...pictures on a screen. Between this screen and my eyes was a filthy keyboard, coated with dandruff.
Keeping the computer company on were piles of books, a mouse, a mouse pad and nearly a dozen empty Mountain Dew bottles. The most obvious truth struck me – I’m just a guy, in a dark room, staring at lights on a screen.
Epilogue
I wrote up a short letter – an e-mail to Ava Hayworth69. I told her that SnoopyDoo86 had taken the delete, the Big Delete, and that he won’t be seeing her anymore. I debated if I should tell her the whole story but figured just a generic “he didn’t want to be in the fandom anymore after he saw his kid was going in it” would suffice.
I got up from my chair and I looked around the basement. With the lights on I could see everything in its true color. My orange sign, turned off, the red bathtub marker, just visible beyond the open door to my bathroom, the He-Man action figures in their glass house, my black computer on its desk. And two levers hanging down by the stairway. One was for the light up at the top of the stairs, and the other was for the basement. I walked over to the bottom of the stairway and pulled one lever. The basement now was in pitch blackness, save for the golden shaft of light illuminating the stairway.
“Mom, I’m coming up now” And so I did.
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Taliesin93
Condemned
Any thoughts? I'm open to criticism.
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