Moonlyte - part 4 (Patreon)

Anyway, as before, this is NOT PORN. It is a non-erotic horror/crime short story in the process of being made by me. If you didn't read the original story that this is a prequel to, you can find it here.

Also note that these are all early drafts, so if you have suggestions or criticisms now would be a good time to give them, as none of this is currently set in stone and will likely be subject to changes.

[story] [non-erotic]

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‭The Second Day

I wake up to the sound of myself screaming. Sitting up in bed, I suck in a gasp of stale air and pant to catch my breath, keeping my eyes wide open to take in the mundane darkness of my apartment. Away from whatever nightmare I’m swiftly forgetting. The contents of whatever dream shocked me awake have already slipped from memory almost entirely, and my mind is frightened to seek them out.

I remember a dark room -- no, not dark, actually. The gray, undecorated walls had been lit by a shadowy blue light that squirmed and danced around the flat planes of plaster that made up the walls and ceilings. I’d been... laying down, I think. Or sitting. I know my head was lower than the ring of children surrounding me, wide smiles on their placid faces. Eyes too large, empty of iris or pupil, gaping expanses of pale horror that stared down at me as they smiled. Wide smiles. Eager smiles.

Maybe it would have been better if I’d forgotten it entirely. I guess the case Lindsay dumped in my lap shook me more than I thought. All I know is that I don’t want to close my eyes for a while, and the last thing I wanna do is try to get back to sleep.

How long have I been awake, anyway...?

I remember I did end up staying awake longer than intended, running solo dungeons with my undead rogue until I got the leather transmog piece I’d been hunting for weeks. It’d taken like eleven hours, sure. But time flies when you’re mindlessly grinding away at the same bosses thirty times in a row.

Then I’d fallen asleep... assuming it had been somewhere around 9pm when I went to sleep, it should be....

I squeeze my eyes shut hard, then let them open again, rolling to the side of my bed and shambling back to my computer to find the time, not bothering with clothes. No light, however pale, peeking through my blinders. So either it’s still night, or I slept way too long.

1:12am.

I’d slept for about four hours.

Fuck.

There’s a new message blinking on my monitor but I ignore it for now, turning on the actual living room light in my apartment for the first time in... maybe a week? Purging the darkness from the room with burning brownish light, I rifle though my cupboards for coffee and whatever else I can find; ending up with some instant hazelnut bullshit, a package of cherry cola flavored Oreos I’ve been too scared to try, and a... half a bag of marshmallows. Whatever. Okay.

Setting the coffee to do its thing, I collapse into my gaming chair and take a closer look at the message on my screen, eyes immediately drawn to the swaying anime butt. Adam again?

(two hours ago) Superi0r: *chrrrk* Calling Moonlyte, this is Kilo Yankee Sierra. I repeat, calling in Moonlyte for evac.

I blink. Coulda sworn I turned Tor off last night. I never leave it on to just play games. Must be getting sloppy.

Moonlyte: Do you actually know what evac means?

The response is immediate.

Superi0r: Not a clue. But have you noticed anything weird going on with your hard drive? I’m getting glitches out the fucking A S S and I was wondering if it was just me or if it was happening to everyone.

Moonlyte: My hard drive doesn’t glitch, you shitcock. You spill an energy drink on your tower again? Or maybe all your mining bullshit burnt it out. I told you to be careful with that, your lucky your house hasn’t burned down by now.

Superi0r: *you’re

Moonlyte: Are you fucking serious.

Superi0r: If you’re gonna act condescending you can’t leave openings.

Fuck. That’s fair actually.

Exhaling through my nose, I cram a handful of marshmallows into my mouth and check on the coffee, the hot caffeinated nourishment into a discarded styrofoam soup cup -- half coffee, half cream. A series of beeps from my computer assures me that Adam hasn’t shut the fuck up while I was up.

Superi0r: Speaking of the mining though, remember the bot I told you about?

Superi0r: Kate?

Superi0r: Moonlyte?

Superi0r: Okay so anyway I was gonna keep working on it and it’s gone. Like literally gone. I scanned by whole hard drive and I literally can’t find it. I didn’t delete it.

Moonlyte: You still haven’t watched Terminator, have you.

Superi0r: Seriously Moonlyte it’s kinda fuckin weird. I was working on it this morning and didn’t set it to do anything. Now it’s like it didn’t exist -- not in my recycling bin, not anywhere.

Moonlyte: Maybe it saw your porn folder and committed suicide.

Heh heh heh.

I sit and stare at the “Superi0r is typing...” indicator for a while before getting bored, dumping a few marshmallows into my coffee and taking a swig before navigating over to Silence, which I’m delighted to find that yesterday-Kate was clever enough to leave open so I don’t have to go through the snow-screen again. Explains why Tor’s still running. Cramming a cookie into my mouth and finding it to be absolutely fucking hideous, I scan through the forums to the thread I made. Eleven responses. More than I thought, I guess.

(10:21am) ChainsawVasectomy wrote: show me ur fukin tits whore

Okay cool. Expected. Moving on.

(11:01am) 83052jf205 wrote: Nothing I know. Ran a couple searches but nothing with that code’s coming up.

(11:22am) eatyourgods wrote: Why don’t you go suck a fucking cop’s dick if you love them so much. Destroy the disease and the symptoms go away. Stop fighting fire with gasoline, cunt.

(11:27am) 83052jf205 wrote: Jesus dude take a chill pill it’s dead fucking kids.

(11:41am) ChainsawVasectomy wrote: i killed them lmfao fuk those kids

(12:50pm) Cyb3rghost wrote: hax as fuck

(1:00pm) SHEPHARDKING wrote:

The next message hurts my eyes more than a little. Some asshole who thinks putting lemon-yellow text on a custom background of the same exact color is some kind of a funny joke. And of course it takes up half the fucking page. Squinting, I scroll past it, looking for the next comment and finally finding it.

(1:02pm) ChainsawVasectomy wrote: i said show me ur GODAMN BOOBS

Cool. Glad I worked for that. The next one, though, actually looks... sentient.

(2:41pm) DoctorSerpent wrote: Wait, y0g507h07h... like Yog-Sothoth? From the books and shit? The keeper of time or whatever the fuck? Either you’re getting trolled or someone’s taking their Lovecraft way too serious.

(2:43pm) Cyb3rghost wrote: *seriously

(6:28pm) chaosBOI wrote: you’re mom gay

I’m so happy I did this. I feel like I’ve gotten all of this really useful information from this foray into the internet. Drawing in a deep breath, I take another scalding swig of coffee. I don’t know what I fucking expected.

I lean back in my chair, exhaling and thinking for a long moment. Looking at the code, and DoctorSerpent’s translation of it, I feel like it should have been obvious that the numbers were easy letter replacements. So I know someone gets a little too into their light reading, but it doesn’t give me a real lead. No next step to take. All it gives me is something new to look out for, and maybe some “research” to do on the side.

There’s a little ‘blong’ sound from my taskbar, and I see my conversation with Adam flashing. Looks like he finally got around to saying what it took him so long to type.

Superi0r: A5JBKL063BJF7RW2LGDJY

Moonlyte: Took you that long just to type that?

While my response is pretty quick, I look up to see Adam’s swaying-butt avatar has grayed out. Superi0r - offline for 7 mins.

I blink. If he’s been offline that long, how did...?

I feel a lump rise in my throat, and swallow it down. Fuck, this shit’s really starting to get to me. Whatever this dead kid spree is, it seems pretty fucking unlikely that it’d involve Adam in any way, unless murder syndicates started hiring 45-year-olds that still live in their mom’s attic. Then again, I’ve heard of worse things.

I quickly copy and paste the responses from the Silence forum into a hard word doc and save it for later, then skim over the jumble of numbers and letters Adam posted. Just nonsense as far as I can tell, neither structured enough nor crazy enough to look like a code. What it does look like is some sort of really skeevy URL, the kind where you buy child brides and enough cocaine to kill Ajit Pai.

Not that I think Ajit Pai is unusually resistant to the effects of cocaine. I just really like to think about him dying.

Maybe Adam’s rogue AI got the best of him? Came back from the dark web with a chip on its shoulder--? Actually, wait. The dark web. The one place I’ve refused to look, even if, from what I’ve heard about it, it’d be the best place to catch these freaks talking about child rape out in the open.

Taking another long swig of coffee, I edit my VPN and paste in what Adam posted, holding my breath as I reform the extension again and again in an attempt to turn it into a functioning URL. It’s about ten minutes -- my coffee cup now sitting emptied and refilled with just marshmallows -- before I manage to turn it into something: an index. Not a very... helpful, index, unfortunately, just a long string of other URLs that look very similar to the one I just punched in. A lot more indexes, while some sites have more abstract extensions.

As I scroll through, I start to notice that a few of the URLs (seemingly at random) are in a red arial font, as opposed to the crisp, neutral Times New Roman of the others. More and more of them turn red as I scroll down through hundreds and hundreds of links, until all of them are. So bad I don’t wanna click on any of these. Don’t want to see diaper fetish or cock vore or furry anything. Yet I know, knew, the instant I set my eyes on those red links, that I was gonna end up clicking on every single fucking one of them.

I’m in for another long night. Better order pizza.