#ace visconti

Wips and other things lmao ❤️❤️

Representation matters!

The survivor gang is happy for David to finally be out of the closet. uvu

Ace: Suits are for the living. That’s why, when it’s my time to R.I.P. I’m going out of this world the same way I came into it. BUCK NAKED. Yeah. It’s gonna be awesome. Open bar for the guys, open casket for the ladies.

dweetwise:

Cheryl: Hey dad, can I have this?

Felix:No

Cheryl: *turns two degrees to the right*

Cheryl: Hey cool dad, can I have this?

Ace:Sure!

Ace is…kind of a mystery. Wouldn’t exactly call him uncle material, but he’s fun to hang around at the campfire, at least.

PART TWO OF FIVE; also available to read on AO3 HERE

Story Synopsis:  While investigating what remains of the infamous Léry’s Memorial Institute for their popular channel, two Youtube celebrity ghost hunters go missing overnight, vanishing in a freak occurrence that has decided to lay claim to their souls.

While the world they were abruptly taken from grieves their absences and tries to figure out what befell the beloved comical duo, Ryan and Shane struggle to make sense of the new, terrible and violent reality they’ve woken up in. Drawn to a campfire that never seems to burn out, they meet others who have been condemned to the same, eternal fate and are forcibly taught how to survive in an attempt to keep their collective hope and souls alive.

Chapter Word Count: 6706

Pairings:None; just a genfic

Genre:Survival Horror/Supernatural/Angst-y

Next Chapter:Unavailable

Previous Chapters:1,

Notes:it took a while but HERE IT IS. the next part. pls enjoy thank.

…….(why cant i do line breaks anymore this is a shitty line break sorry)…….

There was no sign of a robbery, nor even a hint of a struggle when the camera crew came back to find Shane and Ryan’s sleeping bags empty the next morning. The static camera that had been pointed at them all night was still there, red light on and blinking dutifully with purpose, unaware that the subjects it was meant to be capturing were now gone. No one quite knew what to make of it as they looked upon the untended sleeping bags laid out so pristinely with no one in them, but they didn’t suspect that anything odd had happened- not at first.

“Maybe they’re just out exploring something they forgot to film last night,” Mark suggested with an easy shrug, not yet concerned about Shane and Ryan’s respective absences. He strolled over to where the overnight camera was still recording and knelt down to turn it off and pick it up, ready to pack it away.

“They left all their gear here, though,” Devon said, voice wavering uneasily as she pointed out where the small, handheld cameras they used to film while walking around had been left behind. Even their cellphones lay discarded between the two sleeping bags, explaining why they hadn’t checked in with her when she’d texted earlier. Dread coiled low in her stomach as she watched the little green alert light flash unread on both of their phones.

Mark stared at their discarded equipment with an odd, curious look in his eye that Devon couldn’t decipher, but if she had to take a guess, she’d pin it as something close to concern. He opened his mouth to say something but then shut it, shrugged again, and wound up saying, “In that case, they probably just went out to take a piss or something; they’ll be back.”

Devon wanted to ask him how likely that actually was, but didn’t. Instead, she looked to TJ for his thoughts on where they might have gone, attempting to convey her unease to him without words. He had the authority to declare their disappearances an emergency if he thought there was enough cause for alarm to do so, and she was beginning to suspect that there was. She thought of the voice the spirit box had projected to them the night before and shuddered.

“If they’re not back here in ten minutes, we’ll start looking for them,” TJ said after a moment, sounding more annoyed than anything. He checked his phone for the time and sighed irritably as he tucked it back into his jacket pocket. “With how antsy Ryan was last night, you’d think he’d be raring to leave as soon as he could. He knows as well as I do that we’re on a tight schedule for this one, we don’t have the time for them to be fucking around.”

It wasn’t the answer she’d been hoping for, but it was one she could live with. They’d start looking for them eventually, and that was better than not at all.

Of the three of them, Devon admittedly was the closest to what Ryan called people who believed in the supernatural as ‘Boogaras’; Mark and TJ were strong-minded skeptics like Shane, and wouldn’t think to attribute their disappearances to something unworldly. Even though she wasn’t an advent believer in ghosts and spirits or the like, she nevertheless maintained the faith that they couldexist, and that nagging, back of the mind thought of ‘what if’ was persistent enough to make her want to review the overnight recordings, just to know. Just to be sure that the terrible voice really had nothing to do with it.

“Could I take a look at that real quick?” Devon asked quietly, addressing Mark who was still holding the static camera. He gave it over to her without comment, though he seemed hesitant to do so, pausing slightly as it traded hands.

With the camera in hand, she sat down on the bottom hem of one of the sleeping bags and pulled out the side screen, a worried crease marring her brow as she powered it back on. Mark walked away from her and milled around the room idly before TJ made the decision to start the search early.

“Text us if they come back before we do; we might as well go get the other cameras now to save some time,” TJ said to Devon as she fiddled with the camera. He got a brief nod of acknowledgement in response before he turned away, gesturing for Mark to join him in his effort to roundup the rest of their equipment.

As they left the treatment theatre, she could hear them calling out Shane and Ryan’s names loudly as they slowly wandered away from her, echoing choruses of “Shane! Ryan! What the fuck, guys?” bouncing unheard off the walls. She bit into her lower lip, gently worrying at it with her teeth as she began to watch the playback of the overnight footage.

Fast-forwarding through the camera crew’s departure, Devon resumed normal play speed once the recording reached the point where Shane and Ryan were first left alone. She listened keenly to the conversation they’d shared the night before, trying to gather as much insight into their disappearances as she could despite the fact that the audio was tinny and un-optimized. The conversation ended when Shane went to sleep, but from what the night vision allowed her to see, it looked like Ryan had stayed up for a good while longer. A small smile of amusement broke her look of severe concentration as she fast-forwarded until Ryan was finally able to sleep, his head humorously twitching around as he looked after phantom noises in the dark.  

There was nothing immediately alarming in the video as she slowed it down and sped it up intermittently, but she wasn’t sure what exactly she should’ve been looking for, or if there was even anything worth seeing. There was no dark, mysterious, looming figure hiding in the shadows behind them that was waiting to pounce on them now that their guards were down. There wasn’t even any sort of weird half-formed manifestation of a disturbed spirit upset with their presence hanging over their bedrolls, or anything else that could suggest supernatural foul play; the footage simply showed Shane and Ryan asleep in their bags until it didn’t.

Devon paused and blinked, not realizing that she’d lost sight of them. She rewound the footage to find the point where they’d disappeared on screen, watching with surprise as they popped back into frame a minute later, sleeping soundly with Shane rolled onto his stomach and Ryan turned over on his side. She watched the video carefully as she let it play, and again, it showed them sleeping undisturbed until it simply didn’t.

Incomprehension spread quickly across her face as she backed the video up and played it forward again, trying to make sense of what she was seeing; their bodies weren’t blinking or fading out of the picture, the recording wasn’t skipping frames or glitching, but after the video reached a certain point they just weren’t thereanymore.

She felt cold as she checked the time stamp, watching the seconds as they passed by uninterrupted, indicating that there was no recorded loss of time. Everything was working as it should be, nothing had been tampered with; Shane and Ryan were simply gone. They just were.

‘Here today, gone tomorrow,’ her mind unhelpfully supplied for her as she sat staring numbly at the screen.

Distantly, she could hear the combined shouts of Mark and TJ as they continued calling out, their voices no longer calm but tinged with panic as they failed to locate their friends. They were almost screaming, and the sounds were shrill to her ears.

It was still in the early stages of fall the day Shane and Ryan went missing, but already a cold, steady wind was blowing unimpeded through the long and empty hallways of Léry’s Memorial Institute.

2

There were many times when Ryan would wake up the morning after an on-location shoot and forget where he was and what he’d been doing the night before. Bleary-eyed and poorly rested, he’d roll over in his sleeping bag to relieve an ache in his back or a kink in his neck from a night of sleeping on hard floor and slowly give himself over to wakefulness. It always took a few minutes for his mind to catch up with his memory, and when it did- when he remembered correctly where exactly he was- his anxiety would flare up until he checked to make sure no ghost or demon had done anything harmful to him in the night. But even after he inevitably found himself unscathed, it wouldn’t be until he saw Shane still asleep somewhere nearby that his panic would begin to abate, little by little, his tall friend’s presence offering him more peace of mind than he could ever provide for himself. This made the mornings where he woke up alone and disoriented all the worse, serving as a not-so-gentle reminder that he relied too much on Shane’s ability to ground him. He doubted he’d be half as brave as he scripted himself to be without him, and some days, knowing that about himself stung.

So when he woke up face down in a pile of brown leaves, alone and with no knowledge of where he was or how he got there, his first instinct was to panic.

Ryan slowly pushed himself off the ground and sat up, dead leaves clinging to the side of his face like they were still attached to the branch of a tree. He could feel his eyes bulging as he looked around, his breath hitching in his chest when he saw no sign of Shane nearby. Their sleeping bags and equipment were also gone, and as he frantically checked his hoodie pocket for his cellphone, he was distraught to find that it wasn’t with him.

He sat still in the middle of the clearing for a moment longer, wrestling for control over the fear that threatened to consume him. He forced himself to take in deep, calming breaths and closed his eyes, trying to clear his mind and flush his body of the terror he wasn’t quite sure was warranted just yet.

When he opened his eyes again, he did feel somewhat calmer, but the fluttery manifestations of his anxiety still held firm in his chest, making his voice tremble when he finally spoke. “Shane?” he called out tentatively, hardly able to raise his voice louder than a whisper. He slowly brought himself to a stand as he waited for a response, though if there was one to be heard, he didn’t hear it.

The dead leaves crunched underfoot as he turned around in place warily, scanning the surrounding trees for any sign he might have missed that indicated Shane could be nearby. There was a slight fog ghosting over the forest floor that made it difficult to discern if anyone else was in the area, and again, the terror of realizing he’d woken up outdoors when he’d definitely fallen asleep indoors  threatened to overtake him. 

“Shane?” he called again, mustering his resolve to speak louder and be properly heard. His voice carried and echoed through the trees as he waited with stilled breath, trying to tamp down on the fear that he could feel threatening to burst out of him like a bird full of aspirin. He called Shane’s name again, still louder, and even he could hear the subtle, frantic tones lining his voice as the echo supplied by the surrounding woodland repeated it shrilly back to him. He opened his mouth to call out a fourth time, but was stopped mid-inhalation when he was finally met with an answering grunt.

Relief flooded him as he heard Shane’s heavily sleep-laden voice respond at last, a mumbled, “’m over here, Ryan,” being one of the sweetest sounds he could recall having heard in recent days.

“Oh, thank God,” he mumbled to himself, taking a moment to breathe deeply when he felt the tremble in his voice creep out of his throat and into his limbs.

Ryan followed the direction Shane’s voice had come from over to the edge of the small dell, wherein he found him sitting with his back pressed up against the trunk of a thick tree, sat facing the deeper recesses of the dark forest. He was covered head to toe in leaves, looking very much like he’d been the victim of some errant landscaper who’d been too assed to dump the load elsewhere. Shane himself looked thoroughly confused about it as he started swiping the leaves off the sleeves of his denim jacket.

“Are we- are we outside?” he asked, looking up at Ryan in surprise when he got closer. The corners of his eyes were still crusted with sleep.

“Sure seems like it, bud,” Ryan said, reaching down to offer a hand to help him up. He couldn’t help his nervous laugh as Shane took it and sprung up suddenly, scattering the leaves around him unceremoniously.

In the back of his mind, Ryan both hated and envied how calm Shane looked, even if he had just woken up and didn’t fully understand what was going on yet. Not even five minutes ago Ryan had been in the same situation and had immediately taken to panicking, whereas Shane, for the most part, appeared unbothered; Ryan found his ability to maintain relative calmness at all times endlessly frustrating when he couldn’t manage to do the same for himself.

“Okay,” Shane said slowly, looking around them curiously, taking in their surroundings with unfocused, sleep-ridden eyes before he looked back to Ryan. There were still a few dead leaves trapped in his flyaway hair, making him look like some kind of tall, displaced woodland nymph in Ryan’s frazzled mind. “Mind telling me why that is?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. I woke up over there,” Ryan said, pointing back the way he’d come. Shane craned his head to look into the small glade, confusion written plainly across his face.

He furrowed his brow and scratched the side of his nose, dislodging some of the crust he found there as he shifted his eyes back and forth between Ryan and the area he’d allegedly woken up in. “Is this some kind of bit you’re trying out?” he asked slowly and uncertainly, flicking away the crusty discharge on his finger.

“What? No, this isn’t a bit.” Offended, Ryan took a step back and then gestured around them. “How, or better yet, whywould I want to do this? Who would even find this funny?”

Shane squinted at him dubiously and quirked his brow sharply, mistrustfully. “This is a bad bit, Ryan.”

“It’s not- this isn’t a bit!” Ryan exclaimed, his fear momentarily taking backseat to the indignation he suddenly felt. “I’m not trying to Punkyou here, dude; I don’t know how we got out here, okay? I’m fucking scared, and if you’re just going to stand there and- and criticizeme over a bit I’m not even doing, then- fuck, man.”

Ryan’s breath left him in a single hot exhalation, his body shaking with the strain of trying to relay how serious he felt the situation was. Shane stared at him, equal parts surprised and taken aback; rare were the days when Ryan actually let his frustrations with his skepticism loose, and those arguments never ended well. A memory surfaced in his mind of an argument they’d had that had gotten so out of hand they’d resorted to only communicating through texts for an entire week. Everyone had suffered from it, and rather than continue to antagonize him, Shane’s timid nature demanded he relent, lest they undergo a repeat of that chaotic event.

“Alright, calm down, no need to tear me a new one,” Shane said placatingly, his soft brown eyes looking down at his companion sympathetically. Ryan forced himself to take a deep, shuddery breath and irritably wiped away the leaves that were still plastered to the side of his face, practically slapping himself in his urgency to be rid of them. “Let’s just, head back inside and we’ll get it all sorted out, alright? I’m sure Teej and the rest of them are wondering where we are by now; it must be, what, seven? Eight? Hell, maybe even nine.”

Shane wriggled his eyebrows scandalously in an admittedly poor attempt to lighten the mood, hoping to have the minor argument dismissed entirely. Ryan’s lips twitched into a frown as he shrugged carelessly, taking the bait to look at his watch to confirm the time. The digital display didn’t light up when he tilted his wrist towards himself, though, which he found odd, since he distinctly remembered having charged it only two nights ago in preparation for the trip. He glanced up at the sky to try and judge the hour in relation to the sun, but it was too gloomy and overcast for him to determine anything concrete. He couldn’t even pinpoint the sun’s location through the cloud coverage, which again struck Ryan as odd; he’d made sure to check the weather days in advance to make sure they didn’t get rained out, and from what he could remember, it was supposed to have been nothing but clear skies and strong sunshine all week long. There’d been no mention of clouds or low-hanging gloom, but when he pointed this fact out to Shane, he merely shrugged and glanced at his own watch.

“Meteorology isn’t an exact science, Ryan; it’s more of an… approximation,” he said casually, to which Ryan groaned loudly in frustration. Shane ignored him and tipped his wrist to glance at the clock face of his own watch and was met with a curious stillness. The hands weren’t moving, and didn’t start ticking again even after he tapped the glass expectantly. He frowned, but didn’t give it anymore thought. “Odd as it is,” he said while adjusting his jacket sleeve back over his wrist, actively avoiding Ryan’s scrutinizing gaze, “let’s just start heading back. You know how TJ gets when he’s trying to maintain a schedule; he’s going to crucify us if we miss the flight.”

“Are you seriously going to ignore the fact that bothof our watches are dead?” Ryan asked, perplexed by Shane’s nonchalance. He was met with a simple shrug in response and could feel the indignation he’d felt earlier resurfacing. “Something seriously fucking weird is going on here and you’re not even going to acknowledge it? We both woke up outside,for fucks sake! I understand that because of your Bigfoot ancestry, this might come as normal for you, but this is nota normal occurrence for me! I don’t even have my phone with me to call TJ; do you?”

Shane paused, a half-hearted attempt to explain away just how they’d both woken up displaced and outdoors dying on the tip of his tongue at the mention of his phone. He checked his pants pockets first, patting his Chinos down vigorously with a frown before moving on to his jacket, but didn’t find it there, either. When he realized his phone wasn’t actually on his person at all, Ryan finally saw a flash of vulnerability crack through his calm exterior. Shane’s face fell, and he looked more confused now than he had when he’d woken up underneath a pile of long dead leaves.

He lowered his arms slowly and took another long look around them, finally coming to realize that their bizarre situation was due in part to some external factor that was thoroughly out of their control.

“Bergara, you better swear to me right now that you’re not trying to prank me here-” he began to say, his voice pitched low in warning.

“I swear,” Ryan said, speaking earnestly and perhaps a little too eagerly. He didn’t like the way Shane was so quick to mistrust him, even if it was in his nature to be skeptical. “Again, there’s no way I’d even be able to drag your freakishly long body out here without waking you up first; I’d fumble all over your bonestilts and drop you down a stairwell or something before I could even drag you through the exit. You’re a heavy sleeper, but even you wouldn’t be able to sleep through a broken neck.”

Shane’s brows were knit tightly together in a very serious expression that Ryan didn’t see very often except for when he was deeply involved with whatever he was researching. Shane looked around the clearing as if he were seeing it for the first time, his hands absentmindedly fiddling through his pockets, still trying to find the phone that wasn’t there.

“Okay,” Shane said after one long, contemplative minute. He nodded once to himself, and then turned his attention back to Ryan; clearly, he’d come to some sort of an understanding. “Okay, so, we’ve been kidnapped.”

“Oh my God, Shane, seriously?”

In a way he was right, though neither of them had any way of knowing that at the time.

3

No matter what Ryan had to say on the matter, Shane really didn’t want to hear it; in his mind, he’d already come to accept the fact that they’d somehow been doped and kidnapped from Léry’s to be left in the woods for some undetermined, yet surely nefarious purpose. He’d decided they were probably going to be held for ransom at some point, but when Ryan tried to point out all the flaws in that particular theory, Shane shut him down and refused to hear him out.

It didn’t matter to him that their alleged kidnappers had left them alone, unbound, untended, and free to leave. He didn’t care that no one who likely knew who they even were could possibly know that they’d come to Michaelstown, Illinois to ransom them in the first place; he didn’t care about any of that because the fact that it could’ve been related to something supernatural scared him too badly to admit. Ryan tried to call him out on it multiple times, but each time he did had only served to isolate Shane from him.

The woods were perpetually gloomy; no sunlight was able to breach through the cloud coverage or dense treetop foliage as they walked along, though the worst part of it all, Ryan soon found, was that it was utterly silent all around them: there were no birds, bugs, or other ambient forest sounds to be heard over the consistent crunch of leaves as they plodded along. It unnerved him deeply, but again, Shane wouldn’t hear it.

They’d wandered a little ways away from where they’d awakened before realizing that neither of them knew where they were in relation to Léry’s. The tall, monstrous building that had terrified them on a subconscious level was nowhere to be seen as they walked, and when Shane understood that they were, essentially, lost like babes in the woods, more of his mask began to chip away, and Ryan began to see the fear that was being harbored underneath.

He seemed skittish, almost; edged and on guard in a way Ryan had never seen him before that he could liken to how he himself got moments before being locked alone in a room to commune with spirits. If he hadn’t been so admittedly angry with him, Ryan would have sympathized, but he was stubborn and couldn’t find it in him to rescind his annoyances at that point. If Shane was scared, let him stew in it for a little while; let him get a real taste for it.

4

“We’re lost.”

“Yeah, no shit, Sherlock; even Watson could’ve figured that one out.”

“Tone it down a notch, sassmaster Bergara. You’re supposed to stay put when you’re lost; it makes getting found easier.”

“Are you taking into account our alleged ‘kidnappers’ when you say that it makes getting found easier, scoutmaster Shane? God forbid we get found by them again; can’t wait to see where we’ll wake up next! Find out on the next episode of Buzzfeed Unsolved: Naked and Afraid edition!”

“As entertaining as our viewers might find that, we aren’t- we’re not naked,Ryan.”

“But we areafraid.”

5

They came across the campfire rather suddenly and without warning, stumbling out of the gloom with all the perplexed awareness a cat might have when it walked into a room it thought was empty. Aimlessly, they’d wandered around the forebodingly quiet woods, arguing back and forth intermittently over who was right and who was wrong and what course of action they ought to take, not knowing they had been following a predetermined path the whole while.

It lead them by the nose, guiding them through the woods until It brought them where It wanted them to be, where It needed them to be.

Ryan stopped dead in his tracks the instant they breached through the broad trees they’d been trekking through diligently, frozen in place at the sight of the burning fire and the grim looking people seated around it. He could feel his eyes bulging again as he was met with equally perplexed stares, and to his left he felt rather than saw Shane also coming to a standstill beside him. His first instinct was to turn around and leave back the way they’d come, already afraid of who these people were, but Shane stepped forward in another act of boldfaced bravery Ryan would later envy him for.

“Hi,” Shane began, raising a hand in greeting, sounding relatively casual and not at all afraid, “sorry to bother you, but my friend and I got lost on our hike. Been out here a while and our phones died; could we borrow one of yours to call a friend real quick? Let him know where we are?”

Again, Ryan found himself admiring how easy it was for Shane to adjust from one situation to the next, effortlessly coming up with a believable lie that would presumably get them the help they needed. Perhaps the improve class he’d taken in college actually had left him some valuable talent after all.

There were six people in all sitting around the fire, each one of them turning their attention to Shane when he spoke, but his request for aid was met with absolute silence. While Shane held the brunt of their unreceptive attention, Ryan took the chance to get a good look at the people he was addressing and immediately noticed something strange. They all looked incredibly weary and downtrodden, their clothes and faces grimed with dirt in a way that suggested they’d been outdoors for a very long time. Ryan didn’t like what the implications behind that might mean for them.

“Hiking, huh?” one of the men asked, finally speaking up when no one else would, a strange smile twisting his lips up into a sharp smirk that Ryan found to be immediately disingenuous. “Just where were you boys out ‘hiking’? Aren’t any trails near here to get lost on, ‘s far as I know.”

Caught in his lie and thoroughly unnerved by the situation as a whole, Shane didn’t have a response properly prepared. Ryan felt him beginning to flounder, a blank, frantic look taking hold over his face as he tried to come up with something believable.

“Well how’d you get out here, then?” Ryan asked, taking charge as soon as Shane lost it to flip the interrogation around. “Like you said, there aren’t any trails as far as youknow; doesn’t mean wedon’t know where to find them.”

Ryan expected the man to get angry with him then, but the unsettling grin on his face only grew wider as he broke out into a laugh. It was loud and carried around the area well, bouncing off the nearby trees and resonating loudly around them. Despite how unnerving Ryan had initially found him to be prior, he found the man’s laugh to be warm and inviting. It was charming, in a way, and Ryan found himself letting his guard down against his better judgement, the tension he’d been holding in his shoulders slowly easing away.

“The kid’s got moxie, like you,” the stranger said, turning to the only other man in the group, who rolled his eyes in response. “Why don’t you and your big friend there come take a seat by the fire and we’ll tell you what all’s going on here, eh?”

The charming nature that had eased Ryan into being comforted by his laugh lost some of its potency with the man’s phrasing. A red flag was slowly being raised in the back of his mind, warning him intrinsically against heeding the man’s request. His train of thought fractured, each line following a path of potential reasoning as to why he shouldn’t.

Maybe Shane had been right after all; maybe they really had been kidnapped and had spent all that time walking around lost in the woods trying to get out only to end up back in their kidnapper’s arms. Horror movie scenarios played out in his mind, the plot of Deliverance coming out on top in order to terrify him against the thought of running into people this deep in the woods, but these people gathered here hadn’t been quite so forward with their foul intentions (if indeed their intentions werefoul) as the West Virginian hicks had been.

The part of his brain he left partitioned to believing in the supernatural had him, for one quick moment, entertaining the idea that they’d come across a group of trickster fae, and somehow that scenario was the worst of them all.

He spared Shane a quick glance, and from the look on his face, Ryan could tell that he’d also taken some alarm to what the stranger had said. The man still had an easy smile about him, but the way the others around the campfire were all looking at them with such dreadful expectancy in their eyes had him feeling uneasy about the arrangement.

“Why don’t you just tell us what’s happening from over there, pally?” Shane said lightheartedly, but with enough of a commanding undertone to let them all know he wasn’t about to let themselves be taken advantage of. “Don’t really feel like singing ‘Kumbaya’ with you all just yet.”

The man looked at them thoughtfully for a moment, his smile lessening in intensity but never quite leaving his face entirely. “Where do you think you are?” he asked eventually, and the question he posed was curious enough in nature that it took them both by surprise.

“Where? Look, man, we just want to phone a friend to get out of here-” Shane began saying, speaking dismissively in an attempt to forego the question.

“Alright, and that’s fine; no one’s going to deny you that,” the man said easily. Ryan wished the guy wasn’t wearing sunglasses so he could cross-check the truthfulness of his words with his eyes. “You aren’t where you think you are, though, is all I’m trying to say.

“Where were you before you wound up here, David?” he asked suddenly, turning towards the muscular man he’d addressed earlier.

“England.” The man- David- responded effortlessly, grunting out the answer in a thick, British accent. His eyes glinted dangerously in the fire’s light as he met Ryan’s, staring him down over the flames that burned brightly in the dusk.

“And what about you, Feng?” the original, as of yet nameless man asked, addressing one of the girls who shot him a mean look and didn’t answer. He laughed lightly at her sour expression and shrugged in a way that said ‘well, what can you do’. “I was in Vegas, myself. Staying at The Flamingo before I ended up here.”

“Buddy, I don’t know what it is you’re trying to do here, but if you can’t help us then we’ll just go,” Shane intervened impatiently. He sounded nervous, and it wasn’t hard to understand why.

Everything about this was just so strange; even a skeptic like Shane had to admit that they’d stumbled upon something that was truly, inexplicably weird. They were lost in the remote woods of Michaelstown, Illinois in an area that shouldn’t have been inhabited; the fact that they’d come across anyone else at all- let alone sixpeople- chilling around a bonfire was disconcerting enough on its own, but the thing that was really beginning to mess with Ryan in that moment was the fact that he’d realized he recognized one of those people.

Looking at her, he hadn’t been sure at first because he couldn’t place how or where he’d seen her before, but he’d eventually come to the realization that he didknow her, somehow. Her face, lit passively by the fire, was so familiar to him that he was hit with a strong case of of déjà vu, the knowledge of how he knew her teasing him by slipping in and out of his ability to latch onto that specific memory.

“Iamhelping,” the man replied, a hint of frustration finally edging out in the tone of his voice. His grin faltered for a moment as he tilted the brim of his baseball hat back to rub at his forehead exasperatedly, rearranging the dirt that had accumulated there into a peculiar looking clean spot. “You’re just not getting it; you might have gotten lost, sure, but you’re not in Kansas or wherever the hell you came from anymore, is what I’m saying.”

“Illinois,” Ryan said dumbly, earning a sharp look from Shane. The man fixed his hat snugly back into place atop his head and nodded, flashing him a self-assured little smile.

“Sure,” he said. “Illinois. Vegas, England, wherever; doesn’t matter. Not anymore.”

“What does that mean?” Ryan asked carefully, his eyes flicking from the man he was speaking with to the girl he was still trying to remember. She was watching the interaction carefully but with an air of boredom, her chin tucked securely into the palm of her hand while resting her arms on her knees.

“Ryan,” Shane said sternly in warning. “Don’t.”

Ryan ignored him and walked further into the clearing, stepping in close enough that he could begin to feel the warming effects of the fire as he drew closer. His eyes bored into the dark lenses of the man’s sunglasses, searching out his eyes curiously.

“You’ll find out soon enough. Look,” he said, pointing behind them, back the way they’d come, “it’s about to start.”

Hesitant as he was to take his attention away from the man, Ryan followed his finger and looked back obediently. A heavy, thick layer of fog was steadily rolling in amidst the gaps between the trees towards them unassumingly. It crept in from all sides, crawling towards the fire pit intently like a moth seeking light. Shane looked startled when he realized it was seeping in around his ankles, covering his feet in a fine whit mist. He lifted his feet out of the wisps and stepped in closer to the fire, making his way to Ryan’s side with a bewildered look on his weary face.

“Quit toying with them, Ace; you’re being purposefully cryptic for no reason.” The girl Ryan was still struggling to remember finally spoke, sounding testy as the fog continued to roll in. She pulled her chin out of her hand and sat up, stretching out her back with a slight groan. “You’re being an asshole just for the sake of being an asshole; you haven’t told them anything.”

“If you had a welcome speech prepared, Jane, you could have cut in at any time,” Ace retorted, but he didn’t sound mad, only tired. “I don’t think any of us were expecting anyone new, and anyway, in my experience, the best way to understand any of this shit is to dive into it headfirst. We don’t really have time for them to learn any other way now.”

Ryan’s mind was flooded with a barrage of questions he wanted to ask, from what the fog was to what Ace meant by ‘learning’, but when he heard mention of her name his mind sparked in instant recognition. The memory that had thus far been successful in eluding him finally made itself wholly available to him, and as he looked upon her face once more, he wondered how he hadn’t instantly recognized her before.

“You- you’re Jane Romero!” he blurted out unexpectedly, eyes going wide, unable to contain his shock at finally realizing her identity. He faltered and gaped, his words getting stuck and haunting the back of his throat when he tried to force them out. “Shane, holy shit, that’s Jane Romero.”

At first, Shane didn’t understand; couldn’t comprehend why that name should mean anything to him at all even though it apparently held the weight of something important. The girl Ryan was pointing out looked just as confused as he felt as he ran her name over and over in his mind, trying to pull up the relevant information he must have had stored about her until he remembered why that name was as impactful as it was to Ryan.

“No,” Shane muttered quietly, his own eyes lighting up as he came to the same conclusion Ryan had. “No, Ryan, there’s no way that’s-”

“Jane Romero.” Ryan repeated her name in whispered awe, and as much as Shane didn’t want to believe it, he knew it to be true. “We- we did an Unsolved episode about you!”

She was far more weathered and tired looking than she’d looked from the photographs Ryan had showed him when they’d reviewed her case for an episode of True Crime, but beneath the dirt and world-weary expression of exhaustion, there was no mistaking it: sitting hunched over by the fire was the fabled talk-show host Jane Romero, whose missing persons case had gone national before it went cold and she’d been assumed dead. The authorities had regarded it as an open and shut case after her car had been found submerged in a large body of water by the Jersey turnpike, but there were some peculiarities about it that true crime enthusiasts everywhere had picked up on that made her disappearance worth looking into on a deeper level.

The episode had been Ryan’s idea, as most of their episodes were, and as they’d reviewed the evidence and all the oddities surrounding her alleged death, even Shade had admitted that something weird must have happened to her the night she’d disappeared. It was a lot of little, fine details that had added up to paint a large, sketchy portrait of a woman who’d either faked her own death, or had fallen prey to something worse.

“I don’t… know what that is,” Jane said, speaking slowly. She looked between Shane and Ryan uncertainly, one of her groomed eyebrows arching high in question.

“It’s our- we, we have a web series where we investigate true crime cases and paranormal shit-” Ryan started to explain, but was too flustered to finish what he wanted to say. He shook his head halfway through his explanation, purposefully derailing himself to focus his amazement at having found theJane Romero, alive and well in the woods of Michaelstown, Illinois on his partner. “Holy shit, Shane, did we actually just solve something?”

“As touching? Impressive? Astounding as this is,” Ace began, groaning slightly as he brought his lanky form to a stand, straightening out the lapels of his dusty blazer, “we don’t have time to be discussing who knows who from where. Show’s about to start, fellas.”

The unintroduced group of others begrudgingly came to a stand at Ace’s lead, Jane included. Some held items in their hands that Ryan hadn’t noticed before, and as he was about to ask Ace whatexactly was about to start, he was hushed suddenly. At the moment he opened his mouth to pose his question, the fog that had been steadily rolling in rose up suddenly to obscure his vision and thickened immeasurably, blanketing him in its wisps until he couldn’t see anything at all.