Imagine you're Jonathan Sims. Tragic, I know. Age two, your father dies before you're even cognitively capable of forming memories. A few years later and your mom is dead as well. Not to mention, your mom is dead from "routine surgery", meaning she was likely sick or struggling with a health issue that made her incapable of fully caring for you anyway.
Orphaned by age six at the latest, you move in with your paternal grandmother. This woman not-so-secretly loathes you. She's grieving her son, and she's too old to be raising a little boy. But the rest of your family won't or can't take you in, so the burden falls on her, and she makes it known.
You're routinely bullied by a nineteen-year-old, which really consists of this grown man berating and beating you up. Did I mention you're not even eight yet? Oh, and the grandmother who hates you, she's hired this nineteen-year-old to do work on her house. Where you live. Paying this boy and giving him easy access to further abuse you.
Now, all you want to do is read and be left alone. You're a pretty particular kid. Maybe autistic, you're not sure, it wouldn't shock anyone, certainly. But all you want is to have a few books at your disposal for some escapism.
Your grandmother, in her endless wisdom, gets you the cheapest second-hand books possible with no discretion for reading level, leaving you to read some extremely age-inappropriate content by the time you're eight. Speaking of being eight!
That boy is still bullying (abusing) you, and he steals your book. Lo and behold, that book turns out to be a supernatural portal, which he enters. You witness your first supernatural horror, which permanently traumatized you with a fear of spiders. You spend the rest of your life blaming yourself for this guy's death, presumably going on to isolate yourself entirely and give up the one activity that brought you some peace; reading.
Now, only God knows what you through from ages 9-19. Presumably you maintain your odd habits and overwork yourself through the entirety of school, landing you in Oxford. You get your Bachelor's from age 20 to 24, have an extremely messy relationship with exactly one girl whose life you possibly ruin, and start working in research as soon as you graduate.
It's a decent job. You like at least two of your coworkers. Maybe not the best pay or working conditions, but you're used to that and you're just starting out in academia. You figure it'll get better. You could not be more wrong.
From there, you're forced into a job that you're not even qualified for after the mysterious death of your predecessor. You're trying to prove yourself to your boss, but nothing you're trying is working correctly. You can't figure out Gertrude's system for the life of you, and all of your technology is conveniently broken. Save for a tape recorder, which makes you feel silly and unprofessional, but what else can you do to digitize? So you put on your work-boss persona and snap defensively at anyone who teases you about using such an archaic form of digitization. You're just trying to do your job.
Good luck with that. Nobody in this place knows how an archive runs, including you. Your boss is of no help, and suddenly there's a massive worm infestation on top of it all.
Yeah, oh, by the way, Jon, hi. The worms are EVIL and controlled by a zombie whose rotting corpse is being used as a vessel for the insects that infested her attic! And she's trying to kill you, stalked your coworker, and she's currently got you trapped in a tunnel below the institute with two of your only friends possibly dead. Good luck!
You almost die with a guy you literally hate, but luckily it all works out. You rinse and repeat these monster encounters for four years, while finding out that all the spooky stories you read are real. By the way, your coworker has been replaced by a skinwalker, someone in this building murdered your predecessor, and a cult is planning on causing an apocalypse. Ain't that fun?
Tim hates you, and you cannot trust Martin under any circumstances. Sasha is dead, and you unwillingly end up falling back on Elias. Bad choice, but you're supernaturally bound to your job and you figure the least you can do is gather a team and stop the Stranger's ritual.
Except, Tim apparently has a vendetta that he's never shared with you. He didn't even trust you enough while you were friends to tell you that he had a brother, which stings. So he insists on going with you and forces you to watch him kill himself. On top of it all, his last words are that he doesn't forgive you. Ouch.
And then you're in a coma for six months and reliving the entire world's horrors. And then the GRIM REAPER is the one to wake you up. Did I mention that you were kidnapped, like, five separate times in the last few months before the coma??
Anyways, you finally wake up. Thank god. But you find out that Tim is really dead. Sasha is still obviously dead. Elias did nothing to help you. Basira suddenly hates you, and Melanie is literally trying to murder you. Everyone is in agreement that you're a monster, including your aforementioned ex girlfriend. Daisy is missing, presumed dead, and Martin is avoiding you just as you were starting to like him a little.
So you chase the one hope you have in Martin. You know by now that he had a crush on you at some point, and you'd give anything for some affection right now. It doesn't even have to be romantic, you're looking for any semblance of fhe person he was before your coma. But he isn't there. And worse, he tells you that you should be dead.
Finally you manage to deal with all your loose ends, getting a smidge of control over the monsters and jailing your boss for murder. You save Martin and Daisy, and everyone hates you a little less. Yay, good for you! You and Martin start dating, and you stay in a safe house in Scotland. It's very nice...
For about a week. And then he leaves you alone one day and you CAUSE THE APOCALYPSE. YOU END THE WORLD.
Okay so the world is over. And you doomed it, you think. You blame yourself. And your evil boss is ruling over this entire hellscape. And all your friends are doomed, too, and so is your boyfriend, and you're not human at all anymore.
But you're okay, you can cope! Oh, except anytime you try to cope, your boyfriend (who is honestly pretty mean) snaps at you or shuts you down. He even hits you a few times. And when you meet up with everyone and try to give them your opinion, as the man who literally knows everything and is in the position to become The Pupil... everyone does the same thing. They all shut you down.
Literally nobody listens to you. And then your boyfriend is kidnapped by a woman. And then that woman reveals that every single event I just described, for the last 30-ish years, has been HER fault. She intentionally caused every single trauma in your life. She bred you for this since you were two. She tells you this with giddy delight, ans your entire world view is upended in an instant.
Do you get any comfort from this? No, you get your boyfriend needing you to save him again. So you do save him, but nobody ever saves you.
And when the time comes for a real plan to end the apocalypse, nobody even let's you speak. But you know what will happen if you don't fix things. And after all, it's all your fault. That's what you've been conditioned to believe from the beginning.
So you sneak out. You climb up that tower. You kill Elias. You kill yourself. You finally get your peace. You get to rest.
...except you don't. You wake up moments later in agonizing pain. You can't breathe or speak, or even see. Martin is gone. Where is he? Where are you?
Your voice flows out of you like you're reading a statement, but it's more robotic, and it hurts. You try to scream, but you can't. The recording stops.
"JMJ.error?" An unfamiliar voice mutters in vague annoyance, looking at youâyour screen.
Your consciousness has been trapped in a computer. Not only that, the computer of the world that you doomed when you tried to fix everything. And you're forced for an eternity to watch and read and KNOW that you caused even more people to suffer at the hands of the monsters you brought to them. You saved your world, but at what cost? They're all doomed with you in them. You can't even leave them if you try.
romaincrisis
ellievsbear
pixelskylines
titsay
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