Green, Green, Nothing But Green

:sparkles: T R I G G E R Warning :sparkles:

In which I try and fail to write something scary.

For the prompt exchange thing with Leo. #pcchallenge1

The prompt:

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“Where did you hear about this again, Ken?”

She watched as he pulled out a laptop from its navy-blue sleeve, the once shiny silver cover now matte from use. The worn skull sticker over the Apple logo matched the patch lazily sewn onto the side of his sleeve, reminiscent of his latest rebellious phase.

“YouTube, where else?”

“And you really think it works?” she glanced at the screen over his shoulder curiously, rolling her eyes at its Monster Hunter background. She had to get him into some other videogame series the next time he came over.

“That’s what we’re about to find out.”

The soft pattering of his keys stopped momentarily as his fingers hovered above the keyboard, wiggling and stretching as if trying to magically summon the words that eluded him. The stagnant silence that enveloped them prompted her to stifle a laugh as she asked, “You do know what you’re doing, right?”

“All these years of friendships and you doubt my ability to get on the dark web? I’m insulted.”

“Maybe you should hire a dark web hitman to get rid of that guy that keeps stealing your unofficial official chair in class.”

Ken stopped his wiggling to give her a crossed look, “I’m getting up an hour earlier tomorrow to beat him there so he can’t sit in my spot.”

“I think you should just move to the back of the class with the rest of us.”

The tapping on the keys returned, each letter being pressed more forcefully than the last until she could almost make out a rhythm to his frustration.

“I can’t, he took my spot. I told him, and he still sat there the class after. This isn’t about a seat anymore, this is about a principle.”

“All right, Sheldon, calm down. Looks like you got where you wanted.” She slinked forward, pushing him to the side slightly to pull the laptop towards her despite his protest. This… was it? This was the website he had spent hours talking her ears off about? It was nothing more than a vibrant indigo screen with a single white search bar sprawled across the dead center. No ads, no exit button- pressing ESC just restarted the laptop-, no visible cursor nor other link. Just a blue screen.

“What… are we supposed to do with this, exactly?”

“You’re supposed to type in your address, and it gives you a blueprint of your house without accessing your location”, he nodded at the search bar.

“….you want me to type my address into a search bar in an obscure blue dark web site that manually shuts down your laptop whenever you try to exit it?”

“Yes.”

“Wha- no! Ken! We’ve both since enough horror movies to know exactly where this is going! I don’t wanna die! I still have essays to turn in this weekend and a final on Monday!”

“Don’t be such a baby, the thing isn’t real. It randomly generates blueprints based on models online and sometimes it vaguely resembles someone’s actual house. YouTubers just keep randomly generating them until they find one they can use for a video and then they act surprised for views. Here, I’ll prove it to you.”

“Wait- no- why can’t we use your address?”

“Because it’s your house and I’m the guest. It’s your address going into the obscure online generator”, he leaned over her with a smile as he began to type it out. Despite the lack of a cursor, the letters appeared in the search bar in a bright neon white that felt like an assault on both their eyes. He hit enter before she could object, and no sooner had his finger lifted from the key the entire screen twitched and went black.

“…. if I die, I’m coming back to haunt your ass.”

“Ditto. Maybe we can just shut the laptop down- “

They fell into a still silence as the laptop whirred back to life- a thing they had never seen it do, just some overheating on occasion- and little white lines appeared at the corners of the screen. They moved this way and that, never touching but sometimes cutting it close as they drew some misshapen rectangles connected by dotted lines. It looked to them as a poorly drawn Etch a Sketch drawing until the resolution cleared up and they saw the blueprint of a house.

“… I thought you said it generated random blueprints…”

“I-It does, I’m sure it does. They can’t have access to your location if you don’t give it to them first, and you can’t do that because they blocked out everything else on the screen”, he reassured her, looking at nothing in particular as he recalled with detail what her house looked like.

“What… do the blinking dots mean?”

“They mean- what? Blinking dots?”

She gestured with her head at the screen where two green dots blinked in unison in the upstairs room where she and Kenny were. A third one downstairs blinked, reminding them after a heart stopping moment that her mother was making dinner in the kitchen. He rose slowly, backing away against the wall behind her bed to peer out the window. She glanced at him uneasy, one of the dots moved whenever he did. This had to be some sort of practical joke, right? One of their programming friends had found out about his curiosity for the dark web and set up an elaborate prank on them. Whoever of them did it had done a convincing job, down to predicting where he’d move after seeing the dots.

“Hey, Ken?”

He paid her no attention as he glanced out the window, searching for any sign that gave their friend away.

Nothing.

The same three cars parked outside; her Cadillac, her mother’s little minivan, and that white van her dad used for at home services. If he squinted, he could almost see her dad laying down inside through the side window. Probably fixing one of his drills.

“Ken- KENNY!”

He snapped around and looked at her, her face a shade paler than before. “Our dots turned orange, and mom’s is red. What does that mean?”

“I… I-I don’t know what that means? This is all just a joke someone’s playing on us, we just need to find them and then we can all laugh about it tomo-“

The sound of a scream echoing below shushed them. Her face went paler as she turned the screen towards him, the dot in the kitchen had disappeared as soon as the scream rang out. His face fell as they heard footsteps coming up the stairs.

An unknown dot blinked across the screen towards them, their own now blinking a bright crimson.

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