* * *
🙍♀️Story3: The following is a witness account of an encounter with The Slender Man:
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Not a real witness account…
🙍♀️Story3: “After waking up with a jolt, the girl laid in bed a few seconds longer. Reaching over to switch on her bedside lamp, she tried to remember exactly what had stolen her sweet slumber away. When she couldn’t, the brunette swung her legs over the side of the bed and heaved herself up.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Ah yes, I've had that sort of experience many times too. It's called a nightmare. Nothing comes of it except for a lingering uneasy feeling as the trauma gets processed for the unreality it is, then it fades away, sometimes altogether, without so much as a memory of the dream that caused the reaction.
🙍♀️Story3: Checking the time on her phone, she snorted when she saw it was midnight; the witching hour.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Oh of course, because everything supposedly scary happens at midnight. 🙄
🙍♀️Story3: Knowing that sleep would only evade her, she left her bedroom for the kitchen, a good cup of coffee on her mind.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Because all chain letter/pasta people have swallowed whole the idea that coffee keeps everybody awake. 🙄
🙍♀️Story3: As she passed by her front door, a chill ran down her spine.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Oh, that chill. Because whatever could be at that door? Could it be Slendy? Naaaaah, like no way. *Cue the corny music that tries and fails to be spooky*
🙍♀️Story3: It’s only Winter, she told herself, focusing again on the coffee plan.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: If it was a winter chill, it wouldn't just be running down her spine, she would probably go get a warm housecoat, and not even be rationalizing why the chill is there at all. You're trying to convince me to start getting scared because obviously this isn't a normal chill or you wouldn't have mentioned it. Point taken, but scare-attempt failed.
🙍♀️Story3: Measuring out scoops, water, and preparing her cup kept her occupied,
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Oh brother, this feels a bit like the ice-tea glurge. We get treated to descriptions of every detail of how she prepares coffee. But why all those scoops? how many cups is she planning on downing anyway? Nevermind, I'm just pointing out that if you're going to have one, one scoop is all that's needed.
🙍♀️Story3: but as the dark liquid boiled,
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Boiled coffee? Bleck! Coffee shouldn't boil, because then it smells awful! It's impossible to boil coffee now when using a proper coffee maker anyway.
🙍♀️Story3: she had nothing left to keep her mind from wandering off.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Well c'mon, it's the middle of the night, she's awakened from a nightmare, of course her mind's going to meander.
🙍♀️Story3: The chill returned and she couldn’t help but glance behind her to the front door.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: I wasn't aware the chill had even left, actually.
🙍♀️Story3: It stood there innocently enough, just like always. The deadbolt was still in place and she could see nothing amiss with it.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Good. So you've established the door is not the problem and is not working in cahoots with Slender Man.
🙍♀️Story3: Turning back to her coffee, she did her best to forget about the feeling.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Didn't we already go through this? she gets a chill, she gets worried, she tries to keep her mind on the coffee and tells herself nothing's wrong. Got it. Really, I got it. Moving on now, please?
🙍♀️Story3: With her cup in hand, she started back towards her bedroom.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: you know, I'm starting to feel like this is a bad combo of that goopy ice-tea glurge, the eggs, carrots and coffee glurge, the Professor Coffee glurge, and the thousand marbles glurge.
🙍♀️Story3: As she walked by the front door, she decided that a quick glance out of the peep hole would help calm her restless thoughts.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Argh, why didn't she do that in the first place?
🙍♀️Story3: The chill worsened with each step she took towards the door and further away from the safety and warmth of her blankets.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: So there's a draft, and the nightmare she had makes it seem like something sinister…
🙍♀️Story3: She pressed her empty hand against the cold, metal door and took a deep breath before leading her eye to the peep hole.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Agh. How to make a story drag 101.
🙍♀️Story3: At first, she could only see an inky blackness and somehow seemed to swirl in itself.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Hey, it's night time, so of course she's going to see blackness. Though this swirling business. Swirling into what? If black is all you see, you're not going to see any swirling. There has to be two colours for a swirling effect.
🙍♀️Story3: When she blinked in surprise, the void melted away.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Void? It's night time, so there's not likely to be much activity about. I guess that could be mistaken for a void.
🙍♀️Story3: She wished it hadn’t.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: 🙄 Tada! enter, stage left, Slender Man! *Scowl*
🙍♀️Story3: In it’s place, there stood what she could only guess was once a man.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Hah…
🙍♀️Story3: The limbs were long and inhumanly awkward, with bulky joints branching off into several arms, not unlike the branches of a tree.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Hmm, cut those off him and use them as climbing/chewing toys for my pets. Yeah, why not. They're always needing tree branches for that.
🙍♀️Story3: The creature was draped in a black suit, somehow making the thing more nightmarish to her.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Well at least it wasn't blood red, the other colour that gets overused - in the Jeff The Killer stories anyway.
🙍♀️Story3: The icing on the proverbial cake, however,
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Oh yum.
🙍♀️Story3: was what passed as the hellish thing’s face.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Right, all blank. Or he's got cold, black, soulless dead eyes or some such crap.
🙍♀️Story3: It was as though her mind blurred the ghastly visage to spare itself further shock and horror.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: 🙄 A tree stuffed in a black suit, and that's somehow horrifying…?
🙍♀️Story3: She shoved herself away from the door with the hand still pressed against it. The scalding mug of coffee fell, the liquid burning her bare legs as she fell backwards and tried to crawl away from the door.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: I figured there would eventually be a coffee mess.
🙍♀️Story3: She knew, somehow, that her mind hadn’t been playing tricks on her. As she crab walked away from the door, she watched as tendrils as black as the void itself snake around through the cracks.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: So, Slender man's limbs are bulky-jointed like branches, and his tendrils are thin as worms and can get under the cracks in this particular door. Seems to me this girl's living quarters left a bit to be desired with the door letting in drafts and things as thick as worms/snakes. Who knows what all else in the way of vermin could get in there during the winter.
🙍♀️Story3: The girl was trapped between the instinct to flee and the gut feeling to not turn her back on the door. When the door jolted, the urge to flee overcame her and she slipped in the burning liquid as she tried to make it back to her room.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Um, the coffee's spilled on the ground, which means its surface area has greatly increased, which means it wouldn't be burning any more, but cooling off very rapidly. Going from hot to lukewarm to cool within seconds of spilling.
🙍♀️Story3: She knew deep down that she was trapping herself in a corner, but she had to get away from the door. The girl was halfway down the hallway when she heard the previously locked door creak open. She screamed and slipped into a wall, cracking her chin on it and stunning her.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: 😠 Well since Slendy's tendrils get like 30 feet long, if they could get under this door I suppose it's no stretch to figure he also used them to unlock the door from the inside. But he couldn't manage it with a door that was a proper fit.
🙍♀️Story3: After that, there was only blackness.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: And then she woke up from another nightmare.
🙍♀️Story3: “Nicole?” a warm, male voice snapped the woman out of her trance.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Well! at long last, this woman has a name! Nicole! Why not intro her as Nicole at the beginning of this thing? As usual, this pasta is written in pretty bad form.
🙍♀️Story3: As she turned around, she was met by one of her sister’s doctor’s.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Huh? Her sister's doctor's what?
🙍♀️Story3: She nodded, not sure if she should say anything, or even if she could find her voice if she did have something to say.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Okay, well, we get it, she's been traumatized and had some nightmares. But how did the doctor get into this?
🙍♀️Story3: That morning, she had gotten an urgent phone call from the hospital, saying that her sister, Lindsay, was there.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Hold up! You're confusing me with this timeline thing! You said nothing about her sister earlier, nothing at all before Nicole's nightmare. Then everything goes black, and then she gets a phone call? Why then, is this meeting in person? You never even had her come to until now. So when does the call figure into this? It would've had to be the day before, which wouldn't be "That morning" but "The morning of the day before."
Lindsay's situation, whatever it was that put her in hospital, could explain Nicole's nightmares too. When you're troubled, you can have nightmares.
🙍♀️Story3: Before they had even let her see her, the doctor’s had pulled her off to the side and insisted that they talk to her about what might have happened. Phrases like ‘self-inflected’ and ‘assault’ had been thrown around and Nicole felt her mind reel.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Um, I think you meant 'self-inflicted' not 'inflected'. 'inflection' has to do with speech. So this Lindsay is one of those creepy "battle scars" people? *Shudder* Ugh!
🙍♀️Story3: She still hadn’t fully understood what they had been saying until she saw Lindsay with her own eyes.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Let me guess, she looks terrible.
🙍♀️Story3: Her little sister had a bandage wrapped around her head, covering both of her ears as well as her eyes. They said it was to keep her now deadened eyes from drying out and to try to keep infection out of the wounds Lindsay had made to her ears.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Ewww! She really went to town on herself didn't she?
🙍♀️Story3: The doctors had guessed that either she or someone else had jammed a pencil into them to keep her off balance or to deafen herself against something.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Eww! With a sister like that, no wonder Nicole had nightmares! 😨
🙍♀️Story3: There was the mix of first and second degree burns on her hands, legs, and feet, from what was assumed to be the coffee her neighbors found slipped all over the entry to her apartment.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: What kind of nimrods have they got for hospital staff? As I explained before, spilled coffee won't even give you a bathtub warm let alone burns measuring to any degree! Duh, people! And since when did Lindsay slip in coffee? As far as you've said, only Nicole was in her apartment, and you're not convincing me that at the same time she had her coffee disaster, Lindsay was having another one at that same moment in her own apartment. I'm not even sure Nicole's place was an apartment. More like a run-down little shack.
🙍♀️Story3: As Nicole walked into her sister’s hospital room the first time, she thought she had spied the silhouette of a man in the window. That, she knew, was impossible. Her sister’s room was on the third story of the hospital.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Well, Nicole has been a real emotional wreck, and there could very well be some shadow of a man in an apartment building just across from the hospital room with more than three stories. So that could explain it.
It was Lindsay who was responsible for the whole thing, breaking into Nicole's apartment, terrorizing her, trying to kill her, and then nearly killing herself.
The Slender stuff was just remnants of Nicole's nightmares and fragile emotional state.
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