Lens Cap || Slenderverse Reader Insert || SpiritPasta-Verse

Prologue; Cut the Cameras!

CW: blood, gore, violence, horror, mentions of drugs, death

  Your name is Y/N L/N. You are a twenty-year-old going to university. You have H/L, H/C hair and bright E/C eyes. You have s/c skin and you are about y/h in height. Your favorite color is f/c. You live with your two friends, Pikett Trot and Nancy Woodgate, in an apartment a block away from your school building and you three are huge fans of Analog Horror/Found Footage, Urban Legends, True Crime, ARG's, and other types of horror related to the ones listed. You frequent Wikipedia pages often, writing notes in the stacks of colorful-covered notebooks you'd been hoarding since your freshman year of high school. You've probably got trivia facts about your favorite characters and villains memorized as a side hobby. Your favorite's probably gotta be the Slenderverse. You've always been intrigued by those sets of hours worth of spooks, shaky cameras, and creative villain/entity concepts on the worldwide web. Yeah, you spent a lot of your free-time learning about the Slenderverse. So much that nobody would be surprised if you were a third of the collective views of every episode of every series combined. You started talking about it to your friends, who gave you new facts that you'd not considered before. You had pages upon pages of information about these creatures and people alone that would make even Murder Documentaries jealous, from lore-related facts to using the characters with confirmed heights to try and figure out the heights of everyone else to make jokes about being taller than them later, find out they're taller than you, and then stare in absolute anguish at your discovery.

   That was what you did supernatural-related, and you were happy with it. You'd never really considered doing anything more than researching what already existed, yet here you were, in the woods in the middle of the night with nothing but flashlights and cameras looking for some legendary, deformed dog with no hair and claws that could fillet some unsuspecting bystander in mere seconds, Pikett in front of you and Nancy to your right. 

  It was 11:32 on a Friday night in mid-Autumn.  Pikett was holding a video camera he had gotten for his birthday last year but had never used until now. The blond glanced over at you with a grin as you uncomfortably looked around, feet crunching the browned, dead leaves below you, "come on, Y/N! Lighten up and put your brave face on! We're about to find an amazing discovery for horror-lovers around the world! Just think — if what we're looking for is real, what's stopping the rest of them from leaving their fictional bounds? And I'm not just talking other legends like Chupacabra or Skinwalkers, I'm talking about your favorites-!" he paused to breathe for a moment, blue-gray eyes shining, "I mean, there's theories around the planet about a multiverse, too! Maybe we could find a way to bring their universe to us by doing this, or something!"

   "The multiverse theory is...a very hard one to prove, you know," Nancy spoke up, "we don't even know if what we're looking for is really a thing. Maybe someone saw this bald stray dog while doing drugs in the woods and boom, zany story to tell their friends about."

As he spoke, you saw a flash of movement ahead lulling you into a quieter silence than your apprehension once held. It barely caught the light of your flashlight as it crossed the greenery. It's eyes reflected the beam of light and its appearance was deformed and it looked like it's skin was so thin you could see its bones, lips curled back in a snarl to expose sharp, knife-like teeth as it charged towards some unseen thing.

   "Well, with that attitude, you're not gonna be able to find anything!" Pikett laughed lightly, treading deeper into the forest, "plus, we haven't proved that either of those things aren't real, have we?"

   "Well-"

  "Hey, guys?" you stopped moving, looking over towards the tree you saw that creature go behind with uncertainty.

  "What?" Pikett asked, turning to you and tilting his head, hair moving to expose his slightly pointed ears.

   "...I think I saw something go that way," you pointed towards the forestry to your right where you saw the unknown entity flee, "...I think it was what we were looking for. I think it was the Rake."

  Pikett gasped, "you DID?! Come on guys, let's try to get some footage of it!" without warning, he flicked on the night vision setting for his camera and sprinted towards the foliage with the crunch of leaves indicating his presence remaining.

   Nancy gave you a bewildered, uncertain look before following after Pikett, grabbing your wrist and dragging you with. 

  The forestry carried the scent of burnt grass and fresh rain as you followed the eager blond with haste, scrambling to a halt to avoid running into him when he suddenly stopped.

   "...Pikett?-" He made a shushing noise towards Nancy and pointed forward, aiming his camera near the dark clearning and crouching to be more behind a bush.

   You looked through the screen on the camera to see the horrors witnessed by the eyes of machine and watched as Nancy and Pikett both gained expressions that had twisted into horror. Your e/c eyes widened as you realized why.

  That thing was eating a man alive. You could hear the screams and wails of agony and terror as the monster sliced into flesh and crushed bone underneath its powerful haunches. It made you nauseous and you almost wanted to throw up. The scent of blood mixing with the yellowed grass got more and more powerful as those cries slowly died into silence. You shot a look at your friends, who only looked back with utter terror on their faces. Well, Nancy looked back with utter terror on her face. Pikett was entrapped within the scene, staring intently with either interest or fear as the monster feasted on flesh and organ.

   "...We need to get out of here," Nancy whispered, grabbing Pikett by the arm and standing. His silent efforts to break away were futile, as Nancy was much stronger, but he kept the camera pointed at the monster as you followed behind the two and made your way back to the car.

    You had sat by the outskirts of the woods inside the aged Ford that Nancy's parents passed down to her a few years ago after the unnamed incident. What was the incident? You didn't know. She never really mentioned anything else about it. That didn't matter, anyway. Nancy was attempting to call the police to tell them that someone had been attacked and killed by a wild animal in the woods. With thirty minutes of failed attempts due to a suspicious lack of service, she gave up, holding her head onto the wheel for a moment before sighing and beginning the drive home.

  The silver car had that scent of smoke and ash carried into it as Nancy drove onto the highway silently, occasionally shooting a concerned glare at Pikett in the passenger seat, who was entranced by the footage he was reviewing. You sat in the back behind Pikett, staring out the window and circling through the images of what you'd just seen, trying to force them out of your head but weighed down with failed attempts.

   When you finally were spared the thoughts with dreams that night, they slammed into you like a pickup truck into a squirrel. Dreams of violence. Dreams of bloodshed. Dreams of weird, looming figures that stared into your windows at night. Dreams of gory hunger unleashed that could never be contained again.

      But tomorrow was another day. Things can only get better from here, right?