A Breath of Fresh Air

Prologue: The Best Kind of Gifts Are Free

Usually, stories start out with some kind of prophecy of a person destined to save the world, or some kind of mythical, world-saving item. An ancient relic, perhaps a cursed necklace or a magic sword.

However, that is not our story. Our story begins with a phone.

It didn't look like anything special. It was a phone from 2018, nearly thirty years in the past. It's movements were lagged and the battery lasted about half an hour. It didn't seem like anything more than a hand me down from an older sister who never answers her family's calls, but when Rowan Barnes unlocked the phone, she knew this device was different from the others.

This phone had an app on it that was deleted from the App Store around thirty years prior, an app that people would pay millions just to open one last time. They had tried without success to put their app back on the market by creating stricter policies, but instead of drawing new users to it, it drove the old users away. Soon after, only a select few had the app, but they had all grown up and thought themselves too good for the app and deleted it, not only ridding their phone of it but also their memories.

And this device might be the last one in existence with Tumblr still on it.

Rowan marvelled at the phone, eyes wide with wonder. She had heard her mom talking about a time when the app was used by millions of kids and teens when she was young, and how almost every one of her friends had their own account. The phone was apparently originally owned by her mom, who warned Rowan against opening the app. But Rowan, being the "rebellious" fourteen year old that she was, she decided to ignore her mother's words and clicked on the app.

To be honest, she didn't know what to expect from it. But what she definitely wasn't expecting was a link inviting the viewing user to have sex. Rowan paused, staring horrified at the post. She almost closed out of the app and deleted it then and there, but remembered that if she ever chose to get rid of the phone, it would be worth only a couple thousand without the app. So instead, she took a breath and scrolled past.

The first several posts were about the blogs saying they were deleting Tumblr, that they appreciated all their followers, et cetera, but it was around the seventeenth post that Rowan really started to pay attention to them.

It was a piece of art unlike anything she had seen prior. It depicted a man with gray skin and a 3-D red and blue filter on him, wearing a dark gray suit with a tie waving and saying, 'Farewell'. She stared at the art in fascination, curious as to who the man was. She scrolled down a smidge and saw the caption which read, "Last piece of art I'm posting, I hope you all had fun on this crazy ride with me," along with another paragraph of writing.

"Well that tells me absolutely nothing," Rowan muttered under her breath instead deciding to look at the tags to see if they helped. At first, the tags were all farewell ones but the last one caught her eye.

"And what the hell is a Markiplier?"

She decided to click on the tag, tapping her fingers as the page took forever to load. Once it did, however, Rowan's awe grew tenfold. She scrolled through each post, admiring the art, laughing and crying at the writing, and pondering at the inside jokes. But most of all, her real interest was in the characters this Markiplier created. There were so many of them and each one had an elaborate backstory and personality. She loved seeing the different theories and "headcanons" the fans made, the writings each person made, and most of all the pieces of art they all made.

Rowan was torn — either she continued to marvel at the art on Tumblr and stay blissfully unaware of the rest of the fandom, living in a fantasy where Mark still made videos and fans made more art, or she moved onto the channel and watched Mark's videos, thrusting her into reality but giving her more insight onto what was going on in each art piece. It took a majority of the night, but she finally came to a conclusion.

"Okay Mark. Show me your worst."

She did the smart thing and avoided his goodbye video, instead watching the most popular ones first. She was skeptical about the graphics of the game, considering the video was made in 2014, about thirty-two years ago. However, the game was surprisingly well made and Rowan hated to admit it, but she jumped on more than one occasion. She enjoyed watching Mark, she had to say, and after the span of a week, she finally got the courage to watch one of the character videos labelled "Five Nights at Freddy's: The Interview".

She almost immediately fell in love with Wilford Warfstache.

How he was written, the way he talked, the way he moved, everything about this character. He was so well created and made Rowan laugh harder than she had in her entire life. She moved onto the other Wilford Warfstache sketches, soon coming upon "Markiplier TV" where she learned about the other characters on his channel and watched the videos. She recognized the man in the drawing as the proclaimed "Darkiplier" who, she hated to admit, became one of her favorite egos alongside Ed Edgar and Wilford Warfstache.

The more she watched and the more she read, the more she grew attached to these fictional characters. Soon enough, in only a month, Rowan Bars started creating her own art and writing, but was shunned for it. While having Tumblr in her era of children was seen as a huge popularity boost, her sudden obsession with the now dead YouTube channel was seen as creepy. So, Rowan turned to more Markiplier, where she then stumbled onto a video she found very interesting.

It was titled, "DARKIPLIER vs ANTISEPTICEYE."

And now, my dear audience, our story can really begin.